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Student Found Dead

Daily Colonist14 April 1968p. 23Before 1979

“Student Found Dead”, Daily Colonist, p. 23, 14 April 1968 licence unknown
Read this article on the Daily Colonist site ↗

Summary

The body of Russell Wayne Hodson, an 18-year-old University of Victoria student of 877 Royal Oak, was found early on the Saturday morning at the foot of a cliff on the Sooke River, about a mile from the gate to the Sooke Potholes. Sooke RCMP said he died instantly in a 150-foot plunge in the canyon north of the Sooke River bridge. He was one of 26 young people who set out on a hike after attending church services at the First Christian Reformed Church, 661 Agnes, and disappeared from the group at about 3:30 p.m.; no one was concerned until 5 p.m., and night fell as the first search party reached the area. Saanich dogmaster George Barr and his dog Prince joined the search, but rugged terrain and poor light forced its postponement until 5:20 a.m., when Craig Hodson, Constable Barr and Prince searched the west side of the river while Cpl. Scotty McKay of Sooke and three others took the east side; as Prince picked up the trail, Cpl. McKay spotted the body from across the river.

Written from the article text only. Where the scan is hard to read, the summary was taken from the page image rather than the OCR.

Details

Headline“Student Found Dead”
PublicationDaily Colonist
Date14 April 1968
Page23
SectionCliff Fall
EraBefore 1979
Document typenews report
Original articleInternet Archive — the Daily Colonist, April 14, 1968, page 23 ↗
Sourcebritishcolonist.ca (University of Victoria)
Accessed2026-08-04
Licensinglicence unknown
Record confidenceconfirmed

Archivist's note

Cross-reference: this fatality happened at the same stretch of the Sooke River canyon where Juan de Fuca Ground Search and Rescue carried out the waterfall rescue reported on 2007-07-14 (TC p17), and where the 2022-23 Melissa McDevitt search was centred. The 2007 article records Bill Meikle saying the waterfall area upstream of Sooke Potholes Provincial Park is legally out of bounds, with danger signs, a fence and a locked gate. The archive therefore documents the same hazard across roughly sixty years, though no article in the collection draws that link itself.

The clipping

Scan of Daily Colonist, page 23, 14 April 1968 — the article “Student Found Dead”
The article as printed. source scan is already a single-article clipping (96 words on the page), so the full scan is the article - no crop needed.

Read the original online

These links leave this archive and point at the publisher. They may change or disappear — the scan held here is the archival copy.

Files

Full page scan (PDF)

Archive notes

SENSITIVE: a death, with the deceased and his surviving siblings named as published. The archive stores the record as printed; any public presentation should apply the project's first-name-only convention. Shared page: the item runs down the far-left column of p23 beside an unrelated photo feature on a Vietnam war protest at HMC Dockyard ('U.S. Sub Brings Demonstrators'). The summary describes only the Hodson item. PROVENANCE GAP: TABLE_OF_CONTENTS.md does not list this PDF, so source_database, source_url and date_accessed are recorded as unknown rather than inferred. The britishcolonist.ca dive recorded in 06_pre_formation/2026-07-17_british_colonist_early_searches.md is the probable source but is not stated as such for this file. Provenance resolved 2026-08-04: located via britishcolonist.ca's search index (solrcurl), which points to the underlying scan on the Internet Archive (dailycolonist collection); the source_url above is that specific page. Confirmed by matching distinctive article text (not just date/page) against the OCR text at that Internet Archive item.

Record id 1968-04-14-daily-colonist-p23-student-found-dead-hodson. Original file in the project archive: 06_pre_formation/1968-04-14_daily_colonist_p23_student_found_dead_hodson.pdf.

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  • 14 April 1968The body of Russell Wayne Hodson, an 18-year-old University of Victoria student of 877 Royal Oak, was found ea

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