Stephen Reid (writer), Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetStephen Reid (writer)
Canadian writer and bank robber
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Sables-Spanish Rivers, Ontario, Canada
About Stephen Reid (writer)
- Stephen Reid (March 13, 1950 – June 12, 2018) was a Canadian criminal and writer, who was a member of the notorious Stopwatch Gang and was also convicted twice of bank robbery.
- Reid served time in over 20 prisons in Canada and the United States.Reid was born in Massey, Ontario, on March 13, 1950, and is of Irish and Ojibwa descent.
- Reid, working with fellow Canadians Paddy Mitchell, and Lionel Wright stole approximately $15 million—mainly in the 1970s and 1980s—from more than 140 banks and other sites across Canada and the U.S.
- The Stopwatch Gang, which was famous for its speedy heists—including the 1974 robbery of $750,000 in gold bars from the Ottawa Airport—was named for a stopwatch Reid wore around his neck.
- They successfully completed a $750,000 gold heist in 1974 from the Ottawa airport.
- They were arrested after that robbery and all escaped from prison by 1979.
- Later in 1980, Reid was arrested in Arizona, and began writing in 1984 while serving a 21-year prison sentence at the Kent Institution in Agassiz, British Columbia.
- During his first sentence, he submitted a manuscript to Susan Musgrave, then writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo.
- Thus developed an ongoing correspondence, and they married in 1986 at Kent.
- He published his first novel, Jackrabbit Parole, that year.Reid was released on full parole in June 1987.
- He lived with Musgrave and her daughters in Sidney, British Columbia, teaching creative writing at Camosun College and working as a youth counsellor in the Northwest Territories.
- He became addicted to heroin and cocaine and, in June 1999, committed another bank robbery, in Victoria, British Columbia, and was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
- He was granted parole in February 2014.Reid was the subject of a 2007 National Film Board of Canada documentary film, Inside Time, which was the recipient of a 2008 Golden Sheaf Award for social/political documentary.Reid won the 2013 Victoria Book Award for his second work, A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden: Writing from Prison.Reid died in hospital near his home on Haida Gwaii on June 12, 2018.
- Susan Musgrave issue a statement saying he had died from “pulmonary edema, and third-degree heart block.”His archives, along with his wife's, are held by the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University.
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