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Sheila Steele's allegations regarding
Superintendent Dueck and the Saskatoon Police Service.
- I first encountered Corporal Brian Dueck
in 1993 when I watched him on videotape " interviewing"
the Ross children. Rick Klassen had just obtained his copies
of the disclosure tapes and he brought them to the Citizens Concerned
about Free Trade office on 2nd Avenue in Saskatoon and a group
of us watched them. These tapes were prepared for busy Crown
prosecutors who later used them as evidence to prosecute 16 people.
I was so appalled by this misuse of police funds that I wrote
a rant about the "soft room" for the newsletter of
Video Verité, an artist-run co-op of which I was a member.
- The following year, I had a chance to
look more closely at these tapes and at the taped interrogations
of Rick Klassen and Anita Klassen Dueck made in Red Deer. The
techniques he used were frightening. He accused Rick of having
sexually assaulted a former foster-child
of his grandmother's based on an accusation Dueck alleged the
man had made a few days before he was brutally murdered. He told
Anita that he knew details of her private
background which included a sexual assault against her before
she was married, and used this information to say that he KNEW
with a high degree of certainty that she had assaulted the Ross
children because she herself had been a victim in her life. In
these interviews, he tells both Rick Klassen
and Anita Klassen that he believes the children because "children
don't lie about these things" and that he absolutely believes
that Anita is guilty because of her past background and that
Rick is guilty because of a previous conviction of his father.
He ignores Anita's requests to have a lawyer present at least
three times. The interrogation of Anita goes on for almost an
hour. The interrogation of Rick is about 35 minutes.
- During September 1993, John and Johanna
Lucas were arrested for defaming Dueck after they had failed
at their attempts to have the police investigate his subornation
of perjury from his child witnesses. The Lucases were forbidden
to speak, write or have anything to do with the issue of child
sexual abuse.
- I took up the cause and began postering
a call for a public inquiry. In August, 1994 I was arrested along
with Richard Klassen for defaming Dueck by picketing to bring
his crimes to public attention. We were placed on an undertaking
which forbade us to poster or picket regarding this case.
- The charges against me were quashed
July 7, 1995. I was advised by Ed Holgate that it would be inadvisable
for me to picket again because I might be convicted if I was
recharged. Richard Klassen remained under the same undertaking
until the spring of 1998 when the Crown finally abandoned its
appeal aginst his jury acquittal.
- Effectively, the main persons who had
been calling for Dueck to be brought to justice were muzzled
for four years as he climbed up the ladder in the Saskatoon Police
Service. During this time Sgt. Dueck and Sgt. McDonald had Richard
Klassen pulled over several times and eventually took him into
the police station to quiz him about allegations made by convicted
killer-rapist Beryl Stonechild. He also made the remarks about
the "inbred group" composed of his critics.
The problem with a bad cop like Dueck
is that he just keeps on going, bull-dozing his way with sloppines
and ineptitude through bad investigations and eventually, it
becomes easier for people to leave him alone than to actually
deal with him and bring him to account. He or his cronies have
gone to great lengths to shut us up, including complaining to
our internet service provider when we first launched this website.
Well, we have a very long attention span and a long memory, too.
In the following Western Report article published in November,
1996, Dueck said that if he could not criminally convict Richard
Klassen of defamation, he would consider a civil suit. Since
Klassen's acquittal, no suit has been forthcoming. All defendants
in the Klassen-Kvello civil suit --except Dueck -- have made
a counter-claim of civil defamation, a silly strategy that has
been successful only in dragging out the case. What we have claimed
about Dueck was true when we said it and remains true to this
day. Chief Dave Scott is damaging his own credibility -- perhaps
irreparably -- by standing by this bad cop. During May, 1999,
the StarPhoenix printed a press-release where Dueck was called
"Acting Superintendent."
The media still accept
his photo opportunities and help shore up his reputation
Feb. 23, 2000, he is called a senior
officer and "Superintendent.": (drunks need detox centre,
below) Witch-hunt number two --
18 charged, four convicted - By Schafer Parker, Western
Report, Summer 1994 | Globe
& Mail article reference to Dueck | Richard Klassen's acquittal of defaming Dueck,
also in Western Report
Drunks
need detox centre: officer
By Kim McNairn, February
18, 2000
People found drunk on city streets deserve
to have a detox centre to sober up and get help instead of ending
up behind bars at the police station, says a senior Saskatoon
police officer.
Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver
all have drop-in detox centres. Supt. Brian Dueck says it's time
Saskatoon got the drunks out of the drunk tank and into a place
where they can be helped out of their addictions.
Between April and December 1999, police
made 1,664 intoxication arrests. One person was picked up by
police 28 times for being drunk.
"We are warehousing them. We bring
them in basically for their own safety. What we see here is a
tremendous problem. It is just not a police issue," said
Dueck in an interview this week.
Since November, Dueck has been meeting
with community groups to find out who would like to help establish
a drop-in detox centre, known commonly as "mattress detox."
He hopes to host a discussion on the matter with interested groups
as early as April.
Dueck sees the facility as a place with
beds for people to sober up and where counsellors could refer
them to longer-term detox centres such as Larson House.
He said a drop-in centre could have helped
Lawrence Wegner and Rodney Naistus, two men who were drunk and
froze to death near the Queen Elizabeth II Power Station in recent
weeks.
But he emphasizes that discussions about
drop-in detox started long before those two deaths and the investigation
into two police officers who allegedly took another drunk man
out to the plant and told him to walk home.
While there is lots of interest within
the community for a centre, Dueck said the roadblock is funding.
It's unclear who would foot the start-up costs and pay to keep
the facility running year after year, he said.
Mayor Henry Dayday, chair of the police
commission, said he has wanted a detox centre for years, but
the recent strains in relations between the aboriginal community
and police intensifies the need.
"It focuses it more now," said
Dayday.
Though the mayor recognizes the great
need for such a facility, he doesn't believe the City of Saskatoon
should pay for it. He wouldn't rule out some type of partnership.
He suggests Saskatoon District Health (SDH) or the provincial
Justice Department lead the way.
"I don't think for one moment the
city is without some responsibility here," said Al Hergott,
of SDH's family health services. "Right now they (the city
police) do have responsibility for it and they can't just give
it away and expect us to pick it up given the economic difficulties
we are facing right now."
Hergott estimates a detox centre would
cost at least $300,000 to create, depending on the type of building
chosen. He said addictions are a community problem and cannot
be solved by just one agency.
"I think incarcerating people for
intoxication is barbaric. Most medical professionals accept that
addiction is not a matter of willpower but is a serious health
problem." | News reports on Police Murders
Judge slams
'Rambo' investigation: Postal worker's name cleared after mail
theft charges dropped
By Betty Ann Adam, StarPhoenix,
March 21, 2000
Charges against Kim Allan Cooper, a Saskatoon
postal worker accused of stealing $184,500 from the mail, have
been dropped after a judge threw out the only evidence against
him, declaring that it was obtained by a police officer "operating
without any sense of decency or conscience."
In his March 8 decision, Queen's Bench
Justice Robert Laing said Sgt. Murray Zoorkan, a 27-year veteran
of the Saskatoon Police Service, staged a "highly Rambo-type
investigation" that included intimidating comments about
Cooper's wife and children and a threat that the Hells Angels
biker gang would come after them.
For more than seven weeks, Zoorkan pressed
Cooper to take a polygraph test, something Cooper had the right
to refuse. Nor was Cooper advised of his right to a lawyer.
Cooper eventually gave Zoorkan a short
handwritten statement. In it, he said he recalled handling a
money packet the night in question. He said the supervisor told
him to leave it on the table, that he left it there and locked
the room before going home.
That statement formed the basis of the
Crown's case against Cooper. It was the evidence Laing threw
out two weeks ago.
Cooper, 45, was charged in December 1998
with theft over $5,000 and theft from the mail. The charges followed
a two-year joint investigation by Canada Post and city police
in Regina and Saskatoon. Cooper was fired the next day, on Dec.
22, 1998.
The theft involved the corporation's
now-defunct "money packet system," which allowed customers,
such as banks, to send cash by registered mail. The money was
never recovered.
"It disappeared without a trace,"
said prosecutor Terry Hinz.
On Oct. 6, 1996, a package containing
$184,500 in cash was mailed from Credit Union Central in Regina,
destined for Saskatoon and branch offices in the area. The registered
packet was scanned by a computer in the Regina post office. Nobody
knows what happened to it after that.
The normal procedure would have been
for the package to be placed in a "monotainer," a large
open box, that would have been carried by forklift to the loading
dock, then placed in a semi-trailer. In Saskatoon the monotainer
would have been carried in, dumped on a table and the bags and
boxes sorted. A registered money packet should have been scanned
and locked in a safe awaiting delivery to the local address.
When the package didn't arrive, the credit
union contacted Canada Post. Postal investigators tried to find
out what happened to it, but came up with nothing. The matter
was reported to police and officers in both Regina and Saskatoon
investigated.
After months of tracing the route the
package should have taken, they came up empty-handed. They had
no evidence to show the package ever left the Regina post office
and no way to link any individual to it.
By Feb. 12, 1997, Zoorkan's main suspect
was Kim Cooper, the postal clerk who sorted packages in Saskatoon
the night the money disappeared.
Cooper had worked at the post office
for 12 years. His wife Marilyn is the nurse in charge at Luther
Senior Centre. The couple have four sons, who were 13, 11, seven
and four years old at the time.
Cooper enjoyed coaching his sons in soccer,
taking them to judo lessons and puttering around the garden.
Cooper and his wife spoke Saturday about
the nightmare they endured during the investigation and how it
has changed their lives.
Meeting with a reporter and their lawyer,
Darren Hagen, the couple were tense and nervous. Some recollections
brought them to tears.
On March 14, 1997, Zoorkan and another
officer interviewed Cooper at the police station, during which
Cooper refused to take the lie detector test. When Cooper stood
up to leave, Zoorkan told him to sit down, that he wasn't finished
with him yet. At the end of the interview Zoorkan told Cooper
they would be in touch.
Although Cooper had asked that the interview
be taped, it was not. Cooper said that on more than one occasion,
Zoorkan discouraged him from consulting a lawyer, saying that
Cooper didn't need one if he was innocent and that a lawyer would
just slow down the process.
Soon after the first interview, Cooper
phoned a lawyer whose name he got from the yellow pages. The
lawyer told him polygraphs are inconclusive and are not accepted
as evidence in court.
Near the end of March, police in a cruiser
followed Cooper and his wife as they prepared for an Easter vacation
with Kim's relatives in Calgary. The couple felt they had no
choice but to go to the police station to see Zoorkan.
At the station, Zoorkan told Cooper he
was a suspect in the theft. He asked Cooper how his marriage
was. When Cooper replied that it was like any marriage, Zoorkan
said, "We'll see about that."
Zoorkan told the couple he intended to
talk to all their neighbours, their minister, their children's
friends' parents.
He also told the couple he knew what
school their children went to. "He was going to try and
destroy our family. I felt like he was trying to break us,"
Marilyn recalls.
"I couldn't believe the incident
was happening. Why would you involve our children?," she
said. "I was afraid. We were doing what we thought was right
by co-operating and it was a threat."
On Saturday, April 24, Cooper and his
family returned from buying groceries to find Zoorkan waiting
in a police car parked in front of their house. When the family
got out of their van, Zoorkan approached Cooper and said he wanted
to talk to him.
When Cooper refused, Zoorkan told him
to get in the police car or he would arrest him immediately in
front of his family.
In the police car, Zoorkan angrily swore
at Cooper. He told Cooper another officer had some information
Cooper would be interested in.
Sgt. Brian Dueck arrived
and got in the car with them. He said word on the street was
that the Hells Angels knew he had $184,000 in cash and that they
intended to come after his wife while he was at work.
After 70 minutes of sitting in the police
car on the street in front of the neighbours, Zoorkan let Cooper
get out of the car.
He walked past his family, who had stayed
in the front yard throwing a ball the entire time, and went into
the house. He went into his bedroom and cried. "I lived
in fear. I had to go to work with this threat. It was a death
threat. I was taking different ways to work," he said.
Cooper still refused to do the polygraph.
On April 29, Zoorkan told them to come
to the police station again. This time another officer was in
the interview room with Zoorkan and the Coopers. The other officer
took a less aggressive approach in trying to get Cooper to do
the polygraph, while Zoorkan sat against the wall.
When the Coopers said they had to leave
to take one of the boys to a dental appointment, Zoorkan stood
up and kicked a chair, startling the couple. On May 6, Cooper
sat down at his kitchen table and wrote the details he remembered
from Oct. 6, 1997.
Cooper's statement was the first evidence
police had to show the money arrived in Saskatoon. It did not
contain an admission. Rather, Cooper wrote that he had notified
his supervisor that a money packet had arrived, that the supervisor
couldn't get the safe open and told him to leave the money on
the table for the day staff to put in the safe.
Cooper told the supervisor he was uncomfortable
doing that, but the supervisor overruled him.
"I left the pouch on the table,
locked the cage and gave the key to (the supervisor.)" Cooper
wrote.
On May 17, Zoorkan phoned Cooper and
called him a liar.
The couple waited to see what would happen
next. For a year and a half, nothing did.
On Saturday, Dec. 18, 1998, Cooper was
driving his son and his son's friend to judo when three unmarked
police cars surrounded him. Zoorkan came to the car and told
him to get out. He told Cooper he was under arrest for mail theft.
Cooper was held in custody for 12 hours
before being released. On Monday, Dec. 21 he was formally charged.
He was fired the next day.
For the next five months, Cooper stayed
in the house almost constantly. Cooper took a job as a truck
driver and now works away from home five days a week.
The first part of the trial was to determine
which evidence would be admitted. After a voir dire, Justice
Laing ruled that Cooper's handwritten statement was not admissible
and the Crown stayed the charges.
"The case is toast," Crown
prosecutor Terry Hinz said last week. "Once Judge Laing
ruled that statement was inadmissible we're back in the situation
where we can't even prove the money left Regina. Without that
statement we had no alternative but to shut the case down.
In his ruling, Laing severely criticized
the investigative tactics employed by Zoorkan: "He decided
he would operate not according to the law - which I am sure he
was well acquainted with - but according to his own rules, which,
in a nutshell, was intimidation to force Mr. Cooper into doing
something that law said he had a perfect right not to do,"
Laing stated.
"I will go so far as to say that
Sgt. Zoorkan's conduct, in my opinion, was offensive to the rule
of law.
"In the view of this police officer,
the end justified the means. The courts have never tolerated
this approach by police officers, nor do I."
Laing characterized Zoorkan's actions
the day he threatened Cooper with the biker gang and threatened
to arrest him when he had no grounds to do so, as those of "a
police officer totally out of control."
"There was never any right to counsel
or any warning given to Mr. Cooper at any stage along this highly
Rambo-type investigation," Laing stated.
Laing also stated that Zoorkan lied when
he claimed that he accidentally left the microphone turned off
during the first interview. Laing also noted that Zoorkan did
not warn Cooper that he was the main suspect and did not tell
him of his right to have a lawyer present.
"These were two experienced police
officers. . . . I am not able to suggest or overlook that they
did not know what the proper procedure was," Laing wrote.
Laing was amazed by Zoorkan's intimidation of Cooper.
"The evidence indicates, in my mind,
a police officer operating without any sense of decency or conscience,"
Laing stated.
"It would not hurt my feelings if
the remarks were made available to the police chief," Laing
stated.
Dale Meier, president of Local 824 of
the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, said he expects Cooper
to get his job back.
"In cases like this, I've never
seen anything less," Meier said.
The union automatically filed a grievance
with the corporation when Cooper was fired, saying that he was
unjustly released. Now the union will wait for confirmation from
the courts that the charges have been dismissed before proceeding
to arbitration with the employer, Meier said.
Canada Post spokesperson Brian Garagan
said the corporation's legal staff will review the matter after
all the legal procedures are complete.
Judge's denunciation of cop to be reviewed
By Betty Ann Adam, SP May
22, 2000
Police Chief Dave Scott has instructed
senior police officials to review the statement of a Queen's
Bench justice who denounced the investigative techniques of a
Saskatoon police sergeant as those of "an officer totally
out of control."
Justice Robert Laing made the comments
about Sgt. Murray Zoorkan in his March 8 decision to dismiss
the only evidence against a Saskatoon postal worker who was charged
with stealing $184,500 from the mail.
Without the statement from the postal
worker, Kim Allan Cooper, as evidence in the case, Crown prosecutor
Terry Hinz had no choice but to stay the charges against Cooper.
The missing money was mailed from Credit
Union Central in Regina in October 1996. It was scanned by computer
at the post office there, then disappeared without a trace.
For more than seven weeks in the spring
of 1997, Zoorkan tried to get Cooper, who sorted packages in
Saskatoon, to give a polygraph test, something Cooper had the
right to refuse.
Laing said Zoorkan intimidated Cooper
with comments about his marriage and by saying he knew where
Cooper's children went to school. As well, Cooper was threatened
that the Hells Angels biker gang would come after him or his
wife. Cooper eventually gave police a short statement saying
he had handled a money packet the night the cash disappeared.
He said he left it locked in a cage, at the direction of his
supervisor.
Laing said the statement was given involuntarily
by (sic) an officer "operating without any sense of decency
or conscience," who staged a "highly Rambo-type investigation,"
that was "offensive to the rule of law."
Scott said Dan Wiks, deputy chief in
charge of operations, and Don MacEwan, superintendent in charge
of criminal investigations, will consult with Hinz in reviewing
Laing's statements, "to see if there are any issues that
we as a police service should be concerned about with regards
to the investigation. "If there is I will address them."
Scott said he has no idea what the possible
outcomes might be.
The review will probably take a couple
of weeks, Scott said. He leaves for a holiday April 11 and won't
be back until the end of the month.
"It would be around the first of
May, I would imagine, before I could get a clear understanding
of what the issues are and what we should do," he said.
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