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. 

Women still wearing the blame for rape

A young Saanich woman was allegedly kidnapped and sexually assaulted last week. Police were in the media soon after warning women to take more care.

Yes, 40 years after “women’s liberation,” sexual assault is still our fault.

Women’s issues were a bit of a darling in the media industry when I first got into journalism in the early ‘80s as a “women’s page” reporter. So I wrote a lot about the kinds of things that were considered women’s issues at that time.

They ran the gamut, from jam-making and wedding dresses to abortion, rape and sexual harassment. There were some pretty heavy issues on the table at the time, and I’m glad to say that several are history now.

When I started out reporting, a husband in Canada couldn’t even be charged with raping his wife, because there was no such offence. Sexual harassment had barely even been conceptualized. Hospital boards were being ripped apart by the abortion issue.  All of that has changed.

But the way we talk about rape and sexual assault hasn’t changed a bit. It’s still all about victim-blaming and shame.

Don’t women know better than to walk home alone at night?  Why aren’t we catching cabs and going everywhere in big groups? Could it be that we’re dressing just a bit too skimpily? Or getting sloppy about monitoring our drinks constantly at the bar so nobody can slip drugs into them?

A friend of mine used to work as an aide in a local elementary-school classroom. He once told me the story of a little girl who was getting her pants pulled down by a group of boys every lunch hour. The principal addressed the issue by ordering the girl to quit wearing elastic-waist pants.

I love that story for how perfectly it sums up the way it has always been for girls and women around rape and sexual assault. Honey, it’s all up to you.

We like to think we’ve gotten past blaming women for their own rapes. But I don’t think we’ve ever internalized the message. Good on UVic’s Patty Pitts for stating the obvious to local media after the Saanich incident - that warning women to stay safe is not nearly as meaningful as challenging “the core beliefs that allow sexualized violence to occur.”

Want to avoid being raped? Don’t dress provocatively. Or drink too much. Or leave your drink unattended, or pick the wrong date. Don’t go around doing wild things like walking home in Saanich alone.

 It’s like rape is an unstoppable force waiting to happen to all women unless they learn to keep themselves out of danger.  

I don’t mean any of this as an insult to men. The majority are good people who are not rapists, and not the reason why women continue to be blamed for their own sexual assaults.

Nor do I mean to absolve women. They’re half the population, after all, and really do have the ability to affect major change if they’d ever just pull together to get it done.

But let’s get beyond the gender issues and just agree that it’s ridiculous to respond to any terrible crime solely by exhorting future victims to be more careful. We need to be talking about rape and sexual assault in meaningful ways, and not just piling more responsibility and shame onto the victims.

I guess we’re supposed to consider it progress that rape now figures so prominently in TV and movies. The Law and Order franchise has for many years had a “special victims” series that provides a handy reason for starting virtually every episode with a graphic rape or equally disturbing sex crime. As an issue, rape is seriously out of the closet.

Or is it? In real life, victims still go unnamed in court proceedings - understandable on one hand, deeply shaming on the other for the way it stigmatizes the person. Women still frequently keep their rapes and assaults secret, fearing the traumatic things that can happen to sexual-assault victims once they’re in the justice system.

Sexual assault is still not a subject we raise with our sons, despite having normalized it as a form of home entertainment. Nor have we come up with any more creative ways of preventing it than to send police out after each new rape to warn women everywhere to mind their skirt lengths and stay home after dark.

What a sad, slow ride to nowhere. Ladies, lock your doors.