Woman gets 18 years for killing abusive husband
Son receives three-year sentence for helping dispose of body in a pond
September was makeor-break month on the Naslund family farm. By Labour Day weekend, Miles Naslund, his wife Helen and their three sons would typically know whether the operation — located off a range road near Holden — would make enough money to keep going, or whether they'd fall further into the red.
September 2011 looked as though it would be the latter. That long weekend, Miles Naslund got drunk and ordered Helen and their son Neil around with a gun. After returning from a Saturday shift at the equipment shop she managed, Helen Naslund started her chores, which included running the haying machine.
At some point, the tractor broke down. Miles was furious. As court documents later summarized: “Miles became so angered that he threw a number of wrenches at (Helen) during an angry tirade.” At Sunday dinner, he cleared the entire table — throwing food and place settings to the floor, declaring the meal was “not fit for a dog.”
Early the next morning, Helen took a .22-calibre revolver from a cabinet, went to her husband's bed and shot him twice in the back of the head while he slept.
On Friday, 56-year-old Helen was sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter in March. Her 28-year-old son Neil was handed three years for helping hide Miles' body, which went undiscovered at the bottom of a pond for nearly six years.
Justice Sterling Sanderman imposed the sentences on a joint recommendation from Crown and defence.
“Most people who are charged with criminal offences in this building are not evil people, they're not bad people,” he said. “They're people who make mistakes because they're overwhelmed by their personal difficulties … that's what we have here.”
Helen's lawyer, Darin Sprake, briefly described her life before sentencing Friday. She was the youngest of eight children, born in 1964 on a dairy farm in east central Alberta. They worked hard growing up, each of them assigned one of the myriad tasks needed to keep the farm running.
At 16, she left home and went to Camrose, where she later met Miles. They married in the winter of 1983 after dating a few months. She was 19. He was 21. In 1985, they moved to the farm near Holden, where they started a ranch and a family. They had three sons — Wesley, Darrel and Neil — between 1984 and 1992. The relationship was not a happy one, according to an agreed statement of facts entered with the court. There were “many” cases of physical and emotional abuse over the 27-year marriage, though nothing involving police, Crown prosecutor Dallas Sopko said. Miles would often get drunk and handle firearms around the house, “(intimating) an intention to commit suicide,” the facts state. Helen feared for her safety, but felt she couldn't leave.
Helen described the controlling atmosphere to her lawyer.
“When I was in public he was always right there, if I talked to a friend he had to be there with his input,” Sprake quoted her as saying. “I couldn't go anywhere without him … it was always `do as I say or else.'”
Helen drank to cope with the strain. She attempted suicide several times in the early 2000s. She and Miles took other jobs to ease the financial pressures on the farm. She worked at A1 Rentals in Wetaskiwin, while Miles had a side job as a water hauler.
One place Helen found contentment was rodeo. She was an avid barrel racer, competing for cash in races around the province before and after her husband's killing.
The morning after she shot Miles, Helen and Neil dragged the body outside and dumped it in a truck bed tool box. They placed a grocery bag over the head, drilled holes in the box, filled it with tractor weights and welded it shut.
That evening, they drove to a dugout, rowed the box out in a fishing boat and dumped it in the water. Helen reported Miles missing on Sept. 6, 2011. She told officers he disappeared in his Chevy Cavalier with a .357 Magnum handgun. She suggested he had killed himself.
In fact, the Chevy had been crushed and buried on the farm using an excavator Helen borrowed from work. The pistols lay at the bottom of another dugout.
Court heard Helen and Neil contacted the two other sons to keep Miles' killing a secret. Police searched as far as northern Alberta for his car, and conducted interviews with family, friends and co-workers. Helen even feigned frustration with the RCMP for the lack of progress on the investigation. Then, on Aug. 28, 2017, police received a series of tips from people who said they'd heard one of the Naslund sons talking about the real circumstances of Miles' death. Over two weeks in September 2017, police scoured the Naslund property. An underwater recovery team called in from B.C. found the truck box at the bottom of the pond, buried under a layer of silt.
Neil and Helen turned themselves in on Sept. 7, 2017. They were initially charged with first-degree murder. Sprake said Helen's friends were stunned at the news. Some struggled to understand why she was being prosecuted given the abuse she faced.
“This was incredibly out of character and a decision of last resort,”
Sprake said.
Sopko said his negotiations with Sprake included a discussion of “battered woman syndrome” as a potential defence, but he felt the evidence didn't support it. Her plea did not require her to admit she intended to kill her husband.
Aggravating factors in the case included the use of a gun and the lengths Helen and Neil went to cover up their crimes, Sopko said, including sending police “on a wild-goose chase.”
Sanderman said that while he felt empathy for mother and son, at the end of the day, “this was a callous, cowardly act on a vulnerable victim in his own home … by a partner.”
Helen leaned on family members as she arrived at court Friday, before taking her place beside her son in the prisoner's box. She hung her head, her eyes often not visible behind her COVID-19 mask and her short grey hair. Helen and her son declined to address the court. Both will receive a four-month credit for time served in custody or under house arrest.