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Martensville nightmare
'will never end'
Lori Coolican, The StarPhoenix,
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Some said the Martensville
nightmare was finally over when the provincial government announced
in March that it had reached out-of-court settlements in the
final two malicious prosecution lawsuits filed by the wrongly
accused.
Try telling that to Ron Sterling.
"It doesn't end. It never
ends. It will never end," Sterling said in a recent interview.
"Even if we have a public
inquiry, it won't end. But if you want to print any statement
from me at all, you can print that I demand a public inquiry
into what was done. I'll want a public inquiry until I'm dead.
But do you think we'll get one? Not."
Fourteen years ago, the Saskatchewan
Justice Department, represented by senior Crown prosecutors,
took the position that Sterling, his wife Linda, and their son
Travis were key figures in a satanic cult who had subjected a
number of local children to unspeakable acts of ritual sexual
abuse and torture inside a blue-and-white building, dubbed the
"Devil Church," north of the small town.
According to the prosecution,
the Sterlings' home -- where Linda operated a neighbourhood babysitting
service -- was the cult's hunting ground, where they and their
son Travis, along with a teenaged girl and several local police
officers, chose victims from two to nine years of age for their
bizarre occult practices.
It was shocking. It was horrifying.
It was all a pack of lies.
The Sterlings lived in the
pitch-black shadow of those lies for two years before a court
acquitted them of all charges.
In the meantime, they were
run out of town -- by order of the court. Ron Sterling lost his
job as assistant deputy director of the Saskatoon Correctional
Centre. Friends and even some relatives disowned them. Their
lives were threatened. Their faces were splashed across newspapers
and TV screens all over the country. Every last scrap of their
financial resources was poured into the cost of defending themselves.
When the smoke cleared, they were destitute and collecting welfare.
The same Justice Department
that accused them of unthinkable perversion waited a full decade
to compensate the Sterlings for what they lost, and to this day
has not admitted fault offered them a formal apology or taken
any action against its staff.
The government's official position
is that its employees did nothing wrong -- they didn't know how
to interview children properly back then, but things are done
differently now.
Those sound like pretty thin
excuses from Ron Sterling's point of view.
"One of the judges said
one time that justice must not only be done, it must be seen
to be done. Well, out of this case, what justice has been done
or what justice has been seen to be done?" he said from
his home in Prince Albert, where he now works as a cab driver.
"All the people that created
the problems are still in their positions. Nothing has been done
to resolve it. They slid us a little bit of money and said, 'Go
away, we don't want to talk to you anymore.' And that's basically
what they did."
Today's Weekend Extra checks
on the lives of some of the main principals in "the Martensville
nightmare."
lcoolican@sp.canwest.com
© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2006
- Martensville Scandal
Trial and Error
Lori Coolican, The StarPhoenix,
June 24, 2006
Ron Sterling and his family
were not the only ones trapped in the sticky web of devastating
accusations of child abuse that spun out of the quiet bedroom
community of Martensville in the winter of 1992-93; and 14 years
later, they're not alone in their desire for a public inquiry.
John Popowich was a respected
Saskatoon police offi cer when he was sucked into the nightmare
in early June 1992. Members of an RCMP task force formed by the
government a few days after his arrest would later ask prosecutors
to let Popowich take a polygraph test, arguing there was a good
chance he'd been mistakenly identifi ed.
Richard Quinney, the director
of public prosecutions, refused on the grounds that it might
make the Crown's case look weak. The two prosecutors who took
Popowich to trial the following spring maintained the evidence
identifying him as a child molester was "compelling."
But when his trial fi nally got underway, the children could
not pick Popowich out of a courtroom lineup and the case against
him collapsed like a house of cards.
"You put it behind you,"
Popowich started to say in a recent interview, then changed his
mind.
"You never put it behind
you," he said. "Even the Milgaard (inquiry) -- you
listen to people complaining that it's a waste of money. It's
not a waste of money. Let's see where things went wrong with
Saskatoon city police and the Department of Justice, and come
up with an answer there." Popowich is currently involved
in a Regina production company's efforts to make a movie about
his experience. He recently fi nished reading a revised version
of the fi lm's script.
The presiding judge at his
trial, Justice Ted Noble, remarked that the mistaken identifi
cation of Popowich "should be a grim reminder to all members
of society that it can happen to anyone." It can, and it
did.
Ironically, Jim Elstad was
the senior Martensville police constable who took the original
sexual abuse allegation from a local child's parent on Oct. 1,
1991. He could not have imagined how far the case would snowball
that winter after it was handed over to a rookie constable with
little supervision.
Exactly six months after he
took that fi rst complaint, Elstad himself was arrested. He lived
as a man accused of heinous acts of child abuse for one year
and 10 months before all of the charges against him were dropped
on the eve of his trial. By then, Popowich and the Sterlings
had already been cleared and the bogus nature of the allegations
was becoming obvious.
Unlike the Sterlings, Elstad
is rarely recognized on the street as one of the falsely accused
"devil-worshippers" anymore. He and his family have
been able to move on with their lives.
"I very seldom have people
look at me or say anything. And the ones that do know, they know
it's a bunch of crap and they never bring it up," he said
recently. "I've got lots of friends out there, probably
as many or more than we ever had before. And as far as that goes,
I've still got lots of people in Martensville that I still talk
to. We've got friends there that still supported us out there."
The subject of the ordeal rarely comes up in his day-to-day life
anymore, Elstad said.
"I don't let it. You've
just got to let go of it. You've got to either forgive people
or it's going to eat you apart. I'm not going to lose my health
or my life over something that's now 14 years gone.
I'm 56 and my family's growing
up and my last daughter's getting married." Ed Revesz was
the former chief of the Martensville police department when the
tar-coated brush of the child abuse investigation swept over
his life in June 1992.
As in Popowich's case, the
RCMP task force requested Revesz be given a polygraph test because
of doubts about the strength of the evidence gathered against
him. The request was denied, and he remained an accused child
abuser for two years before the Justice Department stayed the
charges against him.
The tar will never completely
wear off, he says.
"There's defi nitely a
stigma. I still get comments, and there's still people that think
I'm guilty as hell. And there's nothing we can do to change people's
minds on that. People have their opinions, and I never had a
trial, and a lot of people think we got off on technicalities.
That's the nature of the game. See how much I've mellowed?"
The media played a role of its own by failing to treat the allegations
with the appropriate amount of skepticism, Revesz added.
"For the news media, I
have one word of advice: watch your sources. Don't believe the
government and don't believe the police. If there was some doubt
thrown at the start -- and there was none, everybody was after
our hides -- if somebody had stopped and thought, 'How the heck
do you get cops from four different police forces or some darn
thing involved in something like this? How does one cop approach
another cop to go molest children?'. . . Always doubt your sources,
no matter who they are." Like Popowich and the Sterlings,
Revesz exhausted his fi nancial resources to defend himself.
When asked if he's retired these days, he scoffed.
"Retired? On what? Remember,
they took all my money." The former police chief is now
a long-distance trucker. His wife rides with him, and they enjoy
their time on the road together.
Revesz prefers to take a philosophical
view of the surreal events of the early '90s.
"In life, shit happens,"
he says. "It just depends where you're standing when the
big bird craps. We were a little too close." Darryl Ford,
another former Martensville police chief, was apparently standing
too close as well. The charges laid against him on June 3, 1992,
were stayed after a judge acquitted Ron and Linda Sterling in
February 1994. Contacted recently in Regina, where he now lives
and works, Ford referred all questions about his ordeal to his
Saskatoon lawyer, who did not respond to repeated phone calls.
RCMP Const. Darren Sabourin
was yet another of the unlikely people dragged into the Martensville
quagmire and arrested in front of the media on June 3, 1992.
Stationed in Warman and living with his wife in Martensville,
he served alongside Ron Sterling on the town's volunteer fi re
department. Sabourin was cleared at the same time as Elstad and
Revesz, two years after he was charged.
The only one of the wrongly
accused whose career is still intact, Sabourin remains a member
of the RCMP. A spokesperson for the national police force would
not name the detachment where he's currently stationed, but agreed
to forward an interview request.
Sabourin did not respond.
Bob Mitchell was minister of
justice when the Martensville scandal erupted. Years later, when
he was no longer in charge of the department, Mitchell spoke
candidly about the miscarriage of justice in a televised interview
with CBC's The Fifth Estate.
"This is a situation that
requires healing, and damn it all, if that requires an apology,
then somebody should apologize," he said.
"Sounds to me like a pretty
good idea. If I were there, I'd want to do that." Chris
Axworthy was minister of justice four years ago when a Queen's
Bench judge made it clear John Popowich would win his malicious
prosecution lawsuit against the province if the matter went to
trial. The Sterlings, Revesz, Elstad and Sabourin had fi led
lawsuits of their own. The whole embarrassing fi asco had already
cost taxpayers more than $2 million.
Clearly, it was time to settle
out of court.
Popowich received $1.3 million.
He refused to accept any settlement unless it was accompanied
by an apology -- in public, in writing, and in person. He got
it, and to this day Axworthy's letter of apology hangs framed
on a wall in his home. He has warm memories of Axworthy's private
meeting with him and his entire family.
None of the other wrongly accused
people got such a letter or meeting.
Ron and Linda Sterling, along
with their son Travis and an unnamed youth who was charged alongside
them, shared a $1.3- million settlement more than two years after
Popowich negotiated his deal. Justice Minister Frank Quennell
had taken over from Axworthy by then. Quennell offered no apology
and told reporters the government was not admitting liability
by settling with the Sterlings.
Quennell announced the settlement
of Sabourin's lawsuit for $150,000 a year ago. Earlier this year,
he announced Elstad's settlement of $285,000 and Revesz's settlement
of $175,000. He did not offer an apology on either occasion,
reading instead from a prepared script.
"This case has caused
suffering and upheaval in the lives of many, many people for
more than a decade. This is truly a regrettable situation and
I extend my sympathy to Mr. Sabourin," he told reporters
at the legislature on April 17, 2005.
Only the names had changed
when Quennell read the script again on March 7, 2006.
"This case has caused
suffering and upheaval in the lives of many, many people for
more than a decade. This is a truly regrettable situation and
I extend my sympathies to Mr. Elstad and Mr.
Revesz," he said.
Ford, according to justice
offi cials, never fi led a suit.
In a recent interview, Quennell
would neither confi rm nor deny that his department is negotiating
a compensation package for Ford.
"I can't comment on what
discussions might be going on between lawyers, until any discussions
that might be going on have a resolution," he said.
Quennell said he wasn't aware
the Sterlings wanted an apology.
"We have expressed regret,
and I have extended my sympathy to the Sterlings and to Mr. Elstad
and to Mr.
Revesz, and I understood that
what I had to say was satisfactory to those parties. The issues
were negotiated, and my understanding was that we had reached
a mutually acceptable agreement surrounding the compensation,
and that what I had to say in respect to what had happened to
them was satisfactory to them," he said.
He will not go the extra step
of offering a full apology now, Quennell said.
"I consider these matters
resolved and at a close." Does he think it's fair that Popowich
received an apology while the Sterlings did not? "I think
all the circumstances in the cases are, of course, slightly different,
and I think the discussions about how they would be resolved
were different and held at different times, and I think what's
fair is that in each case we have reached a mutually acceptable
agreement as to the expression of regret on the part of the government
and the amount of the compensation. (The Sterlings) had very
experienced senior counsel and they reached an agreement with
the government." Even with the settlement, Ron Sterling
is still trying to cope fi nancially.
"I would have been on
full retirement by now, wouldn't have to work," he said.
"Now I'm going to have to work probably until I'm 70 or
so before I have enough put aside to do anything with. The government
has lots of money, that's why these lawsuits took so long."
He has said in the past that he feels the government starved
his family into accepting a deal.
"That certainly wasn't
the intent of the government, and we have a group of interests
we need to balance," Quennell responded.
"One of them was to provide
appropriate compensation and an appropriate expression of regret
and sympathies to the parties, and another interest is that this
is public money and it needs to be treated responsibly.
That's what we're trying to
do, is balance those interests appropriately." Quennell
will not order any sort of inquiry into the case, regardless
of what Popowich and the Sterlings want.
"I don't think an inquiry
would accomplish very much in these circumstances.
Since 1995, we've had in Regina
a children's criminal justice centre (and) we are perhaps the
leaders in the country on how to interview child witnesses. These
cases go back to the early 1990s, and an inquiry would be a very
expensive way of fi nding out that we need to do things the way
we are now doing them, and not the way we did them back in the
early '90s," Quennell said.
"And little would be served
in my mind, either given the expense or the human cost of an
inquiry, by having an inquiry into these matters, where signifi
cant changes have been made -- not only in Saskatchewan but across
the country -- in the way these matters are investigated and
conducted since the early 1990s when these cases arose in Saskatchewan."
At an Appeal Court hearing in May 1995, an expert in child psychology
who reviewed transcripts and tapes of police interviews with
the children involved in the Martensville case was asked if any
one of those interviews was properly conducted according to the
accepted methods at the time.
"Not within the guidelines
that we teach investigators to use," the doctor said. He
described the interview techniques used by one Saskatoon police
offi cer who worked on the case as "some of the most serious
violations of proper interview procedures that I have ever observed.
. . . His techniques were so inappropriate that they just destroyed
the integrity of the interview process and therefore raise substantial
questions about the obtained statements." None of the expert's
testimony was challenged by lawyers for the Justice Department.
When asked what he means by
the "human cost" of an inquiry into what went wrong
in the Martensville investigation, Quennell paused a moment.
"I look at inquiries,
like the Stonechild inquiry -- from which I've received a report
and which I think was an inquiry that had to take place because
there wasn't evidence that could possibly have led to a trial
in that case -- and I look at the Milgaard inquiry, which I think
is important for a number of reasons which I'll comment on more
fully when the inquiry is done, (and) there's no question these
inquiries are stressful on everybody involved," Quennell
said.
"It's one thing to call
for an inquiry. I think the people that might be involved in
that inquiry (into the Martensville case), even though they wish
to have it, might regret it later because . . . looking from
the outside at them, I think it's very diffi cult on the people
that are involved, and I don't think you need to go much further
than the Milgaard inquiry to see that that's the case."
Opposition justice critic Don Morgan called on the government
to deliver an apology and launch an inquiry into the Martensville
case soon after the fi nal settlements were announced in March.
"These were innocent people
and they deserved to be treated as such. If the justice minister
won't formally apologize, then I think the Department of Justice
will forever have a grey cloud over it on this matter,"
Morgan said.
Ron Sterling says the people
of Saskatchewan deserve to know things about the case that came
out during the civil litigation process, but were never heard
by a judge or the public because the lawsuits were settled before
any trial could happen.
"None of that (information)
can be made public because it's never gone before the courts.
If that information was made public, it would show who did what
and did it wrong," he said. "But we can't do anything
because the lawyers have it, and they're not allowed to release
it. If they do, we're liable to court action." Sterling
draws a clear distinction between the Saskatchewan justice system
and the people who worked for it during his family's ordeal.
He is not interested in discrediting the system itself.
"Our justice system is
one of the best in the world," he said.
"Even going through what
we did, I still say that.
It's the people who are in
the justice system who have screwed things up, and not just prosecutors
but lawyers and judges and police and everybody . . . they're
all to be held responsible for the way the system is right now.
The thing is, the public is not going to change its mind until
you show them that something went wrong." He bears no grudge
against the children involved in the case, who are now in their
late teens and early 20s.
"We weren't the only ones
that suffered -- these kids suffered, their families suffered,
friends suffered, supporters suffered, people we didn't even
know suffered over it. And the people that caused the problem
are still doing what they were doing then. Nothing's been done
to them. They haven't even been slapped on the wrist." Quennell
might think an inquiry would be too hard on the Sterlings, but
they'd rather make that judgment for themselves.
"I would love to be able
to stand up there for six months, every day, day by day, and
explain to people what happened," Ron Sterling said.
"But people don't want
to listen that long, and you can't tell the story in an hour
or two. You can't tell the story in a page or two. You can't
express the grief and the hate and the anger that you went through
and had to get rid of before it destroyed you."
© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2006
Prosecutors did their
best with what they were given
lawyer
Lori Coolican, The StarPhoenix,
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Bruce Bauer and Leslie Sullivan
would rather forget about the Martensville nightmare -- and it's
plain they wish everyone else would, too.
The two Crown prosecutors who
took John Popowich and Ron, Linda and Travis Sterling to trial
in 1993 and 1994 have continued working in Saskatoon, bringing
cases against countless individuals in the years since then.
They have not given media interviews
on the subject of the Martensville scandal since they were named
as defendants in the malicious prosecution lawsuits brought by
the wrongly accused after the case collapsed, citing the fact
that the matter was before the courts.
It is no longer before the
courts, but they remain as cautious about discussing the case
as ever. When contacted for interviews after the lawsuits were
settled, Bauer and Sullivan asked Prince Albert defence lawyer
Martin Popescul, who represented them during the civil case,
to speak for them instead.
Popescul took pains to note
the lawsuits were "discontinued" with no admission
of liability. Neither of the two prosecutors suffered any fi
nancial loss as a result of the Martensville case, and no money
was paid on their behalf to the complainants in the lawsuits.
He said the Sterlings, an unnamed
young woman, John Popowich, Ed Revesz, Jim Elstad, Darren Sabourin,
Daryl Ford and the children in Martensville were not the only
people who suffered.
"Both Bruce and Leslie
are career prosecutors, they've been doing that for their entire
careers and both are very experienced, and . . . it was a very,
very diffi cult case," Popescul said.
"Whenever you're dealing
with very young complainants, thousands of documents, many experts,
a high-profi le case as you're aware, and I think at the time
the Sterling trial was the longest criminal trial in Saskatchewan
history . . . and shortly thereafter they were sued, and the
lawsuit hung over their heads for the better part of 12 years.
"So I think it would be
safe to say that to some degree their professional lives were
put on hold for over 12 years, and personally this would affect
them negatively as well. So there's a number of people that have
been negatively affected, including the prosecutors." When
the lawsuits were fi nally settled earlier this year, "I
know there was a sense of relief on behalf of both Bruce and
Leslie to have this off their plate and to be able to get on
with continuing to be a prosecutor and acting on behalf of the
state to do their job," he said.
Court documents fi led while
the lawsuits were underway showed that investigators from Saskatoon
city police and the RCMP who worked together on a task force
looking into the bizarre allegations of sexual assault in Martensville
prior to the trials had warned Bauer and Sullivan they had doubts
about the truth of the allegations -- especially the identifi
cation of Popowich as one of the abusers -- but were overruled.
The position of the task force
investigators and the prosecutors "differs signifi cantly
in that we are seeking the truth as opposed to looking only at
what will support the charges currently before the court,"
one offi cer wrote in a report at the time.
Those documents have led to
suggestions that the prosecutors' objectivity was overwhelmed
by an ambitious desire to win the case. That's "simply nonsense,"
Popescul said.
"They were prosecutors
that were assigned the cases by their superiors and they were
mandated to do the best job that they could given the circumstances
that they had, and they did their level best to do what they
could within the law to bring the case forward and put the evidence
forward the way prosecutors ought to and are required to,"
he said.
"I've known both of them
for 30 years, and neither fi ts the mould of some overly aggressive
person who's out to put their names in the media.
And that might be indicated
by the fact that they've asked me to speak on their behalf --
they have no desire to put their names forward. They want to
continue to do the jobs they are required to do -- nothing more,
nothing less." Popescul, who is himself a former prosecutor,
was asked if Bauer and Sullivan have their own perspective on
what went wrong in the Martensville case.
It's always preferable to have
a "slam-dunk case," but often the Crown has to do the
best it can with young or inarticulate witnesses and "evidence
that doesn't always, always line up," he said. "And
the fact that somebody is found not guilty does not necessarily
mean that the prosecutors were wrong in pursuing it in the first
place." He noted Sullivan and Bauer "did the responsible
thing" and stayed the charges against the remaining accused
people "at that earliest opportunity" after a jury
acquitted Ron and Linda Sterling, because "the prosecutors
realized that the evidence that they then had was not suffi cient
to pursue the other people." Popescul said he agrees with
Justice Minister Frank Quennell's assessment that techniques
used in gathering statements from children have changed since
the early 1990s in order to prevent tainting their evidence with
leading questions. He pointed out the Martensville children were
interviewed by several different people, including the investigating
police offi cers, before Bauer and Sullivan even knew the fi
le existed.
When asked if there's anything
the two prosecutors would like to say to the people who were
wrongly accused in the Martensville scandal, Popescul said, "I
don't think so, in that they've indicated throughout the process
that .
. . they did what they had
to do based on the evidence that was before them at the time."
"It cannot be forgotten that there was a conviction that
took place," he said, referring to Travis Sterling's conviction
and jail time for a sexual assault that predated the rash of
"satanic" allegations against his parents.
"So it wasn't as if there
was no substance to any of the allegations," Popescul said.
"Certainly we know that someone was convicted and someone
did go to jail, so their efforts were not in vain in that respect."
Bauer and Sullivan see "no need whatsoever" for an
inquiry into the case, since teams of lawyers already pored over
every scrap of evidence during the civil case, he said.
"There's nothing to be
gained . . .
there's no questions out there."
The majority of the shocking allegations against the Sterlings
and the police offi cers emerged after a rookie constable in
Martensville, Claudia Bryden, was assigned to investigate the
fi rst complaint made by a parent who noticed a rash on a two-year-old
girl's bottom. Bryden was less than a year out of police college,
but got very little help from her senior offi cers.
When she began interviewing
other parents of children at the day care, word quickly spread
and the case snowballed in a matter of months.
Bryden remains a police offi
cer, working for the Corman Park police department.
She did not return phone calls
requesting an interview. Nor did former Martensville police chief
Mike Johnston.
Former director of public prosecutions
Richard Quinney, who was also named as a defendant in the malicious
prosecution lawsuits, died in 2003.
lcoolican@sp.canwest.com
© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2006
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell