Well of Lies

by Colin Perkel

  It seemed self-evident to Trudell that Stan should not return to Walkerton and he told him so. Besides his client’s state of mind, there was no telling who would be burned by the firestorm unleashed by McQuigge. But Trudell was also acutely aware that Stan appeared to have gone into hiding. The inference could only be that he had something to hide. Still, much as he might want to, Stan couldn’t go back home, at least not until the time was right.

  The right time was to come within days. Tuning into CBC Radio, Trudell heard an interview with the pastor at Walkerton’s Trinity Lutheran Church, which Stan had joined after his divorce from Mary and remarriage to Carole.

  “My congregation very strongly sends Stan their love, as do many, many people in the community,” Pastor Beth Conroy was saying.

  “Even those parents who have sick children in the hospital are saying, ‘Tell Stan we understand that nothing is ever one person’s fault and we’re waiting to hear what has really happened.’ ”

  Trudell knew it was time for Stan to go home. The psychiatrist agreed. Trudell called Conroy.

  “He wants to come home, but he wants to see you,” he said.

  —

  One of Walkerton’s claims to fame as county town is its jail, where Stan’s youngest brother Ken worked as a security guard. You pass it on the left as you go up Jackson Street a few blocks south of Durham Street. The structure has been there from the town’s earliest days. In the 1860s, young John Hoag was sentenced to the gallows for killing a man in a drunken rage over a woman. Hoag was duly hanged behind the jail’s imposing stone walls. The town doctor pronounced him dead and the body was placed in a coffin for burial in a plot outside town. A few weeks later, the judge who’d condemned him to death ran into a very much alive Hoag in the northern United States. Turns out, Hoag’s desperate dad had prevailed upon the doctor to show sympathy to his wayward boy. In turn, the doctor had prevailed upon the hangman, who went along with a scheme to save the wretched youth. They fitted a harness and hook under his coat to which they attached the gallows rope. The death plunge wasn’t. Out of sight of prying eyes, the live body was retrieved from the casket, which was filled with stones and buried. The episode was later memorialized in the syndicated newspaper series, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Walkerton was featured in Ripley’s again on another occasion, when it recognized the town’s uniqueness in having a jail with four churches on its four corners. Punishment and redemption located within a stone’s throw of each other in a community whose solid religious underpinnings date back to Joseph Walker’s times.

  —

  Beth Conroy was in effect the religious elder in Walkerton even though she only had five years in the town. The United Church minister had just retired, although his retirement tea had to be put off for months because of the crisis. The Presbyterian position was vacant, and the Pentecostal Church had yet to fill its vacancy. The Anglican part-time pastor lived outside town, while Father Paul Reilly, who headed the town’s Roman Catholic Church, by far the largest, had been in place for only a year. The result was that Pastor Beth became the spiritual voice of the community throughout the crisis, a status reinforced by the fact that Stan belonged to her church. She had come to Walkerton to serve the 250-strong Lutheran congregation from the small southern Ontario community of Fisherville, where she’d seen another environmental disaster up close. The nearby town of Hagersville made international headlines in 1989 when a mammoth fire at a used tire dump burned uncontrollably for seventeen days, spewing choking black smoke and poison that smeared the community. The tire fire had hurt Hagersville badly, but its ugly blackness paled in significance to the hurt in Walkerton. Conroy found herself spending more and more time in the hospital, offering support, comfort, and a willing ear. Never had she experienced such intense suffering. It felt as if a Biblical plague had befallen the town, like some grotesque punishment for sins unimaginable. Now and again, as she listened to both the grief and anger, her eyes rolled back in their sockets, as if scanning some inner horizon in search of strength and wisdom to stay afloat as an emotional tidal wave threatened to swamp her.

  Conroy knew the Koebels well. Both were regulars. Stan was always there whenever anything needed doing: washing the dishes or helping clean up the lawns after functions. She instantly agreed to Trudell’s request that she see Stan. Trudell remained worried. He climbed into a car with the psychiatrist, while Stan and Carole took their own car. En route, Trudell called Dennis Player, Walkerton’s acting chief of police, to ask advice. Player was immediately receptive.

  “Where do you want to go? We’ll help you,” Player assured him.

  Conroy met them outside town for a brief chat, and they all headed to the church, Trudell filled with trepidation at the reception they’d find. As they emerged from their cars, two passersby instantly recognized Stan, who was dressed in a checkered, open-necked, short-sleeve shirt, a lottery ticket protruding from his breast pocket.

  “Hi, Stan, how are ya?” called the one.

  “Hey, Stan, nice to see ya,” the other said.

  At that moment, Trudell knew he had nothing to worry about. And so did his client. It was time to face the media. Through his long career, Trudell had raised the sympathy game to a fine art, earning himself the nickname Weeping Willie in certain legal circles. But playing the sympathy card was dangerous. Like everyone else, he had little idea what had gone down or what might be uncovered. Still, as a defence lawyer, he had to remind the world that an accused remains innocent until proven guilty, that Stan deserved the benefit of the doubt. With the TV cameras rolling, photographers flashing, and reporters scribbling, Trudell read a statement he’d prepared earlier, a plea to give his client, who stood so forlornly at his side, some desperately needed breathing space.

  “Mr. Koebel has come home to his community and wants to stay here. This is the community that he and his family love and which they have served for many years. He is a man who is suffering a great deal along with many others. He has been devastated with the loss of lives and suggestions that he or anyone is to blame.

  “However, he is very grateful for the compassion and understanding which has been shown and he believes and trusts in the sense of fairness in this community and indeed in this country.

  “This is a horrible tragedy that no one wanted, no one planned. On behalf of his family he asks that the members of the media respect their privacy and I, too, ask you to be compassionate and fair. Mr. Koebel is currently under a doctor’s care. He is fine, but of course will be making no statement at this time.”

  Holding hands with his wife, Carole, and daughter, Stephanie, who flanked him, and with Pastor Beth keeping a respectful distance behind, Stan entered the church. At the quiet, private reunion, the family talked, hugged, and wept. It had been exactly five days since Stan had dropped out of sight.

  Many in the media thought it more than passing strange that almost everyone seemed so willing to protect the man who appeared to have done them such an egregious wrong. But Stan was one of them, and his family was a mainstay of their community. They knew in their hearts that he’d never have intentionally caused them harm. And they didn’t need outsiders to tell them how to react or to ask endless questions about anger and blame. They wanted answers, but instinctively they understood that no one man could possibly have borne responsibility for such an enormous calamity. The media might have wanted to see blood, but there would be none of that here. So Stan went back to his small bungalow at 902 Yonge Street, a kilometre or so up the road from the jail, to the refuge of the yard he’d tended so many times. Sure, there were a couple of crank calls and one person drove by the house and yelled, “You’re a killer,” but Stan was home, where he belonged. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last. It didn’t.

  A Town Under Siege

  FROM ACROSS the country and abroad, hearts and wallets opened up for the rural town whose name everyone now seemed to know. Relief supplies poured in as people, small businesses, and large companies from near and far don
ated money, bottled water, bleach, toothbrushes, showerheads, food and food supplements, and other supplies. For its part, the provincial government announced an emergency relief package to cover out-of-pocket expenses for both individuals and businesses hit by the crisis. But despite the largesse and sympathy, and even as the urgency of caring for the sick and burying the dead eased, the town’s shock and anger turned to depression. A blanket of despair began to settle over the besieged community. Out-of-town school teams cancelled games in Walkerton, or told the town’s teams to stay away. Stories circulated about how a family from the town had been asked to leave a restaurant in Hanover, or how store clerks were afraid to handle money from Walkerton shoppers. Businesses struggled to stay afloat, if they were able to open at all. Employees were ill. Patrons stayed away. Who would want to eat in a Walkerton restaurant, stay in a Walkerton motel? People showed up at work, eyes red from the chlorine in the shower water. Hands turned raw. Homes smelled of bleach. Children began exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Had they been sent away to live with a relative or friend because they’d been bad? Where were their buddies? Offered a chance to look inside a real helicopter, one little boy recoiled in horror. That, he said, would mean being taken away, maybe to die. Another child hid a bout of diarrhea from his parents. He didn’t want to end up being flown off to a big-city hospital as had happened to a playmate down the street. Parents worried as they kept kids away from taps and out of the lawn sprinkler that is every child’s right on a hot summer day. Each day, people filled containers of water from a tanker or picked up donated bottles of water from the arena and lugged them home or dragged them up stairs. Mundane chores, washing vegetables, brushing teeth, doing the dishes, giving the kids a bath, became a constant reminder of the abnormal situation in which they lived. One time, Lloyd Cartwright reached for the bottle of water next to the basin to rinse his mouth. He accidentally grabbed the bleach bottle next to it, a slip that left him with nasty burns to his mouth and lips. His wife Marie’s bridge team decided to skip the regional tournament. They just didn’t feel welcome. The arena, packed almost to the rafters with donated bottled water, cancelled the normal events that provide the fun and games that help bind a community. Baseball diamonds, usually filled with the friendly rivalry of area teams playing ball, were empty. One night, a bunch of youngsters at a typically teenage loose end opened the tap on the giant water tanker and left it gushing. Residents coming to fill their bottles the next day were dismayed to find it empty. The Concerned Walkerton Citizens intervened. A new tanker would come and this time there would be security. But the plan was scrapped when someone decided that tanker water was vulnerable to contamination anyway. Instead, only bottled water, this time courtesy of the provincial government, would be made available. Strangers intruded into every home, leaving red tags on water mains and concentrated chlorine solutions in every pipe and every tap as the tedious, painstaking task of cleaning the system got underway. Streets were dug up as underground mains were located and replaced. The remediation bill began mounting into the millions of dollars. Who would pay? How long would it last? What would happen to the children who had been so deathly ill? When, in God’s name, would it just be over? No one could say. Mayor Dave Thomson retreated behind his communications firm and his lawyer, Rod McLeod. Town hall meetings designed to provide information left townsfolk angry, frustrated, and wholly unenlightened. They felt cut off from their civic leaders, mistrustful of their provincial politicians, and denied straight answers. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had sent a message of sympathy, but no one from the federal government dared enter the political swamp that Walkerton was becoming. Still, to the casual eye, the town stood as it always had. There had been no earthquake. No devastating fire. No tornado. It all looked so normal. Why then was everyone so gloomy?

  —

  For Rita Halpin, it felt like the war again, when the menfolk in her family disappeared overseas to fight, many never to return. Left behind, the women back home waited, their dread hidden behind a mask of seeming indifference. Life would go on. People would go about their business. No one need know. But there was no escaping the assault on Walkerton. Clothes seemed to age with every wash. Fabric that escaped the ravages of bleach succumbed to the onslaught of chlorine. Their out-of-town grandchildren were reluctant to visit and became uneasy in their apartment when they did. Rita felt as if the community itself, the little town she loved, had been ravaged and beaten, and she despaired, quietly, away from prying eyes. But the anguish engulfed her husband, Terry. The same indescribable sorrow he felt when he lost his daughter and grandson in a horrific car crash more than a decade earlier reappeared from nowhere. An unwelcome demon of gut-wrenching mournfulness had returned with a vengeance, set loose by the water crisis. He constantly felt on the verge of tears. When the death of Maurice (Rocket) Richard, the famous Montreal hockey player of a bygone era, displaced the E. coli disaster as the top news story, the tears came at last. But the grief that flowed down Terry’s cheeks was really for Walkerton. Whenever they could, the couple fled the town for the refuge of their sailboat, where they could shower or brush their teeth without hassle. In the end, the Halpins gave up looking for a house in the town they loved, the town in which they had planned to live out their lives. They moved instead fifteen kilometres north to Chesley, The Nicest Town Around, or so the welcome sign on the road says.

  The Politics of Water

  UNTIL THE Walkerton water crisis happened, the biggest headache facing the Tory government in its second term in the legislature was a scandal involving the government’s real estate arm, the Ontario Realty Corporation. Allegations of corruption and mismanagement had surfaced. The Opposition suggested there’d been bid-rigging during the sale of Crown lands to the benefit of Tory supporters. The issue dominated daily question period as the Liberals tackled the government, largely to no avail. The story lacked pizzazz. It was complicated, difficult to follow, and made for terrible television. In addition, while forensic auditors were investigating, the government was able to parry demands for information by insisting the probe be allowed to run its course. Similarly, a complicated civil lawsuit against the government had silenced most questions over the police killing of Dudley George during the nighttime eviction of a group of aboriginal protesters from Ipperwash Provincial Park on Lake Huron in September 1995. In the suit, George’s family asserted Premier Mike Harris himself had ignored top-level advice by directing police to use force against the unarmed protesters, a claim the premier strenuously denied.

  The Walkerton disaster hit the legislature like a lightning bolt. Coming as it did during a weeklong recess allowed the Opposition to prepare for a major offensive: Walkerton would be Mike Harris’s Waterloo and they girded for bloody political battle. Already information was surfacing about problems in the Environment Ministry’s oversight of the town’s water. Pointed accusations were levelled about the changes the Tories had made in 1996 to the water-testing system as they took their axe to the bureaucracy. The ministry had also known about adverse water results in the town in the months and weeks leading up to the crisis but had failed to alert the public health unit. The entire Common Sense Revolution, the neo-conservative platform that had first swept Premier Mike Harris to power in 1995, was now on trial. Media interest was beyond intense. When the house resumed sitting May 29, a week after the first reports of illness in the stricken town, the Opposition, already inflamed by Harris’s attempt to deflect blame to the previous New Democrats government, went on a blistering attack that would last for weeks. The session kicked off with Environment Minister Dan Newman proposing a motion to have an all-party legislative committee investigate the tragedy. The Opposition roared. Only a full-scale judicial inquiry as demanded by Concerned Walkerton Citizens would be sufficient, they argued. A grim Mike Harris refused outright.

  “My experience with public inquiries is that they are very expensive, they take months to set up and get going, and we just think we need a legislative commit
tee to get started right now,” Harris told the legislature.

  The proposal for a legislative committee, quickly dubbed a kangaroo panel by the Liberals, was badly flawed. For one thing, it would be dominated by Conservatives. For another, it was to be led by a Tory member who’d been forced to resign his cabinet post amid a scandal involving tax evasion. Passions and emotions ran high in raucous sessions that had the Speaker struggling to keep under control. Again and again, the Opposition accused the premier of failing the people of Walkerton. Again and again, they demanded a full-scale public inquiry as the only way to get to the heart of the tragedy. Again and again, Harris was dismissive.

  “I suggest to you, nothing is easier than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll turn it over to a judge and let him take whatever time he wants to take and hire all the lawyers and away we go,’ but I think that’s an abdication of our responsibility as legislators.”

  Veteran Liberal member Sean Conway stood up in the house:

  “With a legislative committee that’s going to be led by Steve Gilchrist and controlled, if behind the curtain, by the now government house leader, Mr. Sterling, who was through 1998 and 1999 the minister of the environment, who may very well be culpable, how can any of us, least of all you, Mr. Premier, accept that as anything other than a sham and, for important members of the community like the government house leader, an obvious and potential conflict of interest?”

  Reporters swarmed cabinet ministers demanding to know what had gone wrong in Walkerton and why they were refusing to call an inquiry. Environment Minister Dan Newman, a hard-working partisan member of the legislature who had fallen into what the government had always considered a junior posting only two months earlier, stammered his way through media scrums like a fox cornered by the hounds. The Tories also had another problem in the form of one of their own: Bill Murdoch, the shoot-from-the-lip popular member from Bruce County. First elected in 1990 in an election that saw the New Democrats come to power and the Tories firmly relegated to the political wilderness, Murdoch had proven popular with his constituents. The bearded cattle trader easily won re-election in the Tories’ sweep into office in 1995 and might have been seen as cabinet material had it not been for his stubborn, independent streak and penchant for criticizing the Vise-Grip in which the “pimply-faced Nancy’s in the premier’s office,” as he called them, held on caucus members. He was well aware of the demands in Walkerton for a judicial probe. Even though he didn’t believe budget cuts had anything to do with the tragedy, he figured the media would keep blaming the government without one. So when the Liberals formally proposed an inquiry, he made it clear he’d vote in favour. It was the last thing the battered Tories needed. With the vote on the motion set to go, Labour Minister Chris Stockwell, a proficient if theatrical performer from Toronto, moseyed over.