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. Continue…