Girls lost dad, then their childhood
Heartbreaking tale: Ivan Henry’s daughters never could recover from the loss, court hears
Consider two innocent girls — one nine, one seven — seeing their dad indefinitely imprisoned as a serial rapist, partly on the spiteful say-so of their drug-addled mom. What was the cost? For the youngest, always daddy’s girl, even Ivan Henry’s release 27 years later in 2009 couldn’t staunch the emotional hemorrhaging.
Kari Rietze died of an overdose earlier this year at 39 — the same age as her mom Jessie when she OD’d.
The gravel road her sister Tanya Olivares travels — the foster care, the couch-surfing, her mother’s squalid death, the struggle to free her dad, his frustration adjusting to release, his night terrors, his writhing in anguish, flailing, bathed in sweat, the continuing six-year fight for compensation — led this week to the witness stand in B.C. Supreme Court.
In a mournful black dress, her flaming red hair cascading nearly to her waist, Tanya occasionally dabbed away tears with a balled up tissue in her right fist as she relayed a heart-rending tale of two sisters who lost their childhood.
Henry’s quest for redress for his wrongful convictions exposes not only the misconduct of police, prosecutors and governments, but also the generational nature of family dysfunction — this very much another long day’s journey into night.
Starting with Henry’s abusive stepfather — his impoverished Prairie upbringing and delinquency — three generations are caught up in this Eugene O’Neillstyle tragedy filled with ghosts, past and present.
Now 42, Tanya was the eldest, already acting as mum in 1982, already cauterized when the police took away dad and neighbourhood kids began to shun them.
She didn’t have many friends anyway, never bringing anyone home for fear mom would be blotto and angry or, at best, simply passed out.
Tanya was born in 1973 and her sister two years later, just as dad was beginning a fiveyear stretch for attempted rape in Saskatchewan’s Prince Albert penitentiary.
The family lived outside the prison walls and her earliest memories are of institutional visits: the shame — washing over her again while recounting the searches — of feeling like a criminal.
She grew up “feeling scared and fearful all the time,” worried her out-of-control mother could “die at any time” from the alcoholism and drugs or at the hands of an abusive man she brought home.
“Positive memories of my mom,” she said, “I have very few.”
When her mom died in 1990, Tanya knew she had to flee: “It hurt me so much to leave (Kari) but I didn’t know what else to do.”
She went to Mexico, married, started a family and began to rebuild her life. They returned to Canada four years later.
She visited Henry in prison shortly afterward, for the first time since his arrest, but cringed while repeating the visiting process with her son. That shame again. No more, no more, she said.
She never brought him back to see granddad. She wouldn’t expose him to it again; she couldn’t repeat the cycle.
Still, what she primarily recalled was a little girl’s hagiography of Saint Dad — captured not in an illuminated manuscript but rather preserved in a faded album of old letters and Christmas cards and the warm amber of a kid’s memory.
When Henry was at home, intermittently over the scant two years he was free during her childhood, he kept her mum sober, though they fought like cat and dog and she was always throwing him out.
Regardless, he worshipped his little girls, taking them to museums, walking them to school, building a balance beam so Tanya could practice gymnastics.
“Everything changed (in 1982),” she said. “From the moment we learned he was arrested, our world crashed down … We actually turned on the TV to learn he was arrested.”
For three hours in the witness stand Tuesday, her two children sat in the public gallery with her husband David, riveted by her testimony.
She has discovered a stability that Kari, who became a licensed practical nurse, never found.
Into drugs and drink like her mom as a teenager, Kari was pregnant at 19, gave birth to a daughter, married at 21, divorced at 29.
“It was hard,” Tanya emphasized, the loss of her sister still raw. “We had no parents. It was a lot for two kids to go through. ... She was a daddy’s girl. She really depended on him. ... She never recovered from the day he left. My sister couldn’t get over it … She said it over and over again, ‘If only we had him, this wouldn’t happen.’ She really was tortured by his loss on a daily basis.”
Kari led the fight on the outside to get her dad released, penning dozens of letters, never abandoning hope. Ironically, it was the emotional roller-coaster set in motion by the review of his case in 2006 and his release that proved too much.
“She was so sad around him,” Tanya said. “It was all those years for her. … She just couldn’t get them back.”
She stepped down, emotionally spent, without once allowing a justifiable, “And neither will I.”
The forces that overwhelmed her sister were forces no sevenyear-old — or nine-year-old — should have had to face.
Her husband gave her a hug outside the courtroom: “She has developed very thick skin over the years.”