FRASERVILLE, N.S. — Whoever killed Jim Slemp probably never ate at The Beach Café on a summer evening during the 1990s.
Your seafood special and view of the Minas Passage would have been accompanied by the restaurant’s proprietor twinkling the ivories.
“He could just make her talk,” said Charles Reid of Slemp’s piano playing.
Reid learned of his old friend’s murder in Belize via the media, as did most of the residents of Route 209. Running from Parrsboro to Advocate Harbour, this twisting road of former shipbuilding communities perched between red spruce forests and a hard shore was Slemp’s adopted home for the better part of half a century.
In 1976, Slemp traded the tiny windswept prairie town of Castor, Alta., for 78 acres looking out over the sea. He got fields growing up with spruce and blueberry vines and the cracked foundation stones of a long abandoned homestead in Fraserville, Cumberland County.
He built himself a little house and outbuildings, got to know his neighbours, raised sheep and lived close to the ground.
Prices for blueberries through the '80s were strong and Slemp did all right by them.
“He did it the way you would of 50 years earlier with no chemicals or nothing – what grew, grew and he was happy with that,” said Reid.
It was just him on the property over a kilometre away from the paved road running between the handful of houses that compose Fraserville but Slemp wasn’t a hermit.
He was an involved and respected thread in the fabric of the community.
Getting older and minding winter’s teeth along the Bay of Fundy, Slemp turned snowbird 15 years ago and began heading south to Belize.
He moved into the heart of Hopkins, a community of mixed African and indigenous residents who farm and fish with the mountains at their backs, palm trees above them and bluegreen tropical waters at their toes.
“When he first came to Hopkins, he lived in town, near the beach. But then he got tired of reading books and watching movies,” friend Dwight Punzel told Belize journalist Duane Moody of NEWS 5.
So Slemp bought some land in behind the village, cleared room for a house and began raising Brahman cattle as a senior citizen. He made friends and even became a godfather to a local youth.
He kept coming back to Fraserville and his friends along that shore each summer.
According to Punzel, the 79-year-old Slemp had just finished butchering a steer a few days ago when he went to confront a neighbour about stealing his tools while he was back in Nova Scotia last summer.
“All I knew is that (Slemp) and the gentleman from across the creek were in a dispute. Jim went to confront him about stealing some things and I think that’s when it happened.”
Slemp’s body was found by concerned community members who went searching for him after he stopped returning phone calls or text messages.
He was found in a brook. Local police have said that Slemp had several wounds to his back and that they suspect foul play and that they have a person of interest who they are seeking to speak to in relation to his death.
“He’ll be missed here,” said Reid.
According to Punzel, he’ll be missed in Belize, too.
