FORMER colleagues of John Holdridge Pope in Canada described him as a “good reporter” but he was “troubled and unhappy” and had a dark side.
“He was a very unhappy guy, a troubled guy. He was kind of a crazy man,” Doug Martin, former features editor at Prince George Citizen, was quoted saying in a report by the Vancouver Sun.
Pope, who introduced himself in Cebu as a retired journalist, was a staff reporter of Prince George Citizen, a daily newspaper in Prince George, British Columbia, from the 1970s to the 1980s. Pope was born in the United States, but he reportedly moved to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.
An account in the Citizen said Pope covered the general community in Prince George, the largest city in British Columbia in Canada. He started writing for the paper in 1976 and his last article that carried his byline was published in the middle of 1981. He then moved to Ontario and joined the news desk of the Toronto Star before working for the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party in the early 1990s.
In documents he sent to Cebu Daily News, Pope said he had “worked as a full time speechwriter and researcher for the provincial caucus of backbenchers in the ruling Progressive Conservative Party for the province of Manitoba in Canada.”
Spokesman Mike Brown was reported saying that his name sounds familiar. “There was a man by that name that worked in PC caucus. I can neither confirm or deny it’s the same man,” he said.
Former Citizen editor Doug Martin said he remembers Pope as a “big, physical man who would work out at the boxing club”.
No middle ground
“You were either his friend or you didn’t exist” was how photographer Brock Gable described Pope. “It was black or white, right or wrong with him. There was no middle ground,” he said. He added Pope was a “competent reporter and a nice man” which
Bernice Trick, a former reporter at Citizen, when he described his ill-starred former colleague as a “good reporter who was on top of his beat”. A staffer in the Canadian newspaper told the Sun that Pope was a “gun nut who was teased by fellow reporters over his love of firearms”. “He seemed like a prime candidate to pull out a gun and shoot us all. We laughed about it. Maybe we shouldn’t have,” Martin said. Pope’s sister, Susan Webb, once advised her brother to get rid of his unlicensed guns in a letter after Pope was arrested for allegedly brandishing a .45 caliber pistol outside a building in barangay Capitol Site after he allegedly threatened to harm Dr. Reynold Rene Rafols and his wife.
Webb’s letter was included in his journal titled ‘Justice Denied’ which Pope wrote to document his legal skirmishes in the later part of his over 15 years residency in Cebu.
Webb advised her brother to seek professional take medication “to control (his) anger”. She had also advised his brother to just settle the court cases filed against him by Dr. Rafols.
“When you are a guest of a country, you must follow their laws or return to Canada if you don’t like them,” Webb wrote.
The advice went unheeded and Pope went on to gun down Rafols and his lawyer, Jubian Achas a day before he was to turn 67.