Dead Ends (25 page)

Getting in would be easy. Sharon knew the boys and would be glad to see them, even ask them for dinner, he predicted.

It unfolded exactly as Darren planned. The women did welcome the boys, and began to prepare lasagna. Muir thought that was funny, the victims cooking for the killers.

Then they pulled out the crowbars. Muir crushed Doris Leatherbarrow's skull and then cut her throat. Lord struck Sharon Huenemann, but he didn't swing as hard. As he leaned over her, struggling to find her jugular vein, she was still conscious.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, seconds before her life ended. They placed the dishcloths on the women's accusing faces and left. Two teen killers, walking into the night.

Darren and Amanda were waiting when the duo got off the ferry. In the twenty-five-minute drive from the terminal, they talked about the killings.

Lord was quiet, brooding in the back seat. Muir was wired, joking, energetic. They all thought they had got away with murder.

They didn't. Once Cousins told the police what she knew, it was over. Huenemann was tried first, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for twenty-five years. Lord and Muir were found guilty in a second trial and sentenced to life with parole eligibility in ten years.

It was justice. But it didn't explain how three teens, fine students with the world ahead of them, could become stone cold killers.

“Why are you doing this,” Sharon Huenemann asked with her last breath. Her question was never really answered.

David Muir was paroled in 2002, granted day release on his first application.

Darren Huenemann remains in jail, not yet eligible to apply for parole. He briefly escaped in 1995 and was recaptured hours later.

Derik Lord has applied for parole every two years since 2002 and been refused every time. He continues to deny guilt. (His mother testified he was at home on the night of the killings.) The parole board believes that shows a lack of remorse and means he remains a danger. Lord's family has been consumed by the fight to prove his innocence since the night of the killings.

I
t took less than a minute. Dan Campbell and Ginger Goodwin came together in the hills above Cumberland, a scrappy Vancouver Island mining town. It was July 27, 1918.

Goodwin had been in hiding in the forests for three months, avoiding conscription and military service in the First World War. He was a union leader and socialist and didn't see why working people should be killing each other so capitalists could make money.

Campbell was a special constable, a hotel owner paid to help in the hunt for draft dodgers.

Campbell fired his hunting rifle. Goodwin fell dead. There were no witnesses.

Murdered, or martyred? Almost a century later, no one knows.

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Albert “Ginger” Goodwin was thirty-one when he died. He had spent more than half his life in coal mines.

First in Yorkshire, where he followed his father into the mines when he was twelve, driving the pit ponies that pulled carts of coal to the surface. When Ginger—he had red hair—was fifteen, miners staged a two-year walkout. The owners evicted strikers' families from the grimy company row houses, including the Goodwins.

Canada, he decided, might offer better opportunities. At nineteen, he crossed the Atlantic and took work in a coal mine
in northern Nova Scotia's Glace Bay. A new country, but the same struggles. In 1909, the miners were on strike in a bitter battle for union recognition, and families were again facing eviction and hunger.

Goodwin stuck it out through the strike, but in 1910 was on the move again, first to mines in British Columbia's East Kootenay region, then to Cumberland. The town was built practically on top of the mines. Mountains and the Comox glacier looked down on both the town and the Strait of Georgia a few kilometres away.

It was a beautiful setting, with the most dangerous mines Goodwin had seen. Methane gas seeped from fissures in the rocks. Explosions and fires took a terrible toll. During ninety-two years of operation, 295 men died—sixty-four in one 1901 disaster. Miners heaved a small sigh of relief any day they emerged, black-faced, from underground.

Goodwin liked the town, with its tidy rows of wood-framed company housing and its ramshackle Chinatown and Japantown, home to about 430 Asian miners. He was a skilled soccer player, and did well in the local league.

But in 1912, a major labour battle hit the mines. Goodwin was emerging as a union leader and a committed socialist. The two-year strike over union recognition failed—in part because of pressure to restore production as war loomed. But Ginger's role was noted. He was blacklisted by the mining company and left for Trail, where he worked in a smelter.

Goodwin was twenty-nine, short and slight, likeable and persuasive. He had decided that unions and socialism were the keys to better lives for working people. He was an activist, powerful speaker, and leader. In Trail, he was elected secretary of the union, vice-president of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, then a political arm for workers, and president of the Trail labour council. In 1916, he ran for
MLA
under the Socialist Party banner. It wasn't a token effort. In the previous election, socialists had captured twelve percent of the vote and won two seats. Goodwin came third, with about nineteen percent of the vote.

But another, bigger, issue was looming. By 1916, the war in Europe was more than two years old. Grinding trench warfare and new weapons brought massive casualties. Returning Canadian soldiers told horrific tales of life in the trenches.

Voluntary enlistment slowed just as more troops were needed. Conscription—the draft—was introduced in 1917.

Goodwin opposed the war, but registered and applied for an exemption to avoid service. (More than ninety percent of those who registered for the draft joined him in seeking an exemption.)

The doctors who assessed Goodwin found him a poor candidate for the military, with bad teeth and stomach problems. He was slight—even skinny—and had trouble eating. He received a temporary exemption from service. (Ill or not, he was still a star player for local soccer teams.)

Less than two weeks after a strike at the smelter began under Goodwin's leadership, he was ordered to report for reevaluation and declared fit for service.

The smelter owners might have pulled strings to get an effective union leader out of the way. The military might have become more desperate for conscripts.

Either way, Goodwin wasn't having it. Instead of reporting for duty, he headed back to Cumberland and the woods. If the army wanted him, they would have to find him.

Goodwin wasn't alone. A small band of evaders, most local, took to the mountains west of Cumberland, helped by locals like Joe Naylor, a socialist and union activist who had been a mentor to Goodwin.

The Dominion Police was ordered to bring them in. It was no easy task. Local supporters helped the evaders, who knew the woods. For almost three months, officers had little success. They started hiring trackers and special constables.

Like Dan Campbell. He was a crack shot and skilled woodsman. He had been running a hotel outside Victoria since he had been kicked off the British Columbia Provincial Police for extorting a bribe from two women he caught recklessly driving a buggy.

On July 27, Campbell came upon Goodwin in the woods. Both men had rifles. Campbell said he called for Goodwin to surrender. Instead Goodwin raised his rifle.

So Campbell killed him.

Goodwin's friends and union leaders didn't believe it. They were convinced it was murder.

The authorities had suspicions as well. On July 31, Campbell was arrested and taken to Victoria.

That didn't defuse the mounting tension. In Cumberland, the mines were shut down, and a huge procession followed Goodwin's coffin to the cemetery.

In Vancouver, union leaders called a one-day general strike, and about 5,500 workers walked off the job, including longshoremen and shipbuilders. It was a day of violence, as returned troops opposed to the strike clashed with union members and denounced strikers as traitors.

A week after Campbell's arrest, he appeared before two justices of the peace. They were to decide if there was enough evidence to proceed with manslaughter charges. They heard that Goodwin's wounds—the bullet through his wrist and into his neck—were consistent with someone being shot while raising a rifle to shoot. But witnesses also said Campbell had talked about killing draft evaders. They decided there was enough evidence to justify a trial.

But in October, a grand jury heard the same evidence and reached the opposite conclusion. There would be no trial. Campbell walked out of the courthouse on Victoria's Bastion Square a free man.

And Ginger Goodwin became a symbol of workers' struggles in British Columbia.

J
ean Ann James and Gladys Wakabayashi might have seemed unlikely friends.

Gladys Wakabayashi was the forty-one-year-old daughter of a Taiwanese billionaire, thin and exotically beautiful, with long black hair and an easy smile. She lived with her twelve-year-old daughter, Elisha, in a 4,800-square-foot house in Shaughnessy, one of Vancouver's ritziest neighbourhoods. She studied, and taught, piano. Gladys never flaunted her family wealth. “Everyone we talked to said she was well-liked, kind and a compassionate lady,” a police investigator recalled.

Jean Ann James was a flight attendant and union leader, perhaps a little chunky, with a blond perm, more than a decade older at fifty-three. Her husband, Derek, was an air traffic controller. They lived in a much more modest house in Richmond, comfortable, but not rich.

But Wakabayashi's daughter and James's son—both only children—were enrolled in the Tyee School in 1985. It was part of the Vancouver public system, a highly regarded Montessori school where parents took an active role.

The two couples met and quickly became friends. They socialized, had dinner gatherings in each others' homes, participated in school activities.

Danger can lurk when couples become close, especially when relationships change. Gladys and her husband, Shinji, drifted apart and separated, on good terms, in 1991. She was Chinese, he was Japanese, their daughter explained. “They
didn't fight a lot. They just had cultural differences that couldn't be resolved.”

And Gladys—beautiful, rich, musical, exotic—and Derek James found a strong connection. They became secret lovers.

Before long, Jean Ann James suspected.

She didn't confront them. Instead, Jean Ann began to play detective. She confided in the school janitor and borrowed his car so she could trail her husband undetected, but didn't catch him out. She called his hotel room when he was travelling on business, but Derek always covered his tracks and had explanations for absences.

So on June 15, 1992, she told a friend, Brendan Carver, about her suspicions. He worked for a research company, and she had him get the telephone records from her husband's hotel room on one of his weekend trips.

She instantly recognized the Wakabayashis' phone number. But once again, she was thwarted. Anticipating trouble, Gladys had asked her estranged husband to say Derek had been calling him.

Some people might have waited, or let it go, or confronted their husbands.

But Jean Ann James acted. On Wednesday June 24, as Vancouver sweltered under an unusual heat wave, she drove to Shaughnessy, parked a few blocks from the Wakabayashi house, and made her way there through back lanes. She had called her rival and said she had a present for her, and would meet her once their children were in school.

The friends had coffee in the kitchen, made small talk. They went upstairs. In the walk-in closet, Jean revealed her gift, a necklace.

Let me put it around your neck so you can see how beautiful it will look, she said. Instead, she slipped on gloves and, with a razor-sharp box cutter, slashed open Gladys's throat.

James was not yet done.

“Tell me the truth,” she said. “And I'll call you an ambulance.” She slashed her victim's legs, seeking a confession. How long had the affair been going on?

Then James, the suburban mom and flight attendant, washed the coffee cups and wiped away any evidence of her deadly visit. She dropped the weapon in a Dumpster on her drive home, disposed of her clothes in the school incinerator.

And her rival was gone.

Police were suspicious. They interviewed James. But they couldn't find evidence. It seemed the perfect crime.

But, sometimes, murder will out.

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In 2007, fifteen years after the killing, the British Columbia Unsolved Homicide Unit—the cold case squad—pulled the file on Gladys Wakabayashi's murder, pored over the files, and decided only a confession could close the case. And they set out to get one.

The Mr. Big sting was pioneered by the
RCMP
in British Columbia. Police create a fictional world, lure the suspect into a criminal fantasy, and coax or coerce a confession.

By January 2008, police were ready to start the seduction of Jean Ann James. The play was written and the characters created, each with a backstory and role to play.

And the curtain went up.

Act One opened in the posh Spa Utopia in downtown Vancouver, with its waterfalls and faux Roman statues. Jean Ann James received a call saying she had won a day of treatments—although she couldn't remember entering any contests.

A stretch limo picked her up, and James found herself riding with another winner, the proudly nouveau riche wife of a developer. They talked in the limo and through a day of massages and pedicures and wine. By day's end, James had invited her new friend to join her and Derek at a wine-tasting at the Rosedale restaurant on Robson Street.

Except the new friend was really an undercover police officer. The spa day, the limo, the chance meeting, the tales of a free-spending lifestyle were the start of the sting.