Book on Leo LaChance murder leaves questions unanswered

Page 13

Review

Buried in Silence

By Connie Sampson

190 pages, $15.95 (pb.)

NeWest Press, Edmonton

"The whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is untrue. Only his own best deeds, only the worst of the Indians, has the white man told."

--Yellow Wolf of the Nez Perce

"While much is too strange to be believe, nothing is too strange to have happened."

--Thomas Hardy

Carney Nerland was the leader of the Jesus Christ Church of Aryan Nations in Saskatchewan. His Chilean wife wasn't white. He ran Northern Pawn & Gun in Prince Albert, a hangout for off-duty police officers and prison guards, with a treaty Indian business partner. He rented the space for his store from a Jew.

Just before supper time on Jan. 28, 1991, Nerland celebrated the end of the business day with two off-duty guards from the nearby provincial correctional centre by downing several rye and colas. When an elderly treaty Indian, Leo LaChance, entered the store, Nerland fired three shots from a rifle at this customer. One 7.62 mm full metal jacket bullet, the same type of ammunition about to be used by Allied forces in the Persian Gulf War 10,000 miles away, blew through LaChance's rib cage and tore apart his organs.

LaChance and Nerland exist today only in memory. LaChance was buried on a warm winter day on the Big River Reserve. Nerland served the required two-thirds of his four-year sentence after pleading guilty to one count of second degree manslaughter. In December 1993, Nerland walked through the main gates of the Stoney Mountain Federal Penitentiary in Manitoba, into an RCMP cruiser, and entered the oblivion of the federal Witness Protection Act.

Author Connie Sampson, a reporter with the Prince Albert Daily Herald, tries to unravel this story in her book. She does very well in the book's opening chapters, describing the history and society which spawned Leo LaChance, going back to the time before the first white settlers arrived in Prince Albert.

LaChance is the forgotten man in this incident. An elderly, simple, barely educated man who wasn't above having a few swigs of Lysol cocktail on the city's skid row, his death was the latest in the long line of early and violent deaths in the LaChance family.

The book, unfortunately, falls apart as soon as Sampsoon leaves the LaChance family. She traces Carney Nerland's involvements in western Canadian white power groups, but she doesn't mention why such groups have found fertile soil in Saskatchewan. She also doesn't talk about the tense state of the city at the time of Lachance's shooting ? a very large oversight.

Sampson even fails to mention the relations between First Nations and the justice system. In the wake of the Helen Betty Osborne case, in The Pas, Man., and Sandy Seale in Sydney, N.S. (the Donald Marshall case), Nerland's prosecution and sentencing would be a test to see if the justice system has learned anything. Apparently, it hadn't

The book's anticlimax is the provincial inquiry, set up by the Saskatchewan government in February, 1992. Led by former Court of Queen's Bench justice Ted Hughes, the commission was created in hope, and ended in irrelevance.

The city police's investigation was cut short due to budget restrictions. Russ Yungwirth and Gar Brownbridge, the two others in the store when LaChance was shot, told the police that Nerland shot LaChance outside the store, while ballistics experts disagreed. Nerland refused to testify at first. When he did, he said he couldn't remember the night in question. But he could remember the names of a score of city police officers who, he said, expressed racist views to him. And he wasn't a racist ? he said.

To add insult to injury, the commission wasn't allowed to name the RCMP informant in the Aryan Nations. Such an informant would probably get special treatment from the judicial system and the police. The Prince Albert Tribal Council and LaChance's family say Nerland was the informant.

An active and voca member of the Aryan Nations, Nerland once described a shotgun as a "Jewish birth control device" to reporters.

He made $900 a month from his store, yet withdrew $2,000 from his bank account, after the shooting, and paid $3,100 cash for airplane tickets for him and his family a month before. He also had no trouble despite his violent and racist beliefs, in getting the paperwork needed to sell guns and ammunition.

Shortly after his arrest, Nerland met with Const. Andy Lawrence, a Regina-based RCMP officer. For a white trash loner looking for someone to blame for his lot in life, Nerland had a lot of friends in the right places.

There are a lot of unanswered questions, and Sampson, who isn't an investigative journalist, doesn't know how to pick up the threads the Hughes inquiry unraveled. Was Nerland the informer, or did he take the money and tell his friends about the wool he pulled over the Mounties' eyes?

Why would the RCMP protect an informant who would start a race war on his own? Were the cops who hung out at Northern Pawn & Gun fellow white power followers, or were they checking up on him on the sly? Was Nerland placed first in solitary confinement in Stoney Mountain, and later in the witness protection program, not only to keep him from getting killed by Native terrorists or vengeful white power freaks, but also to cover up the incompetence of senior RCMP officers who approved Nerland's involvement?

Sampson's book takes the strange and terrible saga of Leo LaChance's final hours one step beyond the whitewash delivered y the Hughes Commission. Her book is the first on the subject, but it won't be the last, and probably, won't be the best. But it will do until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police end their silence.