Candace Derksen’s parents have turned their daughter’s murder trial into a celebration of life

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/01/2017 (3219 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On the first day of the retrial for Candace Derksen’s murder, right as the defence questioned a former Winnipeg police officer about the shed in which he found the victim, Wilma Derksen’s phone suddenly started ringing. 

She didn’t know why it was beeping, and she fumbled to turn it off. When court took recess a few minutes later, she turned to her husband Cliff and their grown children, Syras and Odia. With a look, the family burst into laughter.  

It was a beautiful sound, and for a minute, the room glowed with life. It felt as if sunlight had sneaked through the wooden blinds drawn over the courtroom windows. For a second, it seemed as if all of this could be normal. 

In a way, Wilma had predicted that moment, in spirit if not specifics. On Sunday, hours before Mark Edward Grant’s retrial for her daughter’s 1984 disappearance and death began, she wrote in her blog about what she expected. 

Yes, Wilma explained, there would sadness and there would be anger. There would also, she thought, be light. 

“Of course we will all laugh at some point,” she wrote on WilmaDerksen.com. “I will probably say something really silly — as I am prone to do — and they will laugh. We will find ourselves celebrating each other! I just know it.” 

That lightness, Wilma told reporters later, has been “deliberately cultivated” over the 32 years since Candace disappeared. After all, she pointed out, if the family had waited for justice, “can you imagine where we’d be?”

“We’d have put our whole lives on the shelf,” she added. “We had two other children. We’ve had to say… ‘all of life is good.’ In that way, we also maintain Candace’s memory even better, than if we had just obsessed over justice.”

Yet justice — deliberate, labyrinthian — works in its own time. And it still searches for a coda to this crime. 

So here the Derksens are again, in court again, hearing the frank details of how police found their daughter’s frozen body again: the orientation of her head, the twine that bound her limbs, the veil of frost that covered her skin. 

Here they are in the big courtroom again, the one on the second floor with marble panelling and plaster curlicues on the ceiling. Here they are in the front row, surrounded by the typical assortment of law students and reporters. 

It is the same courtroom where the Derksens sat in 2011, and were convinced “emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually” by those proceedings that Grant had killed their daughter. So, back then, was the jury that convicted him.  

That legal conviction was overturned due to an error by the original judge. The one in the Derksens’ hearts was not. But they’re “open” to the possibility of Grant’s innocence, they said, and so they will go through it all over again. 

They’re not the only ones. On Monday, retired Winnipeg police officer Gilbert Vance Clarke once again took the stand to carefully describe “a shed,” as if that shed hadn’t loomed in the nightmares of Manitoba parents for a generation. 

And David Wiebe, one of Candace’s former classmates and friends, once again described how he saw her walking home from school on the day she disappeared. That he threw snow at her — and that he had a crush on her. 

But this is the surreality of time: today, Wiebe is in his late 40s. He has a family of his own and salt-and-pepper hair. Once upon a time, two blushing kids met in the snow; one of their timelines continued. Candace’s was taken away. 

In that way, Wiebe’s testimony was above all testimony of life: vibrant and vivid, studded with joy as well as pain. 

“I think Candace was desperately in love with David,” Wilma laughed after court broke for the day. “That’s why she was over-the-top happy when she said, ‘He gave me a facewash.’ She was so happy that day.”

So time will play a role in this retrial: how it affects memory, how it affects evidence. Clarke, for instance, testified that he doesn’t have his old police notes; he retired in 1995, and doesn’t know where they ended up in the years since. 

But perhaps the bigger lesson is how entire lives have flourished since Candace went missing in November 1984.

In a poignant twist, Tuesday will mark the 32nd anniversary of the day her body was found. And so the Derksens have been living this longer than several of the reporters who flocked to interview them have even been alive. 

And time, fluid and ephemeral time, saw the Derksens’ two surviving children grow into thriving adults. Time brought Wilma and Cliff three grandkids, who adore Paw Patrol and light up their grandparents’ lives. 

Time brought Wilma the space to become an author, acclaimed speaker and a tireless advocate for victims and children. She has given hope to other families of victims, and shined her light on paths to healing and forgiveness. 

For all these years, she has been a city’s beacon for hope and justice —sometimes even our moral compass. 

Sooner or later, this retrial will conclude. The judge will issue her ruling, which will enter the public record. Let this enter the record too: In grace, the Derksens are once again transforming the unimaginable into a celebration of life.

“With the span of time, it has also kept Candace’s memory alive,” Cliff said. “We’re always sensing Candace’s presence. It’s almost like she hasn’t passed away, on some days. Because she’s so present and so real.” 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca