Who killed hitchhiking....

Every greenie likes bikes and electrical buses and windmill-powered solar proton beams but nobody embraces hitchhiking. Thumbing a lift should be an ideologically embreacable method to reduce global warming & smogalicious air. It could demonstrate how strangers can work together and share resources as dictated in otherwise flawless anarchist theory.

But it only takes a few complete assholes to ruin a good thing and one of these was Gregory McMaster, 21, from New Haven Connecticut. He came through here in 1978 with his girlfriend Lori-Ann Sidbury in a $25 Toyota. He was summering near St. Leonard De Aston in Mauricie. 27 days after arriving McMaster sold his car for $10.

As you know, those years were prior to our golden age of nonviolence which began when female urine laden with birth control pills was flushed into the water supply thus turning the populace into gentle beings. (WTF? - Chimples).

On July 27 McMaster went alone to highway 20 to hitch a ride somewhere. Louis Bertrand, 17, of Drummondville gave McMaster a lift. Bertrand was a 6 foot 4 and worked in a highway restaurant. The two went for a few drinks at the Mezzanine bar in Drummondville. Six days later the red truck busted through a border crossing at Sprague Manitoba and eight days after their drinking session Bertrands body was found rotting near a roadside not far from where the two had been drinking. McMaster had killed the guy who picked him up and stolen his truck.

After crashing through the Canada-US border, a cop stopped McMaster. The bandit then killed officer Richard Magnuson, 20, of Roseau Minnesota with 10 bullets from his 22 calibre pistol.

Not only had McMaster shot the young Bertrand 11 times in the head to steal his red truck, but on the way west he also killed a hitchhiker named Marcel Girard, 19, who was on his way from Quebec to his home in Pickering, Ontario. The motive for the killing was unclear.

McMaster also confessed to killing a French tourist, Marc Darvogne, 24, in Braintree Manitoba.

According to reports from the local crime press in August 1978, McMasters girlfriend was also missing, its unclear whether he killed her.

Other Quebecers believed to have been killed hitchiking up until June 1977 include Aline Travers, 18, Suzanne Mercier, 18, Jocelyne Beaudoin, 20, Renee Lessard, 23, Lizzie Blacksmith, 15, Bella Brian, Marie-Claire Bouchard, Nicole Demers, 18, Margaret Jones, 18 and Margaret Coleman, 19.

The province passed a law around then ordering $20 fines for anybody picking up a hitchhiker.

Coolopolis would love to see someone put their mind to developing a new GPS, or cell-phone type of techology to make hitchhiking safe.