On the evening of Jan. 21, 1983, JoAnn Wilson was murdered, bludgeoned and shot in the garage of her Regina home. It had been three years since she and husband Colin Thatcher—the son of a former Saskatchewan premier and an ex-provincial cabinet minister himself—had filed for divorce, years marked by Wilson’s remarriage, an acrimonious custody battle over the three Thatcher children and a previous violent attack on her. Twenty months before her death Wilson had been shot through her kitchen window and wounded in the shoulder. No one was ever charged for it. On May 7, 1984, after a lengthy police investigation, Colin Thatcher was arrested for her murder. The sensational and controversial trial unfolded over the fall of 1984. Although Thatcher has never ceased to proclaim his innocence, he was found guilty, and spent 22 years in prison. Released on parole in 2006, Thatcher has spent his time working on his ranch near Moose Jaw, Sask., and writing his account, Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame (ECW Press).
In the book, Thatcher gives his version of events since his arrest, avoiding any direct recapitulation of the crime itself, and concentrating on three areas. Primary is what he sees as the Saskatchewan Department of Justice’s single-minded pursuit of a conviction. It was a determination, Thatcher says, that led Crown prosecutors—against their own official policy on disclosure of evidence, but not then against the law—to keep from his lawyer evidence that tended to exculpate Thatcher. The department’s actions, he writes, added up to a campaign of “unconscionable deceit and litany of lies of omission, much of which would not be known for years, the full extent probably never.” Among the information eventually possessed by the Crown but not passed on to Thatcher and his lawyer for years was a package mailed to the Regina Leader-Post newspaper that included an anonymous confession to Wilson’s murder and even the hatchet the letter writer claimed was the bludgeoning weapon.
Thatcher is not alone in being outraged by what he calls the “double jeopardy” aspect of his trial. The jury was instructed it could find him guilty for either murdering Wilson himself or for hiring an accomplice to do so. It is an open question whether either charge, presented alone, would have succeeded. As some legal observers have asked, does this truly prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? As for the evidence itself, especially the key exhibit at the trial—a credit card receipt dated Jan. 18, three days before the murder, apparently bearing Thatcher’s signature, and found near the murder scene—Final Appeal offers a wealth of detail and a full-bore assault on the Crown’s case, including a claim that the receipt had a different number from Thatcher’s actual card.
Shortly before the book’s scheduled release on Sept. 1, a week after his 71st birthday, Thatcher spoke with Edmonton crime-reporter Byron Christopher.
Q: I guess the obvious question is: why the book? A matter of setting the record straight?
A: There have been several books written about my case. I think it’s fair to call them cheerleading efforts on behalf of the Crown. I decided that I wanted to lay out exactly what happened. But mostly I wanted to document what the Crown did—the evidence they withheld. I really believe that had we had the evidence that is presented in this book that this case would not have survived the preliminary hearing stage. But we didn’t, and I was convicted and it wasn’t until after all the appeals process that slowly things started to come out. I wanted to leave a record behind of what actually happened, because it’s a lesson. It should never happen to anyone again. I can’t believe that it is still happening to me. After all these years I have been trying to get disclosure from my case, the routine disclosure that everybody gets now. To this day I cannot get it. You tell me why. I don’t know why, other than the obvious. They’re afraid of what’s there. They’re afraid to release that. That’s why I wrote the book.
Q: Did you write the book for money too?
A: The profit motive never even occurred to me. Really, one of the things that fuelled me is that on occasion in Regina I have encountered some of those who were involved in my case from the Crown’s perspective. Really, the smirks on their faces, they were a lightning rod to me to finish what I started in the Edmonton Max, because a good portion of this book I wrote some years ago.
Q: Since word got out you were writing a book, there’s been an issue that you shouldn’t profit from it. Do you have any thoughts on part of the profits going somewhere else other than you?
A: I am a believer in free speech. My attitude is: they stole 20 years from me; if they really think that they have to steal my book, well then, go ahead.
Q: Has writing this book been a catharsis?
A: I found it very difficult. There were so many times I almost said, I just don’t want to do this because there are certain junctures in this book when I would be turned down for something. I’ve had just a horrible time. I had a terrible time editing it, reading it and continuing to write because it was not a fun or a pleasant experience. It was just something I felt I had to do. As I say, I wanted to leave behind a record of what actually happened, if for nothing else, for my grandchildren and their children as they come along.
Q: An Edmonton defence lawyer, David Willson, has said that you were dealing with double jeopardy. He felt that the multiple choice aspect was highly prejudicial against you, saying it “lowered the standard of ‘guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.’ ”
A: I agree with him 100 per cent. They took two cases that in isolation would never have survived and they rolled them into one and they gave the jury the choice. Did I do the murder myself, or did I hire someone to do it? The first one, at least there were some specifics, things they were alleging I did at a specific time on a certain date, there was something specific to meet in your defence. The other one was having to face the intangibleness of a “feeling.” There were no specifics to deal with. In other words, if the jury didn’t think I did it myself, there was really no evidence that I had hired anyone, but the jury had been given the option of: “Well, if we just have a bad feeling about this we can convict.” When you have to fight a feeling, it’s very difficult to mount a defence.
