The Boy (12 page)

For the small stuff he's pulled off? Not likely.

He would have been thrown in with the two-bit thieves and scoundrels by the time he was sixteen, and would have learned some fancier tricks.

You're not going to try and prove that Robert Raymond Cook was the victim, are you? Bleeding heart kind of story?

No, I'm not going to try and prove anything. Half a dozen lawyers, two trial judges and two juries did their job. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the decision. Why would I set out to prove them wrong? Robert Raymond Cook is dead. We'll never know what happened that night.

But we know they were afraid. At least Daisy was afraid.

We don't know that. All we know for sure about Robert Raymond Cook is that he was a liar. His lawyer told me so.

Roads Back

Forty-six years of law. I looked up The Honourable Judge D.P. MacNaughton on the Alberta Law Society roster before I sent a letter asking if he'd be willing to give me an hour of his time. He was admitted to the bar in June, 1958, and retired as a supernumerary judge in June, 2004

Initially, I had no interest in talking with lawyers and policemen. There was plenty of information about the evidence and the trials in the written material. Cook was dead. Whether he was guilty or not, whether he deserved to hang or should have been back in the news like Steven Truscott, finally free but still trying to clear his name, wasn't the question I was chasing. I insisted to myself that I didn't feel any kind of attachment or obligation to the face staring out from the cover of
The Work of Justice.
I wanted to know Daisy Cook. I wanted to know if, when she'd married Ray Cook, Daisy had imagined herself able to love his son. If she was ever able to even like him. I wanted to know if Daisy was afraid of Bobby.

Ask me! I'll tell you she was terrified.

Ah, but so many people said he wasn't to be feared. There were no signs of violence in the boy at all, in spite of his dedication to a life of crime.

Well isn't that scary? Even scarier than if there'd been some signs? You want to find those clues, don't you? You want to prove that the writing was on the wall, but no one read it.

I wanted to find one more person who'd known Bobby Cook. I tried tracking Lila Larson, the foster sister who'd gathered signatures for a petition to have Robert Cook's sentence commuted and had stood by him through the final days of his life. I checked directories for British Columbia (the family had moved there, leaving their foster son behind), Alberta (Pecover's book said that Lila had moved back to Alberta prior to Cook's first trial), I searched across-Canada directories for her married name, “Howse,” but came up blank. Who else to tell me about this young man who went to his death adamant about his
innocence? How many other men on death row, I wondered, went to their execution adamant about their innocence? Was it common? Did it mean anything?

Clark Hoskins had told me, after his vehement insistence that Cook was guilty, that if I wanted another opinion I should talk with Dave MacNaughton, because through the years MacNaughton maintained that justice had failed his client. I wrote to MacNaughton.

Five days later, he called. He had an energetic voice, no hint of the old age or failing memory I had begun to expect from all of the leads I followed, and he said he'd be happy to talk with me. Timing was a bit tricky, though. He and his wife were off to Montreal for the Liberal leadership convention.

Liberals are rare birds in rural central Alberta. In the last federal election the Conservative incumbent in that Crowfoot riding where Stettler sits had won with a landslide that verged on a joke. In almost all the interviews I'd done so far, even in the casual conversations I'd had with people in that area, the talk turned inevitably to law and order, and occasionally to restoring capital punishment. The Honourable Judge D.P. MacNaughton suddenly had the appeal of an exotic bird. We made an appointment for after the convention, the fifth of December.

In the ten days before my appointment with MacNaughton, the weather shifted from unseasonably balmy, to treacherously wet. Days of freezing drizzle, then a sudden dip to minus twenty Celsius, heavy snowfall. Finally a Chinook wind blew in, melted the roads to slush and turned them to wicked black ice by night. I wasn't meant to make that trip to Stettler, I decided. The morning I was poised to phone and cancel, Dave MacNaughton called to confirm the appointment. The roads had been a bit of a problem, he said, but he'd driven to Red Deer the day before and he was sure I wouldn't have any trouble. The man was a judge. I couldn't argue with him.

I went back to my books to re-check MacNaughton's involvement. He was a young, small-town lawyer when he took on the Cook case. According to the Anderson book, The Robert Cook Murder Case, MacNaughton was joined at the preliminary hearing by “the famed criminal lawyer from Edmonton, Giffard Main. It was no secret that his services were being offered free of charge and that his main interest in the case was its challenge and complexity. He loved to defend the underdog.” The jury didn't share Main's empathy for the underdog. On December 10, 1959, they took an hour and a half to find Robert Raymond Cook guilty.

Every time I read the account of Cook's trials leading up to his execution, I remembered all the bad movies I'd ever seen about men awaiting execution, final moments of redemption with weeping members of the family, the walk down the long corridor. Where, I wondered, were the lawyers in those last days? MacNaughton was the only one left now. Main was seriously ill by the time of the second trial, so his partner, Frank Dunne handled the defense. Both men died shortly after Cook was executed. But MacNaughton had had fifty years to carry this infamous case with him.

The online road report on December fifth said the route to Stettler was “fair,” a cautionary yellow line on the map. At 8:00 AM the temperature was zero degrees Celsius, and expected to climb to ten. Still, I threw my parka, boots, blanket, and a bucket of sand in the trunk. Filled a thermos with coffee. Tape recorder, notebook, pens, and the two books that stuck to me like barnacles, were in the canvas carry-all I'd begun to think of as my Cook bag. Did I need the books? They bristled with sticky notes, and were dog-eared, the spine on the Pecover book cracked so it fell open automatically to the photos in the centre. MacNaughton could probably tell me more than either of these two books. Take them, I thought. At least they show you've done some work already.

The CBC usually kept me company in the car. If I grew tired of radio talk on the drive to Stettler, the glove compartment held a pile of CDs, and I could switch to music. Or, I could enjoy the four hours of silence, but that was an invitation to Louise to wake up and I had now decided on a twist of plot for her story that I did not want to divulge until the words were on the page. I wanted the reins in my own hands. Louise had seized control like no other character I'd ever encountered, but I was determined that the ending to her story was going to be mine. Non-negotiable.

It was still rush hour at 9:00 AM, and traffic on the Deerfoot Trail came to a full stop so many times I was able to pour coffee and glance through my notes. Finally, beyond Airdrie the highway opened up. As the landscape flattened, a stiff wind whipped up from the ditches and threw a veil of white over the icy stretches. After a few miles, I relaxed. I am a good driver, and I enjoy the road.

I began to pay attention to the radio, to Shelagh Rogers on “Sounds Like Canada.” It was the eve of the eighteenth
anniversary of the Montreal massacre of fourteen young women at the École Polytechnic. Shelagh was interviewing two women involved in establishing monuments to the slain students in their respective cities. Both of them had faced fierce opposition and even personal threats. Ironic, considering their efforts were meant to honour the lives of women lost to violence. So much attention had been paid to Marc LePine, the man with the gun who'd killed himself in the end, one of the women said, that eighteen years later, everyone knew his name. But the names of the victims were lost. I turned off the radio.

Victims. Robert Raymond Cook's name was part of Alberta lore, and his father's by association, but many of the people I'd interviewed had forgotten Daisy's name and no one but the man who'd been Gerry Cook's best friend remembered those of the children.

I fumbled around in the glove compartment, randomly chose a CD and listened to the Rankin family for the next hour. By the time I got to Red Deer, the right-hand lane of the highway was snow-covered and it seemed no one else had noticed that it might be a good idea to adjust speed accordingly. I cut over on one of the secondary roads and hit ten miles of snow, an icy rut of tire tracks on each side of the road the only guide to staying out of the ditch, and those veered occasionally and then recovered the path. By the time I finally got to the intersection with Highway 21, I had begun to lose my driving nerve. Fortunately, the snow thinned, a weak sun poked through the clouds, the temperature rose, and there was so little traffic I drove for miles without seeing another car. Occasionally a truck sailed by, sending a sheet of brown slush over the windshield, slowing me to a crawl until the windshield wipers recovered the view.

I'd allowed an extra hour of driving time, and arrived in Stettler forty minutes early. The judge had given me directions to his home in the country and said it was only five minutes from town. I pulled into Tim Horton's, emptied the dregs of my coffee in the snow beside the car and took the thermos inside. I'd had plenty of coffee, but I'd fill it up for the drive home. I knew I'd need the caffeine later. Over a bowl of soup, I watched people come and go. Almost everyone who walked through the door seemed to recognize someone else and the place was buzzing.

When I got back into the car, Louise's presence was so strong she may as well have been sitting in the passenger seat. Apparently I had conjured her in that crowd of coffee drinkers.

Oh tell me about it. The joy of the small town coffee shop where you don't need to worry about people overhearing your conversation, because they all know your business already.

The pretty prairie town I remembered from summer was bleak in its dirty coat of snow. The landmarks seemed to have disappeared and I drove in circles getting out to the northbound highway.

Lost in Stettler. And I'm counting on you to find our way to the end of this story?

Finally, I was out of town, and found the turn-off in minutes. I was to look for a sign that said “MacNaughton Ranch.” There was no missing it. The sign was big enough to declare itself even in the deep snow, the house was set on a rise, the driveway wide. I drove slowly up the snowy road and parked in front of a three car garage. Beyond the sprawling bungalow there was a smaller house set into a grove of trees. A collie resting beside the house got stiffly to her feet and shambled up to the door with me. It was opened within seconds by a man in casual slacks and a golf shirt who looked as though he could have been in his sixties. Right on time, said the judge, with a brisk nod, and I was glad I hadn't lingered over a donut.

Women's voices drifted up a staircase to the left of the entryway. His wife and daughter were making Christmas decorations downstairs with some other women, he said, and he ushered me around the corner into a living room that seemed designed for family gatherings. Two big groupings of comfortable-looking chairs and sofas and tables, a piano, and a window with a view to miles and miles of snow-covered prairie that in the summer would be a soft watercolour of greens and browns and big big sky. The judge sat across from me, a coffee table between us, his chair just a little higher than the sofa I was on, so that I found myself looking up to him.

This was beautiful property, I told him, a lovely home that felt like a good place to raise a family.

It had served their large family well. Five lawyers in the family, he told me with obvious pride. Two of his children had followed in his footsteps, two more had married lawyers. The smaller house out back had been his wife's studio for years. She was a potter, but now that she'd retired from her craft, the studio had been renovated as a guest house.

We talked about the trip to Montreal, politics. He'd gone to support Stephane Dion in the leadership bid and was pleased to say the job was done. He'd been to many Liberal conventions, but this was one of the best. I asked if he'd grown up in this area, still wondering how Stettler had come to breed a Liberal. He was originally from Saskatchewan. Now that, I thought, helped to explain his political leanings. He'd come out here, he said with the hint of a smile, as a missionary. Actually he'd moved here in March of 1959 because he wanted a law practice that would leave him time for his family. He had five children by then and knew that a position in Edmonton, where he'd graduated from the University of Alberta, would mean long hours, high stress. It was the right move, he said, a good town.

I mentioned that Stettler seemed to have had more than its share of grisly crimes for such a peaceful looking corner of the country.

Again that bit of a smile. Some claimed it was the water, he said, and there had indeed been some “dandies.”

And then we were finally onto the topic of his first murder defense. He was an easy man to talk with. Warm and informal, in spite of his being perched just slightly higher than I. He watched and listened as though he was as curious about me as I was about him. He told the story as though he'd told it many times before. But, he qualified, it had been a while now. That same refrain I'd heard from everyone. It was so long ago.

The first Dave MacNaughton heard of Robert Raymond Cook was a phone call on Saturday night, June 27, 1959. Cook was being held at the Stettler police station and was trying to engage the services of MacNaughton's associate who was not available. So by default, Dave MacNaughton took on what seemed to be a relatively simple case of false pretense charges. There was a problem about a new car, some unfinished paperwork, identification that belonged to Raymond Cook Sr., not the son who had picked up the 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible in Edmonton. When MacNaughton visited Robert Cook in cells that evening, Cook told him that his dad was out of town but would be back in a few days and everything would be straightened out.

From all accounts, including Dave MacNaughton's, there was no way to explain Cook's return to Stettler as the actions of a guilty man. He drove up and down Main Street, showing off his new car. When he was asked to come into the station, he obligingly turned the car around and drove on down ahead of the police car.