Saskatchewan Memo randum in Klassen/Kvello appeal

Explosive: The Mikolajewski Report (pdf file) exposes the shoddy work done on the Barbara Stoppel murder investigation and how Winnipeg Chief Jack Ewatski helped block a proper re-investiagtion to protect a retired inspector and the secrets a warranted search of his premises would reveal. Terry Arnold: Another snitch dead Also : Blogging RCMP informants

Sermonette : continued from previous

More on accountability. Boring? I hope not.

The last sermonette showed how the Crown and social workers need malice (the freedom to use the law to pursue courses which are not just) and that is why it is so important for them to appeal Judge Baynton's judgment. The last half of the sermonette was from Winnipeg police Sgt. Mikolajewski 's internal report where he agonized over the malice he had encountered when trying to properly investigate the Barbara Stoppel murder.

This week I am looking at the police some more, but I am also looking at the media and the public.

With the Gomery Commission being forced to reverse its position on publication bans, we saw some intelligent observations from several media: non-publication orders are virtually unenforcable because with the internet, the people who have the information will get together with the people who want the information no matter what orders have been made.

I find this true and sad. One true and happy part of this is the observation that judges whould not automatically grant gag orders: it is up to the party requesting the ban to make the case that its interest over-rides the right of the public to know. This should mean that a lot more material will be available to the media and we should expect more thorough reporting.

Sadly, though, the public seems to be interested in a story only when there is a sexy hook. I cite as an example the fact that Sebastian Burns' lawyer Theresa Olson was suspended from practicing law for two years this week because some jail guards claimed they had seen her having sex with her client. This is a preposterous story but they said it under oath so it must have had something to it. Right? Wrong. But it was a story which received some play in the U.S. media last week. Lo and behold there were more visitors to the page I have posted on Theresa Olson than there has ever been to any page on any day since we first launched the website.

Sad, because there is on this website material which I think is important but the public -- including the media -- does not seem to be that interested. The story I'm specifically thinking of is that of Terry Arnold, the RCMP snitch who was allowed to rape and murder women as part of his deal with the mounties. It really doesn't take too much brainpower to put the dots together and see that this is in fact what has happened. I have expressed doubts about the veracity of the reports he killed himself. The police knew where he was and had visited him at his home in Victoria just one week earlier to get DNA from him to compare against evidence in the murder of Denise Lapierre. That's right. Not Barbara Stoppel. A retired inspector had destroyed evidence which might have linked Arnold to her.

I am co-administrator of a new blog to look more deeply at information about RCMP and other police snitches which is available without any search engines or subscribing to specialized websites. It is shocking to see that this is a pattern.

It is little wonder that Ron Wilson was in such a state last week at the Milgaard Inquiry. As a young petty criminal, the cops really put the squeeze on him. They needed someone to perjure testimony against Milgaard in order to allow Larry Fisher to go free. Whatever information they were getting from Fisher seemed to be important enough for them to trade a licence to rape and kill. The important information in this story is that it happened 25 years ago so we know it has been going on for at least that long. The information about Terry Arnold brings us right up to date. Chief Ewatski, who refused to allow a warrant on a retired inspector (former RCMP) now says he will give a statement about this in two weeks time. What can one say?

In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the RCMP could not enforce publication bans to protect the details of their sting operations while at the same time acknowleging that police need to use subterfuge and ruses to catch the bad guys.

This week we have former deputy chief Dan Wiks telling us that telling lies to the media was necessary to protect his officers. Those same officers followed his lead and ended up fired. Somehow or other the acknowlegment that in extreme circumstances it is okay to bend the truth became blanket permission to lie first and cover up later.

This is the school that Brian Dueck was trained in.

As the 20th century morphed into the 21st, before Hatchen and Munson took Darrell Night to the Queen Elizabeth Power station on a killer cold night and Night survived to indict them, before The Fifth Estate broke the cone of silence around the Foster Parent scandal, Brian Dueck was moving up the ranks. We first realized he had made it all the way to superintendent when he appeared on television in his new white satin-shiny uniform to tell Saskatoon that we needed a brief detox center so members of the force would have an alternative to taking drunk aboriginal people to the edge of town to freeze to death.

We had made it our declared project to bring this corrupt cop down. We knew he was corrupt because we had in our possession videotapes from 1990 where he and contract therapist Carol Bunko were interviewing three FASD children to manufacture evidence and ensnare innocent people in what he had, in 1991 declared to be "The Scandal of the Century."

Dueck was competitive and greedy. He had emerged from a rogue platoon where he had learned every trick to avoid the book. The Criminal Code Book, that is. He was an expert at losing files, constructing bogus evidence and throwing his considerable weight around. He did not keep a notebook. Around the time he got his Superintendent promotion, he was identified with having terrorized citizen Kim Cooper, a postal worker accused of stealing $175,000 from the post office. He and fellow upwardly mobile cop Murray Zoorkan had gone to the man's house and threatened to turn loose Hell's Angels on his family. Justice Robert Laing had thrown out the case when he learned of the two cops' "Rambo-like tactics."

Police Chief Dave Scott did nothing to clean up the Police Service. He was not going to heed the words of some Queen's Bench judge. The StarPhoenix followed the story -- an investigation had cleared Zoorkan and Dueck's name no longer came up in connection with this incident.

Meanwhile, Dueck became the most powerful man on the force. His portfolio included Major Crimes, among other important responsibilities. On December 30, 2003 another Queen's Bench judge, George Baynton, found that Dueck had acted maliciously in his prosecution of the Klassens and Kvellos. Dueck began to appeal this judgment but abandoned the it when the Saskatoon Police service, now under a new chief, and the insurance company balked at anteing up more money for his defence. (Hundreds of thousands of dollars had already been spent). The evidence presented against him at the civil trial stood unchallenged and it still does.

The crimes of Dueck which were revealed at the civil matter included the obstruction of justice through perjured testimony at several court proceedings and the outright manufacturing of evidence. The new Saskatoon chief got the Regina police to review this evidence and concluded that there were insufficient grounds to proceed against him, either through a discreditable conduct hearing within the organization or outright criminal charges. Dueck walked away with his full pension.

When we were first investigating Dueck (and he was certainly investigating us, charging us with defamation against him -- charges of which we were acquitted -- and talking the Sasktel server to block our first website) we learned that one of the methods he used when grooming the Ross children for their stories to tell the court was to reward them with trips to McDonald's. McDueck's. I Created a satirical page called McDuecks in January 1999.

When he wasn't bribing children, Dueck was setting up drug stings --another area of his mandate. We have elsewhere on these pages described how he used Shannon Gursky, a known morphine addict, to entrap marijuana users in a sting called Project Flotilla. She was sent with a wire to the homes of friends where she would dramatically beg for some grass to help her through her withdrawal. She was paid by the head and she used sex to entrap several others. I don't know if Dueck met with her at McDonald's.

Seven years later, we have discovered that McDonald's was a popular place for Dueck to meet adults as well -- particularly his colleagues. He was in a position to cut cheques. He discovered that if he was not in a position to manufacture a case himself, he could contract it out. RCMP "E" division in North Vancouver, offers "Criminal Investigative Analysis" < http://www.rcmp.ca/techops/crim_prof_e.htm >. Al Haslett is one of the masterminds of "Life Style" studies. If you have a suspect who you want to extract a confession from, the first step is to do a study of the person. Find his weaknesses (drugs, alcohol, poverty etc.) and then design a "scenario" which will play on the weakness. "Anybody is approachable and anybody can be brought into our scenarios if the approach is done right. . ." he is quoted as saying.

Services of "E" division don't come cheap. In order for a police department to consider ordering up a life style study, they have to pony up $25,000. That is a deposit. The full bill comes after the target has "confessed." I haven't been able to determine if there is a bonus for a conviction but there is a fee scale somewhere. The Bellevue Police hired them to sting Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns. The local budget wouldn't cover the cost of the final bill so there has been a lot of fuss about who should pay. Reading between the lines of various reports, it looks like it was between $800K and $1M.

One of the last stings Dueck ordered up was put on a waiting list and by the time the name came up on the list, Dueck had taken paid medical leave in the wake of the findings of malice against him in the Klassen civil matter. Sgts. Joe Faber and Donald Yonkman had been fully briefed, though, in one of those meetings at McDonald's a couple years back. In late 2003, the life style study had been completed. It was now up to the Saskatoon Police to watch their investment. This apparently required flying Faber and Yonkman out to B.C. several times to follow the RCMP operatives from a safe distance and to be briefed during the operation (which had a project name beginning with an E as most of their operations seem to have.)

This was going on at the very time the Saskatoon police were negotiating a settlement with Richard Klassen -- the details of which remain secret but which I know amounted to much, much less than a million dollars. This Project E sting, which was specifically entrapping a person on whom they had only exculpatory evidence, has probably cost more.

Where does Chief Russell Sabo fit into all of this? If he is claiming ignorance, he should not be chief. If he is in on it, he is no better than Scott. I know the RCMP run a hard sell with their business of entrapping people. It appears they are not above tricking the police departments who sign contracts with them to keep them on the hook. There is some evidence they gave the Saskatoon cops some bad information (lies) to keep the payments coming. They have flown such bogus stuff past police departments before (including this one) and have found Crowns with enough creative ingenuity to fly it past a judge.

Judges are catching on. Judge Klebuc did not go for police methods used to get Farand Bear's confession. Judge Dovall did not like the police using an edited tape to try to get Richard Klassen thrown out of the lawsuit,which received a favorable judgment we are still fighting to have upheld.

first run-through Sheila Steele, April 11, 2005

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell

Truth suppress'd, whether by courts or crooks, will find an avenue to be told. Sheila Steele, injusticebusters.com

If you hold the mouth of Truth, It will burst out its rib-cage. Somali proverb

Truth crushed to earth will rise again. --William Cullen Bryant

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Who we are:

Publisher Sheila Steele

Co-founder: Richard Klassen

New: injusticebustersblog. Participate!

Our activism contributed greatly to the good vibes which happened around the civil trial.

Index to the stories on this website

This is not regularly updated so if you are looking for a particular story and you have a name or keyword, please use the site search engine(at the bottom of the page) which IS regularly updated

Index to Saskatoon Police stories

This is a pretty good scrapbook for the 1998-2002 period.

More Sermonettes

 

early commentaries mixed in with news reports

2001

January: Legal Treachery to keep Dueck's lies safe

September: Hatchen and Munson trial

2002

March, 2002 -- Gay Bashing still a legal sport in Saskatoon -- Even when it turns to murder

First conscious sermonettes

2003

 

Feb. 1: Where we stand

Feb. 15, 2003: Has Saskatchewan learned anything?

March 1: Connecting the dots

March 23, 2003: From Micro to Macro

March 25, 2003: About libel and malice

March 27 : Gangs of Saskatoon: the police and prison guards

April 28, 2003: The Naked Truth

May 5: How low will they go?

May 15, 2003: Come clean Calvert, Cline!

May 30: Still smearing Milgaard - defamation is alive and well on the lawn of the Regina legislature and Precendent has been set as we reclaim our institutions

June 11, 2003: --Eric Cline carries on a corrupt tradition

Nov 7: Courage -- the only reward is justice

November 20: Just following orders

November 24: Mayor Atchison, community policing and graffiti

November 25: Michael Jackson

November 30: Corrupt officials must be severely punished: otherwise they just keep on putting the administration of justice in disrepute!

December 1: Christmas comes early for injustice warriors

December 4: Wide open Saskatchewan?

December 16: Crawling through the tunnel of justice since 1991

December 24: The Crown keeps right on breaking the law

December 30: Who will find justice under their tree?

 

2004

 

January 1. 2004: Unprecedented publicity and Happy New Year

January 8, 2004: Malice still afoot

January 10, 2004: Shame and mugshots

January 14, 2004: Telling more truth about the undefamable: McKillop and Quennell, the static duo

January 17, 2004: Fifth Estate returns and A working class hero is something to be

January 22,23, 2004: Justice is still prevailing -- it is just taking longer and Bits and pieces are now coming together to tell the story of the century

January 27, 2004: Telling the truth about the undefamable, restoring reputations to the defamed.

February 5, 2004: Negotiations and strategies: getting an intransigent government to remedy its damage

February 10, 2004: How many lawyers does it take to ruin a province? and Lawyer continues to treat people's lives as a cruel game: monopoly?

Febrary 16, 2004: Calvert is not King Arthur

March 29, 2004: Counting down to the damages trial

April 16, 2004: The internet, the courts and now the movies -- We will so what it takes to get justice

May 1, 2004: If Frank Quennell is any example of what former Justice Minister Chris Axworthy called "evolving," Saskatchewan is ready to kiss justice good-bye!

May 27, 2004: Some observations on Saskatchewan and justice

June 7, 2004:Media coverage of Monique Turenne's story illustrates journalistic laziness

June 8:, 2004 -- The police not only failed to serve and protect Don and Lorna Smith and their children but set them up for false charges and community shunning

September 2, 2004: A tale of three cops: Dueck, Gobeil and Schinkel -- with an update on how they get away with criminal obstruction of justice

November, 2004: Wilfred Hathway, Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns -- RCMP stings offensive to community standards

November 11, 2004: Rogue Platoon? Identifying the rotten apples in Saskatoon Police Service and why we need a full public inquiry into our whole justice system

November 28, 2004: Can Justice Minister Quennell take a few more steps? The Prosecutors' office is still harbouring crowns who put the administrative of justice in disrepute

November 12, 2004: Saskatchewan Justice in chaos: The Stonechild report suggests it is.

November 28, 2004: The price for being a good judge or a good prosecutor

December 30: When the government interferes with the judiciary, we know a Police State is a dangerous possibility (The government appeal of the Klassen/Kvello decision)

 

2005

 

Jan 1, 2005: Chewed up digested and spit out

Jan. 5, 2005: More on chief Sabo

February 18, 2005: Tunnel vision: Darren Koehn, Wilf Hathway and Leon Walchuk

March 2: Fixing the system: Time to quit talking and implement previous commission recommendations

March 19, 2005 : Injustice as ShowBiz

April 2005 The Crown and Social workers need malice