Case explores the mystery of people’s invisible private lives

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This article was published 18/07/2016 (3701 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the trial of Andrea Giesbrecht began in the spring, it put light on details that were grisly, unsettling and strange.

In that early testimony against Giesbrecht, who stands accused of concealing the remains of six infants, a former colleague recalled how Giesbrecht once confessed a desire to punch herself to induce miscarriage. Court heard how investigators found decomposing remains in a McPhllips Street U-Haul storage locker next to mundane items: a plastic necklace, a Happy Meal coupon.

So it is notable that, when the trial resumed on Monday after a nearly three-month break, some testimony touched on parts of Giesbrecht’s life that were abjectly normal. Because however those infants’ remains came to be stowed away, this much is certain: the shadows in this case are those that divide the public parts of a life from those unseen and unknowable.

For the most part, Monday’s testimony was straightforward. In the morning, court learned about how Giesbrecht twice kept a locker at a different storage facility, and how it permits entry. After a break, one of Giesbrecht’s two sons gave a geography lesson of his family home: the master bedroom his parents slept in, a bathroom with a toilet that only haphazardly worked.

Seated in a corner of the courtroom, Giesbrecht quietly watched this unfold. She looked different than she did in a photo that circulated after her arrest: younger, less severe. She wore her hair dark and long, face framed by heavy bangs. She wore black slacks, and carried a black Michael Kors bag. At times she glanced over at reporters, then calmly turned away.

She sat focused while her son — who cannot be named due to a publication ban — jiggled his arm at the witness stand, anxious. Despite that tic, his answers were clear and collected. Yes, his parents had friends. Yes, they always lived at the family home. No, he can’t remember his mother being pregnant, including when she was carrying his younger brother.

When Giesbrecht’s son was finished, he loped out of the courtroom with the slouchy gait most young people use when they are poised on the bridge between adulthood and youth. The circumstances that brought him to the courtroom are unsettling, but as son followed his father down the hallway the snapshot could have been taken in any typical family setting.

So what are we to gather from this juxtaposition of information that ranges from disturbing to routinely familiar?

A thought: for observers, a trial is a chance to piece together a story. Crimes are generally understood to be transgressions committed not only against victims, but against society. Justice is imperfect, but it enables some assembly of facts to fill in the gaps, some way to explain how — and at least point towards why — bad things happen in the spaces we share.

In the Giesbrecht trial, perhaps, there will be no such resolution. Partly, the aim of these proceedings is not to determine how the infants died; medical experts have already testified that this cannot be determined. So the point of this trial is only to decide whether Giesbrecht unlawfully concealed their remains.

When it is over, the Crown may or may not have proved this was the case. But no matter what Judge Murray Thompson decides — he is presiding over the judge-only trial — what unfolds between now and August may not be able to answer the case’s most haunting questions: that of the tension between what is seen, and what could stay forever hidden.

In this society, death is rarely truly private. Usually, it leaves some hole in the social fabric; even when it comes to the quietest or most isolated deaths, there is generally some traceable record. The Giesbrecht case transfixes because it forces us to contend with those spaces in which the unknowable happens, where private lives play out beneath outward appearances.

It is the storage facility manager who tells the court that she knows who rented a locker, when they entered it and when their payments came late; but there is no way she could have known what was stored there, or by whom, or when. It is the son who paused awkwardly when asked if he’d ever noticed his mother’s weight change. (It stayed the same, he decided.)

Above all, as some of Monday’s testimony suggested, this case may turn on the dynamics of a family that at least in some ways looks like many we know: a mom and a dad, and two healthy sons. They played hockey and went to church and had guests for Thanksgiving dinners. Sometimes the parents argued, Giesbrecht’s son said, and maybe took a day to cool off.

Beneath that, Giesbrecht was saddled with crippling gambling debt, which was detailed in a separate fraud case to which she pleaded guilty in April. But nothing her son described on Monday sounded abnormal. There were flickers of information that stuck out — Giesbrecht’s father was a hoarder, her son testified — and hints of the doubt that defence lawyer Greg Brodsky is trying to bring out: at one point, he pressed her son to list various girls and women that had been to their family home.

Still, as the rest of this case unfolds, perhaps the question that will linger outside of the courtroom will go: what else goes on in the lives of the people all around us, that we may never truly know?

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca