Practically Perfect (31 page)

Within two months of Wagner’s announcement it was obvious to even casual observers that something indeed had happened to reinvigorate the search for Therrien. In a January 1965 article, the
Shawinigan Standard
noted that “Indications are the mystery surrounding the 1961 disappearance of Denise Therrien from her home at Shawinigan South will be solved within a matter of days. Police now believe she is dead.”
[25]
A day after the article appeared, another newspaper began discussing the case. According to the
Montreal Gazette
, a Quebec chemico-legal expert and three provincial police detectives were digging on private property in the Shawinigan area, looking for articles of clothing. “Shortly after daybreak each day since Tuesday the four men, equipped with shovels, drive from their motel accompanied by a uniformed police escort and disappear into the hilly countryside in the Shawinigan area. They return to their motel late at night, between 9 and 10 p.m. and almost immediately go to bed.”
[26]

By the end of January investigators decided they would wait until spring for the ground to thaw, and then resume their digging. In early April officers took Bernier into custody, charging him with attempted murder for his 1962 assault on the parish priest. A day or two later they began another digging operation, this time in the St. Michel Cemetery. Almost immediately they hit the jackpot, albeit not the one they were searching for originally. The skeleton unearthed was not that of Therrien, but of Laurette Beaudoin. Her skull was so badly battered that officers first believed she was shot multiple times in the head. Not found in the cemetery was the body investigators were looking for. That discovery, however, was not long in coming.

With Bernier in custody, the police had all the time they needed to question the former grave digger. To ensure that they were not interrupted, they moved him from jail to jail, keeping the suspected killer away from both the press and his lawyer. Whatever one may think of the interrogation techniques employed by the Quebec Provincial Police, they worked. Three weeks after his arrest, Bernier cracked. He told officers that he killed Therrien when she rejected his advances and buried her body in a heavily wooded spot about ten miles north of Shawinigan. They would find her remains on a small hill, lying face up under about a foot and a half of dirt, her head pointing towards the St. Maurice River. If officers wanted her personal effects, they would have to look elsewhere. With that he drew a map of St. Michel Cemetery, putting an “X” on the spot where he buried Therrien’s gloves, address book, and prayer beads.

As of April 30, 1965, Denise Therrien was no longer missing. Bernier led officers directly to the spot he told them about. It was obvious that she had been brutally beaten prior to being murdered. Four days later an inquiry into her death got underway. Shortly before it did, Quebec’s chief pathologist warned reporters about what they would hear. The dead girl’s skull, he said, showed multiple fractures, likely caused by an iron bar, and, he added, “When I say multiple … I use it in the strongest sense of the word.”
[27]

When the inquiry was convened it was, for the first time in Quebec history, presided over by a judge rather than a coroner. Bernier testified under protection of the
Canada Evidence Act
, which meant that nothing he said could be used against him in any subsequent proceeding. What he had to say made it clear that he had been a predator for years. He admitted that yes, he was the Claude Marchand registered at the Shawinigan employment agency, but he had used other names to lure young women into his clutches, always with the offer of a babysitting job. Asked specifically about Denise Therrien, he recalled that he met her just as she got off a bus. “I told her Mr. Marchand had been unable to make it and had asked me to drive her to his cottage.” There he tried to kiss her, and when she resisted, he struck her. Did he mean to kill her? “I don’t know. There was a helicopter overhead. It all happened very quickly.” When the pathologist who examined Therrien’s body was asked if the young woman had been sexually assaulted, he said there was nothing to suggest she had been. All that was left of her were bones, and what clothing remained was so badly decomposed he could not tell for sure whether it was rearranged during a rape.
[28]

Bernier’s trial started on February 14, 1966, and lasted ten days. Testimony by investigating officers made it clear that while Bernier admitted knowing where Therrien’s body was buried, he actually never confessed to killing the teenager. Not to someone in uniform, that is. Bernier did confess to the murder during a series of talks he had with a bank robber lodged in the cell next to his while he was awaiting trial. Only the man was not a criminal — he was an undercover policeman. In testimony he gave at trial, the officer said Bernier not only told him he murdered Therrien, he also spelled out where he buried her. The officer asked the killer if it bothered him to talk about the murder. No, Bernier replied, not too much. Even before that conversation, Bernier confessed to being involved in Therrien’s disappearance. During a conversation with his wife and mother-in-law about five months after the Shawinigan girl went missing, he told the women that he alone knew where Therrien’s body was buried. “On my deathbed I will say where she is buried — not before.”
[29]

It took jurors just forty minutes to find the former grave digger guilty of murder, and another fifteen to agree that he should be hanged, rather than have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. But the killer did not hang. When the federal Liberal party took office in 1963, it refused to allow anyone to be executed, and in January 1968, the federal government officially commuted all outstanding death sentences. So Bernier was not executed, and if we are to believe former Liberal Member of Parliament Jacques Lavoie, that was a very fortunate thing. In 1977 the politician started to lobby the Quebec justice department to reopen its investigations into the murders of Laurette Beaudoin and Denise Therrien. Bernier, he said, was innocent. Even though the convicted killer died in a British Columbia prison in May 1976, the MP said he deserved the right to have his name cleared, at least with regard to the murder of Therrien.

According to Lavoie, Bernier was in love with Beaudoin, who plotted the kidnapping with her boyfriend, a man whose name Bernier refused to divulge, out of concern for the safety of his children. Bernier said Therrien was drugged and kept in a house near Shawinigan. She was going to be released in due course, but one day she stumbled as she came down a staircase. As a result of the fall, she fractured her skull and died. Lavoie said Bernier was not even present when Therrien died, and only agreed to bury the young woman’s body because of his love for Beaudoin. That love, however, died with Therrien, and from that day forward Bernier grew increasingly determined to get even with Beaudoin and her boyfriend.

For better or worse, Lavoie was not able to clear Bernier of the Therrien murder.

Appendix: Timelines

1: They Got Away with It Before

Fred Stawycznyk and Pauline Yatchuk:
Babies in Boxes

William Bahrey:
The Brothers in the Haystacks