Wilma Derksen used to have revenge fantasies about what she would do to predators like the one who kidnapped and killed her 13-year-old daughter, Candace.
Candace disappeared while walking home from school Nov. 30, 1984, in Winnipeg and was found dead nearly seven weeks later, frozen in a remote shed near her home. She had been abducted by a stranger.
In her new book, The Way of Letting Go, Derksen describes imagining 10 child murderers lined up — their faces covered with hoods — as she aims a gun at them and pulls the trigger.
But as the bullets fly and the hoods are removed she sees the dead men’s family members mourning the losses, their grief matching her devastation over losing Candace.
“I felt their loss as keenly as I felt my own,” she writes.
Forgiveness, rather than revenge, is the path Derksen has chosen to cope with her daughter’s violent death 32 years ago.
The Way of Letting Go, Derksen’s sixth book, explores forgiveness as an ongoing quest, a “ritual” as she describes it.
“Forgiveness is letting go of the past and moving on to the future, and that’s a constant,” Derksen, 68, an author, public speaker and advocate for victims of crime, says in an interview, referring to her daughter’s slaying. “We never finish forgiveness. It’s an impossibility to say I have forgiven completely.
“We have to wash ourselves every day to stay clean,” she explains. “Forgiveness is a washing of the spirit every day.”
Derksen spoke by phone from Winnipeg, before coming to Toronto for the Feb. 21 book release.
For the past several weeks she has been sitting in a Winnipeg court, watching the second trial of the man accused in her daughter’s slaying, Mark Edward Grant.
Grant, 53, was arrested in May 2007, based on DNA testing. He is being retried on second-degree murder charges because his original February 2011 conviction for the same offences was overturned on appeal in 2013.
Nine months after Candace’s body was discovered, a 12-year-old girl was abducted nearby but found alive. A knot used to tie her was similar to one used to bind Candace. And a Wrigley’s gum wrapper was found at both scenes.
The Manitoba Court of Appeal ruled that Grant’s trial judge erred in preventing Grant’s lawyer from providing the jury with evidence potentially pointing to another man believed responsible for the 12-year-old’s kidnapping. That kidnapping happened while Grant was under arrest.
Derksen and her husband, Cliff, 71, an artist, had their lives turned upside down the day Candace vanished in late 1984. It was a Friday, and Candace’s good friend from summer camp was going to come over after school for a sleepover.
The sleepover was a big deal for Candace, who phoned home after 3:30 p.m. and asked her mom if she could get picked up from school. Candace hoped that would get her home faster, and she and her mom could buy goodies for the sleepover on the way home.
It was winter and Derksen was busy. She had to take care of Candace’s younger siblings, brother Syras and sister Odia. So Derksen told Candace to take the bus home. But she opted to walk the 25 minutes to her house, just across the river from Winnipeg’s downtown.
She’d done so before, so this wasn’t unusual. But she never made it home.
Cliff, who is also a proponent of forgiveness, never faulted his wife for what happened that day.
“From my perspective I made sure I never blamed her for this. We have accepted the fact … we came to understand that murder happens in the midst of life and there are always regrets. There’s always thoughts of ‘if we did it this way or that way it wouldn’t have happened,’ ” he says.
“You can always go back and say ‘what if,’ but it’s not worth it, especially in our case, since it could have happened the next day, the next week, the next month,” Cliff Derksen says. He adds that he and his wife believe their daughter was watched and pursued, at least on the day of her abduction.
The couple met 50 years ago while at a bible school north of Saskatoon. Cliff is from Saskatoon, and Wilma from B.C.
They raised their children in a comfortable middle-class home in Winnipeg, in a community that had a lot of children.
They lived freely and related to other people easily. They left their doors at home unlocked, oblivious to crime and danger. It is the essence of who they were at the time.
Daughter Candace was a skinny, fun-loving youngster who enjoyed the outdoors.
Whenever she ran out of socks she’d sneak into her parents’ bedroom and snatch a pair of her father’s to wear. It was a game, and her dad would try to catch her in the act, and if he did he’d chase her around the house.
“That (game) is one of the things I really missed when she first disappeared,” Cliff says.
Candace’s death strained her parents’ marriage.
While Candace was missing, Wilma wouldn’t touch Cliff intimately for six weeks.
In her book she writes: “Because I thought someone had abducted Candace to sexually violate her, the thought of intimacy was revolting. I had resisted for six weeks. It had left us both isolated, uncomforted and stressed.”
Forgiveness played a role in helping her get over that phase, she explains in an interview.
Though her husband was in no way responsible, Wilma had to get over the fact she blamed men and sex for Candace’s disappearance. (No sexual charges have been laid in the case.)
Derksen realized “I have to love my husband at the level we committed to each other … I put it (the feelings of not wanting intimacy) away and resumed our love life.”
Over the years the couple never sought therapy (they didn’t have the money or time, Derksen says) but reached out for support and advice from friends, family and fellow church members. Many of these conversations revolved around forgiveness.
In her book Derksen writes about attending a conference in Washington, D.C., in 1997 — 13 years after the slaying — where the topic was learning to forgive.
There were no eureka moments at the gathering, Derksen says, but during the taxi ride to the airport to fly home, a cabbie described forgiveness with an eloquence she’d never heard. He described it as “the beauty of being set free, letting go of the past, embracing the moment and anticipating the future,” she writes.
Derksen has visited prisons in Canada and spoken to inmates about her story, and about anger, guilt and forgiveness.
While she believes there are dangerous offenders and predators that need to be kept off the streets, she favours a treatment-based approach where difficult-to-cure inmates are overseen by specialists in psychiatry and psychology, rather than a solely punishment-based model, where the only supervision is by jail guards.
“We tend to want to change (offenders) and put them in an uncomfortable place so they can change. But I often think this is futile and creates more anger,” Derksen says.
Derksen and her husband are well known in Winnipeg, and praised for their response to the tragedy.
An effort is underway in Winnipeg to build Candace House, a non-profit charity and facility that would provide a quiet, private space where family members of crime victims can retreat during trials. The hope is to have the downtown space operating by the fall, near Winnipeg’s provincial and Queen’s Bench courthouse.
Cecilly Hildebrand, the executive director of the initiative, has known Wilma Derksen for years and describes her as a unique individual who has overcome incredible challenges.
“In terms of her position on forgiveness, it’s not a position you’re going to encounter very often,” Hildebrand says.
“It takes a lot of bravery.”
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