by Rudy Wiebe
All day I sat in court, watching, taking notes. I tried at first to be inconspicuous, but that was impossible in small Courtroom B, where the single row of chairs for spectators is not more than a metre behind the two desks where the accused and his defence lawyer sit on the left, and the Crown Prosecutor on the right, facing the judge. I had to sit beside the RCMP officer who brought Leon in, shackled, and stationed himself directly behind him throughout the trial. Sitting at his red-serge elbow I was, presumably, physically safe.
His Honour Judge D.M. Arnot looked at me immediately, “Are you with the press, sir?” I shook my head. “No, very good.” and since then he has ignored me.
So has everyone else; I’ve become conveniently invisible. I’ve watched Leon listen as the lawyers ponderously dug up details of his brutality against his sister and relatives, watched his thick handcuffed hands with large knobbly knuckles probably broken in innumerable fights, watched him staring around in defiance, sometimes even cockiness, or on occasion with head bent and profiled face expressionless, only his foot and thumbs twitching slightly. And I wondered: is there such a thing as a courtroom ego? To have one’s most trivial actions examined so minutely, almost iconically, within one of the few ritualized procedures left in our society—the courtroom trial? Does Leon ever think: I bust one cop-car window, I fuck one drunken bitch, and I get all these big shots just a-hopping—hey! Look at me! I’m big news. I keep them in fancy cars and slick women.
And Karen recovering from a binge, for three hours in the witness chair, her rigid, painful emotion as the cross-examination questions intensify, right to the legal-aid defence lawyer’s grotesque demand that she state the size of her bra. She is at the most painful moment of memory, she has just told him she became conscious of being crushed under the huge body of her brother, she finds herself naked except for T-shirt and bra—and K.M. Mignealt demands to know both inch and cup size. And then he makes her repeat it. As Yvonne will note when she reads the trial transcript: “A typical stupid male who has a position in the legal system to defile the victim.”
But Karen gives the data again, flat and clear. It is Crown Prosecutor Taylor who finds the breaking emotion in her: when she admits it was her abusive husband’s drunken, public blabbing about her assault that hurt her most deeply. And then, surprisingly, in what until then has been a kind of mechanical excavation of harrowing personal experience, it is the policeman beside me who gives her the only gesture of courtroom kindness: he gets up and offers her a tissue to wipe her tears. And she accepts it.
I had understood that the defence lawyer was hesitating about having Leon take the stand, but there he is, talking willingly. In fact, after the first few questions he just rolls on without question, of his own accord. It seems to me he savours the sound of his own story, as only he can tell it, though his answers to the Prosecutor’s cross-examination quickly drop to monosyllables. But he sticks to his position, and he has no idea why his sister would accuse him of such an act.
All of which elicits from Jim Taylor the comment: “I didn’t know Leon Johnson was such an exemplary guy, or I wouldn’t have prosecuted him.”
And Cecilia Knight. She has sat all day in the tiny visitors’ alcove across from Courtroom B, never entered to hear a single word either of her children had to say; waiting for it all to be finally over. She asks from the doorway, just before the judge adjourns the court, “Can I come in now, without hearing something bad?”
The judge states he will pronounce his verdict two days from now. And Cecilia turns, leaves immediately. Leon’s eyes follow her; from the angle where I sit I can’t tell whether he has ever looked at Karen, but I don’t think she glanced at him even once. I go out, outside into the breathable air of the sunny fall parking lot.
After a few minutes I see the judge emerge, get into a blue Mercedes 450, and drive away. Then Cecilia and Laura appear at the public doors, talking to Karen, who gets into the back seat of a worn, white station wagon with them. Cecilia drives it out of the lot, down a North Battleford street, between tall trees now stripped of their leaves. She stops opposite a bungalow; Laura goes in, comes out with a small swarm of children carrying duffle bags. They crowd into the seat beside Karen, spill back over into the baggage space. Slowly the station wagon pulls away, turns left at the first corner, then left again. Cecilia driving out of the city, towards the river bridges, south towards Red Pheasant Reserve.
[From the judgement of His Honour Judge D.M. Arnott on 21 October 1993]
The issue in the case distils to a question of credibility. Karen gave her evidence in a straightforward manner, in my opinion. She was at times emotional […] recalling the incident was very painful. She was precise, concise, coherent, and consistent, and credible in her testimony. Some of her evidence was […] not entirely flattering to herself […]. in the face of thorough and rigorous cross-examination … she remained steadfast in her position.
I have placed considerable weight on the evidence of Phyllis Stevenson [.… She] was straightforward on the crucial elements […]. Her comforting of the alleged victim, her descriptions of the emotion of the victim were something I place considerable weight on.
The accused’s evidence, I’m sorry to say, I found to be evasive, self-serving, conveniently forgetful and, on a number of important points, simply not credible […]. The accused’s evidence lacked candour … he rambled on without direct answers [… his] evidence did not have the clear ring of truth.
In analyzing the evidence, I asked myself, “Why would this victim lie?” […] This is not something that the witness, in my opinion, would fabricate […] something she would merely hallucinate, misread, or misinterpret […]. This matter distils to this point: I believe Karen Sinclair, and I disbelieve Leon Ray Johnson […]. I find the accused guilty as charged […].
I agree [with the defence counsel] that this must be a very difficult thing for Mrs. [Cecilia] Knight to deal with, and certainly it was a difficult thing for Karen Sinclair […]. In balancing off of these competing interests, then, it seems to me that the appropriate sentence is one of three years and three months in a Federal Penitentiary.
While Leon was serving that sentence for sexual assault and incest in the Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Federal Prison—he was granted no early parole—he was formally charged with eight other counts of rape, intercourse with a female person under the age of fourteen, sexual and physical assault, and incest offences against his cousin Darlene Jacques and his sister Yvonne. The offences had been committed at Red Pheasant Reserve and the town of Battleford between 1972 and 1989.
And while Yvonne anxiously waited in Kingston to be called to North Battleford to testify at a preliminary inquiry which would convince a judge that enough evidence against Leon had been gathered to go ahead with a trial, the Prison for Women erupted into violence. As Judge Louise Arbour later described it, in her official review of what happened: “On the evening of April 22, 1994, a brief but violent physical confrontation took place between six inmates […] and a number of correctional staff. The six were immediately placed in the Segregation Unit […].” However, the violence continued, to the point where “on the evening of April 26, 1994, the Warden of the Prison for Women called in a male Institutional Emergency Response Team to conduct a cell extraction and strip search of eight women in segregation […]. At the end of the lengthy procedure … the eight inmates were left in empty cells in the Segregation Unit wearing paper gowns, and restraints and leg irons.”
Fortunately, Yvonne was not personally involved in these events; but the six inmates who began the crisis were all Native women, members of the Sisterhood, and that, together with the general chaos in prison, affected her immensely. Nevertheless, her preliminary inquiry was set to begin on 11 May, and so, on 10 May, she was taken out of P4W and flown to North Battleford to confront Leon with her charges. She had not seen him since he knocked her down into the bathtub in 1989.
Yvonne’s formal charges against her brother were two instances of
sexual assault in Saskatchewan in 1988, and the concomitant charges of incest. The first involved the fight at the family reunion, and the second a visit with Minnie to Leon’s house, both at Red Pheasant. In Yvonne’s testimony of over a hundred pages, the Crown Prosecutor identified a key issue:
[From the inquiry 12 May 1994]
Crown Prosecutor Taylor: Yvonne, as you were growing up […] what was the relationship between you and Leon as far as any control you felt he had over you.
Yvonne Johnson: […] He was my teacher and I never had no control over anything […]. He’d have me beat my sister down. And, if I tried to back away, crying or whatever, he’d say, ‘Feel it, don’t you feel it.’ And he’d convince me to get angry inside […].
Q: Okay. The times you told the court about, between you and Leon, the family reunion and the time at Leon’s house […].
A: He had control. If you are a survivor […] of any form of abuse […] it affects your thought process and everything is out of whack […]. When someone tells you to do something, especially if it’s been consistent over a lifetime, you just do it. You don’t think about it. It’s better off calling it soul murder […]. I’ve tried to talk to Leon before any of this [i.e., this inquiry], when I had memories. I didn’t remember what happened when I was two and a half […] till I stayed sober for a while and I was sitting in Kingston Prison that the memories came back. I wrote and asked him and I says, ‘Leon, I don’t blame you for what happened […] ’cause you were only eight, but tell me what happened so that I can try to get my life back.’ And, all they did was pass my letters around, amongst family, saying I wrote hate mail and it never went no further.
It shouldn’t be in a Court of Law. He’s not going to get no help in a prison, but—then you got to think of the dangers. All it takes is one time and you’re messed up forever. I don’t want people to hate him for what he did, but I have to have my say. I’m tired, really tired. I guess it’s pretty bad when your only escape in life is thinking, ‘Oh, I can always count on killing myself. I want to die, and I don’t want to go on like this.’ What do I do?
Yvonne said this while facing Leon a few feet away. He was the accused, she the accuser, but the legal consequences of their individual actions had brought them both there in shackles; if they so much as stirred hand or foot, their chains clattered. When she entered the courtroom, she had looked directly at him. She had named herself to the Court as “Medicine Bear Woman,” and had testified for over an hour holding an eagle feather in her left hand, which verified before the Creator that she was telling the truth.
And she had said to Leon directly, from the witness box: “One thing I do want to say, Leon, is I do love you. I don’t love what you did, or what you’ve become, but I love you.”
And finally, “I have to have my say.”
And he gave her a kind of answer. The court tape recorder recorded it exactly:
Accused Johnson: It’s not my fault.
A moment of “very high drama,” as Jim Taylor described it to me; and also, as he understood it, a concession that part or all of what Yvonne had described had actually happened.
Darlene Jacques lived in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and the inquiry into her charges were heard in North Battleford later that year.
Darlene Jacques (née Bear)
[from her inquiry testimony, 14 November 1994]:
I moved around so much when I was a kid, it’s hard to recall all the places. My mother, Josephine Bear, and my brother left and I was sent to live with my older half-sister Shirley Anne Cooke, now Salmon, in Biggar with her two daughters. I was really lonely and then the opportunity arose to live with my Aunt Cecilia on Red Pheasant, in the fall of 1973 when I turned fourteen.
There were Aunt Cecilia’s children there, Karen, Minnie, Kathy, Yvonne, Perry, and Leon when he wasn’t in jail. A baby too, little Edward, my Aunt Rita’s son, still in diapers. The house was actually Grandpa John’s old house, and I ended up moving to my grandparents in the spring. My Grandpa felt at that time that I was being mistreated, even though he didn’t know everything that transpired. I never told him, I didn’t think anyone would believe me.
The first time it occurred was in around September, October. There were no adults present. We were left in Leon’s care, he was babysitting us. And I was sleeping in one of the bedrooms with Karen. And he—he had been drinking. He came into the bedroom, and he dragged me out of the bedroom. And he sat me down in the living room. He gave me a Bible to read, I don’t remember what I read from it. Afterwards, like this lasted maybe ten, fifteen minutes, afterwards he dragged me into the bedroom. He locked the door with a knife and he raped me. I was absolutely terrified. To me he looked huge.
This happened twice more. Once I believe I was hiding, I’m not sure hiding outside or inside, and the same scenario played itself out. He found me, sat me on a chair, got me to read from the Bible, took me into the bedroom and raped me again. The third time happened right here in Old Town [Battleford]. I was walking by myself, out on the street when I heard Leon call from an upstairs window. And he called me upstairs. And I did go. Leon had been drinking. He grabbed me again and dragged me into the bedroom. He raped me.
There was no adult around that I could trust, or tell. But one thing that I made very clear in my mind, is that once I got off Red Pheasant Reserve, I would never return.
Crown Prosecutor: Did this have any effect on your school grades?
Answer: I believe it did. I failed, I spent two years in grade seven.
Crown Prosecutor: What did the Bible have to do with this?
Answer: I have no idea.
Counsel for the Defence: Did anyone ever ask you about any possible attacks?
Answer: Yes. Karen did after the last incident on the reserve, just before I moved to my grandfather’s house. And I told her.
Leon’s subsequent trial on the charges laid by Yvonne and Darlene took place in the Court of Queen’s Bench in North Battleford began on 20 June 1995, before Mr. Justice I.D. McLellan and a jury.
Cecilia testified first. Though she was called as a Crown witness, and though she could not remember any exact dates, including the crucial date of the family reunion, one thing she remembered most certainly was that Darlene had lived with her and her family at Red Pheasant in 1971, not later. That was the year Earl died, and Leon, of course, was then a minor—only fifteen—and so legally he should not now be charged in adult court for raping Darlene, who would then have just turned thirteen. The Cando School records showed that Darlene attended there in 1972 and 1973, but that did not shake Cecilia’s insistence, and since she had always been away working, she knew nothing about this story anyway. Besides, they had never had a Bible in the house until the children, including Leon, were all baptized at once, on the reserve several years later.
As for Yvonne, Cecilia was adamant that as soon as she heard that Louis Johnson, Clarence’s father, was abusing the children, “I told my husband about it and he beat me up for it […]. I never left my children at all […] I refused to go to work till my husband kicked his dad out of the house. [And later, after we were separated] Leon called me from Butte. I was working in Winnipeg. Leon told me come get Yvonne, my dad is trying to bother her […]. I quit my job and went and picked up Yvonne. As far as I know, she never lived with her dad again.”
There were many things Cecilia could not remember on the stand—“Not right this minute”—and not a single thing concerning Leon and Yvonne’s relationship as children—“Like I say, I had so many children to watch I didn’t particularly watch one person as the years went by”—but now that she had had a stroke, had severe high blood pressure, and was a diabetic, Leon, of all her children, had especially shown his concern for her. “He comes to see me every day when he’s home.”
Leon’s legal-aid lawyer, D.J. O’Hanlon, shrewdly pointed out in camera to the judge: “Effectively I do not want Cecilia Knight’s credibility reduced in any fashion. I think she was a benefit to our cause. She was [�
�] a credible witness.”
But not for Yvonne, as it turned out.
Karen had been brought in from Winnipeg to testify, but on the morning of the first day of trial she was again badly drunk. So the Crown Prosecutor had her put in the cells again, overnight this time, and she testified on 22 June.
She was curt to the point of being monosyllabic: as for what she remembered of 1973, there were two “incidents” of Darlene going into Leon’s room, and neither time did Darlene want to go there. Karen admitted that before the second “incident” she told Leon where Darlene was hiding in the attic—under cross-examination she could not explain why she had told him—and also that at the time she had told her mother that she “suspected something was going on with Leon and Darlene, but [Mom] did not really believe me that it was anything.”
The Crown Prosecutor asked Karen nothing regarding Yvonne, but Leon’s defence lawyer did. Karen testified that at the family reunion during which Leon allegedly took Yvonne away and forced sex upon her: “I myself stayed away from Vonnie [in the hall] because Vonnie just seemed to want to attack everybody.” Did she recall whether Leon remained in the hall the entire time? “Oh, I don’t—it’s really hard to say. Leon and I we pretty much, we did a lot visiting between ourselves […] I did not want to fight, he did not want to fight.”
Yvonne does not comment to me on Karen’s evasions regarding herself and Leon; but she does tell me she believes Karen knew everything that happened to Darlene in 1973 because the two girls were very close friends then. Leon was the reality they all—Karen, Darlene, Minnie, Kathy, Vonnie, Perry—lived with in that house on the reserve, where everyone could hear whatever happened: the question was never one of being able to escape him. If he was around, it was simply a matter of what he would do, and to whom. Karen must have helped Darlene logicalize it in the only way the helpless girls could: don’t fight or he’ll beat you up and take you anyway; and convince herself: better a cousin than a sister. When Leon first comes into their bedroom, Karen pretends to sleep while nudging Darlene to go; when Darlene hides the second time, Karen tells him where she is because he threatens to beat her up. At some point Karen must protect herself; she locks herself in as best she can; Leon is huge and unstoppable—except by their mother, who is mostly away—eighteen and out of jail for the moment; he’ll have anyone he wants when he’s home, and Darlene is the newest.
