List of conferences Dueck attended | The $10M lawsuit | Fighting for his life: Rick Klassen has been under fire from Saskatchewan authorities since 1990 | UK: BBC Panarama "In the Name of the children" | The Roy Shuttlesworth UK case | Superintendent Dueck: Trawler extraordinaire | Martensville | 2002 version of framing parents: the Bice family | Adriaan Mak | Vopni family | False Memory Syndrome | Multiple Personality scams | Carol Bunko-Ruys | Martensville | Marketing Martensville | Dismantling the Victim Machine | Rape Shield Abuse | Police methods of extracting false confessions | Abduhali Mohamed | Monique Turenne |  

Dismantling the Crown's secret case against the Foster Parents

Prosecutor Matthew Miazga's desired witness Dr. George Fraser is a practitioner of Ego State Therapy and a diagnoser of the questionable multiple personality disorder.

At his website, we learn Fraser is a former military psychiatrist (Lieutenant-Colonel, retired) and was chief of psychiatry with the Canadian Forces in Germany and Halifax. He worked for 16 years at the Royal Ottawa Hospital as Director of the Anxiety and Phobic Disorders Clinic. (This is where he was when Miazga wanted him so badly as an expert witness). He now specializes in Anxiety/ Phobic Disorders and Trauma disorders including dissociation and post-traumatic stress. He also employs hypnosis.

Definitely trendy, he is also on the social anxiety disorder bandwagon. Seems he was a bit too pricey for the fiscal minded bureaucrats here, though, or else he wasn't available. The trials proceeded without the expert Miazga tried to persuade D. Murray Brown was so essential to their prosecution. But there, there, Matt: you got your convictions and three of them stuck for a little while (until the Supreme Court overturned them) and one stuck for good . . . or has it?

Dr. Jon Conte from Washington State University is another expert that Dueck refers to. His name continues to crop up in connection with therapists who claim expertise in the area of Satanic child abuse.

Back in Conte's home state, we find the Wenatchee scandal. Take time to read The Power to Harm, a prizewinning 1998 series in the Seattle Post-Intelligence on this 1994-5 hysteria which ruined hundreds of lives. This is one of the few cases which post-date the Saskatchewan hysteria. No one, from social workers and police who got involved at the beginning all the way to Janet Reno has owned up to any wrongdoing, or for that matter, been found legally responsible. The damage was wrought mainly upon welfare recipients, many of them retarded. Some went to jail and are perhaps still there.

Dr. Conte shows up as an expert witness in several cases: in this Alaska case where he failed and in this one where he succeeded. He promotes Ellen Bass's notorious bestseller, The Power to Heal, which all by itself created work for thousands of unqualified therapists who could spot MPS and repressed memories.

Deconstructing MPS

Carol Bunko-Ruys and the other "experts" who were whispering greedy temptations into the attentive ears of Saskatchewan Crown prosecutors had an agenda. Dueck learned the technique and we see him practising it on Kathy Ross in the first fifth estate broadcast of "Scandal of the Century" (Nov. 29, 2000). "Think harder, Kathy," he tells her, "I can hardly see you thinking."

Just as the local yokels were really getting into wacked-out psychology, raising hysteria in Saskatoon and neighbouring communities CBC's fifth estate was already deconstructing Multiple Personality Disorder (1993), one of the most pernicious of the new syndromes created by greedy, lazy people with a smattering of education and too much time on their hands.

The show "Mistaken Identities" provides a first-rate discussion and critical analysis of the controversial issues surrounding the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder (now referred to as dissociative identity disorder). Experts interviewed on this program place particular emphasis on the potentially iatrogenic effects of suggestive questioning, hypnosis, and other questionable therapeutic practices. They also call into question much of the commonly held wisdom regarding multiple personality disorder and its causes. It traces hysterical outbreaks of the phenomenon noting that each time emerges it is with a twist that fits its time.

Apparently this show is now difficult to get. Ask CBC Newsworld and the new Documentary Channel to show it. They are asking for suggestions right now and are reviving many excellent shows which have been gathering dust. There is a whole new generation which needs to be educated!

The movie book and movie Sybil during the early 70s planted seeds in the fertile minds of many therapists who began to cull both "alter" personalities and corresponding "repressed" memories of childhood abuse from their patients, often with the use of hypnosis. Significantly, however, there exists strong evidence that Sybil herself was mis-diagnosed MPD. Herbert Spiegel, M.D., a recognized specialist in hypnosis, who worked with Sybil and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, maintains that Sybil was a highly hypnotizable 'hysteric' and not a multiple personality. Dr. Spiegel reports that when he told Dr. Wilbur that it would not be accurate to label Sybil a multiple personality, Dr. Wilbur retorted, "But if we don't call it multiple personality, we don't have a book! The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won't sell." PBS Frontline

in 1992, the FBI did a thorough investigation of Satanic ritual abuse, which Religious Tolerance has graciously reproduced on their site. More Deconstructing MPD

We should not forget about Kelly Michaels or the Little Rascals attack in North Carolina, or the McMartin Day Care in Manhattan Beach, California. PBS Frontline did a six hour series on the former, the later was made into a movie starring James Woods. These are terrible stories without satisfactory endings. Lives were utterly ruined with no accountability from those who had ruined them.

In Saskatchewan we have an opportunity to learn from the deadly mistakes which have been made in the U.S. The Klassen-Kvello lawsuit could be settled with a public flourish and most people would breathe a sigh of relief that the cover-up was over. Then Peter Klassen and the Rosses could also receive settlements. Those seeking justice for what happened to them in the Martensville fiasco could also be compensated and acknowledged. Saskatchewan could become known as the place where justice is gaining its strength rather than land of cover-ups.

John Popowich received a $1.2 M settlement after the judge set a trial date and suggested his case could be won on malicious prosecution. The crown likes to brag that it has never been nailed for malice and it didn't want to start now.

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