Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  Wenger: I never talk to mine, anyway […].

  Jensen: I don’t know whether to shit, laugh, cry or go blind.

  Wenger: Who’s gonna paint my house now? I got this guy’s house all masked off and ready to spray and there she sits, fuck!

  They’re all laughing, hard, feeling not too bad for a moment.

  Jensen: I guess a guy should try and cheer up. It ain’t gonna get any fuckin’ worse […]. It was just a party that turned into a accident.”

  They are all silent. They know they are at the centre of their small city, Wetaskiwin, “The Place of the Hills of Peace,” where they live, work, hang out, walk warm along the sidewalk in sunshine, wheel their vehicles around to any bar they please and someone they know will be there, will say, “C’mon over, have one on me”—but now all they can hear are the heavy sounds of captivity, feel the density of every wall and door with their tiny sliding windows.

  Dwayne Wenger says, “The thing that bothers me, it’s Yvonne. She’s always left alone. That could screw anyone up.” He gestures across the hall. “She’s next door, there.”

  Dwayne goes to the door, peers through the crack left by its window. Suddenly he shouts, “Vonnie!”

  “What?” Her voice is distant but clear, as if buried.

  “How you doin’?”

  “Reading.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine. I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  Ernie is beside Dwayne, on tiptoe, trying to peer out. Dwayne mutters. “They got ’em right over there.”

  “She’s in the way,” Ernie says, “we can’t see.”

  Dwayne says, “I’ll show you how.”

  “Straight,” Ernie says, “straight from that window—you can’t see her?”

  “Yeah, I know. I fuckin’ know every square inch of this place, I painted it.”

  “Can’t cry over spilt milk, but I sure wish that prick woulda never showed up that day.”

  Wenger yells at the door, “Come on and feed us!”

  Four hours in a cell is exhausting work. In a minute Constable Jones will give Bradley the prearranged signal that will get him out of here, but even as he thinks this, he studies the two doomed men once more, carefully, with the trained eye and memory of a professional witness who knows he will be cross-examined by lawyers in a court of law. Poor buggers.

  Yvonne is silent; not even with a lawyer present will she speak. She does not know what anyone else has said, she knows nothing of Dwayne’s video re-enactment of the crime; all she decides is, sober as she is now, from her they will learn nothing. At her brief court appearance on Monday she is charged with second-degree murder and then taken back to the women’s cells at the rear of the Wetaskiwin police station, behind the desk in the hall where a matron is always on duty.

  But shortly after noon on Monday, she becomes aware of stirrings in the hall; whispers outside her locked door. When she peeks through the blind in the window to see, a large RCMP man blocks it and begins twirling what sounds like a noisy ratchet to cover what is being said. Abruptly the door opens and she is ordered out so that her cell can be cleaned. When she protests that she’s just cleaned it herself with a mop and hot water, the officer says, gesturing “Johnson, out, now!” and of course she goes.

  They put her first in a cell with two bunk beds, down the hall near the men’s section. She listens, and suddenly she knows she is opposite Dwayne’s cell. She hears him talking to someone, though she cannot understand what they’re saying. There is coming and going, and soon Ernie is brought in too, mooching for cigarettes even from the cop. Two co-accused together in a cell with a third prisoner? Coming and going, talking? She feels very uneasy—Are they playing the usual police games on them? Since when does it take all afternoon to clean a cell that’s already spotless?

  Dwa calls to her once, and she tell him she loves him before the policeman shuts them up. It gives her a jolt of happiness.

  After supper on Tuesday, 19 September, Yvonne is moved again. And she is astonished to find her cousin Shirley Anne is already in the cell where they place her. Sitting on one of the lower bunks, close beside another woman inmate. They look up when Yvonne is escorted in, surprised as if caught whispering together.

  Later, Shirley Anne would make various statements that when she ran from the house after midnight on the morning of 15 September, for some time she hid in terror of “Yvonne sending the boys after me”; that she tried for refuge in the house of a minister she knew, but he had moved—“I seen Satan that night when that [other] man answered the door”—and she fled; that after huddling in an apartment landing all night, next morning she hitchhiked to Edmonton to stay with her “stepfather,” John Wheels.

  Yvonne knows John Wheels as a man Shirley Anne lives and drinks with when the occasion arises. But Yvonne doubts that Shirley Anne ever went to Edmonton, because no street person in the city remembers seeing her. Yvonne believes she may have hidden in Wetaskiwin, perhaps with her mother or Lyle Schmidt, who stated in court he knows her very well.

  But on Tuesday, 19 September 1989, The Wetaskiwin Times Advertiser carried a large front-page headline, “Three Charged in Slaying,” just below a picture of a police officer photographing the half-naked body of Leonard Charles Skwarok, thirty-six, of no fixed address, lying in the dump. The news item stated that Dwayne Wenger, twenty-eight, Yvonne Johnson, twenty-seven, and Ernie Jensen, thirty-two, had been charged with second-degree murder in provincial court on 18 September. The article continued on page A5 with a headline: “Police Seek Woman for Information,” directly above a dramatic picture of Dwayne in front of a police car, surrounded by officers and giving the photographer the finger. The article concluded: “They [police] are also looking for Shirley Anne Cooke, 39, who also goes by the last names of Bear and Salmon, who they believe has information about the murder.”

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, 19 September, shortly before four o’clock, Constable Witzke was talking to Cecilia, who was at Yvonne’s house taking care of the children, when the phone rang. It was Shirley Anne. She said she was at the pay-phone in the Wetaskiwin bus depot; she wanted Cecilia to meet her, so she could tell her side of the story. Cecilia told her to turn herself in and hung up; then she informed Witzke. In a few minutes he was at the depot; a bus was leaving, he stopped it and asked the driver if a person fitting Shirley Anne’s description was on it.

  Witzke testified at the inquiry: “The driver pointed to a person walking away from me who at that time turned and looked at me, and then walked towards me.”

  The person admitted she was Shirley Anne Salmon, and added, “I was going to turn myself in to the police in Edmonton”—even though she later claimed she had just come from Edmonton. Witzke did not question her about that; he simply arrested her for murder.

  According to Witzke’s testimony at the inquiry, Shirley Anne told him in the car, “I want to tell the truth.” At the station he read her the standard police warning about her rights, but then, just moments before a legal-aid lawyer arrived, she said, “I didn’t know he was dead until I heard it on the radio the next morning. It wasn’t premeditated. We just got drunk.”

  Witzke then asked her nine questions, all of which she answered; he testified that he wrote them down in his notebook immediately after:

  “You want to tell the truth?”

  “Yes […]. I’m not a murderer. I was coming down for court yesterday. I got ten dollars for the bus and came down to turn myself in.”

  “How well did you know Chuck?”

  “I just met him once.”

  “Were you there when it happened?”

  “Yes, I saw it all.”

  “Did he talk about molesting his kids?”

  “He said he was charged once. You can check his record.”

  “He has two girls, a six-year-old and a baby?”

  “I think it was the baby.”

  “Did he say what he did to her?”

  “He said he did it to
her.”

  “Did he say if he touched Yvonne’s kids?”

  “I think he said something. I was kind of loaded.”

  “Did Yvonne and Dwayne fight with Chuck?”

  “Yvonne did nothing. It was the guys. They threw him down the stairs.”

  “Did you and Yvonne go downstairs?”

  “Yeah, but we just watched.”

  They say the first statement is always closest to the facts—or could it be closest to lies?

  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 s
tories 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.