Stolen Life (65 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
So. Ernie was jerking him around with this cord by the neck, Dwa was still standing on him. And then Shirley Anne grabbed the cord and we were still trying to knock him out. And I said, “If you’re going to, just, if he tries to get up then you can hold on like this.”
But what she was doing, she would choke him and stop choking him, she was supposed to be doing this to the time of his breathing.
And Ernie was going crazier on him, and this is where I did something real stupid ’cause Ernie had another table [stool] leg and he was going to use this table leg on him and I wound up spreading his legs and Ernie shoved it all the way up his rectum.
And when he did that Dwa said, “Chuck pissed himself.”
Dwa said, “He’s dead.”
I said, “No, he’s not.”
And Dwa said, “Yes he is, he pissed himself.”
“No, he’s not,” I said, “just watch his breathing.”
Dwa was standing on top of him and I looked over and Shirley Anne had that cord, and she just had it tight, she was pulling on it, she had it [so] tight around his neck that she was holding it back with her weight, her body was on a tilt.
And I told her, “Let go,” but she wouldn’t listen. I was trying to see if he was okay.
“Shirley Anne, let go!” Three or four times I yelled at her, and she wouldn’t. Finally I got up and I just pushed her and she flew across the room, and I took the cord off him.
Dwa was still standing on him and I pushed Dwa, I said, “Get off!” And I was standing there looking at him.
Everything was quiet, there was no noise, no commotion, no nothing. We all just stood there and were looking at each other. I was trying to watch him breathe, and I couldn’t see it, his chest going up and down.
Dwa said, “He’s dead.”
But I kept saying, “No, he’s not. No, he’s not.”
Everybody wound up going upstairs, and we started kind of panicking. Ernie started walking back and forth really fast, and I looked across at Shirley Anne. She was sitting by the sink: she was covered with blood. There was none on me, Ernie was covered in blood, and Dwa was sitting there very quiet in a kitchen chair and he had no blood on him either.
Shirley Anne sat by the sink on some empty beer cases and it was really weird what she was doing. She had on a red pullover T-shirt and she pulled up the sleeves and her arms were just covered with blood. Just covered. It seemed like it didn’t even faze her, she had her arms out and she’d twist them from one side to the other, she’d slink her hands, she’d kind of slap her hands together one on the other like that [slapping] and look at them. She was smiling. The longer I watched her, the more—she sat there, nothing was bothering her. I was being torn into a hundred million different pieces and she was sitting there calm, cool, collected, just looking at the blood on her arms and hands.
Dwa was sitting across from me at the table and he was still very quiet. I couldn’t look at Shirley Anne, and I turned and looked at him, and I said, “He’s not dead.”
Dwa goes, “Yeah, he is.” And after a minute, “Is that what everybody wanted?”
“No.” I said. “No, he’s not.” Then I looked at Ernie: “Ernie, is he dead?”
Ernie was pacing back and forth, really jittery. And he goes: “Yeah, he’s dead.”
“No, he’s not.” And I looked at Shirley Anne: “Shirley Anne, is he dead?”
She says, “Yeah, he’s dead.”
And I said to her, “No. He’s not.”
I couldn’t look at her any more, so I got up and I figured he was just playing like he was passed out, finally. I went down a couple of cellar steps to where the first step was missing and I squatted down there looking at him.
I was waiting for him to move. And I kept thinking, Don’t do this, stop playing this game, and I’ll catch you, you have to breathe sometime.
I sat there, and I was watching him. Waiting.
In Wetaskiwin, Alberta, sometime around midnight between 14 and 15 September 1989, four people fight one man in a small basement. Within eleven hours, that man’s body is examined and verified as dead by police. At the trial in the Wetaskiwin Courthouse on 7 March 1991, Dr. Graeme Dowling, the Prosecution’s expert in the field of forensic pathology, responsible for overseeing the investigation of sudden, unexpected deaths, testifies: “It was my opinion at the conclusion of my examination that this individual had died as a result of the combined effects of ligature strangulation and blunt injuries, but that the more important of these two causes was ligature strangulation.” For the ligature (a “long, thin flexible object” like a rope or cord) strangulation to be fatal, he said it would have to be applied steadily for at least three to five minutes.
A factor that did not fit with Dr. Dowling’s conclusion that a ligature had been the primary cause of death was the broken hyoid bone. This “tiny bone […] which supports the voice box” is located “high up in
the neck […] and is well protected” so that only a sharp blow would break it. Or possibly “some manual pressure by hands on the neck.”
Besides numerous contusions to head and body, one other forensic fact was that “the anus was bruised,” an injury “consistent with the insertion of some blunt instrument […] not to a great depth, probably not more than one, one and a half inches.” This injury would not cause death; nor had it been made by a sharp instrument, like a knife.
Dwayne Wenger and Shirley Anne Salmon had been legally sentenced in January 1991 for their responsibility in the Charles Skwarok homicide: Dwayne pleading guilty to second-degree murder and Shirley Anne pleading guilty to aggravated assault. On 19 March 1991, Madame Justice Nina Foster carefully instructed the jury that the guilt or innocence of each of the remaining accused, Yvonne Johnson and Ernest Jensen, must be considered separately. She reviewed the crucial definitions of legal terms:
Manslaughter:
causing the death of a person, though unintentionally and unplanned, while committing an unlawful act;
Second-degree murder:
when a death is
a) caused by an unlawful act,
b) the accused had the specific intent to do it;
First-degree murder:
when a death is
a) caused by an unlawful act,
b) planned and deliberate, and/or
c) caused while committing or attempting to commit the offences of forcible confinement or sexual assault.
A jury gives no reason for its verdict; in fact it is always instructed by the presiding judge to keep everything about its deliberations secret: “If you disclose [your deliberations and your votes], such disclosure constitutes a criminal offence.” The jury’s only duty is to come to a unanimous decision on the basis of the evidence it believes to be true “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
There was strong physical evidence against Ernie Jensen in the case—shoeprints, blood on his T-shirt, hair samples, paint chips. But there was no physical evidence whatsoever against Yvonne. The Crown’s
case against her depended solely on their “star” eye-witnesses, Shirley Anne Salmon and Lyle Schmidt. Shirley Anne had been in the basement during the beating, Lyle had been with Yvonne immediately after; the credibility of their verbal testimony would determine Yvonne’s sentence.
From the trial record it would appear that Shirley Anne laid the basis in the jury’s mind for Yvonne’s first-degree-murder conviction; Yvonne insists that, in testifying as she did, her cousin lied over and over again.
The first of what Yvonne considers Shirley Anne’s most damaging lies on the stand was that, when the four of them were drinking in the living room late in the evening and Chuck phoned and said he was coming over, Yvonne hung up and said, “Let’s do him in.” Then Shirley Anne immediately tried to temper the statement’s meaning by insisting that “no one took the words seriously.”
Yvonne has explained to me that she does not speak that way; such an expression is not in her vocabulary. She would say, “Let’s do him,” meaning to beat him.
Speaking about this critical matter in the cell-shot record, Dwayne told undercover agent Constable Harvey Jones that Shirley Anne “started it … and got us all worked up and then he [Chuck] phoned … and then, in a way we had it planned that we were gonna fuckin’ do this guy in.”
Ernie Jensen added, “Gonna die.”
“In a way we had it planned” could be seen as Dwayne’s careless surmise, with a general “we” that could mean anyone or all; the question is, which one of them actually said the key words, “Let’s do him in”? Yvonne has always insisted to me that Ernie said them; and his statement recorded in the cell shot, “Gonna die,” would seem to corroborate her.
Now, whether Shirley Anne took the words seriously or not, her testimony asserted that they had been said by Yvonne. And so the jury could begin to believe that Yvonne was developing a plan for murder.
Yvonne says Shirley Anne’s second lie on the stand was that, during the calls made earlier in the evening, Yvonne invited Chuck to come to her house—implying that by supper time Yvonne already had
“a plan” to “do him in.” Yvonne insists she was then not capable of planning anything; she denies that she talked to Chuck at all on the phone before supper, and Ernie Jensen corroborates her denial. On 5 March 1994, Ernie wrote to Yvonne from Edmonton Prison, where he is serving his ten-year sentence.
You did not talk to [Chuck] on the phone. You dialed the number and gave the phone to Shirley and told her, You talk to him, you are the single one, you talk.
Yvonne says she and Ernie heard Shirley Anne try for half an hour to “sex-talk” Chuck into coming over, and then he said he was going fishing with his cousins and hung up; however, about five hours later, he called and said he was coming over. Alarmed and worried, Yvonne simply said, “Okay,” and in a few moments Chuck appeared alone with beer and a bag of sex magazines “to party.”
The jury, if they found Shirley Anne convincing, could now begin considering a sentence of first-degree murder because the unlawful act was “planned and deliberate.”
That “confinement” had taken place—another reason for a first-degree verdict—was stated by J. Barry Hill in his summation to the jury, but not spoken to by Brian Beresh in his jury address; apparently he thought it was evident that, if Skwarok was confined, there was no evidence to indicate that Yvonne had anything to do with it.
However, there was a final reason for a first-degree verdict. Sexual assault. And Shirley Anne testified that it was Yvonne who sodomized Chuck Skwarok: “Yvonne says to me, she ordered, and she says, ‘Take his pants off, Shirley Anne,’ and I was scared. So without even thinking, I don’t know why I did it. I closed my eyes for a minute, and I took his pants off, and I looked and he was naked from the waist down.”
[Yvonne writes on the trial record, an arrow pointing to these words, “I got first for this.”]
And without any further directed question from Crown Prosecutor Scott Newark—the only time Hill did not present his witnesses—Shirley Anne immediately continued with her version of events:
“So Yvonne picked up a wooden stool leg, and she was hovering over the deceased. I couldn’t see. She was blocking my view, and
I couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, but I could see from the motion she was making with her arm what she was doing, and she says to the deceased, ‘This is how little kids feel.’ ”
Q: What did she do with the table leg?
A: She took it, and I assumed she shoved it up his rectum.
Yvonne’s defence lawyer, Brian Beresh, interrupted immediately with “Well, let’s not
assume
anything.”
One “wooden stool leg” was filed in court as evidence and labelled “Exhibit number 8”; later, “two small furniture legs” were added as “Exhibit number 31,” but no fingerprints to incriminate Yvonne were gathered from any of them; nor did the prosecutor distinguish between them as which might have been used. However, if Shirley Anne were to be believed, then death could have occurred while “committing a sexual assault” with the wooden legs.
Both Dwayne’s and Ernie’s evidence support Yvonne’s contention that she did not assault Chuck with the leg. In the cell shot, Dwayne said it was he and Ernie who took off Chuck’s clothes and then “Ernie shoved that thing up his ass.” And Ernie writes Yvonne in his March 1994 letter: “One important thing to remember is that Shirley said that it was you that stuck that thing in Chuck’s ass when it was me.” It is for these and other reasons, Ernie concludes his letter, “I am going to do my best to get a perjury charge laid against her as soon as possible … if we just point out that Shirley lied we should get a new trial.”