by Rudy Wiebe
–Yvonne Johnson to Rudy Wiebe, January 1998
WHEN, in late October 1992, I first heard about Yvonne Johnson, she had already been in prison for over three years. After numerous letters and several phone calls between us, in April 1993 I contacted the Edmonton lawyer, A. Brian Beresh, who had defended her at her original trial for murder and also presented her appeal from that decision to the Alberta Court of Appeals. I talked to him at some length—the appeal decision was still pending—and he gave me a complete 884-page transcript of the original trial.
That gave me the judicial version of what had happened in the basement of Yvonne and Dwayne’s Wetaskiwin home; the version in which, on page 800, Crown Prosecutor J. Barry Hill addressed the jury with, it seemed to me, truly overweening condescension: “Now, you remember that I said to you that we don’t videotape murders. Indeed, the whole trial process is in many ways an attempt to recreate for you, as best we can, what happened.”
But I wanted much more than Hill’s re-creation of the events in the basement; I wanted to hear Yvonne’s personal account of what went on. Especially, I wanted to hear, from her, what she knew she had done. And in her written comments on the trial, in her letters, in our conversations, she did explain things—but never in sequence; never as one connected story. For several years she could not find it within herself to do that.
In the meantime, she and I were working on this book together. Many of the facts were clear and accepted: one fundamental was that four people had had a hand in killing Chuck Skwarok and in trying to dispose of his body. Another fundamental: within six hours of Skwarok’s death, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who serve the city of Wetaskiwin as its urban police force, were informed of that fact. By early morning of 15 September 1989, about a dozen RCMP officers were investigating the crime.
In order to have a clearer understanding of these events, I compiled a timetable from the verbatim record of the preliminary inquiry held in Wetaskiwin in January 1990, and then collated and supplemented it with data from the official transcript of Yvonne’s and Ernie Jensen’s trial for murder conducted over a year later. Here are the results:
Sequence of Events, Friday, 15 September 1989
Before 5:00 a.m.: On-duty RCMP constable Thomas Witzke investigates a small hatchback parked behind bushes inside Parkdale Park, beside Parkdale School. He sees “nothing out of the ordinary” and radios for a tow.
5:35 a.m.: Ex-taxi driver Lyle Schmidt contacts Witzke and talks to him in his cruiser; Schmidt gives him a knife as evidence of a possible murder in Yvonne Johnson’s house.
6:00 a.m.: Witzke informs his superior, Corporal David Aitkin.
6:15 a.m.: Witzke, with Constable Ladoucer, tries to enter Yvonne’s house; she won’t let him in without a warrant.
6:30 a.m.: Aitkin contacts Corporal James Bradley of the RCMP General Investigation Section (GIS), Red Deer, for assistance.
7:00 a.m.: Schmidt signs a two-page statement about a possible homicide; Aitkin sends Constable Ambrose Wolfe to close the dump and Constable William Fraser to keep Yvonne’s residence under surveillance.
7:30 a.m.: Harvey Schneider sees a body in the dump; radios police.
7:40 a.m.: Wolfe arrives; sees the body from the dump entrance but does not go down. He radios to headquarters in code to avoid scanners—“a 10-4 type of thing”—which simply means “Confirm.” Aitkin does not understand that Wolfe has found a body, but knows the dump is closed off and guarded.
After 9 a.m.: Red Deer GIS officers headed by Corporal Bradley arrive in Wetaskiwin and, with Aitkin, organize a search of the dump for a possible body.
10:55 am.: Aitkin, Bradley, and others, including a police dog, arrive at the dump. Under oath Aitkin declares this is the first time he knew that Wolfe had had the body in sight for over three hours.
11:20 a.m.: On a warning from Fraser that Dwayne Wenger has come out of his house, Witzke and Constable Pittman drive there and arrest Dwayne outside Parkdale School, where he has gone, he says, to check on his small daughter.
11:38 a.m.: Constable Dennis Travanut, gis, begins to interview Dwayne in the Wetaskiwin RCMP headquarters.
When the law-enforcement system seizes you as a criminal, the world changes. You may never recognize yourself again.
Yvonne knows she can only escape into sleep, to take herself away with alcohol. If she forces herself out of sleep, out of bed, the phone is ringing, ringing, all she does is interrupt her escape.
“Yvonne! What the hell’s happening?”
It’s the neighbourhood pawnshop owner, telling her her name is all over his RCMP scanner. She hangs up, tries to crawl back into her escape, and notices Dwa isn’t in bed with her, but the phone rings again; it’s Jerry, Dwa’s friend, shouting in her ear, frantic.
“Vonnie! There’s cops with guns all over, they’re swarming around your house, get out, just get out!”
“Get out? Where?” she asks him and hangs up. She flops back onto the bed, pulls the covers high; blankets can be trusted to be close and warm and——There’s a tremendous bang, the kitchen door is breaking open. She sees there’s a guy in a tan jacket hunkered down against the corner of the bedroom door, arms extended and locked together, and she is looking at the small, steady circle of his pistol barrel.
“Police! Don’t move!”
What took them so long? She feels as if she has been sleeping for months, floating on alcohol; some weeks ago she wouldn’t let them break in without a warrant, she could just let him shoot her, there’s a shotgun with an RCMP standing in the doorway trying to cover her too, okay, enough guns, they’ll do it, but the uniform blunders against the first guy, knocks him aside into the bathroom doorway, and then she is almost laughing at these Keystone Kops—Where’s the camera?— and she pulls the blanket up while they curse each other, thumping around, but her feet go cold, and she kicks to cover them too; the blanket jerks and she curls down to pull it back tight again and the big bastard in uniform is rushing her.
The plain-clothes man yells and shoves the uniform back into the kitchen. Yvonne lies motionless, watching them. Right now she’s still okay with her T-shirt and jeans on, she’s quiet in bed. But then the squatting cop with his gun levelled, the tan plain-clothes man, waddles in on her low; he is saying something, maybe identifying himself again, maybe barking to keep her hands in sight; and a horde of men in uniform are crowding into the doorway, all pump-actions levelled. She hears herself moaning, she is trying to somehow stay herself, be her own believable person, but he’s moving in, his gun won’t stop boring in, and then he jerks her blanket away, throws it into the corner. She tries to crawl after it, the reality of her blanket, but he shouts:
“Don’t move! Do you have a weapon in your bed?”
She has nothing. Arrest strips her of every possible thing, especially choice. After Chuck, Lyle sealed it: someone had to make her choices and now they are made. She recognizes that this man she has never seen before with his revolver and tan jacket will do it. He is reading, very distinctly, from a card taped inside his notebook:
“You need not say anything. You have nothing to hope from any promise or favour, and nothing to fear from any threat. Whether or not you say anything, anything you say may be used as evidence at your trial.”
If you want to, speak, but you have the right to remain silent. Silent … it’s hard on the brain, it destroys the spirit—just go back inside the hole you already know so well; be silent. Yes, I can be that.
“You are under arrest for murder. Do you understand?”
The policeman attempts to turn her over, she is so limp her arm falls back on the bed where it was when he picked it up. She sees but does not particularly feel herself handled by this man with his gun in her face, rolling her over on her stomach. She is gone, not floating out of herself but gone inside. Like a turtle.
His knee is between her shoulder blades; he reaches for the other arm but the first flops back. Finally he tells someone angrily to come snap on the cuffs.
“… legal right to have a lawyer present when you are questioned …”
She has heard that before. But never in her bedroom, never in her own house where her children live.
Yvonne sees two plain-clothes men are trying to wake Ernie on the couch; two uniformed police climb in through the patio doors and shove aside the chairs, let’s get the bugger hauled out, but Yvonne’s Tan Jacket yells at them, “Don’t mess up a crime scene!” and they hastily try to push the furniture back where it was. They’re dragging Ernie’s arms together for handcuffs, “No!” Tan Jacket orders again, “He’s gotta be awake; you have to read him his rights!”
Yvonne asks, “Where are my kids?”
“Hey,” Tan Jacket says, “someone better round up the kids before Social Services gets here. How many have you got?”
“Three.”
“Find three kids,” he orders.
A uniformed officer brings her knee-high leather boots, her classiest shoes, into the crowded kitchen, bends, sticks her feet into them, hauls them up her legs, and then pushes her jeans down over them. She is being shoved out, moves mechanically, gripped by someone holding her elbows back; she’s bumping into the huge men standing all about her like trees.
“I want to talk to my kids!”
But they’ve got her out on the porch, pushing her, helpless with her hands cuffed and ankles shackled, and a photographer is flashing pictures. “No!” her Tan Jacket yells behind her. “You, get that camera, take out all the film!”
She can hear James behind her and she jerks her elbow loose, turning, and he says, “Okay, okay—let her.”
James—her Little Big Man—stands on the top step, staring about, very frightened. She kneels in front of him, into him since she has no hands to touch him; he nuzzles closer and she places her forehead against his. She tells him she has to go away for a while, these men say she has done something bad, but she will be back as soon as she can. His lips quiver, his eyes fill, and there’s her Suzie Q squeezing between cop legs.
“Hi, Baby. Mommy loves you. James, you go take care of your sister, both your sisters, watch out for them …”
She wants to hug them; it is unbearable not to be able to hold them, and she jerks herself away so they won’t see her cry. She tells Tan Jacket, “Take me, now!”
Then Chantal comes running from school, bouncing through the trees, and sees Yvonne being pushed towards the cruiser, weeping, falling to one knee, and the seven-year-old freezes. The police haul Yvonne to her feet beside the car, and then she sees Chantal. She forces herself to think, to speak clearly through the pain that is breaking her, “Chantal, tell them you want to go to Aunty Bev’s. Get them to let you.”
And Chantal understands; Bev is a friend who takes in foster children; the kids are always playing back and forth between their houses.
But then her private life is over. She’s pushed into the back seat of the cruiser, Tan Jacket follows, and already there are only questions.
“Where’d you guys take him? He may still be alive, where?”
“I don’t know where he is.”
A grand, public departure with an RCMP in uniform driving a uniformed car and all the neighbours at attention. She’ll never see the door, the house again. Or her wide Dodge van, standing there, waiting for her to get all the children together, to climb in and turn the key.
They are pulling her out at the jail when she says, “Get my mom … Red Pheasant Reserve … she’ll come for my children.”
“Where, your mother, where is she?”
“Saskatchewan. Cecilia Bear Knight. No phone.”
“Her name is Ceas—Ceas—what? Bear?”
“Knight, Red Pheasant … Ce-cil-i-a.”
They are in control.
Except for one thing: her silence. Questions, questions, let them pull out strands of hair, even offer them more—here, take it—so that they will finally let her sink into a chair and she can tilt forward, lay her head face down on another chair, go away. Long ago she knew this, as a tiny child she was taught this over and over: cry if you must, but don’t speak a word. Not to anyone. But the questions persist; surrounded by uniformed chests she realizes her menstruation has begun. They don’t know what to do; they all leave and a woman officer appears. She leads her to a bathroom, strips her naked, and gives her coveralls of paper. And a pad, when she asks for it.
Then it’s back to the interview room. Tan Jacket appears, more questions. She tells him that last night a cab driver named Lyle raped her and she is hauled to the hospital, to the clinic and lab; she’s shivering in the monkey suit, very nearly hidden in it, but not her head, and of course her hands are sentenced to exposure in handcuffs, her legs to shackles; she’s on public view and led about with her hands over her crotch—no panties are permitted, only the coveralls. Pulled by men in and out of cars, past hospital and clinic workers, patients, past policemen, prisoners, janitors, lawyers, all of them men and all of them glancing sideways at her again and again, at her handcuffed hands bunching her sagging paper suit up high between her legs because she must hold the pad in place somehow.
Finally, late Friday evening, the endless dragging around is over and she is locked in a cell; she can lie down. She knows that Dwayne and Ernie have also been arrested; that Shirley Anne is nowhere to be found—but there will be time to think, more than enough time.
Sequence of Events Continued
Friday, 15 September:
11:45 a.m.: Constable Daniel Konowalchuk, GIS, and other officers break into Yvonne’s house and arrest her in her bedroom. At the same time, Witzke arrests Ernie Jensen asleep on the living-room couch. They are driven, separately, to the Wetaskiwin RCMP station.
12:20 p.m.: A legal-aid defence lawyer, Ken Sockett, arrives for Yvonne; he asks the police to give her a breathalyser and blood test. Samples reveal alcohol content over double the legal limit.
12:33 p.m.: Unknown to Yvonne or Ernie, Dwayne agrees to make a statement.
After 1:00 p.m.: Yvonne states she was raped by Lyle Schmidt; she is taken to the hospital and then a clinic, but only blood tests are made, no examination for signs of rape.
3:00 p.m.: Constable Fraser takes sample of “red smear in the dirt” around the body at the dump.
4:26 p.m.: Ernie Jensen talks briefly to his lawyer.
4:49 p.m.: Body is removed from the dump; Aitkin accompanies it to the Medical Examiner in Edmonton.
4:39 p.m.: Dwayne agrees “to come clean.” He is taken by Bradley and Travanut to the house to re-enact the crime on video and audio tape.
5:14 p.m.: Dwayne is back in headquarters; he signs a fourteen-page statement, but the police say the video machine did not record anything, and he agrees (“showed no hesitation”) to return to the house and redo it (6:31–7:06 p.m).
7:46 p.m.–8:20 p.m.: Bradley tries to interview Ernie; he denies knowing anything about anything.
Saturday, 16 September:
Early afternoon: Lyle Schmidt is taken to Yvonne’s house for a video and audio re-enactment of what he knows.
4:47 p.m.–6:03 p.m.: Schmidt completes a sixteen-page statement.
The Boys and the Cell Shot
[Dialogue selected from the official record of “cell shot” made between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Monday, 18 September 1989; other details are added from the sworn testimony given by Constable Harvey Jones at the preliminary inquiry, 1 February 1990.]
The parkland world of fall evergreen and glazing gold aspen shimmers over the Medicine Lodge Hills to the west, and the Bear Hills of the Hobbema reserves to the east, as Constable Harvey R. Jones of the RCMP General Investigation Services, Red Deer, drives north to Wetaskiwin. It is Monday, 18 September 1989. He listens to the country-music station that highlights area news, and its “Top of the Hour” report is about the three Wetaskiwin people who have been arrested in connection with the murder, last Friday, of an unemployed man of no fixed address; another suspect, a woman, is still at large.
The three wil
l appear before a judge this morning to be formally charged in court.
With his long hair, beard, and rough clothes, Constable Jones looks like a biker; his official assignment is to be an actor who fishes for information. He will describe his job to Judge H.B. Casson at the preliminary inquiry as follows: “I had been advised [by Corporal Bradley] that I was going to be placed in the cells with one or possibly two suspects in relation to a homicide. I was given no details—I heard some basic details on a radio broadcast […]. It’s generally found, if a person goes in in an undercover capacity … the less they know the better.”
Around ten o’clock, he gets himself shoved into the largest cell in the Wetaskiwin City Police Station. He is armed with all he needs: a tiny radio transmitter concealed under his shirt collar, low enough on his neck so his beard won’t affect it.
Dwayne Wenger is seated on a bottom bunk; he glances up as the guard locks the door behind Jones.
“How ya doin’?” Jones says with just the right edge of careless cheeriness to get a momentum started.
“What?”
Depressed all right; and worried. “Say,” Jones says, cheerier, “how ya doin’?”
Wenger does not respond; he looks ill, his body hunched together in baggy prison coveralls on the edge of the bare bunk. Finally he mutters: “Watcha charged with? Remanded?”
Jones: What’s that?
Wenger: Remanded, or you got [to] do time?
“Well.” Jones drops on the other bunk at right angles to Wenger’s, slumping over close into better pick-up range, “They’re breaching me on my parole. So they charged me for the dope dealin’ so I’ll do some dead time, I guess. Fuck-all a guy can do about it. What ya in for?”
Wenger: Second-degree murder.
