NIPIGON — Area residents were invited to Nipigon Historical Museum on Thursday to meet a local writer who has been chronicling the history of crimes in the region.
As part of the museum's 50th anniversary celebrations, Kim Casey, author and researcher for Northwestern Ontario, was invited to the museum to meet with local history enthusiasts and talk about her work.
Casey, who was born and raised in Thunder Bay, said that her interest in true crime in the region started at a young age when she learned about the reputation of the city as being a crime filled place.
“When I was about 13 years old, I was going across Canada on the plane and I met a passenger on the plane and he asked me where I was from and I said Thunder Bay and he said 'oh, that's the place you go to kill people and get away with it,'” she said.
“And I was 13, and I'm 60, almost 61 now, and I remember being taken aback and never having heard that before and then I asked my grandparents, and they said 'well, yes, this is true wherever we go, when we travel in Canada, when we tell them we're from what they used to call the Lakehead, that's what they would say.'”
Casey began writing about true crime in the 80’s when Thunder Bay began receiving a lot of publicity about murders. She has written several books about the region including one on a crime that took place in Nipigon in 1960 where local woman, Inga Santala, had thrown acid on a local doctor.
Casey said that her work is important to her and that she hopes that people will take the time to learn more about Northwestern Ontario.
“I'm born and raised here, and I love Northwestern Ontario, and I just wanted to understand it better and I feel like Thunder Bay gets undersold like, even though we are known as having a lot of murders,” she said.
“I think if you read the book, you see that there's a context to it because I didn't focus on like the blood and gore I focused on, I tried, as much as on the facts and to find out what was happening there and why it was happening, that was more my interest.”
Casey’s books can be found online at retailers like amazon with her most popular being Thunder Bay District's True Murder Investigations 1885 to 2016.
To find out about upcoming events held by the Nipigon Historical Museum for their 50th anniversary, visit their blog.
