Dead Ends
Page 11
They had a beautiful home on Thunderbird Ridge with spectacular views, lots of friends, and active lives. It was, Katy recalls, a charmed life.
So they had lots to celebrate that New Year’s Eve. Friends were visiting with their children. They made a bouillabaisse and looked forward to seeing in the New Year.
When another couple arrived, they mentioned a party at the Cudmore house down the street. Dr. Richard Cudmore was a neighbour and close friend. He had asked McIntosh to keep an eye on his house while he honeymooned in Mexico. McIntosh and the two men decided to check it out. He grabbed a beer, thinking he might fit in better.
Cudmore, it turned out, was right to be nervous.
Light and loud music poured into the street from the Cudmore house. A drunken New Year’s Eve party was in full swing, with some 150 young people jammed into the house. Cudmore’s nineteen-year-old son, Jamie, had thrown out the invitation, then left his own party.
Jamie, six foot six and powerful, had been picking up money as a collector for local drug dealers. The party attracted some tough people from that world. (Jamie, after a couple of assault convictions, turned his life around and became a stalwart of Canada’s national rugby team and a European pro.)
McIntosh and the two friends decided to go in and try to find out what was going on. They quickly became separated. McIntosh headed for the master bedroom, where a group of young people had congregated.
What happened next took seconds. Someone bumped into McIntosh, and he bumped into Ryan MacMillan, a big, drunk twenty-year-old logger with a record for petty crimes. He threw one punch, McIntosh slumped to the floor, and MacMillan left the bedroom without a backward glance.
Then Ryan Aldridge, nineteen, stepped forward and kicked McIntosh. Four full, swinging kicks to the head.
***
Katy knew nothing, until the doorbell rang and a friend said Bob was hurt. A police car was waiting. The ten-minute ride to the Squamish Hospital emergency room seemed to take forever.
She rushed into the ER, where one of Bob’s running friends was administering CPR. It is like that in towns of 14,000 people. Lives overlap.
It was too late. Bob was dead.
Katy called close friends and family from the hospital, then went home to wait for the twins to wake up. “All I could think about was Sam and Emma, how they had two hours of innocence left,” she recalled. “I watched them sleeping and thought, I hope they don’t wake up till noon.”
And she decided the killing could not be allowed to become a nightmare that hung over their family. “I promised them and I promised myself that underneath the horror of what had just happened we would find a gift.”
***
Police started investigating. MacMillan soon admitted punching McIntosh. Five days after the killing, he was charged with manslaughter.
But the case was weak. Autopsy results indicated that a punch didn’t kill McIntosh.
And the police investigation ran into a wall of silence. Eight to twelve young people were in the bedroom and witnessed the killing; scores more had information that could have helped police.
No one would talk. The people at the party, their friends, maybe even parents, chose to remain silent. They placed protecting one of their own—not being a rat—above bringing a killer to justice.
In September, the Crown stayed the charges against MacMillan. There wasn’t enough evidence to make the case.
Squamish kept its secrets.
***
Bob’s memorial service in the civic centre was attended by about 750 people. Friends, even strangers, wore blue ribbons—the colour of Bob’s eyes—to show support. Katy delivered the eulogy.
But life in Squamish was difficult. Family friends didn’t know what to say, or burst into tears when they met Katy on the street.
And as days and weeks went by without any progress in the case, Katy had to wonder if each person she passed knew who killed Bob. Once outgoing, enthusiastic, friendly, she now found meeting people exhausting, and groups of teens threatening.
In April, Katy moved to Victoria, where she grew up and where her mother and two brothers still lived. She decided to sue MacMillan and the Cudmores for her husband’s death, a decision that angered some in Squamish.
A moustached, grey-haired Victoria lawyer, Mike Hutchison, was handling her lawsuit. By late summer, they were engaged.
It surprised many people. But Katy had a made a quick decision. She was not going to let her life—and her children’s—be defined by Bob’s death. She could see the temptations to embrace anger, hatred, or self-pity, to give up. She was determined to live every minute fully, as Bob had done.
And she believed that something good could come from the worst day of her life.
***
It took four years, but the wall of silence developed cracks. An eight-month RCMP undercover operation that started in late 2001 led to Aldridge, and the undercover officers elicited an admission of guilt in a Richmond hotel room.
But they wanted stronger evidence, and by June 2002, they were ready to bring Aldridge in to try and get a videotaped confession.
Katy Hutchison, who had stayed in close touch with the investigation, had a bold idea. She wanted to talk to Aldridge, to make a personal appeal. Confession, she believed, was important for him. And even more, a guilty plea was needed to spare the twins—now nine—the ordeal of a highly publicized trial.
The RCMP said no. But they let Katy make a videotape. She spoke directly to Aldridge, told him about Bob, and the twins, and how their life had changed since that New Year’s Eve. She said they were linked forever, her family and Aldridge. She asked him just to tell the truth.
When the RCMP played the video and showed him pictures of the twins playing with Bob, Aldridge broke down in tears. He confessed.
Then he surprised officers. Could he speak with Katy?
For police, it was a chance to gather more evidence. For Katy Hutchison, it was much more. The next morning, June 21, the RCMP arranged a helicopter flight from Victoria to Squamish, where Katy walked into a bleak, tiny interview room to come face to face with the man who had killed her husband.
“He started to cry as soon as he got in the room. I said, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ As he sobbed it was all I could do not to hold him. Second to the day I gave birth, it was probably the most human moment of my life.”
Aldridge apologized, told Katy about his years of nightmares about the night. He gave her letters he had written, one for her and one for the twins. When she left the room, she could see him, sitting alone, sobbing.
“I wanted to make it okay for him. He seemed genuinely remorseful.”
Aldridge pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to five years in prison. Katy Hutchison was in court, and read a victim impact statement that brought many to tears.
But their relationship was just beginning.
Katy—initially a nervous public speaker—decided to do a couple of presentations in local high schools to tell her story and encourage kids to think about responsibility and the risks of drunken parties and bad choices.
She showed pictures of Bob competing in triathlons, reading to the twins, goofing around with his friends, and talked about their lives.
And then Katy showed a photo of him lying on the table in the morgue.
It was powerful. But just a start.
In 2003, an article on restorative justice, on bringing offenders and victims together to help both heal, captured her imagination. After much preparation, Katy met with Ryan for five hours in the Matsqui federal penitentiary, showed him her presentation. They talked about Bob, the children, Ryan’s family, and life behind bars. And as the time came to leave, she reached out to the man who killed her husband.
“I do not know what your plans are after you are released from prison, but if you would like to come and work with me in the schools, I would be honoured to work with you.”
Their first two presentations were inside prisons, but then Aldri
dge and Hutchison shared their stories together in schools and community groups.
“We cannot change the fact that our lives came crashing together on New Year’s Eve in 1997,” she wrote in Walking After Midnight, her frank account of the experience. “Ryan and I came at this journey from opposite directions. We met somewhere in the middle and chose to walk forward side by side.”
“It is simply the best we can do.”
WHOSE BODY IS THIS?
Sue Rodriguez walked out of the doctor’s office in August 1991 and knew everything in her life had changed.
She was forty-one, mother of a son just starting school. She had begun working as a legal secretary, was happily married, and had a home in the pastoral Saanich Peninsula outside Victoria.
And, Rodriguez had just learned, she was dying.
She had noticed numbness and weakness in her left hand in April, and been to several doctors seeking answers.
Now she knew. She had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Rodriguez could expect to live two to three years after the onset of the disease—the time she first noticed the numbness in her hand.
As ALS progressed, nerve cells in her brain and spinal cord would die. They control all the muscles in the body. As the cells died, her muscles would weaken and atrophy.
People with ALS lose the ability to walk, or use their arms. The muscles of the head and neck waste away, so they can’t speak, chew, or swallow. They must be fed, first by someone else, then, as swallowing becomes impossible, through a tube. They are at risk of respiratory infections and choking.
As their conditions worsen, people are likely to be paralyzed, unable to lift their heads. Machines keep them breathing through tubes. Caregivers, family or paid, empty catheters and clean bowel movements and try to prevent bedsores.
Death usually comes because patients choke to death on food, develop pneumonia, or suffocate when their muscles used in breathing no longer work.
And through it all, patients’ brains are otherwise unaffected—they feel pain, are aware of their circumstances. The mind is a prisoner in a wasting body.
Rodriguez knew that was not for her.
She researched the disease, decided she would not die that way.
“I’m not afraid of death at all,” Rodriguez told Anne Mullins of the Vancouver Sun. “But I fear gasping for breath, panicking, being in a situation where I am hooked up to a respirator, unable to swallow, unable to move, unable to do anything for myself.”
“I hate to be entertaining the thought, but I will do what I have to do in order to die in as peaceful a manner as possible.”
The law, Rodriguez found, made dying peacefully, on her terms, extremely difficult. Suicide is legal in Canada. But helping someone else commit suicide is a criminal offence.
Rodriguez wanted as much time with her husband and young son as possible. By the time she decided to end her life, she would likely be physically unable to make it happen. She would need help.
She knew she couldn’t ask her husband to help end her life when the time came. It would be too difficult emotionally. And he would be breaking the law. If he went to jail, who would care for their son?
So Rodriguez decided to do everything she could to change the law. If not in time for her, then for others.
It was a brave choice. Polls indicated most Canadians supported an individual’s right to choose the time of his or her death and to be assisted by a doctor.
But powerful groups opposed any change, and politicians shied away from the issue.
Rodriguez went public with her illness, and her desire to end her life when she chose, in the way she chose.
She launched a legal challenge to the law barring assisted suicide, arguing that it was discriminatory and violated her constitutional rights.
Other Canadians, she noted, had the legal right to end their lives. Because the progression of her illness meant she would be incapacitated, and assisted suicide was illegal, she did not.
While the challenge made its way through the courts, on an inevitable path to the Supreme Court of Canada, Rodriguez sacrificed her personal privacy to lobby for changes to the Criminal Code.
All the time, the clock was ticking.
Two months after she went public, Rodriguez urged a parliamentary committee to help change the law. She was already too sick to travel to Ottawa. Her powerful video presentation had to speak for her.
Rodriguez filmed the presentation in her family room, perched on a black leather couch, the sun dappling the treed garden outside her window. Her voice was already affected by the deterioration of her muscles—she spoke slowly, with little affect. She was gaunt, her dark hair cut short on the sides and swept back.
Her words, though, were powerful.
“My name is Sue Rodriguez. A year ago, when I was first diagnosed, I was quite agile. Today I can barely walk.
“I had full control of my hands except for some occasional twitching. Today, as you can see, my hands are misshapen and it is all I can do to sign my name in a scrawl.
“There’s much worse to come… . Soon I will be unable to walk. I will be unable to breathe without a respirator. I will be unable to eat or swallow—unable to move without assistance.
“I want to ask you, gentlemen, if I cannot give consent to my own death, then whose body is this? Who owns my life?”
Compelling. But MPs did not want to touch the polarizing issue. Liberal MP John Nunziata even fought to keep the video from being seen by the committee, saying that if Rodriguez was too sick to appear, she should submit a written brief, though she was also unable to write by that point. An anti-assisted suicide group linked changing the law to the death camps of Nazi Germany.
The politicians wouldn’t act. Her only choice was the courts.
The British Columbia Supreme Court ruled against Rodriguez on December 29, saying assisted suicide was not a right protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
On March 8, 1993, the British Columbia Court of Appeal also ruled against Rodriguez, in a split decision. Two justices said that the rights of Rodriguez were not being affected, and that it was up to Parliament to decide if the law should be changed.
But Chief Justice Allan McEachern said Rodriguez’s fundamental Charter rights were being violated, because they prevented a doctor from helping her end her life when suffering became unbearable.
That left the Supreme Court of Canada. But on September 30, the court rejected her bid to overturn the law in a 5-4 decision. The majority ruled there is no Charter right to assisted suicide, and that the law expressed society’s rejection of suicide and fear of abuses if the law was changed.
The four dissenting justices said Rodriguez’s rights were being violated. Other Canadians could legally choose when to end their lives. The law against assisted suicide denied her that right. And she was being made to suffer because of possible abuses that had nothing to do with her.
Rodriguez saw a glimmer of hope, at least for others.
“While I may not benefit from the decision today, I hope that Parliament will act and allow those who are in my situation to benefit in the future,” she whispered from her wheelchair. “It has been worth it, far more than I ever anticipated. People are talking about this and thinking about these issues.”
But she had never been counting on the courts. Seven months earlier, she had found a doctor—Dr. X—willing to help her end her suffering when she decided the time was right. In mid-January, she set a date. She could no longer hold her son, and did not want him to have to see her suffer and waste away.
On February 11, 1994, just under three years since her diagnosis, Sue Rodriguez had a last dinner with her husband, Henry, and son, Cole. The next morning, they left the home for the day.
New Democrat MP Svend Robinson, a friend and an advocate for her right to die, arrived at her house that morning. Rodriguez had asked him to be with her. They talked, and she gave him a list of friends and family to call.
Dr. X arrived, willing to break the law to help Rodriguez decide when it was time to die.
“Sue remained serene and calm throughout and in total control,” Robinson said. “She faced her death with incredible courage and dignity. I held her in my arms. She peacefully lapsed into unconsciousness and stopped breathing approximately two hours later. The doctor then left.”
Robinson said he called a palliative-care physician shortly after Dr. X left, and soon after made calls to the RCMP and coroner’s service.
An autopsy found she had died of overdoses of a sedative and morphine. The RCMP took a brief interest in trying to identify Dr. X, but there were no charges.
But Rodriguez’s hope that her death would lead to a public debate about assisted suicide and changes to the law was misplaced. Twenty years after her death, the laws remain unchanged.
SMUGGLERS AND DEATH
The west coast was a wild place in 1864, and not just because of the waves crashing on the rocky shores.
The gold rush was bringing another wave of newcomers into the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Conflicts with Natives were increasing, with each side blaming the other for indignities and attacks. Traders from the colonies and the United States sailed up and down the coast, flouting the ban on selling alcohol to Natives imposed by Governor James Douglas six years earlier.
The Royal Navy, already with too few ships to patrol the coast, was on alert over warnings that Confederate forces in the American Civil War planned pirate-style raids on shipping and faced a simmering boundary dispute with the United States.
It was a tense time for the navy’s Pacific Station commander, Rear Admiral Joseph Denman, who had earned a reputation for aggressive leadership in his battles against slavers in West Africa. (Denman Island, off Fanny Bay on Vancouver Island, is named for him.)
Land-based policing was scant and improvised. The Colony of Vancouver Island, created thirteen years earlier, had a police commissioner, but policing authority was delegated to local magistrates, most with no qualifications.