David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog Read online

  “I can’t find Candace,” she said to her husband. “I’m worried.”

  The four of them went back home, watching each side of the street. They began calling her friends one by one. No one had seen her since that afternoon. Wilma Derksen drove to see the boy Candace had been flirting with before she called home. He said he had last seen her walking down Talbot Avenue. The Derksens called the police. At eleven that night, two officers knocked on their door. They sat at the dining room table and asked Wilma and her husband one question after another about whether Candace had been happy at home.

  The Derksens formed a search committee, recruiting people from their church and Candace’s school and whomever else they could think of. They put up “Have you seen Candace?” posters all over Winnipeg, mounting the largest civilian search in the city’s history. They prayed. They cried. They did not sleep. A month passed. They took their two young children to see the movie Pinocchio as a distraction—until the movie got to the part where Geppetto is wandering heartbroken, looking for his lost son.

  In January, seven weeks after Candace Derksen’s disappearance, the Derksens were at their local police station when the two sergeants assigned to the case asked if they could speak to Cliff alone. After a few minutes, they took Wilma to the room where her husband was waiting and closed the door. He waited and then spoke.

  “Wilma, they’ve found Candace.”

  Her body had been left in a shed a quarter of a mile from the Derksens’ house. Her hands and feet had been tied. She had frozen to death.

  5.

  The Derksens suffered the same blow as Mike Reynolds. The city of Winnipeg reacted to Candace’s disappearance the same way that Fresno reacted to Kimber Reynolds’s murder. The Derksens grieved, just as Mike Reynolds grieved. But there the two tragedies start to diverge.

  When the Derksens came home from the police station, their house began to fill with friends and relatives. They stayed all day. By ten at night, only the Derksens and a few close friends were left. They sat in the kitchen, eating cherry pie. The doorbell rang.

  “I remember thinking that somebody probably left some gloves or something,” Derksen said. She was sitting in the backyard of her home in Winnipeg in a garden chair as we talked. She spoke haltingly and slowly, as she remembered the longest day of her life. She opened the door. There was a stranger standing there. “He just said, ‘I’m a parent of a murdered child, too.’”

  The man was in his fifties, a generation older than the Derksens. His daughter had been killed in a doughnut shop a few years earlier. It had been a high-profile case in Winnipeg. A suspect named Thomas Sophonow had been arrested for the killing and tried three times. He had served four years in prison before he was exonerated by an appeals court. The man sat in their kitchen. They gave him a slice of cherry pie—and he began to talk.

  “We all sat around the table and just stared at him,” Wilma Derksen said. “I remember him going through all the trials—all three. He had this little black book—very much like a reporter does. He went through every detail. He even had the bills he’d paid. He lined them all up. He talked about Sophonow, the impossibility of the trials, his anger that there was no justice, the inability of the system to pin the crime on anybody. He wanted something clear. This whole process had destroyed him. It had destroyed his family. He couldn’t work anymore. His health. He went through the medications he was on—I thought he was going to have a heart attack right there. I don’t think he divorced his wife, but the way he spoke, it was kind of like that was over. He didn’t talk much about his daughter. It was just this huge absorption with getting justice. We could see it. He didn’t even have to tell us. We could feel it.” His constant refrain was, I’m telling you this to let you know what lies ahead. Finally, well after midnight, the man stopped. He looked at his watch. He had finished his story. He got up and left.

  “It was a horrifying day,” Derksen said. “You can imagine, we were just nuts. I mean, we were—I mean, I don’t even know how to explain how—kind of numb. But yet having this experience sort of broke through that numbness, because it was so vivid. I had this feeling that this is important. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s kind of like, take notes, this is important to you. You know, you’re going through a hard time, but pay attention here.”

  The stranger presented his own fate as inevitable. I’m telling you this to let you know what lies ahead. But to the Derksens, what the man was saying was not a prediction but a warning. This is what could lie ahead. They could lose their health and their sanity and each other if they allowed their daughter’s murder to consume them.

  “If he hadn’t come at that point, it might have been different,” Derksen said. “The way I look at it in hindsight, he forced us to consider another option. We said to each other, ‘How do we get out of this?’”

  The Derksens went to sleep—or tried to. The next day was Candace’s funeral. Then the Derksens agreed to talk to the press. Virtually every news outlet in the province was there. Candace Derksen’s disappearance had gripped the city.

  “How do you feel about whoever did this to Candace?” a reporter asked the Derksens.

  “We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people’s lives,” Cliff said.

  Wilma went next. “Our main concern was to find Candace. We’ve found her.” She continued, “I can’t say at this point I forgive this person,” but the stress was on the phrase “at this point.” “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.”

  6.

  Is Wilma Derksen more—or less—of a hero than Mike Reynolds? It is tempting to ask that question. But it is not right: Each acted out of the best of intentions and chose a deeply courageous path.

  The difference between the two was that they felt differently about what could be accomplished through the use of power. The Derksens fought every instinct they had as parents to strike back because they were unsure of what that could accomplish. They were not convinced of the power of giants. They grew up in the Mennonite religious tradition. The Mennonites are pacifists and outsiders. Wilma’s family emigrated from Russia, where many Mennonites settled in the eighteenth century. During the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist years, the Mennonites were persecuted—viciously and repeatedly. Entire Mennonite villages were wiped out. Hundreds of adult men were shipped off to Siberia. Their farms were looted and burned to the ground—and entire communities were forced to flee to the United States and Canada. Derksen showed me a picture of her great-aunt, taken years ago in Russia. She said she remembered her grandmother talking about her sister while looking at that same picture and weeping. Her great-aunt had been a Sunday school teacher—a woman whom children flocked to—and during the Revolution, armed men had come for her and the children and massacred them. Wilma talked about her grandfather waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares about what had happened in Russia, and then getting up in the morning and going to work. She remembered her father deciding not to sue someone who owed him a lot of money, choosing instead to walk away. “This is what I believe, and how we live,” he would say.

  Some religious movements have as their heroes great warriors or prophets. The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle’s ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated “Oh, my Lord, my God” seventy times over.8

  “I was taught that there was an alternative way to deal with injustice,” Derksen said. “I was taught it in school. We were taught the history of persecution. We had this picture
of martyrdom that went right back to the sixteenth century. The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on.” To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish. The Mennonites believe in the inverted-U curve.

  Mike Reynolds had none of that understanding of limits. He believed, as a matter of principle, that the state and the law could deliver justice for his daughter’s death. At one point, Reynolds spoke of the infamous Jerry DeWayne Williams case, which involved a young man arrested for grabbing a slice of pizza from four children on the Redondo Beach pier just south of Los Angeles. Because Williams had five previous convictions, for everything from robbery to drug possession to violating parole, the pizza-slice theft counted as his third strike. He was sentenced to twenty-five years to life.9 Williams had a longer sentence than his cellmate, who was a murderer.

  In retrospect, the Williams case was the beginning of the end for Mike Reynolds’s crusade. It highlighted everything that was wrong with Three Strikes. The law could not distinguish between pizza thieves and murderers. But Mike Reynolds never understood why the Williams case provoked so much public outrage. To him, Williams had violated a fundamental principle: he had repeatedly broken society’s rules and thereby forfeited his right to freedom. It was as simple as that. “Look,” Reynolds told me, “those that are actually going down on third strikes, they got there the old-fashioned way—they earned it.” What mattered to him was that the law made an example of repeat offenders. “Every time the media has done a story on some idiot that steals a slice of pizza and it was his third strike,” he went on, “that does more to stop crime than anything else in the state.”

  The British acted from the same principle in the early days of the Troubles. People cannot be allowed to make bombs and harbor automatic weapons and shoot one another in broad daylight. No civil society can survive under those circumstances. General Freeland had every right to get tough with thugs and gunmen.

  What Freeland did not understand, however, was the same thing that Reynolds did not understand: there comes a point where the best-intentioned application of power and authority begins to backfire. Searching the first house in the Lower Falls made sense. Ransacking the entire neighborhood only made things worse. By the mid-1970s, every Catholic household in Northern Ireland had been searched, on average, twice. In some neighborhoods, that number reached ten times or more. Between 1972 and 1977, one in four Catholic men in Northern Ireland between the ages of sixteen and forty-four were arrested at least once. Even if every one of those people had done something illegal, that level of severity cannot succeed.10

  This final lesson about the limits of power is not easy to learn. It requires that those in positions of authority accept that what they thought of as their greatest advantage—the fact that they could search as many homes as they wanted and arrest as many people as they wanted and imprison people for as long as they wanted—has real constraints. Caroline Sacks faced a version of this when she realized that what she thought was an advantage actually put her at a disadvantage. But it is one thing to acknowledge the limitations of your own advantages if you are faced with the choice between a very good school and a very, very good school. It is quite another when you have held your daughter’s hand as she lay dying in a hospital bed. “Daddy can fix everything, and when this happened to our daughter, it was something I couldn’t fix,” Reynolds said. What he promised his daughter was that he would stand up and say, Enough. He cannot be faulted for that. But the tragedy of Mike Reynolds was that in fulfilling that promise, he left California worse off than it had been before.

  Over the years, many people have come to Fresno to speak to Reynolds about Three Strikes: the long drive up from Los Angeles into the flat fields of the Central Valley has become a kind of pilgrimage. It is Reynolds’s habit to take his visitors to the Daily Planet—the restaurant where his daughter ate before she was killed across the street. I heard about one of those visits before I made the same journey. Reynolds had gotten into an argument with the restaurant’s owner. She told him to stop bringing people around on tours. Reynolds was harming her business. “When will this be over?” she asked him. Reynolds was livid. “Sure, it’s hurt her business,” he said, “but it’s wrecked our lives. I told her it will be over when my daughter comes back.”

  At the end of our interview, Reynolds said he wanted to show me where his daughter was murdered. I couldn’t say yes. It was too much. So Reynolds reached across the table and placed his hand on my arm.

  “Do you carry a wallet?” he said. He handed me a passport-size photo of his daughter. “That was taken a month before Kimber was murdered. Maybe set that in there and think about that when you open your wallet. Sometimes you need to put a face with something like this.” Mike Reynolds would always be grieving. “That kid had everything to live for. To have something like this happen, to have somebody kill her in cold blood like that—that’s bullshit. It’s just gotta be stopped.”

  7.

  In 2007, the Derksens got a call from the police. “I put them off for two months,” Wilma Derksen said. What could it possibly be about? It had been twenty years since Candace’s disappearance. They had tried to move on. What good could come from opening old wounds? Finally they responded. The police came. They said, “We’ve found the person who killed Candace.”

  The shed where Candace’s body was found had been stored all those years in a police warehouse, and DNA from the scene had now been matched to a man named Mark Grant. He had been living not far from the Derksens. He had a history of sexual offenses and had spent most of his adult life behind bars. In January of 2011, Grant was brought to trial.

  Derksen says that she was terrified. She didn’t know how she would react. Her daughter’s memory had been settled in her mind, and now everything was being dredged up. She sat in the courtroom. Grant was puffed up, pasty-looking. His hair was white. He looked unwell and diminished. “His anger toward us, his hostility, were so weird,” she said. “I didn’t know why he was angry with us, when we should have been angry with him. It probably wasn’t until the very end of the preliminary hearing that I finally looked at him, you know, and said to myself, You’re the person who killed Candace. I remember the two of us looking at each other and just the unbelief of it: Who are you? How could you? How can you be like this?

  “The worst moment for me was when—I’m going to cry—was when I…” She stopped and apologized for her tears. “I realized that he had hog-tied Candace and what that meant. Sexuality takes on different forms, and I hadn’t realized…” She stopped again. “I’m a naive Mennonite. And to realize that his pleasure came out of tying Candace up and watching her suffer, that he gained pleasure out of torturing her…I don’t know if it makes any sense. To me, that’s even worse than lust or rape, you know? It’s inhuman. I can understand sexual desire gone awry. But this is Hitler. This is horrible. This is the worst.”

  It was one thing to forgive in the abstract. When Candace was killed, they didn’t know her murderer: he was someone without a name or a face. But now they knew.

  “How can you forgive somebody like that?” she went on. “My story was now much more complicated. I had to fight my way through all those feelings of oh, why doesn’t he just die? Why doesn’t somebody just kill him? That’s not healthy. It’s revenge. And in some way it would be torturing him, too, keeping his destiny in my hands.

  “One day I sort of lost it a little bit in church. I was with a group of friends and I just railed against the sexual insanity of it. And then the next morning, one of them called me and said, ‘Let’s have breakfast.’ Then she goes, ‘No, we can’t talk here. We’ve got to go to my apartment.’ So I went to her apartment. And then she talked about her addiction to porn and sexual bondage and S and M. She had been in that world. So she understood it. She told me all about it. An
d then I remembered I loved her. We had worked in the ministry together. This whole dysfunction, this whole side to her, had been hidden from me.”

  Derksen had been talking for a long time, and the emotion had begun to take its toll. She was talking slowly and softly now. “She was very worried,” Derksen went on. “She was so scared. She had seen my anger. And now would I stay locked in that anger and direct it to her? Would I reject her?” To forgive her friend, she realized, she had to forgive Grant. She could not carve out exceptions for the sake of her moral convenience.

  “I fought against it,” she went on. “I was reluctant. I’m not a saint. I’m not always forgiving. It’s the last thing you want to do. It could have been so much easier to say”—she made a fist—“because I would have had many more people on my side. I probably would have been a huge advocate by now. I could have had a huge organization behind me.”

  Wilma Derksen could have been Mike Reynolds. She could have started her own version of Three Strikes. She chose not to. “It would have been easier in the beginning,” she continued. “But then it would have gotten harder. I think I would have lost Cliff, I think I would have lost my children. In some ways I would be doing to others what he did to Candace.”

  A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive—and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.

  1 In practical terms, Three Strikes meant something like this: First offense (burglary). Before: 2 years. Now: 2 years. Second offense (burglary). Before: 4.5 years. Now: 9 years. Third offense (receiving stolen property). Before: 2 years. Now: 25 years to life. Other states and governments around the world would go on to pass a Three Strikes law of their own. But none went as far as California’s version.