Stolen Life (50 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
To Yvonne, being placed in this new cell, and with these people, “didn’t line up right.” She had been held in the women’s cells, at the back, and suddenly she is moved in with Shirley Anne and a young
woman. Why? She feels something is going on, so she ignores the two women, she looks around. But Shirley Anne gets up quickly.
“O, Vonnie …”
Yvonne sees a pear-shaped blob of off-white plastic stuck high on one wall. She tugs a blanket off a bunk and tries to flick it at the blob, to knock it off. But the new woman grabs the blanket from her. “I’ll do it!” She flicks feebly, but achieves nothing.
“It’s just … a bump,” she says, turning away.
Yvonne is looking steadily at her. “Who are you?”
“I’m Mary. I got bust for cocaine today—when were you arrested?”
Yvonne considers her shirt and jeans; dirt smeared all right, but not worn in, nothing ground into seams as there would be if she’d been sleeping in them for a few weeks; and perfect teeth, like a toothpaste ad—coco-nuts are teeth grinders.
“A few days ago.”
“Oh, so soon after the …” and the woman stops.
“So soon after what?” Yvonne asks.
“After they found the guy, at the dump.”
“Who told you that?”
“She did, she …” Mary gestures lamely.
Yvonne turns away, goes and sits down on the toilet. She looks at her cousin and tells her, very carefully, “Listen, in here you shouldn’t talk to her, you shouldn’t talk to me, you shouldn’t talk to the cops, you don’t even talk in your
sleep
, you only talk to your lawyer. Got it?”
Yvonne believed she had foiled an attempted “cell shot” on herself and her cousin; she did not then know that within less than an hour Shirley Anne and Corporal James Bradley, a twenty-year veteran of the
RCMP
special branch of General Investigation Services, would have a long conversation in a “co-operative, congenial” manner. As Bradley testified at the inquiry, Shirley Anne told him she wanted no tape recorder, but she saw him make copious notes and did not object.
Shirley Anne began by asking Bradley if the other three had told the truth. He replied that some had, some hadn’t, and then by directed questions led her into an extended explication of her life. When she got to the evening of 14 September, she said there was no phone call, no gun; she and Yvonne had just watched the boys in the basement.
After an hour and a half of this, Bradley, who had recorded Dwayne’s double re-enactment of the crime (he did not tell Shirley Anne that, of course), testified:
She asked me if Dwayne had told the truth and I said yes that he had. I said, What I want to know is, Shirley Anne, did you kick him just once? Now you know, and I know that you did not stab him, or strangle him, or drive him away and dump him. She said, “Yes! Oh God yes, I want to tell you this. I did kick him once in the basement … in my bare feet, once.” She said that before she left Toronto she was close to God. She went to church every Sunday even if her husband wouldn’t go.
She said Pastor Goodman could verify that as he worked with the Indians quite a bit. She said that to her Sunday was a big day because she could wear her best clothes. I said that I used to be in a seminary to be a pastor too and I asked her if Goodman’s first name was Bob. She didn’t know but thought that he went to school out west somewhere. She asked me where I went to school and I said Saskatchewan. She said that the church was Pentecostal. I said I studied for two years before joining the Mounties. I said, “I want to know how many times you kicked him.
“Like, Shirley Anne, when drunk, once, twice, three times can seem like once when you sober up. Like if he has bruises all over him and someone tells me he’s kicked once, like do I believe that?” She said, “What I meant by once was I kicked him only one time in the basement, not each time I went [down] there.”
In the next hour Shirley Anne told a much longer, and rather different, story about the beating in the basement; a very detailed one, as it developed. Including much more of her own, and particularly Yvonne’s, participation in it. Finally, Bradley testified:
She said, Can I ask one question; and I said, Yes. She said, Do I stand a chance? And I replied that it would be unfair of me to tell her. I told her that she should ask her counsel about that because if I was to tell her one thing and it didn’t happen, then I wouldn’t look very good in your eyes. She said she understood.
So at 9:15 p.m. on 19 September 1989, Shirley Anne was taken away to her cell “to relax,” as Corporal Bradley told her, while he began the long and largely satisfying process of writing out two and a half hours of testimony.
Shirley Anne was arraigned in court the next day and officially charged with first-degree murder. That meant life—twenty-five years in prison. Not at all the “chance” she had asked Bradley about. As Yvonne explained it later in a comment on the trial:
She ran, then tried to find out what was being said to cover her ass; while trying to receive this information—so she could tell her own story—[she got arrested] and she lies, saying she’s turning herself in. So not being able to [find anything out], she lied in her first statements too, which got her nailed for first, and she later found out we were [only] charged with second. Then she tried to get me to talk, but I wouldn’t.
Yvonne refuses to speak; even when she receives hints to contact the
RCMP
, she does not respond; she makes not one single statement. There comes a time, in the empty days of waiting for the preliminary inquiry while inside the Edmonton Remand Centre, when she begins to draw a few sketches, pictures. In grade school she always loved the art and music courses, and this seems another way of speaking to herself perhaps. She listens to a Christian minister who visits the centre, and after a time she begins to read a Bible again, as she did while living with Fred Ferguson. In November 1989, she sketches a message to herself, incorporating words someone else offers her.
She draws a bird-shape emerging out of a surround of words:
Do not fret!
Aren’t we told His eye is on the sparrow—
That small fluttery brownness?
Imagine—a sparrow—
Sold two for a farthing. Almost two for nothing.
“Yet not one shall fall to the ground without His notice.”
The bird Yvonne draws to encircle these words looks nothing like a sparrow. It seems to be swirling up from a seething cosmos, its head feathers swept back from its fierce black-masked eye, its strong beak open like any eagle’s. Ahead and over this bird floats the tiny split ovum of the universe, and the bird is driving itself straight at the long tail that trails down from that egg.
Another drawing, from December, has the superscription
In the same way, I tell you, the angels of God
Rejoice over one sinner who repents.
Two immensely feathered wings below this text hold aloft between them the body of an angel whose single foot emerging from folded robes seems to stand on air. The angel’s slender hands are folded over its breast, and one eye is open, looking straight at the viewer. But the other eye, the left eye on the side of the heart, is closed tight, blind to the outward world. Obviously its sight, in keeping with the Cree understanding of life, is turned inwards, searching for a revelation of that mystery which a human being can find only within herself.
Shirley Anne, of course, is being held in Edmonton Remand as well; Yvonne has to see her every day because they are in the same tier of cells. Shirley Anne is afraid; she doesn’t know what the boys have said but she wants them all to “get their stories straight,” as she says, for the lightest possible sentence. And she keeps confronting Yvonne with “You’re gonna talk, you’re gonna deal.” But Yvonne refuses to speak about the case to the cousin who, she feels, has once again taken advantage of her kindness and then viciously betrayed her.
“No, I’m not talking to cops,” she tells her flatly. “I can’t judge what happened, who’s wrong, who’s right. The law doesn’t care what happened, they only want to nail someone, that’s all. They won’t understand anything. I’m not talking.”
Finally, the day after Christmas, their yelling matches turn into a physical fight. Usually the rule holds that if two fight, two go “to the hole,” as the solitary confinement cell is called. Yvonne is interviewed first and says, “Guilty.” But Shirley Anne, as Yvonne remembers it now, “had a wild made-up story, lie and bullshit, and put it all on me.
They returned her to my old cell with my daily cleaning job. I was the only one placed for fourteen days in the hole.”
She thinks, if Shirley Anne can do this to me in Remand, what will she manage to do in court? Should she talk with the police, as they kept sending her hints she should?
As she comments to me years later, “I guess now I could have made a deal, but would not.” Why? She could not bring herself to do that. Why? She does not know. She remembers her sometimes overwhelming depression then, alternating between anger and despairing guilt; when she emerges after two weeks in solitary confinement, she writes a long poem, “Loneliness,” which ends with these lines:
You try to walk
But you’re fearful of falling deeper
Into another empty space
That’s within yourself […].
I touch myself.
Am I warm or cold?
I no longer know.
Loneliness is existence within an existence
Where nothing exists.
The official preliminary inquiry concerning the death of Leonard Charles Skwarok was conducted by His Honour Judge H.B. Casson in the Provincial Court House, Wetaskiwin, on 29 January–1 February, and 4, 6 and 11 April 1990; there were 703 pages of testimony and legal discussion.
It was during these days that, for the first time, the four accused heard all the evidence, and witnesses, that the police had brought together about the case up to that point. Ernie had said in the cell shot, “Play dumb to see what the preliminary shows”—well, now each of them knew what they had to contend with.
On 22 May 1990, Judge Casson ruled that the evidence presented at the inquiry satisfied him that it would be open to a jury to conclude
that all four accused participated in the process of killing Leonard Charles Skwarok. He declared, “Accordingly, I’m ordering that the accused Wenger, Jensen, Johnson, and Salmon are to stand trial on the charge of first-degree murder.”
A first-degree murder charge against all of them—it shocked the four defendants. A conviction meant a life sentence in prison, twenty-five years without the possibility for parole.
Though Shirley Anne had been arrested on a first-degree-murder charge, this judicial ruling terrified her. She had always insisted Chuck was still alive when she fled. Consequently, her lawyer, Stirling Sanderman, arranged for her to act as an informant on Yvonne in the Edmonton Remand Centre. Shortly after the inquiry ruling, she began to press Yvonne about details concerning the offence; to insist that Yvonne would deal. She was so awkward in her questioning that it seemed to Yvonne she was eliciting information, and finally, as she wrote it later, she yelled back at Shirley Anne,
“It was you and Ernie kicked his neck, I heard it crack, then he gurgled, and then it was you who choked him!” At that, Shirley Anne flipped out, ran to the toilet and ripped off the tape of the bug she wore under her shirt and tried to flush the bug down the john, smashing it on the toilet and trying to stomp it down. To return to the bars gunning me off, with a shiny wire bouncing in front of her to her hard breathing, yelling, “I want to see my lawyer now!” I laughed at her as she stood there, I told her her shiny wire is sticking out. She was yelling, the matron came, and then a
RCMP
, to let her out and he retrieved the broken tape recorder out of the toilet.
Within days after that Shirley Anne was removed to the Red Deer Remand Centre, 150 kilometres from Edmonton, and on 19 August 1990 Corporal Bradley flew in 2,000 kilometres from Whitehorse, where he had been transferred, to interview her again.
When he was cross-examined at Yvonne’s trial about these particular August 1990 interviews, Bradley stated he was told by J. Barry Hill, the Crown Prosecutor, “in no uncertain terms that there were to be no inducements or deals at all offered to this lady … and none were.” Nevertheless, the first point he made to Shirley Anne was that she and
her legal-aid lawyer, Stirling Sanderman, had agreed she should talk to him, and that Mr. Hill had instructed him to tell her that what she was going to give was a
witness statement only
.