Stolen Life (61 page)

It was
RCMP
constable Nicholas Smyth who informed Yvonne of the jury’s decision. Smyth had been the investigator gathering Crown evidence for Karen’s charge against Leon; he also investigated Darlene and Yvonne’s charges. He had even spent a week in Butte, Montana, trying to gather school, police, and
FBI
records on Yvonne’s childhood there. Despite Yvonne’s long negative experience with policemen, she found Smyth “a nice guy.”

She tells me she did meet one other humane policeman:
RCMP
Staff Sergeant Cliff Burnett, who came with his wife to Kingston in May 1995, to escort her to North Battleford for the preliminary inquiry. “He treated me like a human being—a unique experience on a sexual-assault complaint anyway, as most women will testify, and even more surprising since I was a federal inmate on security escort. He never shackled me, just told me straight up if I wanted to jump out of vehicle going a hundred kliks, the choice was mine.”

In fact, Cliff Burnett later wrote a letter to Kingston regarding that escort; he praised Yvonne as a “model prisoner” who “followed instruction to the letter and accepted our direction without question and a great amount of humour […]. I found Yvonne a very intelligent and respectful person […]. We had many preconceived ideas of this inmate before actually meeting her and were somewhat taken aback when she quickly deflated our images with her wit, humour and conversation. She is truly a book that awaits to be written.”

However, by the time of the trial in June 1995, Burnett had been transferred to Regina, and a different kind of
RCMP
officer in North Battleford jail went out of his way to let Yvonne know what he thought of her. He was considerate enough to ask her whether she wanted something to read, but when she replied, “Yes, please,” he gave her only the section of the newspaper that carried a long article about a backwoods Ontario family fighting the courts to leave them
alone in their apparently consenting-adult, incestuous relationships.

“I got the cop’s point, all right,” Yvonne wrote to me. “He as much as told me, ‘Indians are always fucking each other anyway, why bother the courts with it? Clog up our jails, endless arrests and paperwork, who cares if Indians bugger each other up. And these Johnsons, four out of six here in jail at one time and the worst one, this convicted murderer, yelling rape on her brother.’’

“Women accused of violent offences are always viewed as worse than men. In Canada judges have stated this openly on the bench, so why shouldn’t the cops?”

Another policeman told her the evidence Smyth had gathered in Butte would at best make an
RCMP
scrapbook. “That’s the abuse in my life: scrap; cop entertainment.”

Constable Nicholas Smyth did not behave that way to her, and he said he wanted to help her, but there was never enough time, even with seven days in the North Battleford cells, for Yvonne to discuss with him what he had found in Montana. He did tell her two things: he had found not a single living person—including her father—who would confirm her accusations of porn-ring abuse in Butte; and police officials had told him categorically that no policeman had ever been found guilty of a criminal offence in Butte.

I myself had seen the evidence in the long reports of police crime in the 11 August 1989, edition of
The Montana Standard
. It would seem Smyth had talked to police and investigated “official” records only, and perhaps it was not surprising that he found no evidence there.

When Smyth informed Yvonne of the jury’s decision on Friday, 23 June 1995, he came with a woman officer into her cell and told her as kindly as he could that the jury had brought in their verdict after less than six hours’ deliberation: three charges by Darlene, five by her, and Leon had walked free on all eight of them. He said that’s the way the law is, the jury has to believe beyond a reasonable doubt, and they said not guilty.

Where did that leave her? She was crying, she had counted on honest police to gather honest evidence, but it was all the same: always a power confrontation and absolute, overwhelming force, and the abuser walking free again. And Smyth could only tell her that after his investigation in Butte, and what he’d heard about her brother in
court—though she had said and written some pretty wild things—he still believed that what she said could have happened. But Leon had denied everything, and no witnesses had stood up to confirm what Yvonne testified had happened to her in Saskatchewan.

“No one from my family?” she asked.

“You better talk to your family, about what they said in court.”

Yvonne phoned Karen later from P4W, but Karen told her little except that the police had “yanked them around,” they would not allow them to visit her; security, Karen said. Yeah, Yvonne comments to me, “if they really wanted to come, they’d find a connection, Mom was in good with my escorting officers. I’m not stupid, I’ve been in the system seven years now.” She knew that the
RCMP
had searched for Cecilia in town and personally told her to visit Yvonne. After Karen’s case against Leon, both the prosecution and the defence had evaluated Cecilia as a “good woman” caught in a bad situation, having a court search through her children’s violence against each other. She personally told Leon’s defence lawyer after Karen’s trial,

“I support both my kids, but you get caught in the middle, and you really don’t know what’s going on all the time. All my life my kids never told me things, that I’m starting to learn about now.”

And the defence lawyer added at Leon’s sentencing, “To some extent, I think if there’s a victim, it’s her. Because she’s a … she’s a good woman.

Yvonne says that she believes in her heart that her mother
is
a good woman. But she also thinks that at some point Cecilia made her decision: she would back her son, even if it meant going against her daughters. She refused to be drawn into Karen’s trial, but in Yvonne’s she chose to take the stand; once there, there was a lot she could not remember, or that she had never seen. But as Yvonne pointed out, “If Mom says she can’t remember, or saw nothing, then how can she say nothing happened?”

For Yvonne, the situation ultimately turned again on her mother’s life of deny, deny. By continuing to say, “It never happened, Vonnie, nothing was going on, if you say it did you’re crazy,” her mother—despite her good intentions—simply perpetuated the silence that allows abuse in the family to go on, and on.

Yvonne found the holding cell worse after the verdict, four yellow cement walls. She was there for two more days—“I smoke like mad, a smoke was all I knew I had […]. my stay in the cells was spent crying”—before they flew her back to Kingston. Alone except for an Elizabeth Fry Society woman: “She came and stayed with me, she gave me real support. She let me ramble and pace and smoke, she was short and dark, from Asia I think, and I taught her old Johnny Cash songs to give her a flavour of jail. She told me she saw me as a very strong, spiritual person.”

And one fifteen-minute visit from her mother.

Cecilia came for a security visit under supervision in the visiting room: Yvonne writes me she must have deliberately asked for that, in order to keep it short and controlled. There were police officers—at times as many as six—listening all the time, and Yvonne recognized in her mother that cockiness she gets when she has won something. Yvonne had taken Leon to court to confront and expose him for what he had done, but also to reach the family, to achieve some understanding and—best of all—change. But her mother had seen it as a challenge, and now that the jury had declared Leon “not guilty” it seemed to Yvonne her mother was in effect telling her, “You gave it your best shot, and you lost. You tried, but not even a jury of Whites believes you, three members of the family have gone up against him now and it’s over, he’s clean, now let the past lie.” So the court had vindicated her for backing Leon all along:
she
had won.

Would her mother have come to see her even for fifteen minutes if the verdict had gone the other way? She wouldn’t come earlier when Yvonne needed support, so why was she bothering now? Yvonne writes with some bitterness, “I feel she [visited me] for the sake of show. The whole thing was exciting to her.” To show the cops here’s this poor, afflicted mother with her violent, crazy kids, and she still tries, she still cares for them all, even the worst. It’s not her fault, she’s the one to feel sorry for.

The police banged on the door, “Two minutes!”

Cecilia said to Yvonne, “I love you.”

Eight months later Yvonne writes me, still with the pain remembered from that moment:

“I told her I feared for all of them from Leon. That’s when I saw fright, and what seemed almost a breaking of some sort in her, yet her comeback was quick. She said, ‘I’m tougher than that, he can’t get this old bag down.’

“Her big boy would walk free again, despite all she knows he’s done. In her happiness, her words, ‘Now don’t cry, forget it,’ hit me very hard.

“But I was obedient. I told her as I hugged her, ‘And I too love you, I really do, Mom.’ I looked in her eyes and I saw a little give, they seemed to fog a bit and she grabbed me for a hug.

“ ‘Yvonne,’ she said, ‘I’ll help you get out. But be careful what you write, we still have to live here, you know.’

“Then she parted my company, walking out of my life as always.”

When Cecilia left, she cracked a joke Yvonne couldn’t hear; the
RCMP
officers gathered in the corridor laughed, and then the door closed.

In August 1995, Yvonne writes to me from Kingston: