A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

People who have been gone from home for a while often say some version of "I can't wait to be back in my own bed" as their time away comes to an end. I haven't had my own bed since December 2011. My partner and I have been permanent housesitters around Greater Victoria for more than eight years now, and before that, volunteers with Cuso International in Honduras and Nicaragua. We slept in the beds that came with the house rentals in Central America, and have slept in probably 60 or more beds since returning to Vancouver Island in May 2016 and taking up a life of living in other people's houses while they travel. We had a classic black and white striped mattress with coils you could feel through the padding in our Copan Ruinas time, and then quite a decent and stiff box spring set in Managua, where you need a bed that barely dents when laid on if you're going to survive months of 38 C with nothing but a ceiling fan.  We logged some crazy mattress hours when tra...

Once upon a time, I got captivated by the story of Derik Lord, whose absolute denial of having anything to do with the brutal murder of two women in Tsawwassen in 1990 went against all the evidence - and most especially, the evidence provided by his teenage companion on that terrible night, David Muir, in his own confession. That's the kind of thing that always pulls me in for a closer look. The double murder of Sharon Huenemann and her mother Doris Leatherbarrow in a quiet Tsawwassen neighbourhood would have been sensational all on its own, but the fact that Sharon's teenage son Darren had actually hired two of his friends to kill them so he could inherit a large sum of money and one of them was now claiming to have been home in his North Saanich basement the whole time - well, that just took things to a whole new level.  I wasn't the reporter who covered the boys' trials in 1992. But after several years of reading about Derik Lord's obsessed parents in the news, p...