Stolen Life (46 page)

And she’s jolted into a shivering rage. She grabs at his hand on the sliding door, gets her hip and leg against him while she pries at his fingers, they loosen, she gives a final shove and he falls back on his ass. He’s up in a second; he grabs her ankle as she tries to shove the door shut, and she kicks him back again as she falls. Then the other cop is there, yelling, “Don’t let the bitch close the fucken door!”

He trips over the first one, getting up, but manages to jam his hand up inside the door. Yvonne pulls the door back a bit and slams it on his fingers till he jerks them out, bellowing. Then she shoves in place the board that locks the door.

She looks out; one of the cops is sitting on the grass with his hat lying behind him; the other is jumping around, holding his hand and swearing. She closes the vertical blinds; suddenly she can barely stand. Wetaskiwin Mounties always think they can do anything they please.

She grabs the phone on the kitchen counter and dials the
RCMP
number. When she hears the official voice she simply shouts, “You bust into my house at six in the morning with my kids sleeping, who’d you think you are! You think I’m the bad guy here, don’t you?”

“Madam … madam, who is this calling?”

“Yvonne Johnson, and your guys know it, you sent them here, and they’re prowling around outside my house right now!”

“Please stay on the line, I’ll transfer you, please stay on the line.”

And Dwa is standing beside her. He’s in his boxer shorts, his smooth muscles pouring sweat from his hangover and everything else that’s hit him. They’re in their house together with their three children. They can’t run anywhere.

He looks so sad, so strong, so pale. He says, “Vonnie, don’t make it any worse.”

A man’s voice, it can only be a cop, says, “Hello, Ms. Johnson? Hello?”

Yvonne hangs up the phone. Dwa heads back to bed; Yvonne tries to cover the kitchen window with a blanket. The sounds of the police
rustling around the house stop. After a time there is a quiet tapping at the patio door. It’s Ernie. Yvonne opens the door, and he hauls himself up into the house again.

Seven thirty-five in the morning on Friday, 15 September 1989, in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, population 10,103. In the bedroom off the kitchen in the small house partially renovated with new cedar siding at 4123–53A Street, Yvonne Johnson and Dwayne Wenger sleep restlessly, tangled in light bedclothes and occasionally each other’s sweaty arms.

Across the dead-end street from the house, between Parkdale School and a white bench on the 54th Street side of Parkdale Park, a Hornet hatchback has at some point during the night been parked on the grass, half-hidden by bushes. But an hour ago a tow-truck from Mel’s Towing arrived, hooked onto it, and hauled it away backwards. Now a police cruiser is parked nearby on 53A Street, in a spot from which the porch door of the house can best be observed without obstruction.

Three kilometres away Harvey Schneider, who operates the packer at the City Sanitary Landfill—everyone except city council calls it “the dump”—is driving his shiny ’87 Dodge pick-up down the slope into the landfill excavation. He glances aside at the new mounds of garbage he has come to pack, and immediately sees what looks like a pale manikin sprawled out, legs and arms wide, lying face up. He stops, backs up, and drives to within five feet of it. But he does not get out; he simply stares through the window and sees a large White man, that’s obvious enough—the only clothing he has on is a dirty T-shirt caught up high and tight on his protruding stomach.

W
HEN
, 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

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.