Colin Thatcher's three grown children made a direct and emotional appeal to a Court of Queen's Bench jury yesterday to "give a father and a grandfather back to his family."
Greg, Regan and Stephanie Thatcher -- now respectively 38, 34 and 29 -- each expressed similar sentiments in victim-impact statements they read aloud yesterday at Mr. Thatcher's early-parole hearing, but Greg Thatcher's desperate appeal was the most stirring.
Looking directly at the six men and six women of the jury just a few feet away, his eyes red from the strain of fighting back tears, Mr. Thatcher said flatly: "There is nothing you can do to bring my mother back. There is nothing you can do to give Regan and Stephanie their childhood back. There is nothing you can do to give me back the future I had planned on.
"What you can do is give a father and a grandfather back to his family, so that we might have a few more happier moments before our time together is over."
Normally a circumspect and unreadable man, Mr. Thatcher had remarked in passing last week that though he suspected reporters wanted to see him break down in the witness box, he would not give them that satisfaction.
Yet he did come close, decades of whipsawing emotions belatedly, if only briefly, getting the best of him.
As he spoke of the day his father was arrested on May 4, 1984, an arrest he witnessed, Mr. Thatcher's face reddened and he appeared near tears. Minutes later, describing how at the age of 18, he had had to assume the role of single parent to his siblings and run the family ranch while watching his dreams of going to law school evaporate, he had to pause to compose himself.
But it was when he spoke of the difficulty of keeping his own six-year-old twins away from the news so they don't have to see "their grandfather in handcuffs" that Mr. Thatcher, eyes brimming, whispered very slowly, "We all want to protect our children; it's a natural instinct, but I can't protect them from this."
His father, now 65, was later in 1984 convicted of the murder of his former wife, JoAnn Wilson, and has been in prison ever since.
He is here trying to win the jury's nod to reduce the mandatory 25-year period of parole ineligibility that accompanies a life sentence for first-degree murder. If successful, Mr. Thatcher would still have to persuade the National Parole Board to actually grant him parole. It is the tantalizing prospect of this early freedom that gives the process the nickname of a "faint-hope hearing."
Mr. Thatcher, who long ago exhausted every avenue of appeal, has always protested his innocence in Mrs. Wilson's death, and has had the support of his children throughout his long incarceration and at his bid for early parole in 1990.
What is different from that first proceeding, and clear here, is that all the participants are acutely aware of the march of time, and that this may be their last reasonable chance to see their fractured family reunited.
Whereas Mr. Thatcher himself told the jurors last week that he was burned out by prison and that all he wanted was to be with his children and their children, Greg, Regan and Stephanie also emphasized their father's age and the hereditary heart problems that render his health fragile.
"As my father passed his 65th birthday," Greg Thatcher said, struggling for composure, "it struck home to me that the time left for our family to be together is growing short."
His sister, who turned 9 two weeks before her mother was killed and who is Mrs. Wilson's spitting image -- tiny-boned, elegant and pale -- wept as she described her omnipresent gnawing fear for her father.
"I am constantly worried that something will happen to him in there," she said. "Especially now -- he is 65 years old and had an angioplasty just a few years ago, so I am worried about his health."
Then, just as by most accounts her gentle mother might have said, Ms. Thatcher apologized for her tears, whispering, "I'm sorry."
"My kids deserve a grandfather," Regan Thatcher, who is a lawyer in Winnipeg, told the jurors. "It's not fair to make them visit my dad in a penitentiary visiting room." He ended by pleading, "Please grant his application."
Mr. Thatcher's lawyer, Darin Chow, borrowed from Greg's statement in his closing address yesterday, asking the jurors, "What point could be served by refusing to grant my client's application?" and reminding them that "the one thing you can do, the single, solitary thing you can do, is give them hope."
Prosecutor Bill Burge, however, told the jurors that most of the supposed changes in Mr. Thatcher's character were but the natural result of growing older, and that if old age was the criterion for early parole, "everybody serving a life sentence" would be released "simply because, yeah, you get older." That, he concluded, "is not the test."
That the Thatcher youngsters, all bright, well-spoken and accomplished adults, were tormented by their parents' bitter and protracted custody battle and their mother's murder by their father is inarguable. All of them spoke of the oppressive media scrutiny, the whispering of strangers as they entered a room, and what Regan Thatcher described as the perpetual feeling of "walking on eggshells," always wondering when people heard his name, "what they knew about me, what they thought they knew and what judgments they had already made."
But no one was as directly and permanently affected as the big brother, thrust as a teenager into the role of parent, provider and his father's most loyal defender. Just a hint of how these responsibilities threatened to overwhelm him came when Greg Thatcher said, "I cannot express to you how many times I lay awake at night, wondering if I could force myself to get through another day."
The jurors also heard statements, read aloud by a victim-services employee, from Mrs. Wilson's two sisters (one, Nancy, at 44 just a little older than Mrs. Wilson was when she was killed, said that her fear of Mr. Thatcher is "a marrow-deep part of my life now"), her brother, her mother Betty Geiger, and her former husband, Tony Wilson.
Included with Nancy Geiger's statement were five pictures of Mrs. Wilson, the only photographs the jurors have of her in life, and their only visceral connection to the slender, lovely woman who was the first victim of Colin Thatcher, if not the last.