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- The Klassen
story
- Breaking
through to the public
Sarah Gibb
feature
AND THE TRUTH SHALL SET
YOU FREE
By Sarah Gibb for The StarPhoenix,
January 17 2004
SP Photos by Gord Waldner
He was a house painter with
a Grade 7 education and a criminal record when, in July 1991,
the RCMP arrested him and his wife for the sexual assault of
three children they barely knew. Rather than see his family destroyed,
Richard Klassen bought himself a law book and fought back. Now,
he's won one of the biggest malicious prosecution cases in Canadian
history. He has national and international support, has co-founded
a group that fights miscarriages of justice, and is recognized
wherever he goes. He even has his restaurant bills paid by complete
strangers. But what price have Richard and Kari paid for their
day in court? Here, Saskatchewan's most celebrated couple tell
their dreadful tale.
Richard: I knew it was the RCMP because I'd
seen the car pull up. I thought it was a parking ticket or something,
so I told Kari, I said, "If it's for me, tell them I'm not
here."
I was used to being arrested,
armed robbery when I was sixteen, and later, shoplifting, things
like that. So Kari went to the door, and I heard them say to
her, "We're here for you as well -- from Saskatoon, three
counts of sexual assault," and that's when I came to the
door, and I said, "I'm here," and everything just kind
of fell apart.
There was an older officer
and a younger officer. They asked where the kids were. We told
them Krystal, our oldest, nine at the time, was swimming with
her cousin, and our other two were napping. It was two o'clock
in the afternoon.
One of them said, "We
have to wait for Social Services, they're on their way."
And I said, "Why?",
and he said, "We have to take your kids."
That was it. Kari fell to the
floor. She went down right away.
I was bawling and crying and
screaming. I remember shouting, "No, no, no," over
and over. There were some papers lying on a table and I threw
them around, and it got pretty nasty and angry, and I was shouting,
"You're not taking them, you're not taking them."
The commotion woke Kayla, our
two year old. She came walking out of the bedroom, such a gorgeous
girl, beautiful blonde hair. And the young officer, he leaned
up against the kitchen cupboard, and he said, "Oh my God,
she's beautiful," and he started crying.
Kari: Brady was still asleep. He was six months old
that day.
They said we had to wait for
Social Services. We had to wait for them, with police officers
in the house, we had to wait for them to come and take our kids.
Imagine. I don't know how long we waited. It could have been
a lifetime. It killed me. As a mother, it killed me.
- They told us, for your children,
breathe in, breathe out.
- Neither of us felt we'd ever see
our kids again.
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Richard: The two social workers arrived. They
were from the Dept. of Social Services in Red Deer, where we
were living. They were very polite and assured us they weren't
taking our children because we'd harmed them, only because we
were being arrested.
They shoved papers in front
of my face. I said, "I'm not signing anything." And
that's when I found out that it was worse, because I saw more
papers in her hand than just for our three kids. I seen that
she had a whole pile of them.
And I said, "Who are those
for?" The papers were for our other family members, and
they were going to be arrested, and their kids taken too.
The social workers tried to
calm Kari down. They told us, for your children, breathe in,
breathe out. They told Kari to go and gather up clothing for
them.
Kari: They didn't say how much to pack. They just
said get some clothing, and if they have a special teddy bear
or something. So I got all three of them something. My oldest
had gotten money from her great grandpa for her birthday, and
she'd wanted to buy a teddy bear, so we'd gone out and ended
up at London Drugs, and she'd picked out this teddy bear, and
she took it with her everywhere. So I got that one for her, and
Kayla had her teddy bear that she'd gotten recently, and Brady
too, and I got them clothes and diapers.
You try, but there's no reality.
Reality isn't reality anymore.
Richard: We begged them. Maybe we could find
somebody, like our landlord or somebody, someone who knew them,
to take them for the night. They said we couldn't. They said
we'd get our children back, but they wouldn't say when.
Kari: Oh, but we doubted that.
Richard: Neither of us felt we'd ever see
our kids again.
Kari: They had a grey station wagon, two car seats,
and they put our kids in the car seats, and put us in the back
seat of the RCMP car.
Richard: Then we all drove off to pick up
Krystal and our niece, Jackie, my brother's daughter. That was
almost the hardest part, very hard.
There was a lot of crying.
A crowd had gathered because another police car had pulled up.
Jackie was 10 at the time, and she fought them. She was kicking,
she was screaming. We were allowed to get out of the car to talk
to Krystal. They told us not to say Grandpa was coming to get
her, but we said it anyway.
We said, look after your brother
and sister. And we told her we were going on holiday. But she
knew that wasn't true. I mean, the police were there.
After that, we went to my brother
Dale's house, and he was arrested, and we all had to drive to
the Dairy Queen, where Dale's wife, Anita, was working.
Kari: And that's when Myrna saw us. Myrna is Richard's
other brother's wife, John's wife. Myrna saw us all in police
cars, driving toward Dairy Queen. So she ran there to tell Anita,
"I've just seen Dale and Rick and Kari in police cars!"
and just then, as she was standing next to Anita, Anita got arrested
too, in her Dairy Queen uniform.
Richard: Myrna ran home to protect her children,
and she got them out just in time. Some friends were visiting
from Saskatchewan, and she told them, "Take my kids!"
Just as the police car pulled
up for them, Myrna was tying the kids' luggage onto the roof
of the van, and she was cutting the rope, so when the police
arrive, she's holding this knife, and they're shouting, "Drop
the knife, drop the knife," so she dropped the knife, tapped
the van her kids were in, and the van drove off.
And that's how Myrna saved
her children from being taken. Then they arrested her and John.
We were taken to a holding
cell, glass front, like a drunk tank, nothing in it, just a toilet,
no mattress. They wouldn't let us make any phone calls until
everybody was arrested. That evening, we all went up before a
Justice of the Peace, and he said we were remanded in custody
and would be transported to Saskatoon within six days.
- Anita had to be put in
a straitjacket that night.
- Dale thought he'd lost
her.
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Richard: Anita didn't come in right away.
They had to put her in a straitjacket for the first night, and
Dale could see through the glass into the women's area that she
wasn't there, and he thought he'd lost her. He was worried she
had died, or gone absolutely mentally crazy.
Kari: I think I went crazy myself that night. I just
sat there and cried and cried.
Richard: I could hear her crying.
Kari: You get a kind of flush right through your
whole body, and you get shivers and shakes, and I was shaking
all the time. Why? Why? Why? You try to rationalize, but you
can't.
Richard: Then they took us to a remand centre.
Everyone knew who we were because the news was on, three couples
arrested in Red Deer for sexual molestation, and there we were,
three couples.
So at suppertime when they
brought food, people would throw buns, stuff like that, other
prisoners. The guards just sit in their own bubble, you have
no contact with them. And there was verbal abuse, "We know
what you're in for," and my brother said, "Rick, I
think we're in a lot of trouble." Just at that moment, a
bun or something came flying and just about hit us in the head.
So we stuck together. If one
of us wanted to have a shower, as embarrassing as that was, we
all went.
After six days, they drove
us to Saskatoon. It was a long drive. They had us handcuffed
to each other -- husband/wife, husband/wife, husband/wife. At
Provost, we got switched and handed over to the Saskatchewan
RCMP. They were still very nice to us, very decent. We were wearing
the same clothes we'd been arrested in, and we hadn't shaved
or anything. We looked like we'd been beaten up.
Kari: I don't remember eating the whole time we were
in the remand centre. I don't think I did. We were wasted, exhausted.
Richard: It took about seven or eight hours
before we arrived at the Saskatoon city police station, and they
turned us over to the Saskatoon Police Service.
There, things were very different.
- The
Saskatoon officers were ignorant. "This is where
- sex offenders belong,"
one of them said.
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Richard: In Saskatoon, they have a booking
centre, and they stand tall, hover over you, and you look very
small to the counter, which is quite high.
They were ignorant.
It was, "You in that room,
and you in that room, and you in that room."
One of them called us sex offenders.
"This is where sex offenders belong."
We were put into separate cells.
We couldn't see each other, but we could reach through the bars
and we could touch each other's hands.
I asked for toilet paper, but
the guard wouldn't give me any. It was all stuff like that. We
knew our uncle had dropped off a carton of cigarettes for us,
but they made us wait four hours for them. If you asked for a
phone call, an hour later they'd bring the phone. They were very
aggressive.
My brother Dale and I were
in cells next to each other. That was when he broke. We stayed
up all night, me talking to him. He was rattling on the bars;
at that point, he really broke. I said, "Dale, they're gonna
beat you. Don't," and I tried to calm him down.
They're supposed to give you
a sheet, but they didn't, so it was very cold.
Kari: They only brought me a sheet after begging
for hours. I had shorts on and a T-shirt, and it was just freezing
cold.
Richard: Dale and I came up with a plan to
keep our cigarettes lit because they won't give you a light after
11 o'clock. So we'd alternate when the guard went by every 15
minutes. I'd have the cigarette on the inside of my hand so the
guard wouldn't see it, and we'd keep it lit and pass it back
and forth between the bars. So we smoked. And we smoked. We smoked
a whole carton of cigarettes in one night.
In the morning, we were all
put in front of the judge, behind this glass, and they gave us
$250 bail each.
None of us had any money and
we didn't know who to phone to get money from. One of the bail
conditions was that we couldn't phone my mom and dad, or have
contact with my sister, who'd also been arrested and who lived
in Saskatoon. So we were kind of strapped.
Just before they were going
to take us back to the remand centre for the evening, they told
us we'd been bailed out. My uncle had dropped off the bail money.
But he didn't stick around.
So we all ended up standing
outside on the street in downtown Saskatoon. We had some clothes
that Kari's dad had dropped off for us, so we changed into them
before we got out, and we took all our dirty clothes and dumped
them in a garbage can.
Dale had a credit card so we
were able to get enough money for hotel rooms, and we called
a cab and went to the Relax Inn. I phoned my uncle to ask about
the rest of the family, and that's when I found out my sister
was in the hospital after a major overdose, and that was it,
I lost it, I finally lost it.
Kari: You turned blue.
Richard: I don't remember any of it.
Kari: You kept saying, "They're gonna commit
her, they're gonna commit her," and you sat down and you
stopped breathing. Myrna and I were shaking you and tapping your
face and everything, and yelling at you, and finally you came
back, but you were blue.
Richard: All my sister's children were taken
too, and her adopted son was gone. He was only four years old.
And she never saw him again.
Kari: And he was her life.
Richard: She was 450 pounds at the time. She's
probably 100 pounds now. She went absolutely crazy. She was in
and out of psychiatric centres for months and months, actually
years.
Kari: She swallows things. The first time it was
a teaspoon. They had to operate to take it out. She's swallowed
knives, screwdrivers, toothbrushes. She had never done anything
like that before. She just went mad.
- We
found out later than Brian Dueck requested we
- be held for six days. I
think it was just his way of doing
- a little bit of torture.
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Richard: None of us was interviewed during
the time we were in custody, and we've never found out for sure
why they had to keep us for six days and didn't transfer us to
Saskatoon right away.
We were told later, and based
on the documents that I have, that Supt. Brian Dueck [one of
the plaintiffs the Klassens won their malicious prosecution case
against] requested that we be held for six days.
I think it was just his way
of doing a little bit of torture.
We didn't stay in the Relax
Inn that night. We called our landlord to come and pick us up,
which he did, all the way from Red Deer. Then we drove to Outlook
to secure our children.
A lot of family members shied
away from us, which surprised us. It's not that they believed
we'd done anything. It's just that they didn't want to be seen
with us. That's why my uncle who bailed us out just dropped off
the money and took off. There's still a lot of hard feelings
and a lot of resentment.
I was born a Klassen, but my
wife married into the Klassens, so I don't blame her mother and
father, but I remember her mother standing there saying, "Well,
did you?"
I mean, everyone was in shock.
Nobody knows what you're like anymore, nobody knows what's going
on. People who knew us were saying, "Well, did you?"
So we went into seclusion.
Not able to work, completely
isolated. We got kicked out of our apartment, and this was our
landlord who believed in us, but his superiors said we had to
leave, because there were other people in the complex who didn't
trust us.
Kari: We felt ashamed. We knew we hadn't done anything,
but still we felt ashamed
Richard: It was hard on the kids. We wouldn't
allow any children into our home, or allow them to visit other
children, so they were isolated too.
At this point, we still didn't
know what the allegations consisted of exactly. Then two weeks
before the preliminary hearing in December 1991, our lawyer showed
us the videotapes [of the three Ross children being interviewed
by Supt. Brian Dueck and child therapist, Carol Bunk-Ruys].
Kari: I was accused of sticking my finger in Kathy's
vagina and bum, and Michelle's vagina and bum, and Michael's
bum, and sticking his penis in my vagina and bum. He was 10 or
11 at the time.
Richard: I was accused of the same thing, except
for the reverse -- sticking my penis in their vagina/bum. That's
all we heard was vagina, bum, vagina, bum, 75 times, 125 times,
250 times.
My mother was accused of the
same thing, a woman in her fifties, in a wheelchair, clinically
blind, able to walk only with the aid of a walker. She always
had her fists clenched because she was partially paralysed.
On tape, Michael said he had
sex with her.
She thought we were all going
to jail.
- I
shouted at Matt Miazga, "I'm never going to let you
- get away with this. I want
my name cleared!"
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Richard: The preliminary hearing ended in
January 1992, and we were told we'd have to stand trial. Then
on Feb. 10, 1993, nearly a year later, the charges were stayed.
I heard Matt Miazga [the Saskatoon
prosecutor and a plaintiff in the malicious prosecution case]
say they weren't proceeding because the children were too traumatized
to testify. That's when I flipped out. I went after Matt outside
the court, and I was shouting, "I'm never going to let you
get away with this. I want my name cleared!" And Matt was
saying to our lawyer, "Control your client."
I thought, no way are you doing
this to me. But all the other family members wanted me to shut
up. They all said we could be charged again within the year,
because they had only stayed the charges, so we shouldn't piss
in their cornflakes.
I was even threatened by one
of my brothers, "You get us charged and I'll kill you."
First thing I did was to look
around for other resources. I heard about the Martensville case,
so I contacted people involved in that. I started writing long
letters. I wrote to Bob Mitchell, justice minister at the time,
but he wrote back saying a stay is as good as it gets, get on
with your lives.
Then I found out it was Michael
who had been abusing his sisters, and that they were still together.
The girls were being raped. And so then I realized this is apples
and oranges, this has nothing to do with us. What's happening
to those girls, I want it stopped.
I came back to Red Deer, and
I said to Kari, we're moving to Saskatoon. We're going to fight
this.
We decided to launch the malicious
prosecution suit, which we did in 1994, but for years the case
went nowhere. So I contacted the defendants' lawyers, told them
I was representing myself, purchased a $350 civil law book and
started reading.
Angela Geworsky
It was only then I realized
I could view all the documents. I went down to Regina, and there's
this beautiful office, and five boxes, and I thought, "My
God".
So I ordered them all, 50 cents
a page. Kari's mom and dad paid for it.
Kari: We were thinking, "How come there's no
notes from the police officer, from Dueck? Where's the investigation,
where's the evidence? There was nothing.
Richard: Our lawyer said there was nothing.
Nothing. But I went down there, and there were boxes of it.
Kari's mom and dad didn't have
any faith in me to begin with. I mean, we had lawyers, right?
So I had to do a lot of convincing to persuade them to invest
in me, and they had to purchase computers and paper and printers.
But they kept the faith and we went to trial.
Three, four times I tried to
commit suicide during the time I took over. For the last year
and a half, I'm surprised I got here. I know it's because of
Ange (his assistant, Angie Geworsky), Kari and her parents.
I've become addicted to sleeping
pills, although it's getting better. I'm going through withdrawal
at the moment. You feel as though your skin is crawling, your
legs are always wanting to move at night, you can't sleep, your
eyes are wide open, your mind's always running. Hands are constantly
wet, like you're washing dishes. I'm nervous and depressed and
want to cry a lot. Sometimes I find myself wandering, find myself
around town.
Probably the worst thing I've
ever had to live with are the violent thoughts I have against
myself.
I don't know why I'm so depressed.
I have no reason to be. I won.
But in a way, the case kept
me going. I didn't know what to do with myself when we won.
I would have killed myself
had I lost that judgment. Kari knew I'd decided to do that. I
had my pills in my pocket, over 20 or 40 of them.
And then I would have driven
my car through the police station front doors, and we would have
had an inquest. There was no option. They were going to get an
inquest one way or another.
Kari: I was scared out of my mind. It's all I thought
about. But I had faith in him, and confidence in him, the way
he presented all the evidence, the way he got it all out, the
work he did. Incredible.
Richard: I had no faith. I had resigned myself.
That was the end for me. What good would I have been to my wife
or children if I had lost?
They resurrected me by appealing.
They lit a fire under me. After we heard, everybody said, "Rick,
you're looking better already."
These people are vicious. I'm
a self-represented person. I knew they would do everything in
their power to take me out. They are sore losers. I fought them.
Now I've won probably one of the biggest malicious prosecution
cases in Canada.
And I did it clean. I did it
the right way, the judge commented on that. And they can't take
it. They can't handle it. If a lawyer had done this, they'd have
paid out. We're still hoping the government will just buck up
and do the right thing. There's a lot of pressure on them to
do so. I suspect if they don't, the NDP will be wiped out here.
There comes a time when [Premier
Lorne] Calvert can redeem himself, the police dept. can redeem
themselves, we can all redeem ourselves, and get off this Amnesty
International list. Let's get Saskatoon back on the map and make
it a place that we want to be in. It's the opportunity of a lifetime,
the way I look at it.
This is their opportunity to
come out, come clean, let's find out what happened, make it right,
and hold those accountable that have made the system the way
it was.
We can't keep employing people
who are crooked. And it's as simple as that.
I'm surprised we got this far.
But we've had tremendous support from all over the world, e-mails,
letters, even donations. We received one anonymous donation of
$2,000 from Luxembourg, and on the money order it said, "In
the name of my father. In the name of justice." We believe
it came from Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four. That man is
a hero of mine.
You also have to understand
that I'm a very strong person. And so is our marriage, and our
children too. We have a very strong bond.
Kari: Best friends.
Richard: Been through a lot.
Kari: Oh yeah.
Richard Klassen's
website can be reached at www.injusticebusters.com. If you'd
like to comment on this interview, please write to bestworst@thesp.com.
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell