Being a Tampa Bay Lightning fan I’m not often awake late enough to catch Vancouver Canucks games on the West Coast, so I’ve only ever heard 24-year-old Linden Vey’s name in passing. He’s a right winger for the Canucks who was drafted in 2014, scored his first NHL goal in October 2014, and by October 2015 he was sent down to the minors only to return to the Canucks in 2016. To the outsider the swings in Linden Vey’s career might be attributed to swings in athleticism and skill, but details have emerged about an almost unimaginable murder plot that threw his personal life into absolute turmoil. This month Linden Vey’s father and his father’s mistress are scheduled to appear at trial for conspiring to murder their spouses (including Linden Vey’s mother), and this story is so bizarre you’d think it was the script of a Hollywood film and the actual life of an NHL right winger.
The National Post reports:
As Vey has struggled to establish his NHL career, he has been balancing far bigger issues and he’s hoping his family will soon get closure.
On May 24, his father Curtis Vey is to go on trial with co-accused Angela Nicholson. The pair have been charged with conspiracy to murder their spouses.
Police alleged the pair were having an affair, and the plan was to kill Curtis’s wife, Brigitte, in a house fire, while Jim Taylor, Nicholson’s husband, was going to die of a drug overdose.Defence attorney Ron Piche said 22 witnesses are scheduled to testify.
“It changes your life,” Vey said. “Your life is a certain way for so many years and all of a sudden, you wake up one day and it’s totally different.
“But I’m not going to sit here and say it’s part of the reason I’ve had two of the worst seasons of my career.”
The idea that Vey, who is very well liked in the Canucks room, can’t use what’s happened to explain why he hasn’t been a more successful hockey player is a sentiment shared by several people who are part of his team, including the coaching staff.
Can you imagine going out for pro training camp with something like this looming over your head? It’s a miracle that he was ever able to lace up his skates knowing that his father was planning on murdering his mother by burning her alive in a house.
I’m just having trouble wrapping my mind around this all going down in Saskatchewan, and not on the set of some Hollywood film. Major props to Linden Vey for keeping it together over the past few years with all of this happening.
(h/t UPROXX via TheProvince)