DAWSON CITY – Alicia Priest can’t be sure exactly what her father, Gerald H. Priest, actually did in connection with the 1963 theft of $160,000 worth of ore from the United Keno Hill Mine (UKHM) in Elsa.

What she is sure of is that, while he was convicted of the theft then, he couldn’t be under current interpretations of the law.

There were so many irregularities. The ore shipment that Priest and his partner, Anthony Bobcick, sent south was searched in a highly questionable manner several times well before there were actual charges.

The evidence was basically destroyed by having the entire shipment smelted and the money given to UKMH before any final verdicts had been handed down in the case.

During a recent exchange of emails, Alicia, who is suffering from ALS and can no longer talk, was clear in her responses.

“Yes, the charge my dad was convicted on no longer exists, and I highly doubt he would be found guilty today,” she says.

“After all, UKHM could not prove it (the ore) belonged to them even though the smelter gave them the money for the ore.”

There is no doubt that Gerry and his partners obtained some high-grade ore from somewhere.

Gerry Priest, who worked as chief assayer at the mine, offered a number of versions of the tale over the years, but they centred on his personal Moon claim.

Just how high-grade ore ended up at a site where later investigations didn’t find any is hard to explain.

The first version of Gerry’s story has it that a large high-grade boulder rolled down the mountain and landed there. That’s the version Alicia used to create the title of her newly published book, A Rock Fell on the Moon: Dad and the Great Yukon Silver Ore Heist (Lost Moose, $32.95 in hardcover).

Alicia and her husband, Ben Parfitt, who live in Victoria, will be in Whitehorse for a book launch event at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Baked Café.

Alicia was born at the cottage hospital in Mayo in 1953, the second of two daughters for Gerry and Helen Priest. She lived the first 10 years of her life in the company town of Elsa, and loved it there.

“It was simply splendid,” she says. “I had it all: creative and loving parents who adored me and adored each other, an older sister and friendly playmates, a live-in grandmother who embodied maternal love, a dog and a cat, complete outdoor freedom no matter the season, lots of alone time, a pleasant school and a beautiful home full of good food, music, books and games.

“My father was the clever, adventurous and affectionate master of ceremonies. I can’t imagine a better childhood. In fact, I often turn back to those times when I need a reminder of how magical life can be.”

In 1963, it changed.

Suddenly, the family relocated to what was initially pretty poor housing in East Vancouver – a basement suite with few of the amenities they had been used to.

There was no father, either, since he was often away on what he called business, but it eventually turned out he was being investigated and later arrested for his part in the alleged ore theft.

There was a long preliminary investigation, two trials, the first of which was mishandled by the prosecution and resulted in a hung jury.

The second trial sent Gerry and “Poncho” Bobcik to jail. An appeal failed to get him released or his time shortened.

“Can you say ‘calamity’?” Alicia writes. “His criminal escapades turned our lives upside down and inside out.

“Financially, we went from needing nothing to being on welfare. But it was the emotional whammy that hurt the most. He broke our hearts. It took me decades to get over it.”

Decades during which she worked as a nurse for years to be able to afford to go to university and move to the second career she wanted.

“We were poor and there was no money for university, so with the help of scholarships, I completed a two-year RN course at BCIT,” she says.

“Most of the time, I felt like a fish out of water. But I nursed for eight years, travelled, saved money and put myself through UBC, where I studied anthropology and English. Then one year at Langara’s journalism program.”

That began a 25-year career in journalism, with work appearing in the Globe and Mail, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Georgia Straight, Vancouver Sun and others.

Even though her father broke her heart more than once, she still says it was his flair with words as well as her love of reading that nudged her in this direction.

She ignored most of the story that had given her family such pain for a long time, but then she finally began to tell bits of it to her close friends and found they were intrigued.

“The more distant I became from the trauma, the more I realized I had a darn good yarn to tell,” she says.

“My mother told me as much as she wanted me to know, but when I turned to my father, his version of events could scarcely be believed. Details changed with each telling, and as time passed, he slipped into dementia.”

Parts of the story have been written in other mining histories, but Priest went for the RCMP and court files and found as many people as she could who still remembered something of the story.

While she first vowed to look into the matter in 2006, after her father died, she didn’t begin her research until 2011.

It was the ALS diagnosis that pushed her to finish the book before she would no longer be able to.

Aside from documentary evidence, Alicia made contact with some of the investigating officers and litigators from the period, as well as travelling to Keno City and Elsa to refresh her memories of the landscape.

The end result is a book that is part memoir, part detective story and part family history.

It’s also a look at the history of Elsa, which exists today, as she notes, as “an ATCO trailer camp surrounded by encroaching bush and the remains of a few forlorn buildings.”

There was that bump a few years ago when Alexco opened up the Bellekeno Mine, but it has temporarily fallen prey to the ups and downs of the silver market; not before it ate away at a quarter-century of promoting the place as a wilderness tourism retreat.

“I am satisfied that I have dug up 90 per cent of the truth of what happened,” Alicia says. “But because about a third of the RCMP file was redacted, there are still a few mysteries.”

Not the least of these would be what Gerry actually came to believe so firmly about his part in it all, believed with a fervour and eloquence that convinced many people he was innocent.

The last version he told his daughter varies a lot from the version he took to court.

“It’s the story of three sleigh loads of super-rich ore dumped down Keno Hill back in the Werneke days,” Alicia says. “They landed on his Moon claims, and for whatever reasons were abandoned. He found them and therefore they were legitimately his. He blamed Poncho for stealing the precipitates. You are right – many people, to this day, believe he was innocent.”