Criminal - Starlight Tours

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

In January 2000, the bodies of two First Nations men were found frozen in a remote area of Saskatoon, Canada. It was a place where nobody walked, especially in the winter. And then, a man named Darrell Night came forward and said he had been dropped off by police on the outskirts of town, but he had made it back alive. We speak with former police officer Ernie Louttit and reporter Dan Zakreski about the deaths of Neil Stonechild, Lawrence Wegner, and Rodney Naistus, and “starlight tours” within the Saskatoon Police Service. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. We had a spate of freezing deaths in the month of January 2000. Over the space of a couple of weeks, we would get these sort of sadly typical news releases from the city police that went along the lines of, you know, 28-year-old person found frozen. These were the general circumstances. We aren't naming them because it's not a violent death, and that's just how they handled it. Dan Zekreski is a reporter for the CBC. In 2000, he worked for the Star Phoenix newspaper in Saskatoon, Canada. So that particular month, it was the post-Christmas newsroom doldrums.

So I was assigned to take a look at one of these freezing deaths. There was a body found out by the city landfill, which is in sort of the southwest section of the city. It's relatively isolated for the city. And I was assigned to put together sort of a best practices story on, you know, don't get drunk and try to walk home. And develop a little bit of a feature on the individual who was frozen to try to put a human face on it. So I had begun to do my research.

It started off by, first of all, trying to find out the individual's name. And it turned out to be a fellow named Lawrence Wagner, who was a social work student here in town. And was reaching out to his family and trying to find his background. While I was in the process of researching that, my city editor had gotten, at the time, what seemed like this absolutely improbable tip that city police had been dropping people off on the outside of town, First Nations people. Lawrence Wagner was a 30-year-old First Nations member. His body was found frozen to death on February 3rd, but as Dan Zakreski learned, he'd gone missing three days earlier. Dan wanted to know who had last seen Lawrence Wagner.

He started knocking on doors. And one of the doors that I knocked upon was a woman named Eliza Whitecap. And I knocked on her doorway and I said, you know, had you heard anything about this? The woman said that she did know Lawrence Wegner. He was her nephew. And she goes, well, as a matter of fact, the night that he had gone missing,

that evening, that freezing cold evening, he had knocked on my doorway and my daughter had answered it. And he was clearly under the influence of some sort of intoxicant because he was basically in his shirt sleeves and jeans and he was yelling pizza, pizza. So I had called the police, I being Eliza. And when she called the police, they said the 911 operator told her that somebody else had already called about him and police had been dispatched.

So that was really the sort of terrible aha moment because I had a clear connection involving the police and Mr. Wagner. He had come into contact with the police the night that he had died. Lawrence Wagner was found in a remote industrial area by a power plant, a place nobody walked, especially in the winter. And when Dan started looking into things, he noticed that another freezing death had been reported

in the same area. A First Nations man named Rodney Naistis had been found there on January 29th. Two men's bodies, both frozen to death, found in the same place in the same week. And then, on February 4th, a man came forward and said he'd been dropped off on the outskirts of town. But he had made it back alive. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Darryl Knight was a First Nations man. He was 33 at the time. Dan Zekreski says the Saskatoon police knew Darryl well.

He was getting picked up frequently by them, intoxicated, aggressive, abusive, would be put in a cruiser, would be taken downtown, spend the night in the drunk tank, released the next day. And then it was sort of shampoo, rinse, repeat. In the early hours of January 28th, Daryl Knight had been at his uncle's apartment. They'd fought. And around dawn, two police officers found Daryl Knight outside the apartment, intoxicated and yelling.

Daryl Knight later said the officers handcuffed him and put him in the back seat. His account was he's put into the back of this cruiser, and he knows almost immediately that he's not being driven to the police station, because it's the opposite direction. And I recall speaking to him, and he said the car got real quiet. You know, he realized something was up. I think he was, you know, concerned that, was this going to lead to a beating?

Was he going to be shot? He didn't know what was going on. You know, you're in this cruiser, and you think the cruiser should be going north, and it's going south. And instead of heading towards the bright lights, you're heading out into the darkness. And you've got these two police officers in the front seat

who aren't talking to you, and they're just driving you. It was a terrifying experience for him. Darrell Knight later said that the police drove him to a remote area and told him to get out of the car. He told the police he thought he would freeze to death. And according to Darrell Knight, one of the officers said, that's your problem, and the police car drove away.

He later said I thought I was dead. All those rumors I heard in the past they were all coming true. When we first started reporting on this phenomena of what was happening I can remember a First Nations guy telling me

oh that's just a starlight tour. And we'd heard versions of this in the past. You know, the idea being that police would pick a person up who was intoxicated. They don't want to take him into the station because it involves a lot of paperwork. This fellow's thrown in jail. So they'll think, oh, look,

instead of taking you into the police station and charging you, we'll just take you somewhere and you can walk it off. So it was kind of an open secret. What's problematic is if you're dealing with somebody who's really intoxicated and it's 30 below and you take them somewhere, they might not make it back. So the scenario that was presented to us, the tip, was that police had in fact done this, taken a person to the edge of town in really cold weather and dropped them off, and they never made it back in. When we're talking really cold weather in Saskatoon in January. What temperature are we talking? It would be, I guess, simply for comparison purposes, 40 below,

which is 40 below Celsius and 40 below Fahrenheit are the same. So 40 below, freezing cold. You can die. If it's windy out, you'll get frostbite on your face in a matter of minutes. So this is full-on parka weather. Yeah, it's the type of weather where if you're not careful, you can die whether you're intoxicated or not. So at this point, the police, was it the idea that the police, most of the police department was just finding out that, wait a second, there are some officers who have been doing this?

Or was it, oh, no, we've always known this and now everyone else knows it too? I think within the service, back in around 2000, I think I would characterize it as a mature police service in the sense that the average age of the officers and the years of experience was a little bit older. You know, they ran their, they did their business the way they did their business. They weren't under a lot of scrutiny. So just within the police service, they were trying to figure out, well, who was working that night? Who was in that particular sector of the city? Is it conceivable that they would have dropped them off? How widespread is this? On February 7th, two constables for the Saskatoon police force,

Dan Hatchin and Ken Munson, admitted that they'd picked up Daryl Knight, driven him to a remote area, and left him there. Three days later, they were suspended with pay. And then, the Saskatoon police chief announced he was ordering a homicide investigation into the deaths of Rodney Nastus and Lawrence Wegner, and another investigation into the claims made by Daryl Knight. The Saskatchewan Justice Department called in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to take over the investigations. Dan Zekreski remembers feeling like the whole thing was starting to explode. I can remember driving home in my car and seeing police cars and being nervous, thinking, are they following me because I'm doing this story? Have we uncovered this

horrible practice that's been going on. It was an awful experience. And trying to think, how far back did it go? I mean, even something as simple as, well, simple is maybe the wrong word, but when I was doing the research on Lawrence Wagner, you know, trying to do the death by misadventure story, going back in our files and finding out about Rodney Naistus, which had happened like right at the same time.

And I had just never connected the dots because it just seemed like another freezing death. And then all of a sudden you have two First Nations guys found frozen right in the same area of town, right on the same weekend with Daryl Knight. It was terrifying. Like, it just seemed like we went from nothing to anything was possible. I love you. your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark

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Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Is there any thought about how many people were taken on these Starlight tours? My gosh, once we broke the story, the phone lines just lit up from people in the First Nations community calling. And not just within Saskatoon, from around the province, saying, oh yeah, this happens all the time. But nobody ever believed us when we told people. You know, we're socially and economically disadvantaged First Nations people being taken out by the state, by the representatives of the state.

You know, who's going to believe us? White reporters aren't going to believe us. That was just sort of their world. Dan Zekreski remembers that one day his colleague, Les Perrault, was going back through the newspaper's archives, looking for mentions of freezing deaths or First Nations men found in remote areas. I remember vividly sitting at my desk in the Star Phoenix newsroom, and lo and behold, he got back to 1991.

And I'm sitting there, and he just sort of makes this noise of great surprise. And I turn and look at him, and he goes, Meet Neil Stonechild. And he turns around and holds up our scrapbook and there was the page one story on, you know, family concerned with teen's suspicious death. And it was all there, all the elements of the concerned families, the disturbing set of facts,

were all there basically a decade earlier. While the Saskatoon Police Service was under scrutiny, there was one man inside the police service who was doing a sort of investigation of his own. And being a northern Ontario kid, very respectful of the cold and its power. It's a very powerful thing. It just bugged me, like, how did this kid end up there?

And I thought, well, when I get back to work, I'll find out what's going on. This is Ernie Lutet. At the time, he was a constable for the Saskatoon Police Service. When you started with the Saskatoon Police Force, how many First Nations officers were there? There was two ahead of me. I was the third one. So, and what percent would you say that was of the full force? One percent. There was about 350 officers, I think, when I started.

And it was the same pretty much across the boards. I think there was maybe 10 or 15 women at the time with the Saskatoon Police when I got hired. There was one Asian-Canadian. There was one African-Canadian. And that was about it for us. The rest of the guys were white guys, lots of farmers, lots of farmers, kids, lots of hockey players. And I chose to work in the places in Saskatoon where the First Nation population was really high. And I just became an identifiable person.

You didn't have to like me, but you knew who I was, and that made such a difference. So I ended up pretty much sticking in patrol for my entire career. Ernie Lutet was familiar with 17-year-old Neil Stonechild and his 14-year-old brother, Jake. They were both Sato First Nations members. The Stonechild brothers had had multiple run-ins with the police for petty theft, drinking, and breaking probation.

Both boys had spent time in youth detention centers. Ernie found it very odd that Neil Stonechild would be found by himself in such a remote area, wearing only one shoe, when the temperatures were so far below freezing. The local paper reported that his blood alcohol level was well above the legal limit, and his cause of death was listed as hypothermia. He was last seen five days before his body was found. Ernie wanted to see what was in the Saskatoon police file, which he wasn't supposed to be looking at because he wasn't a detective. He looked it up anyway.

I went back to the police station and found the file number on the computer. And against regulations, I had the girls pull the file because I had no involvement in it. The girls from Central Records, the ladies from Central Records. And they pulled it for me. And because it wasn't my file, they didn't want to be caught reading a detective's file, especially on a sudden death, because sudden deaths and homicides were supposed to be really not perused by patrolmen,

because in case you learned something you weren't supposed to learn or whatever. Ernie made a photocopy of the file and took it home with him. And I read this report. It was about 26, or I can't remember how many pages, 27. It wasn't very long. Most of it's just your initial responding officers and all that stuff like that. And I get to the investigation of it. And it was

concluded. The investigator concluded that Neil Stonechild had wandered, was going up to the adult correctional center to turn himself in on some outstanding warrants he had. And I knew right off the bat that that was ludicrous. For one, he was a young offender in Canada. Young offenders at 18 and under. And they don't get housed at adult institutions. So it basically said that he was walking to the wrong facility to turn himself in and he froze to death. Basically, that was the conclusion.

Ernie went to see Neil's mother, Stella Bignall. The last time Stella had seen Neil was the night of November 24th. Five days later, the police showed up at her door and told her his body had been found. She told Ernie that she couldn't get any updates from the police and that she couldn't get anyone to give her back her son's belongings. She felt like no one was listening to her.

Ernie says he made up his mind that he was going to try to help. First, he went to his staff sergeant. He says that didn't go well. He was told to speak with Sergeant Keith Jarvis. Sergeant Jarvis had been with the Saskatoon Police Service for 24 years, and he had been in charge of the investigation into Neil Stonechild's death. He'd closed the file. And I went into Sergeant Jarvis's office, and it went bad from the minute I walked through the door. You could tell I was the last person he wanted to see. What did you say when you walked in?

I said, I have information about the death of Neil Stonechild, and he was instantly angry. He says, what are you doing meddling in this kind of thing? And I went on for 45 minutes and basically told him I didn't know what I was talking about, that I shouldn't be meddling in things I don't know anything about. Nothing I can remember about that meeting was even remotely good. There was no thanks for bringing this information in, you know, look into it, blah, blah, blah. Nothing. Just 45 minutes later, he knew what

my concerns were. He pretty much told me to keep my nose out of it, that things could happen to me. And that's such an open statement, right, that things can happen to you. And when you're a cop, it could be a lot of things. It could be you could be sidelined into a front desk position. You could be, you know, who knows, right? Anyway, it was, so I left there and I was incredibly frustrated. I thought, well, you know, there's no way they could not do something now. I'd given them all the information I had,

you know, whether it was hearsay or not, it was still worthy of them having a look at it. And I thought they're going to contact Stella and at least reopen us or take a second harder look at her, at least a supervisor would. But I went back and seen Stella my next shift, and she said no one had been to see her at all and that nothing had changed.

And I said to her, I said, if I was a white kid, or the son of the mayor, I said, I'm sure this wouldn't be closed, and, you know, that you'd be treated better. And it was just, to me, it was such poor, poor policing. A few months after Neal Stonechild's body was found, the star Phoenix ran a story with the headline, Family Suspects Foul Play, Police Say Every Avenue Investigated. That was the article that Dan and his colleague, Les Perrault,

found a decade later when they were digging through the paper's archives. They decided to put Neil Stonechild back in the newspaper, on the front page, nearly ten years after his death. They put his picture and his story just above a story about the suspected role of Saskatoon police officers in the deaths of Rodney Nastus and Lawrence Wagner. Inquests were just getting underway into those cases, and juries would end up concluding that the men died of hypothermia, but failed, quote, to determine the circumstances leading to the deaths.

In the case of Daryl Knight, the man who had survived being dropped off by police, an all-white jury, seven men and five women, found Constables Dan Hatchin and Ken Munson guilty of unlawful confinement. They were sentenced to eight months in a low-security correctional facility. With all this going on, there was a lot of renewed interest in the circumstances surrounding Neil Stonechild's death. Federal police started looking into it. But there was a problem.

No one could find the police report from the initial investigation in 1990. The file had been purged. It was a rumor at first, and I didn't pay attention to it because there were so many rumors going around at the time. So I'd heard that the file had been purged in a routine purge of files 10 years or older in the Saskatoon Police Service when they were trying to free up space in our old police station.

So I got interviewed a whole bunch of times because by then they'd learned that I'd had information about it. So I had my notes, all the notes I had, and I showed it to them. I showed them to them. I got interviewed by the RCMP several times. And all during this, while this was going on, of course, Saskatoon Police became the kind of focus of the national attention in Canada.

And, of course, there was accusations of racism, murder, and all these things. The RCMP is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada's federal law enforcement. Ernie says he was willing to talk to them. The case had been bothering him for years. He remembered his conversations with Neil Stonechild's mother and brother and remembered thinking that something didn't seem right. And then, one day in 2001,

Ernie was looking for something in his basement, going through old boxes, when he opened a box that he hadn't opened in ten years. And then what's sitting there but a copy of the Neil Stonechild report. You had forgotten that you saved it? Yeah. I had it in my posse box. We used to call it our ticket box for so long, and I took it out, and I just brought it home, and I put it in my barrack box,

and it was the only report in existence. And I called the RCMP guy right away, and I called our deputy chief in the Saskatoon Police Service, and got in my truck, drove downtown, gave it to them, and they photocopied it. What were you thinking? Were you thinking, you know, thank God I saved this, or were you thinking I'm going to get in even more trouble now?

Yeah, I thought I was going to be in trouble, actually, because, you know because we weren't supposed to take reports. But this one always bugged me, so I always kept it. Yeah, I kind of felt in jeopardy. There was a few times through this whole course of all this, I felt in jeopardy just for breaking the rules

or whatever the case was. But this one here, I knew when I found the report that it was going to change things for me. It was going to change things for a lot of people. But I was happy in one respect that I was trying to articulate what my concerns were to the RCMP and stuff like that.

And there it was in black and white. Ernie was able to produce original documentary evidence that just showed how badly the police service had screwed up that investigation. He played an incredible part, and he had an insight into how it wasn't handled. In February 2003, Saskatchewan's justice minister announced there would be an official inquiry into the death of Neil Stonechild. The inquiry started in September. There would be 43

days of testimony and 63 people would testify. So a lot of work in the inquiry went into trying to establish or come up with a set of facts on what happened the evening that Neil Stonechild went missing. And again, this was happening at a time in the police service when we didn't have in-car cameras, we didn't have GPS units in the cars, so it was difficult to have kind of an objective standard of who was where

and when. According to the original investigative report, the one that Ernie had photocopied and had been filed by Sergeant Jarvis back in 1990, no member of the police force had any contact with Neil Stonechild on the night of his death. But during the inquiry, Neil's friend, Jason Roy, testified that he'd seen Neil in a police car that night. Jason said Neil had been yelling, Help me, these guys are going to kill me. Jason Roy testified he'd told Sergeant Jarvis about seeing Neil in a police car. But none of this made it into

the report several of Neil's family members testified that they'd seen gashes and bruises on Neil's face at the funeral and marks on his wrists Ernie Luttit testified for two days what did you say when you testified I was so so, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, I soundly criticized the Saskatoon police and their investigative procedures and how Neil Stonechild's death in particular was investigated. I talked about the environment back then and the way his death was investigated was awful. And the way his family was investigated was awful. And the way his family was treated was awful.

Did anyone say, you know, your turncoat or you don't do that to... I'd say most everybody that I worked with, like my generation of officers, were supportive, all right? Some of the older cops were not. But I don't want to paint all those guys with the same brush. There was a lot of good police officers back then. It's just I hardly, I suppose,

because where I was working, I dealt with more of the ones that weren't but yeah lost friends, made friends even you know I think that self-preservation thing kicked in, a lot of police just

didn't want to talk about it and even years later, for me me now, there's still police officers retired that say he should quit talking about this Neil Stonechild thing, right? And for a while, you know, I'd think, well, are they right?

Should I stop talking about it? And then I thought about it. No, it was an important story. And at the end of the inquiry, I'm kind of skipping too ahead here, but at the end of the inquiry, Justice Wright, who had overseen the inquiry, released his report.

It was five months after the inquiry ended. And my wife and I were sitting at home and the provincial minister was releasing it, and Justice Wright stated that he believed that two Saskatoon police constables had Neil Stonechild near custody on the night that he died. And it was shocking. Here's Dan Zekraski. They lost their jobs. There was never enough evidence to lead to criminal charges. But they were tagged as the guys who had, for lack of a better expression, killed Neil Stonechild. And not everybody believed it.

The police association, the chronology that was put together. It was a tough set of facts all around. But these fellows, you know, we look back on it, they paid for the sins of the Saskatoon Police Service in Neil Stonechild's death. I think the really damning part of the Stonechild inquiry, though, was when the family came forward, how the investigation was just blown off. There was no investigation. And that became a real systemic issue. Justice Wright called Sergeant Jarvis' investigation superficial and totally inadequate. He made a series of recommendations to the Saskatoon Police Service. They included in-depth training about race and that the province, quote, establish an introductory program for Aboriginal candidates

and candidates for minority communities for police services. Do you think that the deaths would have been investigated earlier if it hadn't been First Nations people? I don't know. It doesn't, you know, probably, I'm hesitating because it doesn't speak well for media as well. Certainly within the First Nations community, there was a sense that, oh, you're just waking up to this now. It was an eye-opener for a lot of people, myself included.

I think this will be the first time that most people in the United States will have heard about this. In June of 2003, then-Police Chief Russell Sabo apologized on behalf of the Saskatoon Police Force. He also said, quote, It's quite conceivable there were other times. He said that in 1976, an officer was disciplined for driving a native woman to the outskirts of town and abandoning her there. In 2016, Dan Zakreski was contacted by a college student trying to write a paper on the Saskatoon Police Service. The student told Dan he couldn't find anything about the Starlight Tours

on the Saskatoon Police Service's Wikipedia page. And when he checked back, he found out that it had actually been edited out. Apparently that's one of the features of Wikipedia, is you can see the edits. And he did some digging, and we verified this, that the Starlight Tours section had been edited out by somebody at the police station. Now, what we were able to determine was that the police were sort of caught dead to rights. They acknowledged that, yes, the IP addresses as to where these edits were done trace us back to the station, but they were never able to determine who or where in the station happened. Their internet logs were wiped every 30 days

just because of the amount of traffic. So they admitted that somebody in the station, for whatever reason, had decided to take that particular part of their history out. And it was very embarrassing for them because, you know, you're 16 years past the inquiry and all of that stuff, and yet there was clearly still people within the station who just didn't want that to be known.

We contacted the Saskatoon Police Service for this story and received the following statement from the current police chief, Troy Cooper. All recommendations made as part of the inquiry into Neil Stonechild's death were implemented by the Saskatoon Police Service. There's been a great deal of change within the service over the last 16 years, including training, recruiting, and relationship building with members of the Indigenous community. We continue to look for ways

to strengthen those relationships. The majority of our officers currently serving were hired after the 2004 inquiry and after the changes were implemented. Our service supports calls for an independent oversight body. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our assistant producer. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Michelle Harris. Thank you. studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best shows around, including brand new shows like This Day in Esoteric Political History. Each episode takes one moment that happened that day in our political history,

some well-known, some more obscure, and discusses what lessons it has for this moment. It's a show that tries to give a little historical perspective to these very odd times. And each episode is 10 minutes long. It's hosted by Jodi Avergan, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, and historian Nicole Hemmer of Columbia. New episodes arrive every Tuesday and Thursday. Go listen. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. From PRX. look better in adults. Effects of Botox cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing,

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