Copyright Southam Publications Inc. Oct 3, 1999
Ran with factbox “Quest for Justice” which has been appended to the end of this story.
Clarification: A Sunday Reader story Oct. 3 on Betty McCoy’s complaints regarding a March 14, 1991, city police interrogation of two children said their mother, Janice Gariepy, had made a number of allegations about harassment by Scientologists. The story did not go on to say that two months later Gariepy admitted to police all of her allegations were false. [Correction] /P 991015 A2
Betty McCoy hopes an RCMP investigation into the Edmonton Police Service and Chief John Lindsay will finally provide the justice she has been seeking.
Over the past eight years, McCoy has waged a paper war on Lindsay, his predecessor Doug McNally, the Edmonton Police Commission and former justice minister Jon Havelock. She has been demanding a public inquiry and an outside police investigation into the force’s conduct toward an Edmonton woman, Janice Gariepy, and two of her children.
Among her accusations were that police held the Gariepys against their will and were abusive to the children during questioning.
Police say her complaint has been properly dealt with. But McCoy says her fight shows the lengths to which police will go to avoid admitting wrongdoing.
A retired hospital social worker, McCoy met the Gariepys through her volunteer work with the Mind Control Awareness Society, an anti- cult organization.
Janice Gariepy had made more than two dozen allegations to police about harassment by members of the Church of Scientology. She was in the process of separating from her husband, who was a Scientologist.
The allegations became increasingly bizarre and culminated in March 1991 with Janice claiming Marie, 10, had been dragged off the street into a car and sexually assaulted by a church official.
Edmonton Police charged the official on the word of the child. But when the church official’s lawyer said the man had an alibi, the Gariepy family was brought in for questioning.
What happened next launched McCoy on an eight-year quest for justice in which:
- She would accuse the Edmonton police of wrongdoing and of trying to cover it up;
- She would spend thousands of dollars on legal fees;
- The Law Enforcement Review Board, a quasi-judicial civilian board, would hold a hearing and issue a critical report against the police service;
- Lindsay, who became chief in 1995, would downplay the LERB findings. But her original complaint would become one of 12 filed by Edmonton Police Det. Ken Montgomery against Lindsay that ultimately triggered an RCMP investigation this year.
By the police force’s own admission, questioning by the investigators was “firm and confrontational.” It lasted nearly six hours, ending when Marie and Dominique, 9, recanted their allegations.
When McCoy heard details about the interrogation, she was furious. “They were completely at the mercy of the police.”
She felt Janice was too emotionally fragile to challenge the police, so she filed a complaint herself.
Edmonton Police dismissed McCoy’s initial complaint on March 17, 1991, two days after she made it. She turned to the Law Enforcement Review Board, which the province has empowered to rule on complaints about police conduct. But Doug McNally, who was then police chief, asked her to hold off and give the police another chance to more fully investigate.
McCoy agreed, and the investigation dragged on. Her lawyer, Simon Renouf, wrote six times in 1992 for updates. None of the letters was acknowledged. Finally on Nov. 3, 1992, McNally again dismissed her complaint. And as with the first complaint, the chief did not, as was required by the Police Act, give any explanation.
McCoy went back to the LERB. Her complaint said the children had been subjected to “abusive interrogation,” detained without their mother’s permission, separated from their mother without her permission and locked in a room.
McCoy further alleged the children were told they would be taken away by social services and that their mother would go to jail. She said Gariepy and her children had been called liars, and the mother was called a liar in front of her children.
McCoy named the officers involved: Insp. Jim Cessford, then head of the Criminal Investigation Division, and detectives Fabio Bonetto and John Findlay.
Through Freedom of Information requests, The Journal obtained statements given by the three officers to Internal Affairs. In addition, an interview was conducted with retired RCMP Cpl. Reed Leary who, with Det. Ken Montgomery, was at the police station the day of the Gariepy interrogation.
Second internal investigation verifies some of the key allegations
Montgomery declined to be interviewed in detail because he faces an internal disciplinary hearing on an unrelated matter. McNally also declined comment because of the ongoing RCMP investigation.
The second internal police investigation verified several of McCoy’s main allegations. It found that Janice Gariepy had been called a liar in front of her children and that the children were “interrogated” in a “stern manner” without a parent present. But the investigating officer wrote “the problem was exceptional and exceptional measures were required to resolve the situation.”
McNally dismissed McCoy’s complaint.
Montgomery and Leary knew the Gariepys through their work with the “cult desk” of the Edmonton Integrated Intelligence Unit. For weeks they had investigated Janice Gariepy’s allegations against Scientologists.
Leary’s description of what he witnessed at police headquarters that day contradicts several of the main statements made by the Edmonton police officers to internal affairs investigators.
In their statements, the officers denied Janice Gariepy had been separated from her children. They also denied locking the children in an interview room. And they insisted they had not abused the children.
Leary said he and Montgomery were summoned to the station in a phone call from a hysterical Janice Gariepy. They found her sitting on a chair in the hallway outside the sex-crimes office. She was crying and “emotionally distraught.”
The two children were in separate interview rooms. Leary said he tried the doors. They were locked.
Leary got into a heated argument with Cessford. Leary, who stands six feet four inches and weighs more than 230 pounds, backed the smaller man against the wall. Jabbing his finger at Cessford’s chest, he told him he had no right to hold the children against their will.
“Basically, (Cessford) told me to physically butt out because this was his case and he was going to run it, and I was not to interfere,” Leary said.
“I couldn’t believe it was happening at the time, but now in perfect hindsight, I feel I should have arrested (those guys) for unlawful confinement, if nothing else,” Leary said.
Leary later gave a statement to an Edmonton Police internal affairs investigator.
The LERB hearing began in January 1993. What eventually broke the case open was the release of a police videotape of the children’s interrogation.
On it, the children are aggressively questioned without a parent or guardian present. The children, who were crying hysterically, are called liars and are warned they will be taken away by social services and their mother will go jail. The tape also clearly showed Findlay slipping a key to the interview-room door into his pocket.
The children had told McCoy about the videotape, so Renouf repeatedly asked police counsel to produce it. Police questioned whether the videotape was relevant and whether McCoy had standing to see it. Yet, both Findlay and Bonetto, in their statements to internal affairs, said the videotape would exonerate them.
The LERB ruled the police not only had to produce the videotape, but also allow McCoy to view it.
McCoy says: “It proved everything the children told me about how they had been treated, it proved the police had not told the truth, and it proved the police had not done a proper investigation.”
At her own expense, McCoy hired child psychologist Alfred Reideger to review the videotape. He filed a report and testified at the LERB hearing.
Reideger found that “because of the intrusiveness of the officers, the information (they received from the children) was highly contaminated. It is impossible to determine whether all of the children’s retractions were genuine.”
The LERB ruled the force’s treatment of the children was “threatening, abusive, and excessive” and that the police actions were unjustified.
The board can impose a wide range of penalties right up to firing an officer. It can also refer findings of illegal activity to Alberta Justice for prosecution. But the board gave Findlay and Bonetto the lowest possible penalty — an official warning to be attached to their personnel files for three years.
The board couldn’t discipline Cessford because he had left the Edmonton Police to become police chief for the Vancouver suburb of Delta.
The police service responded to the LERB report by downplaying it both privately and publicly.
In a letter published in The Journal, Deputy Chief Al Buerger, now retired, defended police actions.
Buerger said “the service conducted an exhaustive investigation of the complaint about the treatment of the two children.” He said there was “a need `to come to the bottom’ of the allegations and show them to be manifestly untrue” in order to protect “innocent people from being subjected to groundless prosecution.”
New chief defends officers in force’s internal newsletter
Leary believes Edmonton police had acted in haste when it charged the Scientology official based on nothing more than the word of the children.
Lindsay, who had become chief in February 1995, also defended the officers in a letter published Aug. 15, 1995 in By the Way, the force’s internal newsletter.
Lindsay wrote that the three EPS members had to conduct “admittedly tough interviews as they tried to reconcile the interests of the children with the need to protect innocent people from false accusations.” Lindsay added the interviews produced a positive outcome in that “the charges that supported the false accusations were dismissed by the Crown prior to court.”
Renouf, however, said the Crown did not dismiss the charges. It called no evidence because it was provided with none by Edmonton Police.
Five months later, Lindsay stood before about 750 people at the service’s annual Christmas party to read a poem attributed to him that summarized the past year. Part of it read:
“In the mood of the spirit it may be time for a deal but heaven help you if it’s before the Law Enforcement Review Board on appeal,
For not in their presence the LERB is all too frequently called a Son of a B
And we all know of a decision without joy sometimes referred to as the revenge of the McCoy.”
The poem was later reprinted in the force’s internal newsletter.
For McCoy, the poem showed Lindsay’s “obvious disrespect” for her, and for her rights as a citizen.
“I really expected better than that from the chief of police.”
Lindsay says he’s surprised McCoy was upset by the poem.
Speaking publicly on the issue for the first time, he characterizes the three-page poem as a bit of Christmas fun in which he poked fun largely at himself, senior officers and members of the police commission.
“Obviously I regret Mrs. McCoy feels slighted in any way at all because that was never intended,” he says.
Montgomery also had been disturbed by the poem. After reading Buerger’s and Lindsay’s responses to the LERB hearing, he had made an internal complaint under the Police Act. This led to another internal investigation into the incident. That investigation was under way when Lindsay read his poem.
“I seriously wondered how fair and unbiased the investigation into my complaint was going to be,” said Montgomery.
Montgomery got nowhere with his concerns. Nor did McCoy when she pressed Lindsay in 1997 for a public inquiry into police behaviour in the case.
Lindsay says McCoy’s complaint has led to changes in the department.
While he’s not clear what the official policy was under former chief McNally, he says it’s now clear practice that a parent or guardian must be present when a child is interviewed.
“I accepted the board’s decision completely that we as a service had not dealt with this appropriately,” he says. “I’d say that was a public acknowledgement of the fact that we didn’t do our best here.”
As for a public review of the 1991 incident, Lindsay says that’s not necessary.
“There was a public hearing and that was the LERB hearing.” The issue, as far as he’s concerned, is closed.
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QUEST FOR JUSTICE
- Betty McCoy first complained in 1991 after police interrogated a friend’s family as part of a sexual assault investigation. McCoy said the mother and two children had been held against their will and treated in an abusive manner.
- In 1993, her complaint against the Edmonton Police Service was examined by the Law Enforcement Review Board, a quasi-judicial civilian board that rules on complaints about police conduct.
- In July 1995, the board upheld McCoy’s complaint, saying misconduct had occurred, as defined by the Police Act, with respect to verbal threats, abusive interview methods and detention of the family.
- Top officials from the police department continued to defend the actions of the officers. John Lindsay, who became police chief in 1995, and the Edmonton Police Commission turned down requests from McCoy for a more sweeping public inquiry into the initial police investigation and the way her complaints were handled.
- McCoy had almost given up. Then Edmonton Police Det. Ken Montgomery filed a formal complaint with the police commission against Lindsay in March of this year. Montgomery said the actions of the police were never properly reviewed by Lindsay and questioned the chief’s ability to properly address serious internal police concerns.
The RCMP is investigating these complaints and several others made by Montgomery.