Fucshia-Coloured Cocktail Pyjamas

Why did Commander Frank Johnson, the paymaster for the Royal Navy's Halifax base, spend the night of December 1, 1943, in the living room of his Marlborough Woods estate, burning papers in the fireplace? Why did he murder his eleven-year-old daughter with an axe, weight her body with stones, take it out into the middle of the Northwest Arm in a canoe, dump it overboard and disappear? And what was the connection between those events and the hit-and-run accident in New York the week before that had left Johnson's wife in a coma? Was she a spy? Was he? Had he been fiddling the Navy's account books to finance their lavish lifestyle? Or was it all, as their friends insisted, just a heartbreaking tale of misguided love. The Johnson case is one of the enduring mysteries of World War II in Halifax. Though the story is touched on briefly in Sailors, Slackers, "The Fuchsia-Coloured Cocktail Pyjamas,” a downloadable story in Acrobat format, tells the full tale for the first time ever -- from Frank and Vava Johnson's ostentatious arrival on the city's social scene in the fall of 1942 to the stunning revelation of what was really in the secret city police report on the case and why the FBI came looking for a copy nearly 50 years later. Download it now.