A family's need to believe their son's innocence extended his jail time by 20 years

 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay

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, passionately contending his innocence, I went to interview the family at their Chilliwack home in 2001. 

Derik's father David Lord had a criminal record by that point owing to his increasingly frantic antics to clear his son of wrong-doing, which regularly landed him in trouble with authorities. "I've been in every prison from Agassiz to Victoria in the past 10 years, and before that I hadn't been in one of them," the father told me in 2001. "I think that says something about how my life has changed."

I was fascinated by this family that just couldn't seem to move on. I spent a day with them, and together we went to Matsqui Institution to talk to Derik. I left feeling very sad for all of them, but still quite certain that Derik was guilty as charged. 

To believe that Derik wasn't there that night requires believing that David Muir wasn't there either, because that's the story that Derik's mother Elouise put forward - that the two boys and Darren Huenemann were in fact in her North Saanich basement at 8:30 that night, not travelling back and forth to Tsawwassen with murder on their minds. 

Her statement completely contradicts the testimony of Huenemann's girlfriend at the time - and more importantly, of David Muir, who gave police a detailed account of how he and Derik made their way to Tsawwassen and killed the two women. 

Yet sitting there with the family at their home more than a decade after the murders, I saw how completely they believed that version of events. Derik seemed as swept up in the story as his parents. 

Sticking to that story had major consequences for Derik Lord. Among the ironclad rules of the justice system is that nobody gets parole if they continue to deny their guilt. David Muir was paroled in 2003, and has been a free(ish) man living under a new name for the last 21 years. Darren Huenemann got day parole in 2022.

Derik Lord got day parole in 2020 but continued to be denied full parole. But that changed at a hearing this week, after the Parole Board of Canada was ordered by the Appeals Division to reconsider its decision of February 2024. The board reviewed the decision and this time, granted him full parole. 

The column I wrote for the Times Colonist about Derik in 2007, after he was turned down for parole for the fourth time, remains one of my most read, commented-upon posts here on my blog site. People still wade in with comments on that 17-year-old post, and even the news media came looking for me this week in hopes I might have something to say about him finally being granted parole. 

What's left to say? A terrible crime was committed, and three stupid and greedy teenage boys spent much of their adult lives in jail as a result. Just like the families of Sharon Huenemann and Doris Leatherbarrow, their families endured tremendous tragedy that surely changed them forever. 

The Lord family has certainly paid a mighty price for clinging to a fantasy for 34 years. Derik Lord himself has borne the highest cost of that. 

Having to stick to the story that his mother put forward ultimately left him imprisoned for more than two decades longer than the boy who was his accomplice on that terrible night. Like David Muir, Derik could have been paroled when he was 30 rather than at 50, but going all in with the fantastical story that his mother made up effectively tripled his jail term. 

Relatives of the victims are angry that Derik Lord won parole without ever having to own up to his crime. But if it was punishment they wanted, they got it.