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. 

Mom, you could have told me

I had a DNA surprise about eight months ago. 

I'd done the test, my second, only because I wanted to have my DNA results on the same platform as all my family research, and wasn't expecting any surprises. 

But there was a big surprise. My dad wasn't my biological father. 

Since then, I've had many, many conversations with friends and acquaintances about that discombobulating discovery. 

People have different reactions to my news, maybe because it's being filtered through their own memories of this thing we call Dad, and how they feel about the dad they got. Some have asked how I felt about discovering that my mother had not been "faithful." 

Neither of those things mattered to me personally.  My dad was my Dad, no thoughts otherwise. He was a dad of his times, and yes, I had a period of being angry with him in my reflective 50s for never showing up to any of my piano recitals. But he was unwaveringly on my side through each one of my painful life cycles, from start to finish and without question. That's a Dad.

As for expectations of monogamy, they've always struck me as just painfully in denial of human behaviour. Our great big family on my mom's side has some classic stories of profound human-beingness in our history, and I've always loved those stories the best. 

In my case, everybody is dead who might have more details on this DNA surprise, but at least an aunt remained who remembered the affair, though not nearly with the level of detail I would have liked. 

It turns out that getting your head around the fact that half of your genes are not what you thought is quite a big thing, at least in my experience. There are stories in my bones, but I don't know what they are. The stories that I had grown up believing were shaping my very being were not my stories. 

Some people I've talked with disapprove of me even getting my DNA done. They see it as me going looking for a secret that my mother clearly didn't want me to know. But does one person's wish to keep a secret outweigh another person's right to know who they are at their biological foundation? Not in my opinion. 

Too late now for such reflections anyway. Easily accessible DNA tests will be tossing many cats out of the bag from this point on. Mothers, if you have secrets, tell them now, so your children can start sooner to learn about who they are at their genetic core, and how it all turned out this way. (Oh, the fantasies I've had about Mom still being alive and the questions I'd ask...)

I'm just beginning to get to know the people who share my paternal DNA. Maybe one day I will call them family, but right now they are strangers - and in some cases, very wary ones. 

I'm hungry for the smallest of stories about the man I've only seen in a 1949 photo, but I'm working on trying to bide my time, not to scare them off with a thousand questions.

I get their suspicion. When a random woman calls from nowhere to declare herself your surprise half-sister, how can you not be weirded out and wary? Why should you suddenly answer all her deeply personal questions about this man that maybe you, too, have a lot of unanswered questions about? 

What's the protocol for approaching a "new" relative after a DNA test? I felt like a bit of a stalker for a while there, googling names on Facebook and writing messages to strangers who I thought might be a relative, or able to lead me to one. 

That tactic scared off at least one relative, who felt I was breaching their privacy. But some of them inched forward to take a closer look, and some of them have been very welcoming. We're talking on the phone now, and making plans to meet in person. 

They bring me stories, and I bring them news of their ancestors found in my prowls through paid databases: the mysterious grandmother who disappeared and then died in an asylum; the aunt who tried to cross the US border with a felon she'd met in a classified ad; the lawsuit that Uncle Joe brought against the government. We don't even know each other, yet these are our shared stories.

I'd done a DNA test in 2018 with a different company, but there was no one in my matches closely related enough to trigger any suspicion on my part. That test also didn't break down UK heritage by country, so all I saw was that I was 50 per cent UK, as expected.

Things went differently for my second test. For one thing, this time the UK heritage was parcelled by country and I turned out to be Irish, not Scottish, on my paternal side. That got my attention.

I also wasn't a match for my other cousins in the database on my dad's side. And then there was the matter of a first cousin in Toronto, with a name I'd never heard of even though I know ALL my first cousins. 

And away things went from there. Now, after a lifetime of believing that I had no biological siblings, I'm booking flights to go see my half-sister. 

I think my mom would like knowing that. I think we probably would have had a good laugh about this once we got through that first awkward conversation. I wish she was alive for me to tell her that none of this changes a thing about how I felt about her or my dad. 

***

Click for the article on my DNA discovery that ran on CTV National. Long story as to how I ended up going quite so public, but I had thought I was one anecdote in a much larger story of "people like me," only to realize later I was THE anecdote. 

Life sentence for victims of intimate partner violence

Sharing an opinion piece I wrote this week that was published today in the Times Colonist, sparked by the sentencing of a serial assaulter of women. 

Tyler Mark Denniston is going to jail. And on the one hand, that’s a win in the world of intimate partner violence, where 80 per cent of the crimes aren’t even reported to police and a conviction is far from certain.

But the impact of the Greater Victoria man’s beatings will be felt by the women he attacked for so much longer than he’ll be in jail. That’s not just about having to live with the trauma - it’s about brain injury. 

People experiencing intimate partner violence end up with a brain injury (IPV-BI) from that violence as frequently as 90 per cent of the time.  A majority of them, in fact, end up with multiple brain injuries, because intimate partner violence is rarely something that only happens once.

Denniston was given a four-year jail term this week for attacking his then-girlfriend in 2018 and 2019. But he has a history of major assaults of previous girlfriends before that, all of a type most associated with brain injury. He strangles his intimate partners. Hits them in the head. Smashes their heads into furniture.

One of his victims said in an impact statement at Denniston’s trial that since her abuse, she has become someone she doesn’t recognize. She has trouble falling asleep, has terrible nightmares when she does, and is experiencing periods of explosive anger, panic and suicidal thoughts.

Whether she knows it or not, that could be because she is now living with a brain injury on top of all the trauma she has endured.

But if she’s like the vast majority of victims of intimate partner violence, her brain injury will go undiagnosed and unsupported. IPV-BI is such a newly emerging concept that even victims themselves don’t think about whether they’ve incurred a brain injury. The impact of their untreated brain injury can put them at risk of losing their job, their housing, their kids and so much more, and they won’t even know why.

It seems unbelievable that a woman who is beaten by her partner violently enough to incur a brain injury could suddenly find herself on the precipice of profound poverty, homelessness, child-protection involvement and social isolation as a result of the assault. Surely services are there to support her, or she could move to the head of the line for housing and supports to keep her safe?

Unfortunately, there are no designated services at any level – in BC or Canada – specifically for people experiencing IPV-BI. While some bright spots are emerging within Island Health around piloting occupational therapy assessments as a means of helping victims get past diagnosis barriers, that work is in its earliest days.

More broadly, there are no guidelines for health professionals to follow to ascertain IPV-BI-caused injury. No overarching plan. No targeted funding. No consensus as to what should be done, or data being collected.

And if work on all of that got going tomorrow, there are other hurdles. Start with the fact that only one in five women beaten by their partners even report the assault to police, rendering most victims of IPV-BI completely invisible in our systems.

Add in the stigma, lack of witnesses and fear factor for the victim around doing anything that might spark a whole other assault, and it’s not surprising that the majority of women aren’t even going to visit the doctor about that hit to the head they took, or after they’ve regained consciousness from being strangled.

And even when they do seek medical attention, there are no provincially funded community services for them unless their concussion shows up on an MRI scan. Which is not often the case, because it’s an injury that doesn’t show up well on an MRI, and is much better diagnosed through its impact on a woman’s ability to function.

At any rate, unless a woman can pay for that assessment of her functioning, and the services she needs as a result of what’s discovered, she’s never going to get that support anyway. It was nice to see IPV-BI get some solid mentions last fall in the BC government’s Safe and Supported action plan against gender-based violence, but we are so badly overdue for some genuine action on this appalling state of affairs.

So yes, Tyler Mark Denniston is going to jail. But he’ll be out in not much more than a couple of years if he behaves himself, and his life will carry on pretty much the way it always has. His victims, on the other hand, have been handed a life sentence.

Jody Paterson is a lobbyist and advocate on the issue of intimate partner violence and brain injury on behalf of The Cridge Centre for the Family and the Board Voice Society of BC.

How racist are our roots? So racist

My new hobby of diving into ancestry information brings me many treasurers, including these four 1924 Chinese Immigration Act documents of my uncles and aunt back when they were little kids. They all just showed up recently in my Ancestry.com "hints," so I'm guessing it was a release triggered by 100 years having passed.

My Romanian grandmother had married a Chinese man in 1910 Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, which must have been some kind of crazy act at the time. Their children were thus half-Chinese, and presumably had to be documented via these forms once the Act took effect in 1923.

Canada had ended the Head Tax that year and replaced it with the Chinese Immigration Act, which would block virtually all immigrants from China from coming to Canada for the next 24 years. From the Canadian Museum of Immigration website:

The Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 virtually restricted all Chinese immigration to Canada by narrowly defining the acceptable categories of Chinese immigrants. While the entrance duty requirement was repealed, admissible Chinese immigrants were limited to diplomats and government representatives, merchants, children born in Canada who had left for educational or other purposes, and students while attending university or college. Between 1923 and 1946, it is estimated that only 15 Chinese immigrants gained entry into Canada.

But hey, my people sure did make up for lost time. In the 2021 Canadian census, more than 1.7 million people reported being of Chinese origin. Take that, racists.

The icky truth about international students in Canada

Opportunistic Canadian training institutes that over-promise and under-deliver are no doubt a problem for international students in Canada. The BC government's pledge this week to get to the bottom of that could be helpful.

But if we're thinking it's just Bob's Shady Career College for Suckers that's the problem, take a look at the tuition fees that mainstream universities are charging for international students. 

It helps explain why so many people seem to be freaking out at a shift in the political winds around international students.

It's not because anyone's got a big heart for shielding international students from a shoddy education, or keeping more spaces open for Canadian students. It's about post-secondaries and employers that have been dining out on foreign students for many years, and can't bear to give that up.

The Tyee had a great read on that earlier this month, appropriately headlined "Cash Cows and Cheap Labour." 

Not only do post-secondaries bring in far more money from foreign students than domestic students, the high cost of living in Canada ensures that those students will have to look for work while studying here. That's great news for employers looking to fill low-end jobs. 

Langara College Prof. Jenny Francis told the Tyee that after studying the issues for foreign students in Canada, she'd concluded that they are "the new temporary foreign worker, basically."

And while the provincial and federal governments seem to want to point the finger for exploitive tuition fees at "the diploma equivalent of puppy mills," they'd be wise to take a look at what the higher-status universities are up to as well.  

Let's start with the University of BC, where the cost of completing an undergraduate program is typically more than eight times higher for an international student than a domestic one. The Medical Laboratory Science program, for instance, costs $7,500 for a Canadian student, while a foreign student will shell out $61,000. 

Need an applied science degree in engineering? That'll be $15,000 if you're Canadian, and $60,000 if you're not. Same with a commerce degree. 

Not surprisingly, the number of international students at UBC climbed from 8,685 in the 2012-13 fiscal year to 17,040 in 2021-22. If one international student pays as much tuition as eight Canadians, who can say no?

At the University of Victoria, the per-credit cost is five times higher for international students than for domestic students - $1,981 compared to $411. At any point where there's an additional fee, international students pay much more for that as well: $990 to challenge a course as compared to $205; $1,500 to challenge a co-op work term versus $776. 

Even the mandatory acceptance fee that has to be paid just to get started at UVic is three times higher for foreign students, coming in at $750.

Clearly, the primary responsibility for figuring out whether you can afford to study in Canada has to reside with the foreign student. It's up to them to do their research and make sure they're not signing up with Bob's Shady Career College. It's up to them to bring a healthy level of distrust for any recruiter who makes it sound like studying in Canada is a ticket to permanent residency. (In BC, less than a third of foreign undergraduates land permanent residency within five years of graduating.)

But if foreign students feel like they're doing their best on all of that yet still feeling like there's some plot afoot to take advantage of them, they're right. 

Canada planned things to go exactly the way they're going. The use of foreign students as cash cows and cheap labour was all carefully laid out in the 2013 federal report, "International Education: A Key Driver of Canada's Future Prosperity." 

"We must recognize the immediate benefits of international education for Canada, which span economic growth, job creation, and increased exports and investment," noted the report. "These benefits are distributed across all of Canada, from coast to coast to coast."

And wow, did post-secondaries embrace the challenge. There were 239,000 international students in Canada at the time of that report, with a goal to double that by 2023. Instead, the number of students had quadrupled to a million by last year.

The Tyee notes a 2019 report to the BC government that highlighted the $3.5 billion in tuition fees that international students were bringing in that year. If they were an export commodity, said the report, they would be the third most valuable in the province, after fuel and timber.

Apparently a number of educators interviewed for the Tyee's story felt uncomfortable with that comparison. But that was exactly what our governments set out to do with the massive expansion in international students: Create cash cows and a new pool of cheap labour. 

I haven't seen anyone try to put an international-development-and-global-goodwill spin on any of this, and at least that's a relief. The only foreign students who could possibly afford these tuition fees come from wealthy families. Nobody's even pretending this is about supporting citizens from challenged countries toward a better future for themselves and their homeland. 

But trying to present this issue as being about "a few bad apples" is just plain wrong. We've been taking advantage of foreign students for at least a decade, and now we're a little embarrassed that we let it go this far. Just say it.