Olson tortures victims to the end

Opinion

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This article was published 24/09/2011 (5126 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CALGARY — “Olson! Olson! Parole! Parole!

Those were the last words screamed out in agony by Gary Rosenfeldt as he died of cancer on Feb. 8, 2009.

So, is it any wonder that his wife Sharon Rosenfeldt is awash in emotions after learning Tuesday that her son’s murderer and Canada’s most notorious serial killer — Clifford Olson — is dying of cancer and is not expected to live more than a few days or weeks?

Reached at her home in Ottawa, with her five-year-old grandson chirping away happily in the background, Rosenfeldt said she is not sure how she feels upon hearing the news, that the “monster” who tortured and murdered her 16-year-old son Daryn Johnsrude in 1981 was expected to die in the next few days.

“I don’t really know how I feel,” said the 65-year-old grandmother of five youngsters. “What flashes before my mind is Daryn, of course, and my husband Gary, who passed away 21/2 years ago from cancer with Olson being the predominant thought in his dying days.”

Rosenfeldt, the founder of the group Victims of Violence, said she is extremely grateful to have been called by Don Head, the Commissioner of Corrections Canada on Tuesday to be told that her son’s killer was being transferred from the Special Handling Unit at the maximum security prison at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines Institution, near Mirabel, Que., to a hospital in Laval, Que.

She was told that Olson has cancer that has metastasized through his body and isn’t expected to live for much longer.

“Gary’s cancer had metastasized to his brain. He had five brain tumours,” she said of her husband and best friend. “He obviously went back into his past. He didn’t know who I was, he didn’t know anybody anymore but he was haunted by Clifford Olson. All he kept screaming all the time was ‘Olson!’ ‘Olson!’ and ‘parole!’ ‘parole!’

“Gary was very agitated to the point that they had to strap him down and heavily medicate him and he passed away five days later,” she says.

That’s how pervasive Olson has been in their lives — that he consumed yet another loved one at his death is difficult for Rosenfeldt to contemplate.

“So, when I’m told Clifford Olson is dying, what happened to Daryn and all of what happened to Gary comes back, so it’s hard to define. It’s hard for me to jump up and down at this. I don’t know how to feel. There’s no blueprint for this because Clifford Olson’s name conjures such pain and so does cancer but maybe once he passes I’ll have a sense of relief. It won’t bring Daryn back but after 30 years of almost constant taunting, he won’t be able to hurt us anymore.”

And Olson has done his darndest to hurt the Rosenfeldts. He once sued the grieving couple for calling him a pedophile, because, as Olson said, he had never been convicted of pedophilia, “just the murder of 11 children.” The Rosenfeldts actually had to hire a lawyer, who thankfully did not charge them for his services, but Olson had his lawyer paid for by the state.

Olson also managed to send them letters — one on the fifth anniversary of finding Daryn’s tortured body — describing in graphic detail how he drove nails and screwdrivers into young Daryn’s skull, while asking him how it felt. Then he described how he bashed the teen’s brain in with a hammer after raping the lad in British Columbia.

“He wrote to tell us Daryn’s last words and how he died. Daryn simply asked, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ ”

That Rosenfeldt doesn’t want to celebrate Olson’s painful death is a real testimony to the beauty of this remarkable woman’s soul and heart. Yet, who could blame her or any of Olson’s victims’ families for feeling relief that the self-proclaimed “Beast of British Columbia” will soon be unable to bother anyone ever again.

Olson was arrested on Aug. 12, 1981, after a murderous spree that claimed the lives of 11 children and youth — eight females and three males. After striking a controversial deal that had the RCMP pay his then-wife and son $100,000 to take investigators to the remaining bodies of his victims who had yet to be found. Olson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 concurrent life sentences in 1982. After serving just 15 years behind bars, however, Olson applied for early parole under the “faint-hope clause” and then subsequently applied for parole every chance he got, re-torturing his victims over and over.

On Tuesday, Rosenfeldt says she attended the Conservative government’s news conference in Toronto that highlighted its new “tough-on-crime legislation” that will, among other things, bring in mandatory minimum sentences for child sexual offenders and bring “truth to sentencing” that doesn’t give convicted criminals double time for pre-trial custody.

“After Daryn was murdered, Gary and I delved into our situation and we learned that Clifford Olson had 94 previous convictions.”

But worse than that, were the crimes he committed that he was allowed to get away with because of a lackadaisical system that seemed to care very little about offences against children.

“In the 1970s, he had abducted, sexually assaulted and took pornographic pictures of a seven-year-old girl in Nova Scotia,” explains Rosenfeldt.

He escaped, committed a bunch of other nuisance crimes and wound up in a prison in Saskatchewan. He was put on a bus to head to B.C. but he managed to get off in Edmonton, where Rosenfeldt says he raped a 14-year-old boy. At the time Olson was arrested for the murders of the 11 children, there were 14 outstanding charges of rape and buggery against Olson that were not dealt with because “it would have cost too much money to fly him to the various jurisdictions where he committed crimes,” said Rosenfeldt.

“That’s why when I hear the opposition scream about the cost of the Harper government’s new crime legislation, it really upsets me. We should seek justice, not worry about the costs. If the system had been tougher back then, like the federal government is trying to make it now, Daryn wouldn’t have died. None of those children would have died. Gary and I feel that the justice system helped create the monster that Olson eventually became. How do you put a price on our pain or on Daryn’s life?”

Or on the lives of Christine Weller, 12, Colleen Marian Daignault, 13, Sandra Wolfsteiner, 16, Ada Anita Court, 13, Simon Partington, 9, Judy Kozma, 14, Raymond King Jr., 15, Sigrun Arnd, 18, Terri Lyn Carson, 15, and Louise Chartrand, aged 17?

Rosenfeldt knows her husband worried until his dying breath that this broken justice system might actually grant Olson parole one day. Now, for Rosenfeldt and the rest of her family, perhaps once Olson dies, she can be certain that her final thoughts before she passes on won’t be “Olson! Olson! Parole! Parole!”

 

Licia Corbella is the editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald.

 

—Troy Media