Skip to main content
from saturday's books section

Don Healy



Among the more common horrors endured by published authors are approaches, often at readings, by obsessives with axes to grind, who want help exposing some vast, arcane plot against them.

As a former trial lawyer, I may have been targeted more often than most (and many more times by letter and e-mail) and have often looked desperately about for the nearest fire escape when greeted with a hand extending an elephantine manuscript and a refrain like: "I wonder if you have time to read this."

Some I have glanced at, and typically they weep rivers of self-pity and are studded with angry excoriations of their oppressors: the grasping divorce lawyer who acted for the ex, the callous bureaucrat who stonewalled an appeal, the police, the courts, the system.





Most raise the spectre of conspiracy, using such phrases as, "The forces arrayed against us and their fierce determination to use any means necessary to convict me," or, "An elaborate crown conspiracy to mislead the court" with a "cesspool of deceit."

Those phrases, incidentally, are direct quotes from Colin Thatcher's Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame. Every element of the amateur works described above is contained in its turgid 380 pages, and every oppressor listed above is attacked with vitriolic fury.

One would have had to have been lost in the Arctic barrens for 25 years not to be familiar with Thatcher's 1984 trial and his many appeals against a life sentence for murdering his ex-wife, JoAnn, an act so excessive and brutal that it bellows of anger and revenge. Son of a Saskatchewan premier, a former provincial minister himself, Thatcher famously convicted himself with his own tongue, having shared his thoughts about how to do in JoAnn with everyone from low-life confidants to the former leader of the Saskatchewan Conservatives.









The book's sales will no doubt be enhanced by the Saskatchewan government's announcement of plans to sequester Thatcher's royalties under its new law preventing criminals from profiting from crimes. Obviously, the author is driven less by gain than by a need for cathartic release. He told an Edmonton reporter, "The profit motive never even occurred to me."

Final Appeal will be of interest to those still gripped by the case - and apparently there are many in Saskatchewan - but some may get bogged down in the minutiae of the provenance of a handgun, hatchet and credit-card slip, as Thatcher picks at every tiny nit he can find in the Crown's case. Eye-glazing letters and transcripts fill many pages.

Thatcher's central argument, hardly a passionate plea of innocence, is a legalistic claim to have been exposed to double jeopardy, in that the Crown proceeded on two fronts: He may have been the actual killer or, if not, he paid someone to do the job. This defence got short shrift in the Supreme Court of Canada. As Mr. Justice Gérard La Forest succinctly put it, "… there were ample grounds for the jury to find Thatcher guilty beyond a reasonable doubt while remaining unsure whether he had committed the murder himself or through another person."

A psychologist reading this memoir might be dismayed at how ineffective were prison counselling and anger-management training in expanding Thatcher's limited emotional range, or his self-awareness. He was born again in jail, but it appears that Christian forgiveness was not part of the package received. Replete with petulant sarcasm ("Surprise surprise!" "No kidding!" "Hogwash!"), this mea non culpa praises the loyal, but extends no mercy to his saboteurs.

Some examples: The Regina police are "an abhorrent collection of thugs" and "goons in suits." A jail security director is a "sadistic creep." A couple of RCMP detectives are "either incompetent or blatant liars." JoAnn's divorce lawyer is a "sanctimonious hypocrite." Thatcher's foes are invariably physically unattractive. He was victimized by the press: Regina's "cheerleading media"; the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix with its penchant for "outright garbage." The Globe and Mail was merely "consistently negative toward me."

He doesn't spare the courts. One judge "pretended to ponder" a defence submission; he intimates another was pressured by the Justice Department. The Saskatchewan Appeal Court, he suggests, may have been swayed by his poor showing in books written about the case by Maggie Siggins and Garrett Wilson.

His references to these authors are so personally insulting that they won't be quoted here, except for this excerpt from his review of Siggins's A Canadian Tragedy: "Vicious, blatantly one-sided, atrociously researched, and poorly written." It is Final Appeal, however, that is guilty as charged, on all counts.

William Deverell's 15th novel, Snow Job, a sardonic thriller lampooning Ottawa's political class, has just been published.

Interact with The Globe