MEMORIES of Mom
For years, Christopher Ducharme struggled with grief on the anniversary of his mother’s murder. Now, he remembers the good times — and is helping other victims of violent crimes
» One man’s grief over his mother’s murder has led him to help other victims of violence.
Christopher Ducharme measures his grief in months and years. This year marks No. 15: it’s been 15 years since the body of his mother, Patricia Ducharme, was found in the bathtub of her Campbell River home. She’d been beaten and strangled.
“ Every year I count the anniversary of her death and her birthday. Those are always hard. I’ve been counting half my life. I’m 29, and I’m sick of counting.”
Over time, he says, memories of his mother have taken the edge off some of the raw emotion and helped warm his heart. He remembers his mother singing karaoke versions of songs by Shania Twain and The Judds; how she was so trusting, wide-eyed, so easy to tease.
But even as they’ve healed, Ducharme and his siblings will forever live with the residue of loss. While all have coped in their own way, one of the hardest things for Ducharme was the way authorities treated the family after the murder.
Police focused intently on finding the killer, but paid scant attention to the fallout for the children left behind, he said. In the days immediately after the tragedy, the RCMP met with them only once. An officer gave the two youngest — Ducharme, then 14, and his then-10-yearold sister — each a teddy bear.
Ducharme still has his. The white, nondescript plush toy is a symbol of what he sees as the cavalier way in which he and his siblings were ignored by the legal system.
“ We were left out of the process,” he recalls. “ Victims want to know information but the challenge is that the system doesn’t provide it. There are more rights to offenders than victims.”
A second and final meeting with police came much later, when Ducharme and an older brother were asked to be witnesses at the trial of the man later convicted of the slaying.
After Ducharme testified at the trial, it took him 10 years to obtain a transcript of the proceedings. His efforts were stymied by red tape and the price: $ 1,500 per court day.
The fact that he had to struggle for a decade to get basic information relevant to his family’s welfare still leaves him angry, he admits.
While it took some time to get to this point, Ducharme has now dedicated his life to helping the bereaved get the support his family so desperately needed — but didn’t get — at the time.
In 2007, Ducharme joined the B. C. Bereavement Helpline, and now is an active board member. He’s spoken numerous times to criminology students at Simon Fraser University and to people involved with the Centre for Restorative Justice, a 14-year-old organization headed by SFU criminology instructor Alana Abramson. This spring, he spoke at the National Victims of Crime Awareness Week symposium in Ottawa.
Now, with the support of Abramson, SFU students, friends and colleagues, he’s leading an initiative to form a group that will help families and friends affected by the homicide of a loved one. With funds raised through the Scotiabank Vancouver Half-Marathon and 5K event, Ducharme hopes to organize the B. C. Victims of Homicide Group.
The organization will provide group sessions for families dealing with loss, to families and friends of those connected to B. C. Missing Women case, and offer outreach services.
Long wait, terrible news
Chris Ducharme recalls the day he lost his mother as if it were last week.
It was March 1996, and he, his sister and 18-year-old brother had just returned from spending spring break with their father in Alberta.
They waited at the Victoria International Airport for hours for their mother, who was supposed to be driving from Campbell River to pick them up. She was so late they feared she’d been in a car accident.
The children called their halfbrother, who lived near the airport, and went there to wait. By that time, their mother had been found dead and the children were informed by the RCMP at their brother’s place.
“ We just hugged each other,” he recalled, “ got in a circle and cried together.” Shock, and then fear. His mother’s then-boyfriend, a former police officer named Brock Graham, had taken her car and disappeared. They feared he was coming after them. “ That night we didn’t know what he was doing, where he was. We were really afraid of him.”
Looking back, Ducharme still tries to piece the puzzle together. He recalls Graham as the proverbial nice guy, who, in retrospect, showed some odd behaviour.
“ He was charming but he would talk about washing bodies and horrible unhealthy things that children shouldn’t have to hear. He would show us how to do knife fights.”
By December 1995, when he moved in with the Ducharmes, Graham was the prime suspect in the 1993 slaying of Lynn Duggan, a young North Vancouver woman. ( The Duggan family had long suspected Graham. Long after Graham had been convicted of Ducharme’s murder and was in jail, Duggan’s brother convinced Graham to confess to Lynn’s murder.)
Ducharme said his mother did not know that Graham was a suspect in Duggan’s death, and the children didn’t either.
Immediately after the murder, the children plunged into deep grief. At age 14, Ducharme said his mourning was “ the inside cry that you can’t describe. It was so painful.”
In the years following, he moved back and forth between B. C. and Alberta, where he lived with his father, battling depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide. Help finally arrived in 2006, a decade after his mother’s death, when he found a support group for families of homicide victims in Alberta.
“ That changed my life,” said Ducharme. “ At some point you need to ask for help. Almost every victim is going to try to reach out. It made me feel like there was someone who cared.”
A year later, in 2007, Ducharme moved back to B. C. to join his siblings, continue his fight to heal, and help others who suffer the effects of losing their loved ones to violence.
When SFU’s Abramson met Ducharme, she immediately connected with his story.
“ Victims are often stereotyped to be angry and bitter and resentful and calling for a pound of flesh. That’s not been my experience in the justice community. Many victims are trying to move through their pain and loss by offering compassion and understanding, not to get a sense of accountability for the offender but to get a sense of why this happened.”
Help now available
If this tragedy had hit Chris Ducharme’s family today, the aftermath would have been much different, says an official with the B. C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor-general.
As minors, the Ducharme siblings would have received unlimited counselling sessions, according to the ministry. Victim Service workers would have been standing by to provide emotional support. Today, they help victims communicate with Crown counsel, navigate the justice system and the court process, assist with peace bonds and restraining orders, and help apply for financial assistance.
The recognition of victims’ rights has been slow to evolve.
In 1996, the ministry set up a Victim Safety Unit to notify victims about changes in the status of the accused. In 2002 and 2003, programs were launched to provide financial aid and referrals to families and victims.
Abramson said she hopes for a reformed system that maintains a balance between attending to the offender and caring for victims; prioritizes prevention; and provides therapy for people who’ve been abused, experienced trauma or are otherwise at risk, so that they don’t eventually offend.
The legal system also needs to provide access to information for victims and loved ones.
Like Christopher Ducharme, most people affected by violent crime aren’t fuelled by bitterness, she said. They need answers.
“ When a crime happens, a relationship emerges; there’s a victim-offender relationship. There are good reasons to keep the victim and the offender apart, and that’s what the system tries to do, but it hurts the access to the information that many of the victims need.”