Hunter told the Barrhead Leader that if Hennessey were guilty of anything, it was his being stupid about with whom he chose to associate. With regard to Shawn’s being involved in Roszko’s marijuana grow-op, in the Leader story Hunter said that Shawn worked at Kal Tire sixty hours a week. This made it almost impossible for him to have any extensive dealings with Roszko.
However, other information contained in one of the RCMP search warrants reveals that the police believed that Shawn Hennessey was involved in a marijuana cultivation and trafficking operation with James Roszko. According to the documents, James Roszko’s mother stated to investigators that she believed James grew the marijuana and Shawn Hennessey sold it.
Hennessey steadfastly denied such an allegation to the police.
As the RCMP investigation continued, the residents of Mayerthorpe and surrounding area showed their appreciation for the police by bringing food and goodies to the Legion.
“The local residents were very considerate,” says Al MacIntyre. “They brought in casseroles, cakes, cookies, and all kinds of fruits and snacks. I was extremely impressed with their kindness.”
The townspeople also started asking a lot of their own questions.
Ever since Roszko’s truck had been found at his aunt’s place in Sangudo, the public had been wondering how Roszko managed to travel the 38.5 kms from his aunt’s place back to his farm. There was widespread speculation that Roszko had an accomplice.
Rev. Arnold Lotholz said, “Even from the get-go, there was always a nagging question about who helped Roszko get away from the site and get back.”
Mayor Schalm commented, “Once the smoke cleared, everybody knew that somebody had given Roszko a ride.”
One Mayerthorpe resident told the Canadian Press that Mr. Roszko likely didn’t get back to his Rochfort Bridge-area farm on his own. “It’s something that everyone is wondering. How did he get back to the farm and do the things he did?
Randy Schroeder, Mayerthorpe’s fire chief asked, “How did Roszko get back on the property and why would he do that? Normal criminals flee the scene, they don’t return to it. What was he protecting? There wasn’t anything there that would have put him away for life. Why would he come back and ambush these guys?”
Other people kept wondering how Roszko did it. How did he manage to ambush and cut down four armed police officers?
Cliff Walde, a retired RCMP sergeant, knew Roszko’s property. He said, “It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone to sneak back undetected to Roszko’s property in the dark. Considering the size of the farm, the back roads in the area, and the cover provided by the nearby brush and rolling hills.
“If you had thirty officers it wouldn’t have made any difference … you could have still snuck back onto the property. You got to remember you’re out in the country. There’s no street lights.”
Besides the questions there were a lot of rumours, second-guessing, and untruths flying around. Some people claimed that the four Mounties died during two separate time periods. Others thought that the four members were shot outside the Quonset and then dragged back inside by Mr. Roszko.
One man stated, “I don’t believe for one second Roszko was inside the hut when he opened fire. It doesn’t make any sense. Roszko practised shooting all around his property and he wouldn’t take a position in a building where he could be trapped.
“Roszko managed to kill or severely wound all four officers during his opening salvo. He probably started taking them into the Quonset hut so arriving members wouldn’t see them.”
There were rumours about crosses being on the farm that marked the graves of other dead people buried on Roszko’s property.
Media coverage insinuated that the police were “pleading” and “desperate” for information and further suggested that a possible accomplice might be scaring witnesses from coming forward.
Some residents said that charges had already been laid against someone who had aided and abetted James Roszko with the murders.
All of these rumours were unfounded and ranged from being untrue to being absurd.
The media began featuring stories that asked questions about RCMP training and preparation. One published story asked if the RCMP chain of command had adequately prepared the young Mounties to deal with a dangerous subject like Roszko.
Even a former RCMP superintendent, Clyde Kitteringham, who had a thirty-nine-year career with the Force, was quoted in Time magazine and the Toronto Star about what he considers a crucial lack of protection for the officers who were killed.
“Based on my many, many years of experience in both rural Alberta and elsewhere as an operational police officer,” said Kitteringham, “this was a failure. It was negligent supervision, quite frankly, and I haven’t heard anyone tell me different.”
Kitteringham said supervisors clearly erred by leaving junior members overnight to keep watch. He said the officers were exposed to an ambush because no one kept tabs on where Roszko was throughout the night, allowing him to sneak back onto the farm without the officers’ knowledge.
Corporal Wayne Oakes, the Media Relations Officer for “K” Division, responded to Kitteringham’s assessment: “The superintendent does not have all the facts or the points about this investigation. If we sent more people in there, we would have had more people to bury. The armchair quarterbacking is unbelievable. It’s inappropriate for any of us to sit back and say anything.”
Bill Helland, a retired RCMP staff sergeant from London, Ontario, who had spent much of his career reviewing and assessing operational plans and risk assessments, took exception to Kitteringham and a few other retired members of the Force “who professed to have much more information than anyone else.”
Responding to them in the press, he quoted Lucia Benaquisto, a McGill University sociologist, who maintained that the blame game is not always sensible. “It appears to be a way that people look for answers, but too often it’s a form of posturing by politicians and public figures to make it look like they are doing something.”
Helland questioned why these blame-game people were not prepared to wait until at least a preliminary investigation was complete. “The finger pointing, hand-wringing, and haunting hypothetical ‘what ifs’ from those who had little first-hand knowledge of what really happened bothered me.
“Are they helpful … hardly. Do they represent the vast majority of police officers … certainly not. Will they be involved in searching for answers … probably not, as they are irrelevant to the investigation. Will they be unhappy if, in the final analysis, their prejudgements are not upheld … probably.”
Retired Staff Sergeant Carl MacLeod, who had thirty-two years with the RCMP and had commanded the Joint Forces Unit in Hamilton, stated that the overnight deployment of two members at Roszko’s Quonset was correct and proper.
MacLeod told the author, “Police forces react and prepare for the most part on intelligence information received on an individual from a variety of sources. For example, if information on Roszko had been to the effect that he had killed or had the potential to kill, then you can be assured that the RCMP involved at the Quonset hut would have been on high alert until the search had been completed or Roszko had been tracked down and arrested.”
He emphasized, “This was definitely not a high-alert situation. It would have been different if Roszko had served time for murder or was a suspected killer or even a serious threat to police.
“But that was not the case.
“When a bad guy runs, he runs. He doesn’t return.
“You’re there. You’re seizing his stuff. He’s in trouble. Why would he come back?”
MacLeod says the police deal with situations like this every day across Canada. “Occurrences like this are so common, it’s off the chart.
“Do any of the bad guys come back?” he asks. “I don’t think so. We have to get a warrant for their arrest and go out and look for them.”
He continues, “Anyone can be a Monday morning second-guesser.
But the facts did not indicate they should have done anything other than what they did. The guys in charge out there wouldn’t be thinking he’d return. That would not even be a consideration for them.”
An editorial in the Edmonton Journal seems to have hit the nail on the head.
“As eager as Albertans may be to understand and draw conclusions, we must wait — patiently and confidently — for them [the police] to complete their reconstruction and analysis of events.
“There is already too much uninformed second-guessing of decisions made by the four officers last Wednesday night and Thursday morning. RCMP spokesman Wayne Oakes is rightly frustrated by the ‘armchair quarterbacking’ of the investigation. ‘How these people outside the process are able to offer expert opinion baffles me,’ he told reporters Monday.”
There was also a lot of discussion about why a violent person like Roszko, with such a criminal record, was not in jail. People were asking whether or not the justice system had failed in Roszko’s case and had contributed to the four officers’ deaths.
An Alberta government report released in the fall of 2005 summarized James Roszko’s run-ins with the law and concluded that the ambush and murder of the Mounties was not preventable. The report noted that Roszko had been flagged as a possible dangerous offender in 1995, but police couldn’t apply the distinction because he didn’t meet the required criteria, even with his serious record that included forty-four charges and fourteen convictions.
Senior Crown prosecutor Gordon Wong, who wrote the report, told the media, “At no time did Roszko meet the criteria to be considered for a dangerous offender.”
Wong said one more conviction for sexual assault would have brought Roszko to a level where he could have been considered for a dangerous offender distinction, which would have resulted in longer prison terms for further offences. “What you need to get a designation is a series of convictions,” he said. “You need that to apply for dangerous offender designation. He simply did not have the subsequent convictions.”
Kim Connell, a former commander of the Mayerthorpe Detachment who still lives in the town, said that the Alberta report was a whitewash. “The justice system let us down and that’s why four members are dead. That’s it!” He added that the provincial government issued the report “to cover their asses.”
Gordon Wong denied that, saying, “I’m not interested in covering up anything.”
Some people even began to complain about the expense of the investigation.
An RCMP press release supplied some answers to questions with regard to its cost. “This investigation involved the murder of four police officers and the death of one civilian. While we must be accountable for our financial expenditures we must also be accountable for the actions we take and the actions that are not approved. Given the size, nature and scope of this investigation, the cost is comparable to other large-scale operations. The purpose of conducting an investigation is to investigate. Only when this process is complete are they truly in a position to possibly know and understand all the circumstances.”
On Wednesday, March 16, Superintendent Marty Cheliak, the officer in charge of the Western Alberta District, invited members of the slain Mounties’ families to come out to a private meeting in the Quonset hut on Roszko’s farm. With him, representing the RCMP, were Superintendent Brian McLeod and Rev. Bob Harper, “K” Division’s full-time chaplain.
This type of information meeting is standard procedure in all homicide cases. Although this meeting was difficult for the RCMP representatives to conduct, they realized that many of the family members had questions about how their loved ones had been killed.
Prior to the actual meeting — outside the Quonset hut — the families met with all of the members of the Mayerthorpe Detachment search team. The families were introduced, then chatted with the members and thanked them for their efforts. After an appropriate amount of time, the Mayerthorpe contingent left and the families were invited to go inside the Quonset.
Using all the information at his disposal, Brian McLeod walked the group through the significant steps of the violent incident. Occasionally, either he or Marty Cheliak answered questions from the family members.
One of the things McLeod revealed was that forensic analysis indicated Roszko had been hiding inside the Quonset hut behind a large white plastic vat that was situated close to the human door in the southeast corner of the building. That’s where he fired from initially. Then he apparently got off other shots while moving around inside the Quonset.
Cheliak remembers, “At one point, Don Schiemann said out loud, ‘Evil is residing here. This is an evil place.’”
The most chilling moments in McLeod’s presentation came when he pointed out the various places where the families’ murdered loved ones had fallen.
Marty Cheliak says, “When Brian pointed out the spot where Peter Schiemann had lay murdered, Peter’s entire family — Don, Beth, Michael, and Julia — went to that spot and stood there.
“That was a very powerful moment. They stood there absorbing their feelings at the spot where Peter had been killed.”
After the Schiemanns did this, the various other family members followed suit — going to the spot where their loved ones had fallen.
Chief Superintendent Marty Cheliak. (RCMP)
Then they had a solemn candlelight service where everyone held a lighted candle in the darkness of the hut while Bob Harper offered a prayer for the fallen four.
After the meeting ended, the entire group went to the restaurant in Rochfort Bridge for coffee. The general feeling among the family members was that the meeting, although painful at times, was needed. Many of their terrible questions had been answered. They appreciated all the inside information they had received.
The next day, March 17, Inspector Bob Williams locked the gate on Roszko’s laneway and instructed Staff Sergeant Gary Radford to return all the keys to Warren and Stephanie Fifield. The property was now back under their control. The RCMP had completed their physical examination of the crime scene in two weeks.
Chief Superintendent MacIntyre stayed on at the command post continuously until March 16, when he went home for the long weekend. He came back on March 21 and officially left Mayerthorpe a week after that.
From then on, Bob Williams was officially in charge of the investigation.
A federal Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) investigation and an RCMP internal investigation into the police officers’ actions of March 2 and 3, 2005, were completed at a later date. Both these reports stated that there was no way that the RCMP could have anticipated the slayings of the four RCMP officers.
The report compiled by the Human Resources (HRSDC) department concluded that the “immensely tragic event was the direct result of an unprecedented, premeditated act of murder.”
The RCMP’S internal report stated: “This was a premeditated act of murder. Roszko’s behaviour was unprecedented and unanticipated.
“There was nothing available to the police at the time which would have suggested that Roszko had intent to plan and execute a deadly assault on officers.”
Both reports agreed that this was a most unique case. Never before had a criminal fled the scene and then surreptitiously returned with the determined intent of killing police officers.
The lying and lack of cooperation by Shawn Hennessey and his family initially slowed the RCMP investigation, but in the end, the police got their break from the second man who had travelled with Roszko on the night of the ambush and murders.
A year after the murders, on March 17, 2006 — and during subsequent meetings — Dennis Cheeseman spoke to his boss at Sepallo Foods, Brad McNish, and confessed some vital information to him regarding the Roszko case. McNish, a former Calgary police sergeant, took this information directly to the RCMP.
McNish told Sgt. Terry Kohlhauser that he had held a meeting with his staff where they expressed concerns about some of the employees at Sepallo Foods working there while
under the influence of drugs. After the meeting, Dennis Cheeseman approached McNish privately and revealed that there were times that he had come to work having smoked marijuana. As they talked, Cheeseman gradually became more and more distraught. Gradually he began to purge himself of some of the deep, dark secrets about his involvement in the Roszko incident.
Over the course of several meetings, Cheeseman told McNish that he had not been honest with the police. He said he knew more about the case than he was prepared to share with them. His main concern was that he hadn’t told the police the truth and he was having difficulty dealing with the Mounties’ murders.
Even at that, he lied to McNish.
Dennis tried to deflect the guilt away from his brother-in-law, Shawn Hennessey. Dennis said that Roszko had approached him a few days before the murders and told him he needed a rifle. Cheeseman said he took him to John Hennessey’s place and gave him the Winchester and some ammunition from the back of John’s truck.
Cheeseman also revealed to McNish that Shawn Hennessey was involved in Roszko’s marijuana grow-op. He said that on Wednesday, the day before the murders, Shawn knew the Mounties were searching Roszko’s Quonset hut. Because of his connection with Roszko, Shawn was concerned that he would be implicated in charges related to the illegal grow-op.
Cheeseman told McNish that later that same day, Roszko came to Shawn’s house and said he was going to kill some of the RCMP who were searching through his Quonset. Cheeseman admitted that he and Shawn followed Roszko to a farm where Roszko dropped off his truck. Then they drove him back to his farm. As they were driving, Cheeseman claimed that Roszko ranted about killing RCMP officers at his farm. He said, “They’ve made a mess of my life. They’ve got me and I’m going to get them.” Roszko also told them he was going to burn down the Quonset hut because of the marijuana plants and the stolen goods that were in it.
While Cheeseman revealed all this information to Brad McNish, he refused to go to the police and tell it to them.
The Mayerthorpe Story Page 16