The Mayerthorpe Story
Page 1
The Mayerthorpe Detachment, February 11, 2005. Top, L to R: S/Sgt. Gary Radford, Cst. Brock Myrol, Cst. Leo Johnston, Cpl. Jim Martin, Sgt. Brian Pinder, Cst. Clayton Seguin, Cpl. Jeff Whipple, Supt. Marty Cheliak. Bottom, L to R: Cst. Peter Schiemann, Cst. Cindie Dennis, stenographer Heather Heystek, office manager Pat Lakeman, Cst. Julie Letal, Cst. Joe Sangster. (Mayerthorpe Freelancer)
THE
MAYERTHORPE
STORY
FROM AMBUSH TO AFTERMATH
Robert Knuckle
GENERAL STORE PUBLISHING HOUSE
499 O’Brien Road, Renfrew, Ontario, Canada K7V 3Z3 Telephone (613) 599-2064 or 1-800-465-6072 • www.gsph.com
ISBN 978-1-897508-42-8 (Pbk)
978-1-77123-833-5 (EPUB)
78-1-77123-834-2 (MOBI)
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Copyright © Robert Knuckle, 2014
Cover art, design: Magdalene Carson
Published in Canada
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Knuckle, Robert, 1935—
The Mayerthorpe story : from ambush to aftermath / Robert Knuckle.
ISBN 978-1-897508-42-8
1. Police murders—Alberta—Mayerthorpe. 2. Royal Canadian Mounted Police-Officials and employees—Crimes against—Alberta—Mayerthorpe. 3. Roszko, James. 4. Accomplices—Alberta—Mayerthorpe. 5. Trials (Murder)—Alberta—Edmonton. I. Title.
HV6535.C33M38 2009364.152’30971233C2009-902730-5
For Our Grandchildren
Lakota Knuckle
McKinley Knuckle
Geneva Knuckle
Alexander Barthorpe
Samuel Chichakian
Joseph Chichakian
Silvana Chichakian
Contents
Author’s Coments
1Mayerthorpe
2Roszko
3The Mounties
4Hennessey and Cheeseman
5Thursday Morning
6Officer Down!
7Devastation
8Investigation
9Before the Courts
10Fair or Unfair
11In Memoriam
12Epilogue
13Addendum
Appendix A
Agreed Statement of Facts
Appendix B
Reason for Judgment
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Other Books by Robert Knuckle
Author’s Comments
THIS BOOK IS the culmination of my stories about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. My earlier books were stepping-stones whereby I learned valuable lessons in style and structure. But more than anything, writing those books taught me the importance of incorporating as many interviews as possible to create a compelling narrative.
In July 2005, I was researching In the Line of Duty, VolumeII, a compendium of all the members of the RCMP who have been killed in the performance of their duties and whose names are inscribed on their Honour Roll.
At that time, I was afforded the opportunity to interview the family members of the four Mounties murdered at Mayerthorpe, as well as other principals integrally involved in the story. Those interviews — and over fifty others since then — allowed me unprecedented access to sources whose intimate knowledge of the case was invaluable. Although the murders occurred in 2005, it is only now that the complete story can be told.
For over three years, its plot remained unfinished because the two men who were accused of being complicit in the Mayerthorpe murders had not been brought to justice. Then, in January 2009, both of these men, Shawn Hennessey and Dennis Cheeseman, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to prison for their crimes.
These men still hold out hope that their guilty pleas will be overturned and they then can proceed to a trial. Nevertheless, at this time I feel this complex tragedy is sufficiently resolved so that the story can be properly told.
Furthermore, this incident, as tragic as it may be, has left an indelible mark on the fabric of Canadian history and, as such, it deserves to be recorded for posterity.
I believe it is a story that belongs on the shelves of every library and school in our country — and beyond.
I hope those who read this book will find the story as fascinating as I did.
1 | Mayerthorpe
ON THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2005, the worst case of police mass murder in the history of Canada took place near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. On that day, a disturbed lone gunman ambushed and murdered four young members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a semi-automatic assault rifle that killed them all within a matter of seconds.
There is tragic irony in the fact that such a dreadfully momentous event should be associated with a place like Mayerthorpe, a small and obscure rural town located on Highway #43 about 145 kms (87 miles) northwest of Edmonton.
In fact, this tragedy didn’t really happen at Mayerthorpe at all but out in the countryside much closer to the rural hamlet of Rochfort Bridge, a tiny crossroads community of sixteen houses and one restaurant located in the county of Lac Ste. Anne.
The reason this atrocity will forever be associated with the town of Mayerthorpe is that three of the four slain policemen were members of the Mayerthorpe RCMP Detachment.
There have been other cases of multiple police murder involving the RCMP. Thirteen were killed during the Second World War, but that was over a period of years. Eight were killed in the rebellion of 1885, but that, too, happened in armed conflict and took place over a span of three days.
Five RCMP members drowned in Lake Simcoe in Ontario in 1958 while on a late-night investigative mission to Georgina Island; their small boat capsized in the turbulence of a sudden storm. In 1963, four Mounties died in a plane crash at Carmacks in the Yukon.
In 1962, Constables Joseph Keck, Gordon Pedersen, and Donald Weisgerber were gunned down at Kamloops, British Columbia.
On several occasions, two Mounties have been murdered at the same time. In 1970, Sgt. Robert Schrader and Cst. Douglas Anson were shot to death while responding to a domestic dispute near MacDowall, Saskatchewan. The same fate befell Cpl. Barry Lidstone and Cst. Perry Brophy at Hoyt, New Brunswick, in 1978. Constables Robin Cameron and Marc Bourdages were shot and killed by a lone gunman near Mildred, Saskatchewan, in July 2006.
The March West, 1874.
But Mayerthorpe retains the dubious distinction of being the worst case of multiple murder in the modern history of the RCMP.
What’s more, it is also a fact that the Province of Alberta is disproportionately represented on the official RCMP Honour Roll that lists all the Mounties who have died in the line of duty.
To date, thirty-nine of the 220 members on the Honour Roll have died in Alberta. This amounts to 18 percent of all the Mounties who have died in the line of duty across Canada since the inception of the Force.
This high percentage can be partially explained by the fact that the Mounties have been stationed in Alberta longer than anywhere else in Canada. The Force was initially organized as the Northwest Mounted Police in 1873 to help keep the peace in Canada’s NorthWest Territories, which at that time encompassed the District of Alberta. The major incident that spurred the formation of the NWMP was the massacre of twenty-five Assiniboine Indians by wolf hunters and whisky traders in May 1873 in the Cypress Hills close to the Alberta eastern border.
In July 1874, a conting
ent of 275 of these Mounties began their famous “March West” from Fort Dufferin, Manitoba, and ended their western trek by establishing their headquarters at Fort MacLeod in southern Alberta. The Force was then divided in two, with half of the redcoats travelling north to Edmonton. The following year, Fort Calgary was founded.
Ever since 1874, the Mounties have policed Alberta. In 1905, when Alberta became a province, the Mounties, in essence, became Alberta’s provincial police. And the massive size of the province makes that a challenging task.
Alberta ranks as the fourth largest province in Canada after Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia. It is a land mass only slightly smaller than the State of Texas, extending 1,223 kms (760 miles) from Montana in the south to its northern border with the Northwest Territories. From east to west, Alberta’s maximum width is 660 kms (410 miles).
The only areas in the province that the Mounties do not police are some of the big cities like Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, and Medicine Hat. A few smaller communities such as Camrose and Taber also have their own police service.
Consequently, throughout Alberta there are 2,200 Mounties stationed in 107 detachments, from Waterton Park on the Montana border to Assumption, just below the southern edge of the Northwest Territories.
In 2005, Mayerthorpe had eleven members working in its detachment office, two of whom primarily worked traffic control on busy Highway #43.
Two other nearby communities that play a significant role in this story also have RCMP detachment offices. Whitecourt, a town of 8,500 situated on Highway #43 just north of Mayerthorpe, had a twelve-member unit. Barrhead, to the east of Mayerthorpe with a population of 4,600, had nine Mounties working in their detachment. Although Barrhead has a bigger population than Mayerthorpe, the latter detachment has more demanding highway responsibilities.
Mayerthorpe sits quietly north of the densely populated Calgary–Edmonton corridor, where it is nestled among the rolling hills and widespread rural properties of central Alberta.
The town began its existence in 1919 with the building of a small Merchant’s Bank of Canada on “Main Street.” That was soon followed by the erection of Crockett’s General Store and a small hotel. As a fledgling village, the community got its name from Robert Mayer, the first postmaster in the area, and from the suffix “thorpe,” an archaic Old English term meaning “little village.”
It was officially incorporated as a village in 1927 and has sustained its existence since then by providing agricultural goods and services to local farmers. Today, with a population of 1,600 it also serves as a bedroom community for the lumber mills in Whitecourt and nearby Blue Ridge.
Although the town’s weekly newspaper, The Mayerthorpe Freelancer, was closed in 2008, the essence of the community can be best understood by scanning some of the articles in its back issues:
Celebrating Agriculture in Alberta
Farm Safety
Calving Season Springs to Life
Alberta Angus Breeder of the Year
Preventing Farm Accidents
Our Greatest Asset is the Farm Family
The advertisements are equally revealing:
Farm to Fork with Alberta Pork
Silver II Custom Harvesting
The Dependable Bulls of the Towaw Cattle Company
Cunningham Fertilizers
Ditner’s Feed Service and Supply
Farms and Acreages for Sale
In 2005, the economy in Mayerthorpe was sluggish. However, there had been a time when the town was a bustling, thriving community supported by the sale of cattle, grain, and lumber.
But its commerce suffered a severe blow in 2003 when the threat of “mad cow” disease closed the U.S. border to Canadian beef and devastated the local cattle and trucking markets. That same year, the area suffered a major drought. Then, in 2004, the region was infested with grasshoppers that plagued the grain crop.
Since then, economic conditions have only marginally improved, but farmers, being a hardy and determined breed, have stayed the course and helped keep the town solvent.
The weather in Mayerthorpe is typically Canadian. Although the summers are warm and spring is usually pleasant, the winters there can be brutal. Temperatures of twenty below zero are common and there is usually at least one week every winter when the thermometer dips to thirty or thirty-five below. When this cold is combined with a nasty wind, the chill factor can become unbearable.
But the fall in Mayerthorpe is glorious.
Pastor Wendell Wiebe, the minister of the local Baptist Church and chaplain of the town’s volunteer fire department, says, “The fall colours here are amazing … beyond anything I’ve seen in the world. And that includes the Maritimes, the United States, and the Philippines.”
Living in a small community like Mayerthorpe has both its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the townsfolk enjoy the benefits of everyone being close and knowing about each other. When someone is sick or suffering, the news spreads quickly and the neighbours rally ’round to help. On the other hand, that same social intimacy has the potential for generating gossip. And that can be destructive.
In this regard, it is Pastor Wiebe’s observation that the people of Mayerthorpe are generally cautious and reserved. “I think that’s natural in a small town. Everyone knows everyone else and they have learned to be prudent … cautious … in their conversation. There’s a warm sense of family here but most folks are careful of what they say … and who they say it to.”
From a physical perspective, Mayerthorpe is unspectacular. Viewed from a distance, the town presents an unimpressive profile of lowlying buildings, including a downtown section comprised of four blocks of insignificant stores on either side of its one commercial “Main Street.”
The most imposing structure in the community is a huge grain elevator, no longer functional, that stands next to the town’s rusting railway tracks. Although the elevator is obsolete, it has been declared a historical site and is being retrofitted to its original condition when it was a busy commercial enterprise in the early 1960s.
Elsewhere in town, amid clusters of modest frame houses, there are schools, four churches, the twenty-eight-room Haven Inn Hotel, the Co-op and Super A grocery stores, a Canadian Legion, a fire hall, a Case Equipment dealership, the Lariat Restaurant, a community outdoor swimming pool, an eighteen-hole golf course, and a vacant lot where the old arena once stood. Sadly, it was lost in a fire in 2008.
The most attractive building in the community is the modern, dark-bricked RCMP detachment office that was opened in 1985 and sits on the edge of town near the highway. It’s a one-storey structure with offices, an interview room, a meeting/coffee room, a filing room, a communications area, and four cells for short-term stays.
In March 2005, the Mayerthorpe Detachment was run by Sergeant Brian Pinder, an experienced NCO. However, beginning on Monday, February 28, 2005, Sgt. Pinder had gone on a one-week holiday leave. Acting as commanding NCO in his place was Cpl. Jim Martin, thirty-eight, who had fifteen years’ experience and had been at the Mayerthorpe Detachment since September 2001.
Mayerthorpe is a friendly place. Most people who go there soon discover something warm and welcoming about the local people that they quickly come to appreciate.
It is, however, a place where nothing very exciting seems to happen … nothing of any real consequence.
But on Wednesday, March 2, some ordinary, rather minor events began to play out that would change the town’s image forever.
The day started out like any other. People showered, ate their breakfasts, and began going about their normal routines. Kids went to school, moms and dads went off to work, salesmen made their calls, folks at home listened to their radios.
Everyone in town was looking forward to the end of winter and the start of a new and rejuvenating spring. As the morning progressed, no one in Mayerthorpe could suspect that within twenty-four hours the name of their community would be known around the world.
That morni
ng, bailiff Rob Perry phoned the Mayerthorpe Detachment and advised Cpl. Jim Martin that he was proceeding to James Roszko’s farm on Range Road 75 near Rochfort Bridge.
Perry told Cpl. Martin he was going there to execute a warrant authorizing him to seize a white 2005 Ford F350 Super Duty pickup truck on behalf of Kentwood Motors of Edmonton. The car agency had been unable to confirm Roszko’s credit status, and for two months Roszko had failed to reply to their repeated phone calls.
Perry also said that based on the information he had received about Roszko’s being aggressive and abusive, he decided to bring his partner, Mark Hnatiw, along with him for protection. Hnatiw was a huge man standing six feet, four inches and weighing 240 pounds; he formerly had been employed as a prison guard.
Cpl. Martin advised Perry to be careful, because Roszko had been charged last August for damaging the tires on the two different vehicles that had driven onto his property. One car belonged to a meter reader; the other to a census-taker.
Jim Martin had handled the census-taker’s complaint. It alleged that Roszko had damaged all four tires on her car. When Martin went out to investigate, he found that Roszko had made a spike belt by splitting a length of plastic plumbing pipe and embedding it with nails. Then Roszko laid the pipe down in front of the gate of the driveway leading onto his property.
Prior to the census-taker’s complaint, Roszko had used the same spike belt to flatten three tires on the meter reader’s vehicle.
When Martin went out and discovered the spike belt in Roszko’s laneway, he charged him with two counts of mischief. Now Martin was waiting to testify against him at an upcoming trial scheduled for the spring.
Martin also warned Perry to watch out for Roszko’s two vicious dogs that he often let loose to frighten unwanted visitors.
Peter Schiemann outside the Mayerthorpe Detachment, 2003.
Martin finished his conversation with Perry by telling him he would come out to assist him. Jim said he would leave right away and meet Perry at the gate of Roszko’s farm.
When the corporal got off the phone, he asked Cst. Peter Schiemann, twenty-five, to accompany him out to Roszko’s farm. They left the office quickly, got into a PC (police cruiser) and headed out of town toward Range Road 75.