Stolen Life (49 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Wenger: I told them he came over of his own will.
Jones: Yeah, that’s good. Well, who phoned him, did you? Or your old lady.
Wenger: He phoned over, but Yvonne invited him.
Jones: Invited him. Fuck, don’t ever tell them that […]. And you got rid of the piece of wood, eh?
Jensen: Oh yeah, it’s buried […]. He wanted to play hard ball, but he got the hard ball. I don’t feel too good now, though.
Abruptly, Jensen is called out, and Jones works hard to take advantage of his absence. And Wenger talks, talks without seeming hesitation.
Wenger: Ernie fuckin’ kicked him in the balls six, seven, eight times when he was lying down there.
Jones: Oh, is that right? It was, and Ernie was hittin’ him with that thing?
Wenger: He shoved that thing up his ass.
Jones: Ernie shoved it up his ass. What, you guys stripped him? Before you did him?
Wenger: Ernie and I took his clothes off and said how do you like this (inaudible) fuckin’ diddling little kids. You’ll get your own medicine, and he shoved it up.
Jones: […] Ernie says your old lady gets pretty wound up, eh? […].
Because the guy was a skinner? That’s what pissed her off or?
Wenger: Yeah.… (inaudible) Ya gotta defend yourself […].
Soon Ernie is back in the cell, and on and on the story circles, for another hour. They try to co-ordinate each other’s booze-spaced memories of a terrible night. Was it accidental? As Ernie says it, “I still can’t piece it all together, that’s the fuckin’ worst part.”
But Dwayne is dead certain of one thing. “Shirley Anne started it all and she was fuckin’ right there until the bitter end.”
To keep up appearances, and to change tapes, Jones is called out of the cell as well. When he comes back he tells the two, “You guys are the talk of the town.”
For a moment they are diverted by their dubious fame, but Dwayne still feels bad about his video re-enactment and abruptly he confronts Ernie, who drove the body to the dump in Skwarok’s car.
Wenger: The car, you got lazy, didn’t want to walk home [i.e., from the dump, so he simply drove it back and parked it behind bushes in the park across from the house].
Jensen: That’s right.
Wenger: That was you, fucked up there.
In the face of this growing blackness, Jones tries to be helpful: “Shoulda torched the car. You should’ve drove it over into a lake.”
“Shoulda, coulda, woulda.”
“Yeah.” Jensen grinds it out; bending to drink at the sink again.
But neither can endure such confrontations. They know at any instant the door can open again like a sentence and they’ll be separated, and all their defensive, momentary togetherness will be gone. They must hold hard to whatever fleeting camaraderie they can find, and Ernie grabs for it with a laugh:
“We gotta watch ourselves from here on in,” he says. “But what can you do? Have another beer and go out and fuckin’ do it again.”
Constable Jones laughs uproariously. “I like your attitude!”
Jensen: Talk of the town, my in-laws will never, ever, ever talk to me now, never mind the last time.
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?