Stolen Life (59 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
The issue in the case distils to a question of credibility. Karen gave her evidence in a straightforward manner, in my opinion. She was at times emotional […] recalling the incident was very painful. She was precise, concise, coherent, and consistent, and credible in her testimony. Some of her evidence was […] not entirely flattering to herself […]. in the face of thorough and rigorous cross-examination … she remained steadfast in her position.
I have placed considerable weight on the evidence of Phyllis Stevenson [.… She] was straightforward on the crucial elements […]. Her comforting of the alleged victim, her descriptions of the emotion of the victim were something I place considerable weight on.
The accused’s evidence, I’m sorry to say, I found to be evasive, self-serving, conveniently forgetful and, on a number of important points, simply not credible […]. The accused’s evidence lacked candour … he rambled on without direct answers [… his] evidence did not have the clear ring of truth.
In analyzing the evidence, I asked myself, “Why would this victim lie?” […] This is not something that the witness, in my opinion, would fabricate […] something she would merely hallucinate, misread, or misinterpret […]. This matter distils to this point: I believe Karen Sinclair, and I disbelieve Leon Ray Johnson […]. I find the accused guilty as charged […].
I agree [with the defence counsel] that this must be a very difficult thing for Mrs. [Cecilia] Knight to deal with, and certainly it was a difficult thing for Karen Sinclair […]. In balancing off of these competing interests, then, it seems to me that the appropriate sentence is one of three years and three months in a Federal Penitentiary.
While Leon was serving that sentence for sexual assault and incest in the Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Federal Prison—he was granted no early parole—he was formally charged with eight other counts of rape, intercourse with a female person under the age of fourteen, sexual and physical assault, and incest offences against his cousin Darlene Jacques and his sister Yvonne. The offences had been committed at Red Pheasant Reserve and the town of Battleford between 1972 and 1989.
And while Yvonne anxiously waited in Kingston to be called to North Battleford to testify at a preliminary inquiry which would convince a judge that enough evidence against Leon had been gathered to go ahead with a trial, the Prison for Women erupted into violence. As Judge Louise Arbour later described it, in her official review of what happened: “On the evening of April 22, 1994, a brief but violent physical confrontation took place between six inmates […] and a number of correctional staff. The six were immediately placed in the Segregation Unit […].” However, the violence continued, to the point where “on the evening of April 26, 1994, the Warden of the Prison for Women called in a male Institutional Emergency Response Team to conduct a cell extraction and strip search of eight women in segregation […]. At the end of the lengthy procedure … the eight inmates were left in empty cells in the Segregation Unit wearing paper gowns, and restraints and leg irons.”
Fortunately, Yvonne was not personally involved in these events; but the six inmates who began the crisis were all Native women, members of the Sisterhood, and that, together with the general chaos in prison, affected her immensely. Nevertheless, her preliminary inquiry was set to begin on 11 May, and so, on 10 May, she was taken out of P4W and flown to North Battleford to confront Leon with her charges. She
had not seen him since he knocked her down into the bathtub in 1989.
Yvonne’s formal charges against her brother were two instances of sexual assault in Saskatchewan in 1988, and the concomitant charges of incest. The first involved the fight at the family reunion, and the second a visit with Minnie to Leon’s house, both at Red Pheasant. In Yvonne’s testimony of over a hundred pages, the Crown Prosecutor identified a key issue:
[From the inquiry 12 May 1994]
Crown Prosecutor Taylor: Yvonne, as you were growing up […] what was the relationship between you and Leon as far as any control you felt he had over you.
Yvonne Johnson: […] He was my teacher and I never had no control over anything […]. He’d have me beat my sister down. And, if I tried to back away, crying or whatever, he’d say, ‘Feel it, don’t you feel it.’ And he’d convince me to get angry inside […].
Q: Okay. The times you told the court about, between you and Leon, the family reunion and the time at Leon’s house […].
A: He had control. If you are a survivor […] of any form of abuse […] it affects your thought process and everything is out of whack […]. When someone tells you to do something, especially if it’s been consistent over a lifetime, you just do it. You don’t think about it. It’s better off calling it soul murder […]. I’ve tried to talk to Leon before any of this [i.e., this inquiry], when I had memories. I didn’t remember what happened when I was two and a half […] till I stayed sober for a while and I was sitting in Kingston Prison that the memories came back. I wrote and asked him and I says, ‘Leon, I don’t blame you for what happened […] ’cause you were only eight, but tell me what happened so that I can try to get my life back.’ And, all they did was pass my letters around, amongst family, saying I wrote hate mail and it never went no further.
It shouldn’t be in a Court of Law. He’s not going to get no help in a prison, but—then you got to think of the dangers.
All it takes is one time and you’re messed up forever. I don’t want people to hate him for what he did, but I have to have my say. I’m tired, really tired. I guess it’s pretty bad when your only escape in life is thinking, ‘Oh, I can always count on killing myself. I want to die, and I don’t want to go on like this.’ What do I do?
Yvonne said this while facing Leon a few feet away. He was the accused, she the accuser, but the legal consequences of their individual actions had brought them both there in shackles; if they so much as stirred hand or foot, their chains clattered. When she entered the courtroom, she had looked directly at him. She had named herself to the Court as “Medicine Bear Woman,” and had testified for over an hour holding an eagle feather in her left hand, which verified before the Creator that she was telling the truth.
And she had said to Leon directly, from the witness box: “One thing I do want to say, Leon, is I do love you. I don’t love what you did, or what you’ve become, but I love you.”
And finally, “I have to have my say.”
And he gave her a kind of answer. The court tape recorder recorded it exactly:
Accused Johnson: It’s not my fault.
A moment of “very high drama,” as Jim Taylor described it to me; and also, as he understood it, a concession that part or all of what Yvonne had described had actually happened.
Darlene Jacques lived in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and the inquiry into her charges were heard in North Battleford later that year.
Darlene Jacques
(née
Bear)
[from her inquiry testimony, 14 November 1994]:
I moved around so much when I was a kid, it’s hard to recall all
the places. My mother, Josephine Bear, and my brother left and I was sent to live with my older half-sister Shirley Anne Cooke, now Salmon, in Biggar with her two daughters. I was really lonely and then the opportunity arose to live with my Aunt Cecilia on Red Pheasant, in the fall of 1973 when I turned fourteen.
There were Aunt Cecilia’s children there, Karen, Minnie, Kathy, Yvonne, Perry, and Leon when he wasn’t in jail. A baby too, little Edward, my Aunt Rita’s son, still in diapers. The house was actually Grandpa John’s old house, and I ended up moving to my grandparents in the spring. My Grandpa felt at that time that I was being mistreated, even though he didn’t know everything that transpired. I never told him, I didn’t think anyone would believe me.
The first time it occurred was in around September, October. There were no adults present. We were left in Leon’s care, he was babysitting us. And I was sleeping in one of the bedrooms with Karen. And he—he had been drinking. He came into the bedroom, and he dragged me out of the bedroom. And he sat me down in the living room. He gave me a Bible to read, I don’t remember what I read from it. Afterwards, like this lasted maybe ten, fifteen minutes, afterwards he dragged me into the bedroom. He locked the door with a knife and he raped me. I was absolutely terrified. To me he looked huge.
This happened twice more. Once I believe I was hiding, I’m not sure hiding outside or inside, and the same scenario played itself out. He found me, sat me on a chair, got me to read from the Bible, took me into the bedroom and raped me again. The third time happened right here in Old Town [Battleford]. I was walking by myself, out on the street when I heard Leon call from an upstairs window. And he called me upstairs. And I did go. Leon had been drinking. He grabbed me again and dragged me into the bedroom. He raped me.
There was no adult around that I could trust, or tell. But one thing that I made very clear in my mind, is that once I got off Red Pheasant Reserve, I would never return.
Crown Prosecutor: Did this have any effect on your school grades?
Answer: I believe it did. I failed, I spent two years in grade seven.
Crown Prosecutor: What did the Bible have to do with this?
Answer: I have no idea.
Counsel for the Defence: Did anyone ever ask you about any possible attacks?
Answer: Yes. Karen did after the last incident on the reserve, just before I moved to my grandfather’s house. And I told her.
Leon’s subsequent trial on the charges laid by Yvonne and Darlene took place in the Court of Queen’s Bench in North Battleford began on 20 June 1995, before Mr. Justice I.D. McLellan and a jury.
Cecilia testified first. Though she was called as a Crown witness, and though she could not remember any exact dates, including the crucial date of the family reunion, one thing she remembered most certainly was that Darlene had lived with her and her family at Red Pheasant in 1971, not later. That was the year Earl died, and Leon, of course, was then a minor—only fifteen—and so legally he should not now be charged in adult court for raping Darlene, who would then have just turned thirteen. The Cando School records showed that Darlene attended there in 1972 and 1973, but that did not shake Cecilia’s insistence, and since she had always been away working, she knew nothing about this story anyway. Besides, they had never had a Bible in the house until the children, including Leon, were all baptized at once, on the reserve several years later.
As for Yvonne, Cecilia was adamant that as soon as she heard that Louis Johnson, Clarence’s father, was abusing the children, “I told my husband about it and he beat me up for it […]. I never left my children at all […] I refused to go to work till my husband kicked his dad out of the house. [And later, after we were separated] Leon called me from Butte. I was working in Winnipeg. Leon told me come get Yvonne, my dad is trying to bother her […]. I quit my job and went and picked up Yvonne. As far as I know, she never lived with her dad again.”
There were many things Cecilia could not remember on the stand—“Not right this minute”—and not a single thing concerning Leon and Yvonne’s relationship as children—“Like I say, I had so many children to watch I didn’t particularly watch one person as the years went by”—but now that she had had a stroke, had severe high blood pressure, and was a diabetic, Leon, of all her children, had especially shown his concern for her. “He comes to see me every day when he’s home.”