Innocence on Trial by Joan McEwen

Author:Joan McEwen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77203-003-7
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2014-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

NO JOKE

THE INJUSTICE DONE to Henry made him sensitive to issues of fairness and equality in prison, and he took pride in doing what he believed was right. “In the butcher shop,” he told me, “I began increasing the amount of meat I was allowed so as to ensure sufficient for those too timid to voice that they weren’t getting enough. I protected the ones most hated as best I could. When the night came, these ‘bad’ inmates could be killed outright. Once, during a power outage, we were forced into Unit 13—no lights at all. To create light, we soaked cotton batten in candles and baby oil or shoe polish. In my attempts to stop violence, I’d ask the men, ‘Do you really want another lockdown?’

“If someone offered me more for something than it was worth, I’d say that’s too much and let him off with half. I did this not to get brownie points, but because I believed in fairness and equal opportunity.”

Late at night, though, despair was sometimes hard to keep at bay. “Don’t think I didn’t cry at chosen moments,” he told me. “I was human and very vulnerable. Being alone most of the time, I did have friends, but very few on the list I could talk to or personally associate with. The guards loved telling me about my failures. That’s why, when I got an official-looking letter, I always left it unopened until the next day. Failures disturbed me, and I didn’t want to get eaten up.

“My darkest moments were usually just before or after New Year’s—another year starting off with the same question: why am I still here? It never really sank in until 2002. I’d been in for twenty years. I was turning into an old man. It was no joke.”

•••

ON FEBRUARY 22, 2002, newspapers across the country featured the same story on page one. Robert William Pickton, a pig farmer in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam, had been charged with the first of dozens of counts of first-degree murder involving some of Vancouver’s most destitute women, most of them drug-addicted sex workers.

Revolting as Pickton’s crimes were, it was VPD member Kim Rossmo who caught Henry’s attention. In the months leading up to Pickton’s arrest, Rossmo, a Ph.D. candidate in the new science of geographical profiling—an investigative methodology used to analyze the locations of a connected series of crimes to determine the most probable area of offender residence—had concluded that a serial killer was at work in the Downtown Eastside.

For years, Henry had been compiling accounts of rapists in and around Vancouver. Applying Rossmo’s methodology to his research, he began to develop a profile of the likely culprit of the assaults for which he’d been convicted. Meanwhile, he paid close attention to other wrongful conviction cases. In November 2003, James Driskell, having spent thirteen years in jail for a murder in Manitoba, was released on bail after applying for ministerial review of his conviction. Evidence that had recently come to light pointed to secret payments and immunity from prosecution provided to Crown witnesses.

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