Justice denied continues to haunt

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An announcement earlier this month that the Manitoba attorney general's department had decided to close its investigation into the 1971 murder of Helen Betty Osborne, a 17-year-old Cree woman, has many members of the Aboriginal community wondering if justice for Native people can ever be hoped for.

For Osborne's younger sister Cecilia, who has pressed the RCMP and the province for nearly a decade to renew their investigation into the death, the news etched old sorrows even more deeply upon her face.

"I was looking for some type of closure for myself and the rest of the family, and knowing that the RCMP are done their investigation makes that impossible," she said. "My sister's death has haunted our family for over 25 years knowing that those involved in her death escaped justice."

The RCMP had been looking into new evidence provided by the only man ever convicted of Osborne's murder, Dwayne Archie Johnston, who had met with Cecilia and other members of the family in 1997 as part of a healing circle intended to bring closure for the family and the Aboriginal community at large.

Johnston, who is now on parole for the murder, apparently provided the family and RCMP investigators with new information that implicated one of the three other original suspects who were with Johnston the night of Osborne's murder.

However, after nearly two years of follow-up, the RCMP reported that the information gave them nothing new to use to re-open the case.

So after 27 years of investigation, the justice system has only managed to convict one man, now on parole, on a lesser charge of second degree murder; granted complete immunity to a second man for his testimony against the first; acquitted a third man of all charges; and failed to ever lay charges against the fourth suspect in the slaying.

It is unlikely that Helen Betty Osborne ever thought she would become a symbol one day, although the petite and pretty woman from the Norway House reserve in northern Manitoba had already distinguished herself as one of the very few Indian women of the era to continue on to high school.

She had a natural knack for school, according to her relatives, and wanted to finish her high school education; however, that meant having to leave her community and family to finish school in The Pas, a northern town of about 5,000 people. Privately, there were even hopes that Helen Betty would become a nurse or a teacher, but she never got that chance.

Early on Saturday, Nov. 13, 1971, a young teenager out with his father on Clearwater Lake, just outside of town, stumbled across the horribly mutilated and naked body of Helen Betty.

It would take 16 years before her killers were charged, despite the fact that a local lawyer, a local provincial sheriff and hundreds of residents of the predominantly White community, had already heard or known exactly who had been involved in the killing, four local White men.

Testimony at the 1987 trial of two of the men on first-degree murder charges revealed that two days after the murder one of the men confessed to his father, who promptly sent him to see a local lawyer. The lawyer eventually met with the other three men and counseled them all to simply keep their mouths shut.

But they didn't. Townspeople say they recalled the four bragging about the murder to friends, at parties and during other casual conversations. In fact, one of the youth confessed to a local provincial sheriff in the community, who none the less failed to report the conversation to police.

Police investigators were stymied, claiming they lacked enough physical evidence to charge the four and what was common knowledge among residents of The Pas was never passed on to them during their investigation of the case.

And so Helen Betty Osborne's death became a symbol of an indifferent society and justice system, a symbol of racism at its worst. Many Aboriginal leaders called the environment at the time a "conspiracy of silence" in which the four White men were hielded by their friends, relatives and, indeed, the entire town's, silence.

The exact details of what occurred the night that Helen Betty Osborne was forced into a car by the four young White men who had spotted her walking back to the home where she was boarding will probably never be known. What is clear is that the four men saw the young Indian woman and decided she was nothing more than an object for their abuse and pleasure.

According to trial testimony, it was obvious that Osborne resisted attempts to pull her into the car, and the sexual advances made later by the four. And that her death had been a particularly vicious and violent one was also made clear. Her murderers had considered her to be sub-human.

But while Indian communities were horrified and grieved over the death, the consensus of the predominantly White community was, according to many accounts, "oh well, just another Indian."

If Helen Betty Osborne's case had been an isolated one then perhaps, just perhaps, Aboriginal people across the country might still have even a slight glimmer of hope that justice for all includes them all as individuals and collectively: that police, judges, lawyers and jurors and the general public hold the lives and rights to safety of Aboriginal people as sacred as they do their own.

But the heartbreaking truths behind the Donald Marshall, J.J. Harper and Helen Betty Osbourne stories have stripped the thin facade that the Canadian justice system cloaks itself in. For the victims and for their families, lives and futures were irrevocably stolen. And what of the countless other Aboriginal victims who have never found justice? Their unsolved deaths continue to leave bloodstains upon the scales of justice and upon a society that fails to pursue these killers as relentlessly as they would if the victims were members of their own families.

What of the death of 19-year-old Susan Asslin, an Ojibway woman from the Grassy Narrows reserve, who was found stabbed to death near Drden, Ont. three years after Helen Betty Osborne's death? Asslin's murder remains unsolved. Yet another case of "oh well, just another Indian?"

Recent tragic events on the Tssu T'ina reserve where Connie and Ty Jacobs were killed may yet become part of the growing body of evidence that shows the Canadian justice system is failing its first people. Let us all pray that the justice system will pursue the truth no matter where it leads.

The burgeoning Native population in its jails shows that the justice system has little problem in meting out punishment to its Aboriginal citizens.

It is time for it now to apply equal regor in upholding the fundamental rights to justice of First peoples.

Helen Betty Osbourne should have lived to become a symbol of success, vitality and life, not of injustice, intolerance and indifference.

Surely the justice system owes her memory the assurance that injustice, intolerance and indifference towards Aboriginal people will never again be tolerated.