SOWING DOUBT
Parents of killers struggle with their mixed emotions
The trial judge called it “a devastating, despicable, diabolical act.” A grandmother and her daughter were murdered, their throats slit. The evidence was overwhelming: two teenage boys from Saanich, B.C., near Victoria, had carried out a sickening plot, hatched by their schoolmate.
The motive was money. Before the killings, Darren Huenemann made it known to David Muir and Derik Lord that his grandmother, Doris Leatherbarrow, was worth millions. He stood to inherit most of her wealth. In his twisted mind, Granny Leatherbarrow was dispensable. He decided his mother was, too.
Muir and Lord murdered both women on Oct. 5, 1990. They were arrested and charged with the murders the following month and eventually sentenced to life in prison. Huenemann was also charged with two counts of first-degree murder, and was convicted in 1991.
Their crimes became the subjects of countless news articles and television documentaries, a book and a feature film.
But 25 years later, two people still think police, the courts, a jury and the media got things wrong: David and Elouise Lord have already spent $860,000 on legal fees and detective work trying to prove their son’s innocence.
Derik Lord has always insisted he didn’t kill anyone. “Why would we have any doubt?” asks his mother.
The Lords love their son. But their belief points to the particular horror for families of killer kids: Guilt is contagious. Part of our attraction to bestsellers like We Need to Talk About Kevin, or the Netflix hit Rectify, is a macabre fascination with how a child grows up to be a murderer. Are parents to blame? Should they stand by a son or daughter who has inflicted such terrible pain?
Psychologist and author Andrew Solomon studied and interviewed people whose children have committed murder for his book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.
“Families of criminals often struggle both to admit that their child has done something destructive, and to continue to love (them) anyway,” he writes. “Some give up the love. Some blind themselves to bad behaviour.”
He recalls being “riveted” by the father of a California woman involved in two of the Charles Manson Family murders, back in the late 1960s. Nothing could undermine his faith in his daughter.
Solomon likens the father’s “blindness to his daughter’s free choice to murder” to “the parents of deaf children who couldn’t understand that those children would never use spoken language happily or fluently, or the parents of people with schizophrenia who still fantasized that their intact children were only waiting to be revealed again.”
But every situation, every family, is different. Some parents do fault themselves for their children’s criminal behaviours — justifiably or not. Luka Magnotta murdered a Chinese student in Montreal in 2012. Two years later, at the trial, his father testified. He spoke of his own personal demons — substance abuse, psychiatric issues — and the impact they had on his children.
Luka Magnotta and his brothers “were mixed-up kids and they still are,” he said. And he hadn’t been much of a father, he acknowledged. Luka’s mother, he added, was a “germaphobe,” who wanted “total control” over her children.
Other parents are wracked by a different kind of guilt — not about what they might have done to raise a murderer, but how they respond to the news of a child’s terrible act.
When Sue Klebold learned that her son Dylan was a suspect in the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, she says, she didn’t assume his innocence she prayed he would turn the gun on himself.
“While every other mother in (town) was praying that her child was safe, I had to pray that mine would die before he hurt someone else,” Klebold told Solomon. “Maybe I was right, but I’ve spent so many hours regretting that prayer: I wished for my son to kill himself, and he did.”
Laura Chambers sometimes wished the same fate for her son Kevin, convicted in Pennsylvania two years ago for killing three people: his wife, his wife’s boyfriend and the boyfriend’s mother.
“Kevin has said to me, ‘I should have killed myself.’ I felt that way myself, sometimes,” Chambers told the National Post in an interview, the first she has ever given. (The Post agreed to change her name for this story, to protect her family.)
That’s a tough thing for any parent to feel, let alone admit. Chambers, who agreed to an interview only on the condition of anonymity, to protect her family, also knows how difficult it is for a parent in a situation similar to hers to have a relationship with a child who commits murder.
“I really struggled,” she says. “How can I love my son when he did something like that?”
She never had reason to think Kevin was innocent: His crimes were too obvious. He eventually admitted to the three murders and is serving three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.
Chambers says she even had inklings her son might crack — which made her even angrier, after the murders.
“I saw something coming and I tried to avert it,” she says. “I gave Kevin advice and he ignored it. Angry would not describe how I felt. I was above and beyond angry. All those peoples’ lives that he’s devastated.”
She told him she would not bankrupt herself by trying to obtain his release from police custody, and later prison. “I said to Kevin, ‘I’m not mortgaging my house and getting high-powered lawyers to help you. You did what you did, and you’ve got to pay the consequences.’”
That doesn’t mean that, like Magnotta’s father, Chambers didn’t feel any guilt or self-doubt. She obsessed over what she could have done differently as a mother — and so did many of the people in the community where her son committed his crime.
“Some people were vocal and mean,” she says. During Kevin’s trial, she sometimes asked sheriffs to escort her outside to her car, out of fear.
“People assume we are bad parents, terrible people,” says Chambers. “We are ostracized, criticized, looked down upon. But most of us have done nothing wrong.”
Only after counselling was she able to accept that her son’s actions were separate from her. “I gave it my all as a parent. I gave it 110 per cent.”
She has not rejected her son, she says, although he “had a reasonable fear that I would never talk to him again. Some parents do that.
“It never entered my mind. What he did was terrible, but he’s my son. Now I have to visit him in prison for the rest of my life. I wish I could fix things for him, but I can’t.”
In some ways, Chambers is fortunate. She has a supportive environment at work, and a fiancé who admires and respects her, and helps keep her spirits up.
But there are few resources available to parents whose children kill, no places to go and meet and talk. So Chambers has started a support group on Facebook, for parents in similar situations. She has received just one response, from a woman who thanked her for the effort. It made Chambers cry with relief.
“I needed something positive to come from this tragedy,” she says.
Still, Chambers understands why some parents remain in denial, “It’s a self-defence mechanism,” she says.
“I don’t belittle those parents at all,” she adds, although she says she wishes they would spend the money on their own therapy rather than their children’s legal teams.
The Lords have never considered that. They still give interviews to journalists all these years later, in their attempts to cast doubt on their son’s guilty convictions from 1992 and to advance what they say is the more likely story.
Their account involves dubious claims, convoluted conspiracies. The Lords say two university students from China murdered Leatherbarrow and Huenemann. They say they “were brought over” for the deed by a Canadian businessman recruited by Ottawa to spy on the Chinese government.
“It’s not a fantasy we’ve invented,” says David Lord, who lacks any credible evidence. “We think the RCMP know who did (the murders) and (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) has that information.”
Their son “has enough to worry about” in prison, David says, so he can’t help with their farfetched conspiracy theories. But he “agrees” with their approach.
This despite the fact that one of his accomplices, David Muir, admitted to the two murders after their 1992 jury trial and convictions. And despite the fact that Derik continues to apply for parole, while claiming he’s innocent.
That’s not a recipe for success. Derik’s been turned down for parole, each time. His first-degree murder convictions in B.C. Supreme Court have been upheld by every appellate court.
Meanwhile, the Lords have depleted their savings. They sold their house in Saanich years ago, and now live in a tiny dilapidated home about a 30-minute drive from Matsqui Institution, the medium-security prison where Derik is incarcerated.
Both in their late 60s, the Lords lead lonely, subsistence-level lives. They rely on their old age pensions for income and send whatever they can to their son in prison. “We’re just about done. There’s no money left,” David says.
They don’t have much moral support. “I have a friend who wants Derik executed,” says David. One of his own uncles wrote a letter to a local newspaper, saying the same thing.
The Lords know their son may never leave prison, that he may die inside. But they won’t budge. “There’s no way that Derik could have done it,” says Elouise.
Now I have to visit him in prison for the rest of my life. I wish I could fix things for him, but I can’t.