Scott Billeck, articles in the Winnipeg Free Press & The Brandon Sun.
Forty years ago, a Winnipeg family and city were frantically searching for a missing girl named Candace Derksen.
The 13-year-old was found dead — bound and frozen — nearly seven weeks after she’d failed to return to her Elmwood home after school at Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute.
Four decades later, the case remains on Manitoba’s list of unsolved cases, despite the arrest, conviction and eventual acquittal of Mark Edward Grant.
The sadness and pain are, of course, always there, but having the strength to forgive is what keeps Candace’s mom going.
For the last several years, Wilma Derksen has been working on a book about forgiveness. She struggled to clearly articulate why it worked for her and her late husband, but she’s over the hump and is putting the finishing touches on the manuscript she expects will be complete by Friday — the 40th anniversary of the day her daughter’s body was discovered in a brickyard shed less than two kilometres from home.
It was bitterly cold on Jan. 17, 1985. Family, friends and others who’d helped the police search for the blue-eyed, freckled teen were with Wilma and Cliff in their home after they got the excruciating news.
A man they didn’t know appeared at their door later in the day. He introduced himself as Fred Stoppel, the father of 16-year-old Barbara Stoppel, who had been murdered in 1981.
For the next two hours, Stoppel and the Derksens sat around their kitchen table, describing trauma “brilliantly.”
Stoppel recounted his story and how the trauma and grief consumed him, warning the Derksens of what was to come. Thomas Sophonow was tried three times for Barbara’s killing, eventually being declared wrongfully convicted of the murder.
“He told us he lost the memory of his daughter, that he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, how he had lost all of his relationships and that he became obsessed with the loss of his child,” Wilma says.
“He told us that we will lose all our joy.”
Not being able to sleep is not uncommon for parents of a murdered child, Wilma learned in later years. After speaking to Stoppel, she and Cliff felt something at the doorway of the bedroom, preventing them from getting close to their bed.
Wilma describes it as a religious experience, seeing trauma laid bare on their mattress as they stood at the threshold, unable to proceed.
What they saw was more than just trauma, Wilma says; in Stoppel’s story, they were shown what unforgiveness looked like and the toll it could take.
She says they knew then and there they had a decision to make.
“So we decided to forgive,” she says. “And a miraculous thing happened: we were then able to get into bed.”
That conclusion set in motion what the couple would stand for over the next four decades: forgiveness was the always-present element in their determination to find and somehow stay on a positive path out of the unfathomable grief the killer had delivered to their home.
“We fell in love with the word, and we applied it all of the time,” Wilma says.
Saying it was one thing. Getting there, another.
“Forgiveness has to come at many levels,” she says, adding it did not come quickly. “There was a trauma forgiveness. The body has to forgive, the mind has to forgive, the heart has to forgive, the spirit and the collective has to forgive.”
Steadfast, the Derksens modelled their commitment to show grace under conditions many felt — and still feel — were impossible for nearly four decades before Cliff died in 2022.
For Wilma, the want for revenge was channelled into advocacy and writing; the new book is her seventh. For Cliff, it was memorizing scripture and creating art. What it ultimately assembled is a legacy that will never be forgotten.
“I’ve got hindsight. I’ve got education. I’ve got all of this experience. And to some degree, I’ve had some success in sharing that message,” she says. “But I’ve never really been able to explain (forgiveness) until now. I finally found how to organize it for people.”
She’s hoping to get the book to her editor by Friday.
The working title? Impossible: My Seven Steps to Forgiveness.
Al Bradbury saw first-hand how forgiveness kept a family together.
A former detective sergeant with the Winnipeg Police Service, Bradbury first met the Derksens in late 2004, 20 years removed from Candace’s disappearance.
Bradbury was assigned to review the case as part of the department’s incoming formalized unit to probe files that had gone cold.
Candace’s case would become known as Project Angel.
In early November that year, he met with Wilma and Cliff at the Pancake House on Pembina Highway.
“I was nervous,” Bradbury says, recalling that he didn’t have many leads at the time.
The couple’s hopes of finding their daughter’s killer had been raised before and, with them, their darkest memories were dredged up.
Bradbury was cognizant of dragging them down that road again.
“And in every homicide investigation, you start with the victim and work outwards,” he said. “The two closest people to that victim would be their parents.”
Hard questions were asked. Cliff, Wilma says, would become enraged at times.
That’s where the art helped, including the “beautiful” and “meaningful” work Cliff did with his sculpture, aptly named Project Angel, Bradbury says.
The Derksens’ ability to forgive trumped the trauma.
“I don’t even know if there’s a word to describe it,” Bradbury says. “They are just special people.
“They take you down a path of how much better forgiveness is than revenge or hate.”
Bradbury made no promises and told the couple his unit had very little to work with after taking over the investigation. He asked only that the Derksens trust him.
The work eventually led to cracking the case. In 2007, police arrested Grant; he was charged with second-degree murder, based on DNA evidence. Grant was convicted in 2011 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
The conviction was overturned two years later by the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled the trial judge had erred in preventing Grant’s counsel from raising evidence from an unrelated case involving someone else who might have been responsible for Candace’s death — an unidentified individual who had tied up and abandoned a 12-year-old girl in a boxcar in another part of the city in 1985 while Grant was in custody at the time on another matter.
A retrial was ordered, and Grant was acquitted in 2017, having spent 10 years behind bars.
Bradbury is unable to speak about Grant, who is suing the Crown and police in a filing that names 13 defendants.
The former police officer says the thing that has stood out for him in the 20 years since first meeting the Derksens was their resiliency.
He says it’s one thing to say you’ve forgiven someone. But to live it for the past four decades?
“Incredible,” he says.
“When you take the loss of a child and multiply that by means of how that happened, how you can close your eyes and not see how they spent their last minutes of their life and want to hug them, hold them, save them? And then reach back somewhere else and understand this was out of their control?
“That forgiveness path was that for them; they were able to raise their children and still be there for them while teaching them.
“To see how Wilma and Cliff and their children work to help others get past their grief, that’s the inspiration I take away from them.”
Cecilly Hildebrand first met Wilma during her undergraduate practicum at Canadian Mennonite University in the early 2010s, when Wilma was working with Mennonite Central Committee.
During one summer, the two held a workshop for 25 family members of homicide victims. The theme was forgiveness.
“We called it Unpacking the F Word,” Hildebrand says.
She was exposed to forgiveness that summer as she had never imagined before. She spoke to family members about their stories, the loved ones they’d lost and the sense of forgiveness many of them had experienced throughout the process.
Hildebrand was completing her master of social work at the University of Manitoba, but Wilma wasn’t done with her.
“She has this unique way of roping people in,” Hildebrand says.
When Candace House opened in 2018, Hildebrand was the founding executive director.
Candace House was a first-of-its-kind organization providing wraparound support to families during their interaction with the legal system following the homicide of a loved one.
In 2009, while preliminary hearings took place before Grant’s trial, Wilma’s sister brought her camper van from B.C. and parked it at the legislature, across Broadway from the Law Courts.
The van became a sanctuary during breaks from the court proceedings.
Wilma envisioned a place just like it where families could seek warm refuge from the cold confines of the criminal justice system.
Candace House achieved charitable status in 2013, growing from a grassroots project to an independent organization and then into an incorporated one.
In the spring of 2017, a home was found a block away from the Law Courts building on Kennedy Street. And they took over an adjacent suite in 2023, doubling capacity.
“When we opened in 2018, Candace House was a place families could come while they were going through court proceedings,” Hildebrand says.
Now in its seventh year of operation, Candace House has supported more than 2,000 people in over 200 families, and provided in excess of 1,500 hours of court accompaniment.
“We’ve really expanded what we do,” Hildebrand says. “We work quite closely with police and Crown attorneys, connecting with families shortly after a homicide has happened.”
The space allows families to go at their own pace, provides culturally informed support and someone to walk alongside family members to court dates, offering emotional support and comfort.
“There are a lot of complex emotions, and forgiveness is one of them,” Hildebrand says.
“It’s not a destination. It’s a journey. It’s a choice that has to be made every day.”
She says Candace House is now seeing some of the people who were supported years ago returning.
“A lot of the families we first started to work with, now it’s getting to a point where corrections and parole board hearings are becoming more common with people who were sentenced when we were first opening,” she says.
“Now, we are providing spaces to help families understand that system. Some families have come to Candace House to attend parole board hearings virtually.”
Forgiveness was something Dana Boyer never thought possible.
It wasn’t until Dec. 21, 2021 — his first and only time at Candace House — that it became a reality.
“It was a safe haven in a time of turmoil, chaos,” Boyer says. “It kept me grounded with family that was there, close by.
“And without them, I wasn’t ready for the forgiveness that would come.”
Seven hundred and eighty-two days earlier — Oct. 25, 2019 — his son Ethan was killed on his way to class at the U of M.
A semi-trailer driven by 28-year-old Samuel Maendel plowed into the back of Ethan’s Honda Accord, crushing it between another semi that had slowed after a truck pulling a 10-foot trailer had pulled out from Brady Road onto the Perimeter, partially blocking a lane.
Ethan was 19.
Maendel pleaded guilty to one count of careless driving causing death under the Highway Traffic Act. In a sentence jointly recommended by the Crown and defence, he was fined $2,000 and prohibited from driving for two years.
When Boyer woke up on the morning of Maendel’s sentencing hearing, forgiveness wasn’t on his mind.
But time spent at Candace House before heading into the courtroom centred him. He was with his brother and sister, the two people he credited with keeping his head on straight.
He says support from the people at Candace House helped him handle the intimidation of entering a courtroom for the first time, even as his wife Sue, a longtime Winnipeg Police Service officer, had been through similar doors many times.
“It helped me to feel secure and not threatened,” Boyer says. “It helped me to hear.”
During the hearing, Boyer heard an apology from Maendel for the first time.
“I felt for him… he was just as busted up as we were,” Boyer says.
Not only did Boyer forgive him. His son Reid also did.
Reid, who had struggled — and still does — with addiction, walked out of a Zoom hearing weeks earlier when the family learned the Crown and defence counsel had arrived at a plea deal.
Reid and Maendel shook hands in a face-to-face meeting after the verdict.
Boyer genuinely wonders how Maendel is doing.
“I hope he’s OK,” he says, adding he’d be open to speaking with the man. “I really hope he’s squared himself away, that he’s not wasting away. The demons are always there.
“There is no way to get to that point of saying, ‘I forgive you,’ and shaking his hand and saying, ‘Please, forgive yourself,’ if you, yourself, aren’t in a good place.”
Just as forgiveness sustained Cliff and Wilma in the years after Candace’s death, it did so for the Boyers.
“Without seeing the example they set, I don’t know we’re at the place we are together today without Cliff and Wilma and Candace House,” Boyer says. “We wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t be. It would have consumed me.
“They’re amazing people.”
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