Rampage (13 page)

Cowboys Don’t Cry

David Shearing’s chain-smoking put Eastham’s to shame. Thick cancerous clouds hung around them like fog over the pines. With his arms and legs crossed, brow creased, and body tensed, it was obvious that he was already on psychological lockdown. To loosen him up, Eastham and Leibel started by throwing him softball questions about his childhood. They learned that Shearing had been born on April 10, 1959. After attaining his high school diploma, he took a six-month heavy mechanic’s course at college before travelling around British Columbia and Alberta working odd jobs — from cabinetmaking to fertilizer manufacturing. He had a thirty-seven-year-old brother named Greg, who until recently had worked as a sheriff, and a sister. His mother was still alive and living in a nursing home in Clearwater; but he noted somewhat sadly that his father, a former prison guard, had succumbed to cancer in the spring of 1982. Following the death, Shearing had begun to drink heavily and have regular run-ins with the law. When Eastham asked him if he had ever spent time behind bars, Shearing’s green eyes started to shift about — a sign that he was uncomfortable with the line of questioning. However, when they changed tack and began talking about cars, guitars, and fishing, the suspect’s arms unfolded. He was beginning to open up to them. After a little more friendly banter about the negative effects of his alcohol abuse, including a drunken accident where Shearing had fractured his pelvis, Eastham decided it was time to take things up a level.

“Do you know what we’re doing here, Dave? Considering the distance we came, we must be here for a good reason.”

“No.” Shearing averted his gaze. “I’m not sure. I don’t have anything to hide, you know. I’m an honest guy.”

Eastham reassured him that they would be fair, but professional, and reiterated his rights to remain silent and to an attorney. He explained that they were investigating a serious crime. Simultaneously, he hinted that guilty men used lawyers, manipulating Shearing into thinking everything would be all right if he just kept talking. In reality, the innocent often become loud and indignant about wanting an attorney. David Shearing was acting completely the opposite, and by now, Eastham was smelling blood.

“Are you guys investigating the Johnson/Bentley murders?” Shearing asked.

Eastham took his time answering, letting the silence gnaw at Shearing’s conscience. “Did anyone talk to you about it last year?”

“Yeah. Some cop talked to me briefly about it before, last year sometime.”

Eastham asked Shearing if he knew about Trophy and Battle Mountains, and that they had found the vehicles there. He did. Eastham explained they were getting a lot of help from the community, even from bikers. Shearing squirmed, seeking comfort in cigarettes.

“I want to see if you are an honest guy. I’m going to start back a couple years ago, and see what you will do. Remember, you can leave at any time. We discovered that a kid was killed that summer on Wells Gray Road. It was a hit and run, or criminal negligence, or whatever. The guy didn’t stop. I know all about it, otherwise I wouldn’t be up here in Dawson Creek on a weekend.”

“I know.” Shearing breathed a sigh of relief. Eastham struggled to contain a smile as he saw the suspect’s body relax. It was working — by making Shearing think they were investigating the fatal hit and run accident, they were lowering his guard. Once they had learned everything they needed to know about the vehicular manslaughter, Eastham and Leibel would move in for the kill. Recounting that night in 1980, Shearing recalled that he and a friend, Doug Elliot, had been drinking heavily, and were cruising at about eighty kilometres per hour on the Wells Gray Road when a shape suddenly appeared in his headlights. Before Shearing could react, the car slammed into Dave Carter, lurching as all four tires crushed the life from his body. Suspecting that Carter was already dead, and since Shearing had been drinking, he and Elliot had agreed to keep their mouths shut.

When asked how he felt about it, Shearing replied that it made him feel “upset.” Eastham handed him a pen, paper, and coffee so that he could document his own account of what had happened that night. Between fits of crying, smoking, and sipping coffee, Shearing eventually finished and signed his two-page confession in just over an hour. It was 6:39 p.m., and they had already got him to admit to one homicide — only six more to go.

“Okay, David,” Eastham continued, “you understand everything we’ve done. I told you when we started that we know a lot about you. We wouldn’t be here, especially on a weekend, unless there was a good reason. When we started, we gave you a warning: anything you say can be used as evidence on everything. I also told you we were investigating the Johnson and Bentley murders, and this is where this all stems from. The warning we gave you still stands. As long as you realize that.” Shearing indicated that he did, and Eastham took some time to peruse his statement. When he was finished, the two discussed the possible outcomes of the confession, whether Shearing would be going to jail, and the likelihood that his passenger, Doug Elliot, would face legal action. After some conversation about religion and morality to soften Shearing up, Eastham finally made his move.

“David, what do you think about the Johnson and Bentley murders? What do you think of them being killed in your front yard, so to speak?”

“Well it was pretty bad for the community.” Shearing’s cigarette wobbled.

“Do you know where the car was found?” Eastham asked.

“Yeah.”

“You know where the truck was found?”

“Yeah.”

“You also know where they were killed?”

“Bear Creek,” Shearing replied, his face suddenly dropping. Eastham felt his heart beat like a victory drum. Never mind Bear Creek: Shearing had just put himself up Shit Creek without a paddle. Unlike the sites where the vehicles had been found, the whereabouts of the murder scene had never been disclosed to the public. The only person outside of the RCMP who could have been aware of the location was the killer himself.

“I think I need to speak to a lawyer now,” Shearing chimed in.

Truth and Justice

As David William Shearing’s trial drew near, the investigators were overjoyed to learn that their case was so airtight that his lawyers were opting to enter guilty pleas on all six charges, without any legal wheeling and dealing. On the morning before he was scheduled to appear in court — Monday, April 16, 1984 — Shearing received an unexpected visit from Staff Sergeant Eastham. They exchanged brief pleasantries before Eastham got to the point.

“You told me once that you might tell me the whole story one day, and I left it at that. Well, David, the day you’re sentenced I’m going to come and collect. Think about it, David. I’ll be back.”

Later that day, Shearing stood before Justice Harry McKay in the red-brick Kamloops courthouse, clad in a brown suit and striped tie. There he plead guilty to all six counts of second-degree murder, his lawyers proclaiming he had done so to spare the victims’ family and his own family the anguish of a lengthy trial. Before sentencing, it was necessary to consider the defendant’s character, and over the next few hours, the story of David Shearing was revealed to those in attendance.

Born to the children of prairie farmers in New Westminster, B.C., Shearing had relocated with his family to Clearwater at the age of five. His home life had been happy and stable, and he held a deep reverence for his father, an erudite conservationist whose interests extended from ancient history to photography and stamp collecting. Shearing graduated high school with a 70 percent average. Letters from officials at the institution described him as a “good average student … a very quiet person who responded politely and respectfully.” He had gone on to attend Cariboo College, where he won an award for his aptitude in the heavy machinery program. A left-brained thinker, Shearing was forever reading about mechanics, science, and chemistry as well as sci-fi novels. He also enjoyed the simple pleasures of country life: dogs, hiking, and twanging out country-and-western tunes on his electric guitar. Testaments from friends and neighbours portrayed a shy, helpful young man who could be funny when he opened up to people.

Unfortunately, everything seemed to fall apart in March 1982, when lung cancer claimed his beloved father. Shearing was devastated. Having already established a predisposition for binge drinking in his teens, he turned increasingly to alcohol to cope with the sixty-seven-year-old’s death. Approximately four months later, he gunned down the Johnson/Bentley family at Bear Creek. After, he claimed that on multiple occasions he had climbed to the top of a mountain, intent on committing suicide. Perhaps the most powerful argument for the defence was a letter from Shearing’s brother, Gary, a former sheriff. Soon after the reading of the letter, Judge McKay declared that the prisoner be remanded until 10:00 the following morning.

But the dawning of a new day would bring no light for David Shearing. The twenty-five-year-old was ordered to stand as Judge McKay’s voice boomed down at him from the bench: “What we have here is a cold-blooded and senseless execution of six defenceless and innocent victims for no apparent reason other than he possibly coveted some of their possessions.” A wave of shock and relief rushed over the courtroom as Judge McKay handed down a maximum sentence of twenty-five years with parole for each of the six murders, to be served concurrently. At long last justice had been served. The truth, on the other hand, remained elusive, and Staff Sergeant Mike Eastham was determined to get to the bottom of it.

The next time Eastham visited Shearing behind bars, the policeman’s friendly facade had disappeared. Shearing was less than affable himself: unsurprising, considering the unprecedented severity of his second-degree murder sentence.

“You know why I’m here, David. There’s a couple things that don’t sit well with me, and you know what they are,” Eastham began. “What’s gnawing at me right now is, I think you sexually abused those girls before you killed them.”

Shearing asked for his lawyer.

Defence attorney Fred Kaatz arrived on the scene and was greeted by Eastham’s steely glare. Kaatz knew only too well who was holding the cards, and if he denied Eastham this opportunity, Shearing could expect no future co-operation from him. The lawyer entered the room to speak with his client, and left soon after. Eastham re-entered to find Shearing sitting blank-faced, as if deep in thought. He took a seat across from the convicted murderer.

“All right, Mike. You got it,” Shearing sighed.

Over the next few hours, he admitted to having spotted little Janet and Karen on his way home from work, and had made up his mind that he would have them at any cost. Sometime between August 6 and 13, he had ambushed the adults at night, shooting them dead. Ripping open the door of the girls’ tent, he found them lying propped up on their elbows. They wanted to know what all of the noise was, so Shearing had spun a tale of the camp being attacked by bikers. The adults had left in search of help, he explained, leaving him to guard Janet and Karen from the “bad men.”
***

Once he had them convinced, he returned to where Bob Johnson lay gargling blood, and silenced him with a second bullet. Then, one by one, he carried the bodies to the back seat of the Chrysler, stacking them neatly on top of each other. Laying a blanket over them, he quickly cleaned up before returning to the tent where the two Johnson girls lay cowering. The details of the subsequent sexual assault have never been made public, though Eastham has stated that Shearing’s account left him “breathless” and glad that he was unarmed. When Shearing had finished with the girls, he redressed himself in clothing smeared with their family’s blood, and ordered them to help him collapse the tent. They had asked where their parents were, and he had repeated the lie that they had gone to find help. By the time he had instructed them to climb into the front seat of the Chrysler, there would have been no way that Janet and Karen could fail to notice their family’s corpses, blanket or not. The floor would have been swimming in blood.

Pulling the car onto Wells Gray Road, Shearing drove them to his ranch, then forced them to erect the tent and remain inside it. Returning to Bear Creek on foot, he then piloted the truck and camper back to the ranch and secreted it in the forest by the tent. He warned the Johnson girls not to stray or the wolves, bears, and bikers might get them. Shearing strolled back to his house, climbed into bed, and fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning, he awoke and went to work. He continued to visit the girls’ tent every night, almost certainly subjecting them to more sexual abuse. Then, on Friday evening, he marched them through the dark, rainy, black forest toward a fishing cabin. They did not reach their destination that night, and camped under a plastic sheet strung between trees. By Saturday they entered the little hut by the water, but an unexpected visit from a prison guard at Clearwater Correctional Institute, who was supervising inmates fishing on the river, spooked Shearing. The guard had not seen the girls hiding behind the cabin door, and when the opportunity arose, Shearing forced the exhausted sisters to hike back up to the ranch. When they finally made it, he lured Karen away from her sister to where his .22 rifle lay stashed. Shearing faked urinating, and when Karen turned away, he fired into the back of her head. Leaving her body in the woods, he returned to the camp and explained to Janet that he had bound her sister to a tree. They spent the night together in the camper, allegedly “talking” because “Janet was a virgin, and didn’t know a lot about sex at all.” The next day he used the same ruse on the thirteen-year-old, and shot her dead in the woods. With these final witnesses to his crimes eliminated, Shearing stuffed the bodies in the trunk of the Chrysler, and went to sleep.

When he climbed into the driver’s seat the next night, the stench of rotting bodies was overpowering. Under cover of darkness, he guided the Chrysler up to Battle Mountain, turning off-road into the pines, where the vehicle became stuck. He dowsed it from front to back with gasoline, set it ablaze, and stood watching it burn. Later, following the reports of the disappearances on the August 23, Shearing attempted to drive the Bentleys’ truck and camper off the canyon on Trophy Mountain. Yet the heavy rains mired the vehicles in the mud, leaving him no option but to torch them. As the last traces of evidence vanished into the roaring flames and smoke, Shearing trudged home wearily through the pitch-black woods.