Stolen Life (66 page)

Shirley Anne did not testify about—nor was she questioned about—what Yvonne insists are the facts:

Instead, Shirley Anne testified that she mostly watched, that it was “the boys” who did the beating and it was Yvonne, “she says to all of us, ‘Knock him out’ and the boys are just bewildered and looking
nervously, not knowing what to do […] so she picked up a telephone cord […] She took it and wrapped it around the deceased’s neck, and she pulled it.”

Shirley Anne tempered her testimony immediately and in this she is, for once, in agreement with Yvonne’s account; she continued:

“Like I had timed myself already. She pulled it for about ten seconds. Fifteen seconds would have been too long, ten seconds.”

This is clearly contradictory testimony: Yvonne chokes Chuck, but only for ten seconds, which is not nearly long enough to cause death. Nevertheless, the boys find no pulse—so is he dead as a direct result of Yvonne’s choking? No, Shirley Anne says she found a pulse. The question arises: can this witness be believed at all?

Under Brian Beresh’s relentless cross-examination, Shirley Anne admitted that she had, at her first questioning, lied to the police when she told them “she had seen nothing of the beating.” She lied, she said, “intentionally […] to a police officer,” but only, she insisted, because by lying she thought she could protect her cousin Yvonne, whom she loved. Consideration for herself had had, apparently, nothing to do with her lies. And she was now “so sorry I didn’t tell the truth” then, but “in the last eighteen months, I have learned to tell the truth.”

“Well,” Beresh countered, “learned perhaps for a particular reason? Tell me, a judge heard the evidence at a Preliminary Inquiry and ruled it was sufficient to commit you to stand trial for first-degree murder?”

She does not explain what she knows she was wrong about, but continues that whatever “arrangements” had been made after she had given those statements, they were deals made by her lawyer. “Stirling [Sanderman] didn’t notify me all the time about the deals he made.”

And Shirley Anne interrupted him again: “But I’ll be honest with you. I’m going to acknowledge something. If it wasn’t for the power of God, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be standing here, and I will never be ashamed of him, because someday everybody is going to realize that there really is a living God.”

Brian Beresh made no attempt to hide his sarcasm. “Well, let’s get back to this courtroom for a minute.”

Shirley Anne had been made to confess that she lied to the police during much of the investigation into the case. In his cross-examination, Beresh had emphasized as strongly as he could that Shirley Anne, the confessed liar, was now lying again because of the “sweetheart deal of the century” the Crown had given her. The Crown had already kept its part of the bargain in January: a ludicrously light sentence of
twelve months in prison and five years’ probation for aggravated assault. And now Shirley Anne was upholding her part of the deal by lying, though he offered the jury no direct counter-evidence to prove exactly how.

Yvonne says now, sadly, “Shirley Anne was well coached. That cop Bradley flew from Whitehorse twice to interview her. And Brian just worked her over on all her contradictions.”

It would seem that the two Wetaskiwin Crown prosecutors, J. Barry Hill and Scott Newark, knew their local jurors—four were farmers and the other eight were residents of two large neighbouring towns—very well. Shirley Anne’s ringing declaration of her personal conversion, of her faith in “a living God” without whose power, she said—rather oddly—“I wouldn’t be standing here,” and her repeated regret for what happened because of her admitted “exaggeration” and her repeated desire to be “punished enough,” these professions obviously carried the day. And so, despite the fact that her own original first-degree-murder charge had been reduced to a sentence of more or less time already served—evidence of a pretty good deal indeed—the jury now found Shirley Anne’s testimony not only believable “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but very likely, from their later conviction of Yvonne, believable in absolutely every detail. Believable in the most incriminating manner.

And it would appear that local hang-about Lyle Schmidt helped to solidify their opinion. The one physical fact he had to contribute to the case—the knife—had already been ruled irrelevant to the death by the forensic expert; in any case, it revealed neither blood nor fingerprints. Therefore, all of Lyle’s evidence, like Shirley Anne’s, depended on his word. The core of his testimony was that:

But almost all the physical facts that Lyle cited—concerning the knife, the burial, the burned car—had already been proven false in court by police and expert witness testimony. And Brian Beresh called no witnesses to further undermine Lyle’s version of events. What he did do was to make a thorough cross-examination to try to undermine Lyle’s credibility. Lyle admitted that for much of his life he had had a problem with drinking, and that his sister, whom he awakened at his mother’s house with a telephone call before five o’clock the morning of the murder, told him he was “pissed,” drunk. In response to that, Beresh asked:

Beresh also made Lyle admit that he had been committed to Alberta Hospital, Ponoka, by his mother when he was sixteen (i.e., over twenty years before) and while there been “diagnosed as having poor control of aggressive and hostile impulses”; he further presented a recent affidavit filed by Lyle’s former wife for her divorce from him: particularly apropos was his violence against her to the point where she twice attempted suicide and was hospitalized both for having been physically beaten and for psychiatric care.

Then Beresh took up the detail, made in Lyle’s first statement to the police, that he was at the Wayside Inn “girl hunting.”

For several hours, Yvonne says, she was forced to listen to the man who had first harassed, then taunted, and finally raped her—“an intimacy” was all he would admit to on the stand: Lyle Schmidt given a stage at last, complete with media reporters and a packed courtroom audience, pouring out details and smart responses that reflected so well on himself, on his brilliant deductive powers, details of that horrible night and what she in her blacking out, alcoholic despair had supposedly said. Most of it was distortion, Yvonne says, lies slanted to slam her, until finally he came to the matter of the knife.

Though the forensic expert, Dr. Dowling, had stated a knife could only have been used to make “a superficial bruise” on the right wrist, nevertheless Crown Prosecutor Hill questioned Lyle about the knife in language that must have shocked the middle-class jury with the violence of an assault:

It was then that Yvonne spoke in court; once, very loudly.

The Accused, Johnson: How do you know how that feels? I didn’t say that.

It stands on the court record that these eleven short words were “taken down in shorthand and transcribed from [her] notes to the best of [her] skill and ability” by Jackie Moore, Official Court Reporter. I wanted to hear from Yvonne what she meant by them.

To begin with, she told me, the record does not indicate the long pause between the first seven words and the final four.

“But what did you mean when you blurted that out, interrupted the court?” I asked. “How did it happen?”

“Lyle was up there for himself,” she tells me. “He had a platform and Hill was feeding him, whatever he felt like saying he said, and I wanted him to stop, all the terrible stuff, and I have to sit and listen, nobody’s concerned about the truth, just this court game going on day after day and I can’t move, I can’t speak, and I’m getting my heart tore out. I just looked at Lyle and the words came out. I was shocked at myself. I just thought out loud.

“And there was dead silence when I said it. Not a sound.”

I ask, “Lyle testified you said it while you were ‘doing that’ with the knife. Did you?”

“No, I never did anything like that with the knife, I only cut the cord with it and once touched his wrist. The medical expert said Chuck wasn’t hurt with a knife. And when I pretended I was doing it, with the leg, I never said a word. I had asked him earlier, right at the beginning in the basement, ‘Do you really know how it feels to be raped as a child?’ I wanted him to confess then, but not later.”

“So, I still don’t understand,” I tell her, “what you meant in court: ‘How do you know how that feels?”

“I was talking to Lyle, ‘How do
you
know, what it feels like.’ ”

“In the sense that, ‘You know how it feels, and you describe it accurately because you’ve abused kids yourself’?”

“No, more like ‘What could you possibly know about what it feels like for a little girl?’ I was looking at Lyle, he was grandstanding, making it up, talking ‘ass’ and ‘little girl’ and ‘cunt’ and it was all too much because I know what it’s like, and he’s up there with Hill, playing their games with my life, and I wanted him to stop! And he did. Dead silence.

“And when I spoke, Hill jumped and looked at me, and the judge and the whole jury were staring. All of a sudden I didn’t want to be seen, it was too awful. So I stuck my head down, to hide, but I had to face them so I said out loud, ‘I didn’t say that’—to the court, in the sense, ‘I never said what Lyle says I did.’

“And then I broke down, hiding behind my hair. Brian looked at me, and interrupted Hill who was gonna go on as if nothing had happened, ‘Excuse me, My Lady,’ he says to the judge, and something about have a little patience. And he come over and asked me, ‘Do you want to take a break?’ I shook my head, but he turned to the judge and there was a short adjournment.