Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 11, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba A4 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM NEWS I FRONT AND CENTRE SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 2025 Forty years after their teen daughter’s body was found in an industrial shack, Wilma Derksen and her late husband Cliff ’s resilience and resolve have helped hundreds of families find a way through the same unimaginable grief FORGIVING THE UNFORGIVABLE F ORTY years ago, a Winnipeg family and city were frantically searching for a miss- ing 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, following 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 a man- uscript 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 excruci- ating 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 Stop- pel, who had been murdered in 1981. For the next two hours, Stoppel and the Derk- sens 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 be- ing 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 cou- ple 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 commit- ment 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 chan- nelled into advocacy and writing; the new book is her seventh. For Cliff, it was memorizing scrip- ture and creating art. What it ultimately assem- bled 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 Wil- ma 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 unidenti- fied 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 some- where 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,” Hildeb- rand says. She was exposed to forgiveness that summer as she had never imagined before. She spoke to fam- ily members about their stories, the loved ones they’d lost and the sense of forgiveness many of them had experienced throughout the process. Hildebrand completed 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, Hildeb- rand was the founding executive director. Candace House was a first-of-its-kind organi- zation 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 legisla- ture, 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. SCOTT BILLECK RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS Wilma Derksen has gone through many stages of forgiveness, and written a number of books on the topic, since the father of 16-year-old murder victim Barbara Stoppel visited and showed her what holding on to trauma could do. RUTH BONNEVILLE / FREE PRESS FILES The disappearance of Candace Derksen gripped the city. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Cecilly Hildebrand, executive director of Candace House, said they are there to support the journey to forgiveness. ● CONTINUED ON A7 ;