by Rudy Wiebe
Salmon: She’s […].
Bradley: If Yvonne hadn’t been there […].
Salmon: Um-hum. It never would have happened […]. I don’t think they would have beaten him up as bad as they did […].
I know it’s hard to really believe this but, I don’t believe the boys really, really have that killer instinct in them. Dwayne’s always been a wimp. She always called him a wimp and she was, he was always listening to her […]. It was more or less her that did all the planning. The boys didn’t plan anything.
Bradley: Okay.
Salmon: Nobody planned anything except her.
Bradley: Let’s talk about the planning […]. Did Yvonne say, we’ll phone him and suck him over to the house.
Salmon: Yeah.
Bradley: Okay, tell me about that conversation.
Salmon: Well, I, we’re sitting there and she didn’t specifically just talk to me and she was talking to everybody and, we’ll phone him and, uh, tell him to come over […]. That’s all she really, uh, she really said, that I remember of and uh, that’s when she uh, phoned him.
Yvonne [her memory of the phone calls on 14 September 1989; written and sent to me in June and December 1997]:
Shirley Anne used the words “plan” and “planning” a lot talking to Bradley, and they were repeated before the jury at my trial. But Bradley is doing the thinking for her, she follows his words, and she never says how or when, or what was planned. There was no plan. I did not phone Chuck to tell him to come over—he told me, when he dropped me off, that he was going to come back.
It was my home, it was my kids that were in danger if he came. Therefore it was my responsibility to question him about what Shirley Anne was professing to. The thought scared me, if he flipped out, because if Shirley Anne was lying about him, what would happen? I thought she and Ernie were no back-up if he flipped on me. So I had to know if he was coming or not. I phoned him, and I was told he was sleeping. I hung up. I was no further ahead, and Shirley Anne kept on. I got more and more edgy. Ernie and I questioned her truth; she got more and more excited, he told her, she’s not lying. She knew I phoned once, so she said, “You phone him, get him over here, I’ll ask him to his face, you’ll see.” All the time I feared him coming over before Dwa got home. If Shirley Anne was lying she’d take it to the hilt now, she was in too deep, I feared having to handle him alone. So I broke down and phoned again. This time he got on the phone, saying he would not be coming over as he was going fishing with his cousins instead. I was very relieved actually; he would not be coming. I hung up and told them not to worry, he was not coming.
I’m not really sure any more how the next [third] call happened, but it did. It had something to do with Shirley Anne wanting to talk. I dialed the number as she could not find his amongst all the other phone numbers on the calendar, I dialed and handed it to her. I stood there for a while, to hear her, talk about buns, cousins, males. Then she said, “Why don’t you come over? Yvonne’s passed out and her kids are running around half-naked.” I then grabbed the phone, but she pulled away as I tried, raising her fingers to her puckered lips, and then came her sexy voice and talk of cousins, males, and nice buns again. I left to sit with Ernie in the living room, piss on all this crazy shit, piss on Chuck and Shirley Anne. At the time I thought he was still going fishing. Shirley Anne went on with her routine on the phone, halfway in the kitchen, performing around. After a lot of that, she hung up and told us he and his two cousins were coming together to my house. I really got scared then, as I felt I’d have no choice but to ask him if he was a molester, as Shirley Anne said, and now I felt I had to face triple danger, triple anger, if he, they, got mad at her lies—or worse if he really was [what she said]. I knew no matter what, I had to question him about Shirley Anne’s accusations, plus I knew he did not respect women or children. So who could guess what would happen? I feared the unknown; I knew both Shirley Anne and Ernie were no protection, I envisioned a terrible clash anyhow, of some sort, and Dwa was still not home. So I got the gun [from the basement], knowing there were no bullets and it did not fire, hoping if it got bad I could just scare the three guys off instead of getting beat up. So it was placed under the coach [in the living room] for easy access if needed. I was panicked at just the thought of what was to come. Tensions got higher, and I was telling Shirley Anne it was her fault, all this shit is your doing. No telling what they do when they get here, and three relatives to boot, and I have to ask them, and she’d better not be bullshitting. She went on saying, “He told me, I’m not bullshitting, thanks a lot anyways.”
I was mad at the position Shirley Anne got me stuck in, I was scared, drunk and frazzled. The kids were in their room, but not sleeping. Then Dwa walks in, in the thick of things. Asking, “What’s going on?” I say, “Shit, ask Shirley Anne,” Ernie saying, “Chuck’s a kid diddler,” Shirley Anne saying her shit, acting it out, and yeah, Shirley Anne had invited him and his cousins over now.
And things went nuts and crazy. I was dumbstruck, but somehow felt some peace, as Dwa could now handle it, as he could where I could not. But I was still shaken up emotionally at him coming with two male cousins. The phone rang in the middle of it. It was Chuck; he said, “I’ll be right over.” All I said was, “Yeah, okay.” Dwa was here, he’d handle it.
We still all thought he was coming with his cousins.
Shirley Anne Salmon [from the second “Interview—Cpl. J.R. Bradley with Shirley Anne Salmon (B. 50-8-19), Red Deer Remand Centre, 90 Aug 30, 1256 hrs.” There are twenty-one pages.]:
Salmon: So when someone mentioned that he was coming over I said to Yvonne, “This man said that his wife accused him and charged him for molesting his little girl,” and I showed them, I, I, I exaggerated, and I said, I said that ah that he had her—like he said he had her on his lap, and was going like this—when indeed he only said he only played with her buns while he had her on his lap.
[…] I did this to scare them, and to warn them. I didn’t completely make it out of the clear blue sky. He did mention that his wife charged him, but he admitted that he didn’t do anything, but I figured he must have done something because why would his wife charge him? By this time I, I, I had so much to drink and polished off the Southern Comfort and the thing is, you see, my mother raised us like this, but she always—she only meant good, one time me and my sister were talking and I said to my sister, “You ever notice Mom exaggerates,” and then she said, “Well, she only means good.” […] I only meant to warn them […]. I didn’t mean any harm.
Bradley: When you say you exaggerated.
Salmon: Uh huh.
Bradley: You motioned with your hands like this, like he was screwing the little one? […]
Salmon: And, ah, but I didn’t say he was screwing but—
Bradley: But you left the impression?
Salmon: Yes, I just did this … at the time I didn’t say he was screwing this little girl. You know he said he had her on his lap and I—
Bradley: You made the motion.
Salmon: Yeah, like he would be screwing her […]. I didn’t mean anything by—the thought of killing him or hurting him didn’t enter my mind, I just thought the guys would just tell him … to get the fuck out … if you know what’s good for you.
Yvonne hung up the phone and went back into the living room. She told the three others sitting there, drinking, that it was Chuck. He had told her he was on his way over.
And someone said, “Let’s do him in.”
Perhaps someone said it. At the trial, on 11 March 1991, Shirley Anne testified under oath as follows:
Q [question by Crown Prosecutor Hill]: […] What happens then?
A [answer by Shirley Anne Salmon]: And then the boys are just nodding. They’re not really saying anything. Just yeah, yeah, and they’re just looking, and then she [Yvonne] says, “Let’s do him in.”
Q: Who did she say that to?
A: All of us. I don’t think the boys took it seriously […].
Q: What about you?
A: Well, I didn’t think she took it seriously. I didn’t think she was serious.
On the trial transcript Yvonne writes over this: “All a lie. If I fight I say, ‘Let’s dance.’ Or, ‘I’ll run up one side of you and down the other.’ ” And she also writes on Shirley Anne’s statement to Bradley, where this quote also appears, “What can this really mean, death, or beating, what?” She comments on these words in her notes on the factum prepared by her lawyers for her appeal to the Appeal Court of Alberta: “These words are not in my vocabulary. I’d say, ‘Let’s dance.’ ”
It is clear that what Yvonne remembers is: if Chuck Skwarok was coming over and they accused him of molestation, she thought he would become enraged and they would have to fight him. Or, if he actually was a molester—perhaps even the man who was being talked about as stalking children in town—then they might have to rough him up and throw him out to let him know he was not welcome in their house. She was fiercely protective of her children, yes, but, as she had kept telling Shirley Anne, she barely knew Chuck and—with the possible exception of what Shirley Anne herself had set up that afternoon with Baby—all she knew of him and her children was that he had conspicuously avoided them. She thought of having to fight him if cornered—threats and fights and beatings were standard behaviour in her world—but she never once had the faintest thought of killing him.
And furthermore, Yvonne points out, if Chuck’s two big cousins were coming over with him—as they all expected—was she “planning” to kill all three of them? Clearly, Shirley Anne’s testimony was ridiculous as well as contradictory.
Nevertheless, Shirley Anne’s four words at the trial, which she insisted were Yvonne’s, made it appear as if a plan was being made to “do” Chuck “in.” Then she tried to soften it for the rest of them by adding that neither Dwa nor Ernie nor she thought Yvonne was actually serious.
In her second “interview” with Bradley, Shirley Anne shifted and elaborated further on her “non-serious” state of mind regarding a man she was trying to convince the others was really and truly a child molester. She frankly admits she herself talked to him on the phone, and that “… I asked him over, and [he] said he would [come and] bring a couple of cases and he was bringing these cute guys with nice buns, and at the time all I was thinking about was the cute guys and more booze and partying a little bit and that’s what I was looking forward to. I wasn’t even thinking—didn’t have killing on my mind. I didn’t take it seriously […]. I meet the deceased at the door, no guys and just one case of beer, and to be honest I was a little disappointed, that’s how I felt at the time.”
Yvonne remembers that her feelings at that moment had nothing to do with “cute guys with nice buns” and “partying”; Yvonne remembers: “I did not know what to do. I sat like a stone. It was Shirley Anne let him in.”
A complex sequence of cause-and-effect actions followed Chuck Skwarok’s arrival. From police and witness statements, trial records, and Yvonne’s recollections, I have tried to clarify a logical strand of facts.
Three people sit on the couch set along the living-room wall: Shirley Anne at the end farthest into the room, Ernie in the middle, and Dwa beside a small end table. Out of sight under the couch lies a nonfunctioning rifle. Yvonne sits in the sofa chair with her back to the doorway into the kitchen; the end table and Dwa are on her left, a wider coffee table and lamp on her right. Beyond that, on her right, is the door to the children’s bedroom. It is closed.
All four are drinking; the three on the couch discuss, interrupt, argue what to do when the men arrive. They are coming, that’s that.
Charles Skwarok arrives. He is alone, not with his cousins as Shirley Anne had said he’d be. He carries a carton half full of beer and a heavy plastic bag. He does not sit in the other sofa chair in the living room: he puts his stuff down and goes into the kitchen and returns with a stacking chair whose thin metal legs are curved round at the back. He sits down directly opposite the three people on the sofa, a metre and a half away; Yvonne is within arm’s reach across the coffee table on his left, and the door of the children’s bedroom is immediately behind him. He opens a beer and digs into his bag and pulls out some magazines. He says Shirley Anne asked for them, to “spice things up.”
Yvonne refuses to so much as look at them; she is thinking: Don’t look at this dirt he drags into my house, be stiff, be cold and he’ll leave, don’t move, don’t say a word.
Shirley Anne leans forward to stare at the magazine spread out in Ernie’s lap, and she reaches under the couch. She asks Ernie: “Are there any pictures of small kids in there?”
Ernie stares up at Chuck directly: “Do you like men, or little boys? Their tight buns?”
Voices are rising, Shirley Anne is asking questions now, too fast to wait for answers. Chuck tilts back on the rounded legs of his chair with his gut stretching his T-shirt above his pants, a bit puzzled at first but seemingly not at all concerned. Finally he says to the two men, “Sure … sure, some men have nice buns. I was gonna go fishing with a couple today, but they left, so.…”
He shrugs, relaxed, the biggest guy there with a slit of stomach exposed, and suddenly Dwa, on the couch in his summer-white shorts, hunches around and crosses his bare legs.
“Stop staring at my balls,” he says to Chuck.
There is a shift of feeling in the room, like a sliver of winter wind. Ernie and Chuck are talking very loudly now, not listening to each other. Shirley Anne is scrabbling her arm under the couch and mouthing at Yvonne, “Ask him now, ask him now,” so eager to prove herself right.
“No!” Yvonne exclaims, thumping her empty bottle on the coffee table and jerking to her feet. Chuck reaches his long arm down and pulls up a beer from his carton and offers it to her and she says “No!” again. The room is so crowded, she is standing directly against his legs and she won’t look at him. “I don’t want anything from you!” She is hemmed in; how can she get past him and the coffee table into the open space of the kitchen? “I get my own beer in my own house!”
But she is trapped by his body and the loathing of who he may be, and directly behind her Shirley Anne shouts, “Tell them what you told me, your wife hauled you into court, you were molesting your own girl, tell ’em, you fucken kiddy fucker!”
Chuck tilts upright on his chair, his body moving forward against Yvonne, suddenly huge, his face almost in her chest.
“Move, please!” she says, loudly but terrified. He is peering at her, his body thrusting forward onto her, yelling something at the others. She never has anyone to protect her—“Move!”—she lashes at him with both her fists.
He tips backwards on the rounded legs of his chair, crashes against the bedroom door. It bursts open, and he falls back flat.
Now Charles Skwarok is halfway inside her children’s bedroom. Yvonne hears one of their voices, waking up, and breaks into total panic. She grabs across him for the door knob. “Get out of there, get out!” jerking, jerking, but his head and shoulders block the doorway. She bangs the thin door against him till he twists, curls himself around, and she can finally slam it shut. He kicks some space for his feet, uncoils himself upwards in front of her, his fist comes up and he smashes her; she explodes backwards, head over heels, across the coffee table, knocking the lamp onto the floor beyond and crashing down with it.
Yvonne is crouched on the floor between the coffee table and sofa chair; she knows by instinct what she must do. She must remain small, tiny; she cannot permit herself to be beaten senseless, her children are in the next room; she must remain conscious and extremely small, her bare feet flat on the floor, her thighs resting on the backs of her lower legs, her upper body and head bowed low, and her hands quietly cleaning the shards of the light bulb aside so she will not cut herself when she has to leap up.
There is shouting, shrieking above her, Chuck bellowing, “You fight like a man, you take it like a man!” and “I never did nothing, you cunts,” and Shirley Anne, “You told
me what you did, you kid fucker,” and Ernie, “Fucken skinner,” and Dwa sitting there completely quiet, in six years Yvonne has never heard him yell. Stay small, fake it till you have to make it.
Chuck swings from side to side, poised to handle them all, and stringing curses he turns, walks into the kitchen. In three, four strides he’ll be across it and out the door.
But Shirley Anne will not be denied, she won’t allow it to end. She leaps after Chuck, grabs his hair and yanks him to a stop. He tries to tear her loose, fights her kicks and shrieking; he is sliding on the cork floor in his stocking feet; she has him bent over as he slowly drags her towards the door, straining low, but she knows hair fighting—she has him good and tight and he slips, falls to his knees, she is kicking at him and he reaches up, he has fists big enough to drive her through the wall.
“You stupid cunt, let go!”
And Yvonne makes the mistake of her life: she wants nothing but Chuck out of the house, and she straightens up, she jumps in to separate them so he will go, be gone, vanished.
But when she tries to get between them, Chuck explodes into a frenzy; he forgets Shirley Anne yanking his hair and kicking him, and instead hammers Yvonne. Instinctively she hits him back. Chuck has his fist in her hair as she falls under him, he’s bent under Shirley Anne, and they are sliding on the kitchen floor. Yvonne shouts at Shirley Anne and Chuck to stop, for Dwa to come and break this up, and finally she hears Dwa yell, “Let go of my wife!”
Dwa is there, yanking at them, and then Ernie too, but punching, all five in a tangle and skating into chairs, slamming table, kitchen counter, walls, corners. They are ripping and beating each other into the tight space where the closed outside door and basement door stand at right angles to each other. They are one big ball of fighting now, with Yvonne at the bottom.
