Uncover - S19: "Run, Hide, Repeat" E2: On The Run

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Now a teenager living in Saint John, the secrecy and unexplained moves wear Pauline down. Eventually she graduates and starts a career in journalism thinking she can start to live a normal life. That changes in February 1988 when her mother Ruth says she’s finally ready to tell Pauline everything. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/run-hide-repeat-transcripts-listen-1.6682766 Sitting alongside Stan, Ruth’s secret shocks Pauline. Pauline realizes her life is in danger — and she will never look at her past the same way.

We know the news can be relentless and it's hard to keep up. On Your World Tonight, it's our mission to catch you up in less than 30 minutes. When news breaks, our reporters are there across Canada and around the world. We bring you context and analysis and sort out what's real and what's relevant. I'm Susan Bonner. I'm Tom Harrington. I'm Stephanie Skanderis. We host Your World Tonight.

New episodes every night, seven days a week. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. At one point, I remember we were, I think, grade 12, and you had a panic attack at school. You were shaking, and you were having trouble to breathe. Your breath was very shallow. Face was very red.

And, of course, tears and just crying and upset. And there were no cell phones. Robin Galley Marachek and I were close friends in high school. I thought you were a little wild. It was a draw, I have to admit, an attraction at first. We went places and you had gone through would make you a little more mature. But and at times you could be distant at times, for sure. I put walls up. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. I don't even know how to describe it. There was a bit of a disconnect. That constant sense of some unknown threat in our lives, the constant secrecy, it made me feel different from other people. It set me apart. And once again, that was having an effect on me.

In Winnipeg, it presented as depression. This time, it was acute anxiety. I went to emergency and the doctor said, you need to get more exercise. Yes, exactly. And that was not the case. And again, we now know why you were so anxious. I'm Pauline Dakin, and this iswick, where Robin and I went to high school.

I'm driving my producer Michael through familiar neighborhoods, showing him the places where this story unfolded. And this is this old place on the corner. I knew people who lived there. We used to hang out there and drink. Remind me how old you were when you moved here. I was in grade 8. I was 13 turning 14.

What a terrible time for a kid to have to move, eh? Like socially? Yeah. Well, it was a very different kind of place to go to, and so not where I wanted to be. Just as we'd moved suddenly, secretly, from Vancouver to Winnipeg a few years earlier, my mother, my brother Ted and I had once again followed Stan and Sybil Sears to a new town and a new life.

We arrived at night. I remember pulling into the parking lot of the Hillside Motel on the outskirts of the city. And that's where we lived for the first weeks, in a one-bedroom motel room with a pull-out couch, while Mom looked for something more permanent. You know, it was clear we'd really kind of, our circumstances had declined because we were going from this beautifully renovated old house to the houses we looked at when we started looking at houses there

were just sometimes quite horrifying. And I thought, what have we come to? And so eventually we got a nice little bungalow. But my anger continued to grow for a number of years, and I was acting out on that. How were you acting out? It was not long after we arrived in St. John that I managed to attach myself to, you know, the crowd that smoked and drank on the weekends and had bonfires at the

beach. And, um, you know, eventually we moved on to drugs and, you know, all those ways that you can act out. And for me, it was really about, I think, punishing my mother. See, you took me away from something good. Well, look at what you brought me to. It was showing her that this had not been good for me. I was angry to leave Winnipeg, but I have to say that kind of blossomed in brand new ways once we got to St. John. That trip to St. John started on November 1st, 1977.

I'd spent my last night in Winnipeg at a friend's house. Mom and Ted picked me up first thing in the morning and we started the long drive to New Brunswick. It was cold, cloudy. We didn't talk much that first day. Even Ted was pretty subdued. It all felt crazy. Mom had told us we'd be leaving a few months earlier, around the time Stan and Sybil Sears moved east. We asked her, why were we going? Had she gotten a better job? No.

She'd be working with Stan at his new church. Did we have a new place to live? No. We'd figure that out once we got there. The only reason we seemed to be leaving Winnipeg, a place that was finally starting to feel like home, was because Stan and Sybil were going. I think it was different in the sense that all my other friends up to that point, for the most part, both parents were still together. friends up to that point for the most part. Both parents were still together. Robin and I are catching up, recalling our time together as teenagers.

My life felt so odd back then. I wonder how it looked from the outside. So, no, I don't, I don't think there was ever a sense that there was something, you know, what's the word, nefarious or untoward or really, I mean, it was different, certainly. Stan was around a lot in those days, so Robin got to meet him and see his relationship with my mom up close. And like everyone else, she really liked him. He was just a big, kind, gentle man. And he would come in the few times he was at the house that I was there. He would just be easy and he'd chat with us and talk about school and what we were doing.

Yeah, some people I knew would say, would think it was strange that he would come over and hang out and drink tea with my mother. That didn't strike you as odd? No, it didn't. I don't know why. I think because he was the minister, right? Like, that's what ministers do. They look after their flock. And maybe it would have been different if Mr. Sears hadn't been married. Then we probably would have thought a little bit more about his relationship with your mom. St. John was where I really noticed a strange pattern in my mom's relationship with Stan. My brother Ted noticed it too.

Do you remember how much he was around? How often he'd be there when I'd get home from being out at night? Yeah, I can recall coming home a few times when he was there. I'm sure it was often, but I do recall the odd time. I'm sure it was often, but I do recall the odd time. And did it ever strike you that, you know, Mom was always crying and stuff? You know, Mom cried a lot. She certainly seemed on edge often.

Distant. Distant? No, not distant. I don't even know how to explain it. You know, there was always something else going on. Not never fully, never fully there, I guess. I don't know. It's hard to explain. I can't explain it. I think I know what you're trying to say.

Mom would never say why she was crying. Stan once joked that I must think he was being mean to her. The other thing I noticed is that there were often handwritten pages scattered on the coffee table. They looked like letters. Every time as I came in, Mom would wipe her eyes and quickly hide those letters. When I asked about them and why she was crying, she brushed it off. Eventually, I quit asking.

I was a teenager, busy trying to distance myself from my mom. And these letters, and why they made my mom cry so often, it was just another secret. just another secret. And what was your relationship with her like during that time? I would say it was, our relationship, it was rough. You know, she was trying to set rules, I was defying rules, she was very frightened for me. I, yeah, I was, you know, sneaking out the window at night to just get away from here.

I just wanted to be away. So, yeah, we, our relationship really went into decline. When you were acting out and rebelling, did Stan ever try to intervene? Like, did he ever try and, like, make peace between you and your mom? Yeah, well, one night I had snuck out of the house, and Stan followed me. Mom had obviously alerted him that I was doing this, and I had gone to my boyfriend's house, and the phone rang and it was mom saying bring her home and Stan was there when we got there and he was absolutely he was mediating the situation and you know mom was really angry at me and he was saying well now come on now everything's okay and I felt as in that situation as though he was my ally he was sort of trying to smooth things over between us.

This version of Stan kind patient understanding the peacekeeper That's the Stan most people knew, a kind minister taking care of the people around him. That's the Stan that Robin met at our house, and that's the Stan that spoke to his congregation every Sunday. When we got to St. John in 1977, Stan was busy setting up an adult daycare center at his church, Centenary Queen Square United. My mom was hired by the church to run that daycare program and later on a children's daycare too. The church is gone now, torn down a couple of years ago and redeveloped as condos. Michael Malloy and his wife were the first people to move into the condos in 2022. I came to St. John in 1978 to be the organist at Centenary Queen Square United Church.

And I stayed at Centenary Queen Square until they moved out of this building in, I think, around 2000. Michael and his wife have kept more than a few reminders of his old job in his new home on the site, which he's happy to show me. Oh, my goodness. Look at this. That looks like a pipe organ. Yeah. Duh.

Oh, my goodness. That's amazing. Wow. Wow. goodness. That's amazing. Michael and I head downstairs to the building's main floor lounge in what would have been the front of the old sanctuary, near the pulpit where Stan would have delivered his sermons. I'm surprised by how nostalgic I feel being here. This area, this is close to your mother's office where we are right now. Yeah.

And that would be Donna's office and Stan's office. Michael worked with Stan at Centenary Queen Square for eight years, and the two men became close. What do you remember about him when you arrived? eight years, and the two men became close. What do you remember about him when you arrived? When I came here for my interview in, would have been probably May of 1978, there were several people that were there, and probably the most unsuspecting, or the last person I would have suspected of being the minister was Stan,

because he wasn't dressed like a minister. In a lot of ways, Stan eventually became kind of a father figure to me. He was there when my parents' marriage dissolved. He was there for me at that, which was a very difficult time. He was there, he married us. My wife and I were married here, and he baptized our oldest daughter, and he was there for me when my grandparents died. He remembers Stan and my mom working together to make the community a better place. I thought this is what church should be, because it's a place for people to come to worship, but it's also a place where the church reaches out to the community.

It's also a place where the church reaches out to the community. So he was doing things that were innovative at that time that other churches, you know, 10, 20 years later were starting to pick up. Michael recalls that as much as Stan was trying to push the boundaries of the church's role in the community, going beyond sermons and preaching to set up food pantries and other services that were open to everyone, Stan was also aware of how those actions were perceived, how he himself was perceived. Stan had a Ph.D. in psychology. And we were talking one day and he said people didn't know that and the sign on the front of the church said stanley f sears ba and when he was in i think in vancouver he was counseling a member of the congregation and this person jumped up and said i'm leaving because you're you're

analyzing me and so at that point he thought, if his training in psychology was a barrier alienating him from the congregation, then, you know, he didn't want them to know about it. It's so interesting to hear Michael talk about his experience at Centenary Queen's Square. He had no awareness of the secrecy and tension that were so much a part of our lives. The eight years Stan spent at Centenary Queen's Square took me from age 13 to 21. Like lots of teens, I pushed back against the rules. I snuck out, smoked, drank, played around with drugs, but they weren't the only ways I rebelled. Ted and I had only seen our dad once since we'd left Vancouver. His lawyers had tracked us down

and dad had come to Winnipeg for a family meeting. It was awful. He was angry, furious that mom had taken us, and he wanted access to his kids for summers and every other Christmas. Mom was scared, afraid of what would happen during those visits, terrified she'd be forced to let us go. There was a lot of legal back and forthing. Eventually, an agreement was reached. It said Dad couldn't initiate contact. It was up to us. He had to keep his distance until we reached out to him.

As Ted and I got older, we wanted to get to know our father, and now, legally, Mom had to let us go. So when I was 15, I told her I wanted to visit Dad back in Vancouver. So that, like, that's ultimate rebellion, right? I guess like hanging out with your dad. I sure knew the right buttons to push. And that was like going to DEFCON 10. I'm going to see my dad.

And she would be so tense and anxious as I was getting ready to go. In truth, I was nervous to go, but determined. For the weeks leading up to that visit, mom was silent, tightly controlling her fear, I now realize. At the time, she seemed cold. I felt like I was being punished for going, that I was being disloyal somehow. But ultimately, her hands were tied. She had to let me go. At the airport, she hugged me, gave me some change. She told me, call if you need to, for any reason. For so many years, I'd seen my dad as the bad guy whose drinking had upended our lives. But that visit, he was sober.

And he seemed so benign, so eager to please me, to treat me. There were new clothes, entertainment, dinners out. And I always picture my dad, the first time I came back to see him, standing looking for me. And he hadn't seen me for a long time, but he spotted me. But before he saw me, he was up on the balls of his feet. He was bouncing and just excited. And I still picture that every time I come to Vancouver.

When I got home from visiting Dad, things between me and Mom were difficult. She seemed stiff, stressed, disapproving. I was defiant. Again, her reaction came across as coldness and it reinforced my impulse to rebel. What I didn't understand then was that she was terrified, caught between her legal obligation to let us do what we wanted and her unwavering belief that something awful might happen to us if we ever made contact with our father. It wouldn't be long before I learned why.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. is available now wherever you get your podcasts. In 1985, Stan and Sybil moved away from St. John to a new church, an hour outside of Halifax,

Nova Scotia. This time, it seemed clear that we'd be staying behind. At least I was. I was an adult. No one could secret me away to a new life in a new province against my will. And I found a calling of my own. Journalism. And it changed my life. Suddenly I could see a career ahead for myself. I started freelancing for a local CBC show, and then I got a job at the local newspaper. I loved it. I wasn't going anywhere. Ted was away at university, starting a life of his own, separate from Mom and I. My mom had finished raising her family and was looking for a new purpose. She'd been inspired by her work at the church in St. John and felt a calling to ministry. So mom went back to university and soon moved to Halifax to study theology.

And that meant she'd only be an hour from Stan and Sybil's new church. With some distance between us, I figured all the family secrecy was over. I decided to forget about the weird things and just try to live a normal life. I was 22, engaged to my boyfriend at the time, a guy named Terry. We lived in an old house in uptown St. John. I didn't really talk to Terry much about my past or the secrecy that had surrounded it. I was just trying to move on from it all, to will it out of existence by ignoring it. Instead, I focused on building a new life, burying myself in the work of renovating an old house. It was a nice thought, being free of the secrets, the fear. And for a while while life was good.

But it didn't last. It was February of 1988. I was at my job at the paper in St. John. I got a call. It was Mom. Mom said, you know how I've always said that someday I'll tell you what's been going on and this is it. Can you meet me in Sussex? So that was, she was in Halifax, I was in St. John. So it's like, okay, what is going to explain the craziness that we lived through?

What could possibly be the thing that I'm about to hear? And I was afraid because, of course, she sounded very serious, talking about, no, okay, come and meet me. And, of course, don't tell anybody. tell anybody. Mom asked me to meet her at a gas station just outside of Sussex, New Brunswick. When I got there, she asked me to get into her car, and then she passed me a note telling me to be silent, take off my jewelry, and put it in an envelope. I was used to strangeness in our lives but taking off my

jewelry seemed so bizarre. I knew better than to ask why I did what she asked. Mom started the car and headed toward a nearby motel called the Bluebird. It was right off the highway before this was Four Lane Highway. There was a little garage nearby. You could see there used to be all of the, like each letter of Bluebird was its own little lit up sign along the highway. You could see it as you were coming. Mom had a key and took me into one of the motel rooms. Stan was waiting for us. I was shocked. He'd retired.

By this time, he and Sybil had moved back to B.C. I thought maybe I'd never see him again. But there he was. We were happy to see each other and hugged. Mom made tea in the kitchenette while Stan and I caught up, and then we all sat down at a small table with our mugs. And that's when he and Mom told me why our lives had been so strange, why there were always so many secrets, so many unanswered questions,

those covert moves across the country. It all started with my dad, Warren. They told me he had connections to organized crime. Stan and mom called it the O for short. They said he was associated with some very dangerous people and those associations had put my mom, Ted and me in danger. And that's where Stan had come into the picture back in 1970 in Vancouver. What did you understand about why everybody was always coming after him? I had understood that Stan had helped somebody at some point and that that person had given him information. Ted wasn't at the motel that night,

but he had his own meeting with Mom and Stan later. They told us both the same story. Stan said that at some point years ago, he'd counseled a man who was involved with the mob. My dad and his associates had found out that Stan had learned things during those counseling sessions, and that made Stan a target. Stan said the man he'd counseled had been found dead, assassinated, and Stan described being attacked one night shortly after. During the fight, someone came to his defense. Someone who turned out to be involved with a federal anti-organized crime task force.

Those inside the task force were impressed with Stan's background. He was a trusted member of the community, a minister. with Stan's background. He was a trusted member of the community, a minister. He was an academic with a PhD in psychology, and he was a military man, a veteran. So they recruited him. Over the years that followed, he was promoted. He became a spiritual and tactical advisor

to the people fighting the mob. And now he was a top-ranking officer working for that secret arm of the federal government, living a double life as a church minister. They were trying to get Stan, and they were trying to get to Stan through Mum, and they were trying to get to Mum through us. He was the target, and she became the target because of him, and then we became the targets because of her.

Stan said the task force also discovered that dad had gotten Ted and I tangled up in it all too. Stan and mom told me how dad had set up money laundering businesses in Mexico and around North America. In my name and in Ted's, we were supposed to be brought into the O when we became adults. Remember there were all these businesses that were supposed to be in our names. What do you remember being told about that stuff? You know, all that, all I knew is that when, before I was born, he wanted mom to go to Mexico. This would have been in the day where I guess Mexico was just starting to sell land basically and allow foreign investment. And they saw a great opportunity to go over there,

but it would have been much better to have a naturalized citizen there. So they wanted me to be born there. And then, and that the best I can think of it. It was just a business thing. It was a lot to take in. My mom, Ted, and I had spent the better part of 20 years on the run from my father. Stan and mom described how my father was deeply involved in drugs, prostitution, guns, even murder. And Stan, a man I'd seen as a father figure, had a secret life, was part of a covert government effort

to fight underworld criminals. Like, do you remember what your initial reaction was to all this? Well, I mean, my initial reaction was, this is just crazy. How could this be? Why would my family be targeted like this? The Bluebird Motel is gone. All that's left is a vacant lot near an exit on the Trans-Canada Highway, just outside of Sussex, New Brunswick.

Michael and I are sitting in a car, talking about that night of revelations. Honestly, I just didn't know what to say. You know, who could believe this? And yet this feeling that, how can I disbelieve this? How can I not believe these people who are, you know, smart, solid people? And then, you know, the explanation and the convincing is going on all through this night. and the convincing is going on all through this night, you know, kind of tying all the pieces together for me.

Mom and Stan went back to the beginning, giving the backstory to so many of the odd events that had punctuated my life. That time we had to throw out everything in our fridge back in Vancouver, we'd gotten intel about a poison scare. Those times we'd miss school and work and spend the day at a bowling alley or in a park, there was an immediate threat to our safety. We had to be moved out of harm's way. I asked about the time we slept over at Stan and Sybil's in Winnipeg when Ted and I had been told that the Sears dog had caused the commotion that woke us up. Stan answered gravely. There had been a terrible fight. One of the closest calls they'd experienced, in fact. My father's men had stormed the house through the basement.

Luckily, Stan's team had gotten word and were in position, waiting. What happened next was violent. One of the O was killed. Stan looked stricken. It was clear he was still carrying the weight of it all so many years later. It was clear he was still carrying the weight of it all so many years later. So all of these stories that had kind of peppered, all these strange things that had peppered our lives, in that conversation suddenly had explanations.

Remember this? Well, this is what happened, really. And this was giving everything a context and making puzzle pieces fall into place in a way that somehow felt convincing, as crazy as it all was. Like suddenly there was an answer for pretty much everything. Yeah, all of my questions answered. So suddenly you understand if people are coming after you, why it should be a secret what you're doing and who you're doing it with. You understand why she would be so upset if I wanted to visit my dad, or frightened if I was sneaking out of the house at night, or, you know,

just so tense and worried about our safety beyond what a normal parent would be. So yeah, this was the answer to the secrecy. This was a story that explained all the money my dad always seemed to have and why my mother was so afraid of him. You know, she, as an abused wife, that makes sense, but it was beyond that and, and so afraid for us and, and why we would, um, do these crazy things as a family and disappear. How long did the conversation last that night? disappear. How long did the conversation last that night? So I got there in the evening and I would say we probably talked for five hours until late at night and finally Stan said okay this is a lot so go to bed and we'll talk some more tomorrow. and we'll talk some more tomorrow. But there was one more revelation to come that night.

Mom and Stan told me they were in love, and had been for many years. Stan was married. They didn't want to hurt his wife, Sybil, so they'd never been able to truly be together. Until now. And so they went into the adjoining room together, and I stayed in that room and went to bed. Of course, I didn't go to sleep.

You know, it's just my head is spinning. And part of that was how strange it was to suddenly be thinking of Stan and mom as a couple. And that did not feel comfortable. Stan and mom told me that they were finally going to be able to act on their feelings. And this was why they were telling me the truth now about my father and everything else, Stan and my mom had decided to disappear once and for all, together. And they wanted me to go with them. Next time on Run, Hide, Repeat. The next day Ted got a phone call saying that they were informed that, you know, your father's gang of thugs were coming to break my legs or something like this.

Like it was something crazy. Oh my God, how many crazy people did I interview? Half of them turned out to have a story and they were crazy because no one had listened to them for years so I came at your story in the same path just because it's crazy doesn't mean it's not true I went down to the police station and just said I need to talk to somebody it's an urgent matter

I'm sure this guy never saw it coming. You've been listening to Run, Hide, Repeat from CBC Podcasts. I'm Pauline Dakin. The show was written and produced by myself and Michael Catano. Graham MacDonald is our associate producer and sound designer. Roshni Nair is our coordinating producer. Thank you. of CBC Podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.