The Current - When violence begets violence

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Ken Wyder grew up in privilege, as part of the prominent Vancouver family, the Bentalls. But he also grew up subject to his father's violent outburst and unpredictable rage. In his new memoir, Kill Not the Butterfly, he draws a straight line between those experiences, and his own problems with anger, infidelity and violence. 

One summer evening when she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna-Luk. I can't figure it out, but I do know that it was a violation. Then people started asking questions. What a creep. Who else knows about this? From CBC's personally, this is Agent Leila, the story of how a victim went undercover. So bring it on, let's go. Let's get a confession. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Some people called them the Rockefellers of Vancouver. The Bentils were the family that for decades ran Dominion Construction, responsible for a cluster of iconic office towers that anchor Vancouver's downtown. The family was a business dynasty, prominent philanthropists, but as in many families, there was turmoil under the surface. Ken Weider experienced that turmoil firsthand, the great-grandson of the original patriarch Charles Bentall,

Ken Weider had a childhood punctuated by his father's violent outbursts and unpredictable rage. And now, in a new memoir, he draws a straight line between those experiences and his own problems with anger, infidelity, and violence. That book, Kill Not the Butterfly, is a raw portrait of how patterns can repeat across generations. And just warning, we will be talking in this conversation about intimate partner violence. Ken Weider is in our Vancouver student. Ken, good morning. Good morning.

I kind of gave the brief sketch there in the introduction. But if you were to look out across the skyline of Vancouver, where would you see the imprint of your family? Well, I think from here I can probably see the sun tower. Yes, I can. So the sun tower is over 100 years old now. That was one of the first projects. My great grandfather was involved in. I can't see it.

But of course, the Bentall Center would be the core of the financial discharges. district four towers, actually five now, and I think there's a six on the way. In many ways, it's like the family helped build the city, right? Yeah, that's often been described that way in local media. What was it like growing up in that city knowing that? Well, I guess I felt entitled there, you know, there's that sense that we own this, yeah. And it was just sort of an eight, like, you know, grandpa up on the top floor with commanding view of the city. and the aura around my grandfather,

not my great-grandfather now, but my grandfather, Clark, Charles' son. So, yeah, he was a real dynamic person and really took the company to the next level. You say entitled, like you owned the town? Yeah, it just felt that way because the family had also built the church who went to, built a school I went to,

and so, yeah, that sense of this is all sort of family, you know. I think entitles maybe being a bit hard, but not the defense where you're talking. who knows me, but, yeah, just that idea that we are part of all this, really integrated and have built it. This book, I mean, tells that story of that building and also the cost of that building. And it opens with you describing one of your family's summer visits to your grandparents'

summer property, which was on an island on the BC coast. Yeah. And you go up and you and your siblings find some baby birds that have fallen out of the nest. What happens after you found the birds? Well, I think just a bit more. It's an idyllic place. And it really, I think I described it as being like Eden and with us in innocence as children running around and playing. And so we found these birds and we were really excited just thinking, oh, we can, you know, there are our pets or we can look after them.

But also they're so fragile and vulnerable. We brought them inside and found a shoebox and some tissue. And then we were all, you know, trying. How can we look after them, right? And mom sort of joined in with that. And then dad entered the room and said, oh, you know, you've touched them. They won't survive. Their parents will reject them.

We have to prevent them from suffering. So he took us outside and it was sort of like a ceremony we had to watch. I really didn't understand what was going on until he started, he took a shovel, dug a small hole, put the birds in it, and then started ramming the shovel down on these. Little chicks killed them. Made us watch, like close. What did you learn about your father from that story? You say that in the moment you didn't understand it.

But when you think about it, what did it tell you about who your dad was? Well, I guess he had the keys to life and death. He was all powerful. Yeah, I think, well, I also write at the beginning there that I really didn't process. I didn't, I was, this is part of the book's journey, is trying to find, And what did I feel? Because I remember it visually. I don't recall feeling much of anything.

I was frozen. What was the place of emotion in your family? One of the lines in the book is that if you were hugging your grandfather, it was like hugging a plank. Yeah. And distinguish that. That was my grandfather or my dad's side. Not Clark Vantel. He was very warm and effusive.

Yeah. So, but there's definitely was that sense of emotional repression that even in the Bental side about certain things we've don't talk about or there's, you know, just a certain dignity that has to be maintained. What did that look like maintaining that dignity? Hmm. Well, we dressed well, drove nice cars, went to a nice, clean church, I mean, you know. That was on your, your mother was a Bentel? Yes.

What was it that drew her and your father together, do you think? Well, I think, of course, mid-last century, you know, patriarchy, you still, Fulian Bloom in the business world. And she, you know, she's a smart woman and driven and, and I think has a real good sense of business acumen. And it was, she was, but there was never any consideration that she would be in the company. You know, she was expected to be a home, you know, home mother. Despite the fact that it's this, this incredibly powerful company, she was never, never seen to be part of it. Yeah, she was the oldest.

I mean, she did all change, but it was, you know, 30 years later when my grandfather was getting, old day. She was allowed to be a part of it. By then it was, you know, so much had been destroyed. But yeah, so she grew up, I think as a frustrated teenager, the oldest sibling going, you know, she's not even going to be a part of this. So I think when she met my father, who was very aggressive and dynamic and intelligent and was a, you know, brilliant engineer. And I think he fit, oh, you know, I think this was probably for her all visceral. I don't know. I'm sharing her story. I don't know if this would be it. But I think he could live out. what she couldn't.

And he did really well outside the Bentall group and outside of Dominion. And then my grandfather hired him. And, you know, he joined the Bentall group and became a vice president. So, but that's when things started to actually fall apart pretty quickly for the family. Much of the story around your father, and again, it's what you inherit in some ways, is the violence that kind of surrounded his life. Yeah. And I want to get you to read a passage.

from the book in which you describe how your father's kind of explosions impacted your family. Can you read a little bit of this? This is from page 55. Yeah. One day, Mom was in the back folding laundry. She turned to face me.

Her eyes were bruised. Deep rings of purple and shadow. I froze. What happened? I asked. Your father hit me, she said. Then she turned back to the laundry and kept working. I didn't see the broken teeth.

I only heard about them later. Her injuries were brutal, but something her posture seemed both weary and defiant. And part of me wondered if she'd provoked them. She felt distant. I stood there, then quietly put away my things. For the next few weeks, Mom wore sunglasses whenever she left the house. Even on gray, cloudy days, nobody said a word. How would you describe the violence that surrounded your family?

You say that your father's explosions were seasonal. I repressed so much. I share other stories, too, in the book where I don't even remember them. And I was, you know, of remembering age, you know, I was 12, 13 or something. And some I do. But I think everybody just internalized it in their own way. Some of these stories are, I mean, they're hard to read. Stories.

Hard to write. I'm sure. Him hitting you, he makes, what he makes you dance in the same. snow on Christmas morning? Yeah, yeah. When we are probably only five or six years old, me and my older brother, Danny, yeah. You have to stand in front of him, and this is a different occasion, but you would have to stand in front of him on a regular occasion, and what would you have to say to him?

Well, he would ask, what are you? And we would say, spoiled. And he would say, spoiled what? And we would have to reply, spoiled rotten. How do you understand that? How do you understand why your father did what he did? I know enough about his own childhood to know there was some real damage done there. You mentioned about mom hugging his father, who was like a plank.

He was very cold, his father, and was really harsh. It was a brutal man out of the depression with a hard spirit. And I think he really crushed my dad's spirit. And so I have empathy for my father. I mean, he's passed away. I never had anger for him. I don't know if that's a good thing. I think I should have been angry.

I mean, I did confront him later in life. But, yeah, I have empathy. I mean, he ended up all alone. All bridges burned. His life, you know, broke and just nobody in his life. And that's really tragic. So how do you think the wealth that surrounded your family shaped how your father's violence was handled and was seen by people in the family and outside of the family?

Well, I guess because. Yeah, Mum's side of the family has and had such a sterling reputation. And, you know, they're a great people. They've done more good than in this city. But I think to keep that up, right, I think for mom to save face or to admit, or maybe just her own, like I've recounted shame. Like, you know, humiliation, don't want to show that to the world. But do you think that, not that he got away with it,

but that he got away with it in some ways because of who the family was? That's a good point. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, mom could have just said, ended it. But for whatever reason, she was, didn't. She could have taken us to it out of the home and started a new life. When did that violence begin to seep into your own life? I remember rage, which I want to distinguish from violence because you can be raging without being violent. But, you know, I remember. raging and being violent, even when I was five, my sisters, this isn't in the book, but I recall my sisters were kind of tormenting me. And I grabbed a chair and they were in the bedroom and shut the door in my face, and I ram the chair at the door and it went right through, like the chair leg and that. And I recall that time being overwhelmed, not just with the rage, but what is, what did I do?

Who is this? What's this power in me, this thing? Because the room went quiet and the teasing stopped. So it's, you know, had an effect, right? Like, you describe yourself as a young person as, the word that you use is malevolent. What are some of the things that you did that would lead you to use that word in particular? I don't know. So I guess the idea of doing things that are really wrong for the sheer pleasure of it, like doing things for the sake of exercising power destructively. When does that sense of power and the violence that can be associated with it,

does that start to appear in your own relationships, for example? You were talking about and read that a little bit about your father and your mother. But what about your own relationships? Well, the first really serious one was my first girlfriend. You know, I was 16 and we had an argument. We'd been dating for eight months without anything. I think that kind of not really any anger on my part. And then that I exploded and grabbed her and shook her and she fell.

And that was the end of the relationship right there for her. And that would be the first, yeah, a real serious example of it relationally. You say that that behavior, in your words, crossed some threshold into the irredeemable. I wrote that. You did. Okay. Yeah, I guess it would be, okay, I've attacked somebody I love more than anybody and who's innocent, well, innocent in a sense that they don't deserve violence. And it's a woman.

And smaller than me, younger than me, more fragile. And I've gone and destroyed what I love most. That's what's irredeemable. And it was. It was the end of the relationship. How do you look back on it now in terms of not just what happened, but why it happened? I'm hoping to speak to her sometime in the next year. But I have compassion for me for all that was going on and all the example that had been said.

And she was up to tricks. I think she ended up with my brother for a brief. fit after that. And I think that was already starting. So there was root cause for the anger. Yeah, and all that was going on in the family, like the finances had collapsed. My dad was just so much trouble.

So I have compassion. Certainly as I look back on that. Compassion for yourself. Yeah, yeah. You said you wanted to talk to her. What would you say to her? I would love to hear her side of it, you know, to hear, yeah, and just hear what.

how her life's been to. I know, oddly enough, my daughter and her daughter ended up being friends in high school, so there was sort of that, and I did run into her in my work later, and just a very brief chat. And yeah, I care for her. You know, I think her husband passed away of cancer for years ago. One summer evening when she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna, Luke. I can't figure it out, but I do know that it was a violation. Then people started asking questions. What a creep. Who else knows about this?

From CBC's personally, this is Agent Leila. The story of how a victim went undercover. So bring it on. Let's go. Let's get a confession. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned your brother. And one of the things that happens is that your parents' marriage comes to an end. and your father and your brother moved to San Francisco.

Mm-hmm. And then your brother, Danny, dies in this accident. Mm-hmm. How did, when you look back on that now from a distance, how do you think that tragedy impacted you but also your father? Hmm. I don't know if it impacted him that much. I really think he was such a, I mean, I want to say this kindly,

but he was a complete narcissist and took, no responsibility for his major error. So I expect, you know, when Danny died, you would, I experienced no grief from him. And maybe he did in his own quiet hour. But, you know, I did have a number of meetings with him after him, spent some time with them. And there was, yeah, I think that was one of the, that was the big awakening for me, that he didn't seem to have any, and he certainly had no sense of compassion for the rest of us.

And that it didn't change him at all. Not at all. No, no. It was just another two. It was another event that he could use for leverage to kind of do the things he was trying to do with people and business. Yeah. How worried were you that you were following the same path as your father? And again, I said that in many ways the book draws a direct line between your dad's behavior and who you became.

Did you see that in the moment? Did you think I have to be careful because I'm going to end up like him? Yeah, I think the first incident where I really did. felt I had to take some stronger recovery action was I was been married for a few years. And one of my, my oldest son, he was only maybe one or two. And he was, you know, being difficult, but he was, he was a good child. But he wasn't, he was being difficult in the moment. And I blew up.

Like, and I, and I remember picking him up and just, I was raging. Now, I didn't hurt him physically, but that sense that I had been overcome by rage was so sobering. And I had a good community group of people I was part of back then. And I remember talking to some of them and going, what am I going to do? Like, I don't want to become like my dad. Well, a few of them had some good names for counseling, you know. And so that was, you know, the first time. Well, actually, it wasn't the first time I went, but it was the first time I went,

no, I'm going to specifically work on this issue on anger. I mean, that even turns up before you get married, right? Yeah. You and your wife meet with a pastor, and the pastor asks you to take a person. personality test. Yeah, yeah. What does the personality test show? That my hostility is off the scale or in the 90th percentile, which I was proud of getting a high mark.

Maybe not in that, but not in that. Well, you know, there's so few things that I was academically good at. Yeah. So anyway, you know, I did interpret it as, you know, oh, I think I read, this is in the 80s. I read hostility as meaning you're vigorously masculine and nobody should. F around with you, you know, that was, which I kind of liked. But, you know, there was concern, too. It was like, oh, this is, but not, you know, at that point in my life, actually things were pretty good. I, I'd had a few years of lived with a stable family in Calgary. And so I,

I think I had the illusion that it was all under control and I was getting better. There's another part of the book I wanted to get you to read, if you would. And this comes at a point where you and Anne, your wife, are in a business together, and the business has gone off the rails, and the debts are mounting. And that leads to, as it often can, a real sense of tension in the relationship. Do you mind reading this? Okay. There seemed to be no balance and no intermediary or warning signs of trouble,

just a tightening grip on the wheel of life, as if my survival were dependent upon my complete control of everything, and every waking moment. And then all it took was some incidental trigger and wham. I was raging. One day I shook Anne like a rag doll, my hands around her neck. She fled to another room and called the police,

though by the time they arrived, I had calmed and there was little to say. I was left with an official warning, the reprehensible residue of my nature, and the hopeless task of the next day. You write in the book that, describing yourself, You say I was clearly a monster.

Did you recognize that at the time? Again, hindsight and writing a memoir is one thing. But did you recognize that at the time? I was so shut down in so many ways, you know. Yeah, I think the shame was just so clouding. I don't think I had too many articulated thoughts. It was viscerally overwhelming my behavior or the way others, yeah, had to deal with me. How did you get to the point where you could start to look at that behavior and take responsibility for what you did and the harm that you caused others?

Well, I, of course, being the residue of my life in midlife, you know, where my main relationships are all broken or strained to the point of, I guess, I just being alone a lot, had some good friends at that time. Mom introduced me to Alonan, program for families of alcoholics. I went to hundreds of meetings for years. And, you know, you hear, in those rooms, you hear honesty. And that's probably something I hadn't, I couldn't be honest with some of this stuff. It was just so, but hearing other people's stories helped me to start, yeah, looking at my stuff. And then hearing principles. I mean, you know, spiritual and lifestyle principles all my life at church.

But here it was different. It was sort of more on the road and more gritty and real and people talking about their behavior and what they're doing to address it and getting simple tools to deal with the stuff day to day. And that was so much help. Yeah. These are stories that you didn't need to tell publicly. And yet you've written a book and here you are on the radio talking about this.

Why did you write the book? You know, that's changed over the years. In the book, I detail how 40 years ago when there was something said by an aunt that just triggered me, oh, she doesn't even know what's going on. I've got to write this down. And so that was the first incident to me writing. And, you know, I've done major rewrites and approached it from different angles every decade. And so I wish I could give you a nice soundbite answer.

and I'm not really sure. I think part of it is there's still so many people in my life who don't really know me. I don't really know or really knew what happened in the home. So there's that, that's a big drive too, because there's so much misunderstanding. The book mostly ends with me derelict. So it's not like this wonderful redemption story. It's, you know, here's the price. And, yeah, I really wanted to drive that point home.

This is, you know, this is what can happen. My dad's ending is just so tragic. And, you know, if you don't address your unhealthy masculinity, here's where you're going to end up. How do you deal with anger now? Well, it's just a daily signal. Like if I'm getting angry, even if I'm in traffic and I'm ready to step out for to do good.

It usually comes down to self-care. Okay, what's going on? Like, what, you know, I'm hungry? Am I tired? Am I lonely? what's going on. So I'm pretty vigilant about self-care. I have pretty simple routine.

I have a lot of exercise and I try and eat well and spend time with the grandchildren and do things that are, yeah. And you're able, through what you've learned, but also that honesty you talked about, you were able to kind of diffuse the bomb before it goes off? Yeah.

And through program, like 25 years ago, I've got some really good male friendships and one of them in particular. He's my best friend, and I give him acknowledgement in the book. You know, I'm on the phone with him or having a meal with him at least two or three times a week. And often it's just, okay, what's going on? It's really what's going on, you know?

Oh, yeah, I was doing this. No, no, Ken. But when you spoke to that woman, were you up and sort of – So there's accountability, right? Like I've got at least one really good accountable person. And that keeps you kind of on the straight and narrow. It certainly helps, yeah, yeah. Ken, I'm really glad to talk to you with this.

It's a hell of a story. Thanks for being willing. It's really difficult to speak about some of this stuff, I'm sure, but I'm really glad that you would. Thank you. I'm honored to be on your show. Ken Weider's memoir is called Kill Not the Butterfly. We reached him in our Vancouver studio. You've been listening to the current podcast.

My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.