Dead Ends (12 page)

“Kienan is only three years old right now… . He can't tell us who you are,” said Hebert, unshaven and wearing the same purple shirt he had for days. “This is your chance, right now, to get away. All we want is for Kienan to come back with us and to be safe in our arms again.”

It was desperate, heartbreaking. And it worked.

The Heberts had moved temporarily to a neighbour's house. A search headquarters was located on the only road into the subdivision.
RCMP
officers were everywhere.

But somehow, around 2:00 a.m. Sunday, Hopley took Kienan back to his home, settled him in a big, comfy brown armchair, and tucked blankets around him. Then he left and called 911 to make sure the
RCMP
would know Kienan was there.

Paul and Tammy found their son asleep, unharmed. An ending no one expected.

A few hours later, Kienan was having fun on the front lawn of the tidy two-storey home with his brothers and sisters, playing with a Frisbee, a balloon, and an aerosol can that shot bright lines of foamy string. He had been away playing with “Jason,” he told police.

The officers in charge decided to reach out to Hopley again, calling a press conference to thank him, and urge him to surrender.

But the hunt continued. Hopley wouldn't go far, acquaintances said. He loved the woods and mountains, was at home there. And anyway, he mostly lived on welfare and had no money to get away.

Someone like Hopley could disappear into the mountains. If he could keep quiet.

Hopley couldn't. He heard the news reports and knew they were all wrong. He was no monster.

Hopley began posting on Facebook pages devoted to Kienan's disappearance. He apologized to the family, promised he hadn't hurt Kienan, and said they had water, heat, food, and
TV
in their hideout. Kienan was happy and cheerful, he wrote, and in fact kept Hopley's spirits up.

Hopley wanted the world to know it wasn't just some senseless act. It was a desperate bid to win attention for his wrongful conviction in the 2008 case involving the attempted abduction of the ten-year-old boy. He was forced into that crime. The boy's birth mother offered him money and threatened to make up sex crime allegations if he refused.

He promised to turn himself in once he had seen a lawyer.

The Facebook posts were the break the police needed. They traced the Internet account to a summer Bible camp in Coleman, just across the Alberta border. Officers set up surveillance and, on September 13, a week after Kienan was taken, they spotted Hopley running from a cabin at a nearby mine site. A police dog was unleashed, and he was captured (and bitten).

Inside the cabin, police found food, a
TV
and kids'
DVD
s, children's clothes, a camp stove—and a
Today's Parent
magazine.

Paul Hebert had questions. Why was Hopley on the street when the courts had judged him a danger in 1985? They should either have got him help or locked him up, he said, but did neither. “If a doctor can get malpractice, why can't a judge?”

But the problem wasn't a judge. The justice system—the child protection system—failed Hopley, and society.

Pore through the files and the story emerges. Hopley had a troubled childhood. He was, in the language of the day, slow. (Later assessments assessed his
IQ
from sixty-eight to at best “borderline normal.”)

His father died in a mine explosion when he was two; his mother said he always seemed to be angry after that. His childhood was split between foster homes and his mother's house, grim for a child already insecure and unable to handle change.

The first indication that Hopley really needed help came when he was eight, and an assessment recommended he receive special institutional care.

That never happened.

Hopley made it through grade ten in a special education program, but with no skills—no social skills, life skills, or any sort of trade.

In his final foster home, when he was fifteen and sixteen, he sexually assaulted three younger children—a girl and two boys. He was charged and sent for assessments, which were uniformly bleak.

One doctor listed Hopley's problems—emotional deprivation, behavioural disturbances, poor social skills, lack of empathy, and an inability even to understand why people were upset when he molested younger children.

But, the doctor said, there was nowhere to send Hopley for help.

A second assessment produced similar results and found he needed treatment. But there was no room in the recommended program.

His foster parents persisted, and Hopley was referred to a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, who saw him for eight treatment sessions. She was gloomy about his future too.

“It is unlikely that Randy will refrain from assaulting children without treatment,” she reported. “The boy is not clever, not attractive, and not socially skilled; he is unlikely to attract girls of his own age. Children, who are basically powerless to reject him, are an obvious alternative.”

The psychologist said that treatment might not work. But without it, Hopley was highly likely to victimize more children.

Hopley didn't get treatment.

And, like all children in British Columbia government care then and now, he was pushed out of the foster home on his nineteenth birthday, without support. It's a difficult transition for any youth. It was predictably disastrous for Hopley.

He was almost immediately arrested for possession of stolen property, and placed on probation.

A few months later, in May 1985, Hopley was riding his bicycle on a Fernie path when he saw a five-year-old boy, pushed him down, and sexually assaulted him. When the boy began to cry, Hopley stopped and let him go. He was quickly arrested.

A doctor assessed him and recommended treatment in a sex offender program. That did not happen.

Instead, Hopley was sentenced to two years, received no specialized treatment, and refused to participate in available programs.

When his release date neared, a psychiatrist recommended consistent supervision in a community-based support facility.

That did not happen.

The parole board directed Corrections Canada to find “an adult residential facility with firm external control over
the behaviour of residents together with intensive supervision on site.”

That did not happen.

Amazingly, Hopley wasn't convicted of any more sexual offences.

But he bounced in and out of jail, for crimes that reflected a lack of intelligence, impulse control, and morality. He broke into houses and businesses, stole things, lived in other people's cabins. When he caught a break and received probation, he ignored the conditions and landed in court again.

“Ultimately it gets down to straight locking you up for no better purpose than to keep you out of other people's homes and their business,” a provincial court judge told Hopley before sending him, once again, to jail.

This time, Supreme Court Justice Heather Holmes had to figure out what to do with Hopley.

The Hebert family had left the province and didn't participate. Paul had met Hopley, and Tammy had sent him notes. They were Christians, Paul explained. They practised forgiveness.

But Holmes said Hopley had done great damage to the family.

Hopley had “made the boogeyman real” in their lives.

On November 29, 2013, Holmes sentenced Hopley to six years and two months for taking Kienan and breaking into the Hebert home. With time he had spent in custody, he would serve just under four years. Enough time, Holmes said, for him to get help in prison. She declared Hopley a long-term offender and ordered supervision for ten years after he is released.

Maybe this time Hopley will get treatment. Maybe the system will work.

Nothing did for the first forty-six years of his life.

I
t was the only war fought in British Columbia. It lasted less than fifteen weeks in the spring and summer of 1864 and claimed twenty-six lives. One side—the British colonies—never even acknowledged it was a war.

But for Klatasassin, the charismatic Tsilhqot'in leader, fighting white road builders pushing into traditional territory was war, and a desperate effort to save his people.

It was probably inevitable that Natives and arriving Europeans would clash violently. The breaking point came in the dense forests above Bute Inlet, some 240 kilometres up the coast from Vancouver. Hunger, greed, desperation, gold fever, and smallpox came together to set the stage for conflict.

By 1860, the first gold rush to the Lower Fraser River had exhausted all the easy claims. But prospectors were striking it rich in the Cariboo, attracting a new wave of would-be gold miners.

The new fields were harder to reach, requiring 500 kilometres of gruelling overland travel. Packing supplies in was expensive, and basic goods cost a fortune in the remote goldfields. A shovel could cost fourteen dollars, almost a typical week's wage.

Alfred Waddington, a sixty-year-old entrepreneur and politician who arrived in Victoria for the first gold rush in 1858, saw opportunity. He proposed to cut the land journey almost in half by carving a road through the coastal mountains from Bute Inlet to the Cariboo. Supplies would be carried by sea to the inlet.

Waddington, a peculiar-looking man with a long face, high forehead, and close-set eyes, lined up investors, promising big profits from tolls on the road, and won government support.

It was a crazy idea. The first survey party, in 1861, found the route through the narrow Homathco Canyon incredibly difficult, and the seven members almost died after their canoe was destroyed in rapids. They were saved, half-starved, by friendly Tsilhqot'in, and made their way out in a roughly carved dugout.

But the physical barriers were not the only problem.

The Tsilhqot'in—like their coastal neighbours—were facing hard times in the early 1860s, with food in short supply. They had much less contact with Europeans than many First Nations. Hudson's Bay Company efforts to build trade with the Tsilhqot'in since the 1820s had failed.

The Tsilhqot'in had good reason to fear any incursion into their territory. Settlers or miners could take their land or kill or drive away scarce game.

And they could bring horrible death.

On March 12, 1862, the steamship
Brother Jonathan
arrived from San Francisco, two paddlewheels churning the waters of Victoria's harbour as it pulled into the dock opposite the Songhees Indian settlement. The sixty-seven-metre-long ship, under sail and steam, had made the trip from San Francisco in three days, bringing 350 passengers, mostly in search of gold.

One passenger was sick, infected with smallpox. The disease was devastating. An 1830s epidemic had killed thousands and wiped out entire First Nations communities.

Now it was back. Spreading through Victoria, carried onto the mainland and into the interior by gold seekers. By July, it had reached the Tsilhqot'in.

*
  
*
  
*

Waddington's surveyors and road builders found progress painfully slow. In March 1864, as ice came off the rivers, they arrived to try and push the project forward, building on the thirty-seven kilometres of road and trail completed in the previous year.

Waddington was desperate. The company had collapsed and investors had fled. He had sold everything he owned in a last bid to finish the road to the goldfields.

William Brewster was foreman of the fifteen-man crew. He felt the pressure.

But things immediately began to go wrong. He was counting on supplies left over from the previous year to help provision the crew. But it had been a hard, hungry winter for Natives living around the work camp. They had broken into a storehouse and stolen twenty-five big sacks of flour.

Brewster was angry and determined to find out who was responsible. But none of the Natives would talk.

But he had leverage. The road crew hired Tsilhqot'in packers. When a group of families came looking for work, he gave them an ultimatum: No work unless they told him who stole the flour. That failed. So Brewster told them they could work—but their wages would be docked to pay for the flour, even if they hadn't taken it.

Now everyone was angry. You're in our territory, a Tsilhqot'in man said. You owe us. (The road had reached inland to traditional Tsilhqot'in lands.)

Challenges and accusations went back and forth. Then Brewster went too far. Unless you do what I want, he said, the Tsilhqot'in will die. The whites will unleash disease. For people who had seen the devastation of smallpox and knew it was once more on the land, it was a deadly threat.

The standoff stalled. The Tsilhqot'in stayed around. And, within a few days, Brewster hired them to work on the road.

But word of the confrontation reached Piell, the fifteen-year-old son of Klatsassin. He told his father of the threat.

Klatsassin was a leader of Tsilhqot'in warriors in fights with other First Nations. Strong, about forty, with piercing eyes and a square jaw. He decided war was the only response to the threat to spread smallpox.

On April 28, the first casualty was claimed. Klatsassin and a small group of family and supporters reached a ferry across the Homathco River set up by the road builders. He demanded food and blankets; ferryman Tim Smith refused. That evening,
Klatsassin killed Smith with his musket, and his body was thrown in the river.

The opening shot had been fired. Klatsassin and a larger group of warriors spent the next day preparing for battle. Early on the morning of April 30, they attacked the road building crew's main camp.

Twelve men were sleeping in six tents when Klatsassin's group attacked with muskets, axes, and clubs. In minutes, the ground was soaked with blood and nine men were dead. The three survivors, wounded, took three days to reach Bute Inlet.

The Tsilhqot'in party knew Brewster and three other members of the road crew were blazing a trail about six kilometres away. They killed them all. Brewster was shot, hit with an axe in the head, and mutilated.