CHAPTER
2
It was all gossip and tittle-tattle. People said the old man at Number 662 had been done away with and his bones buried in his backyard. No one had any proof to take to the police, but in 1980 it was probably the best gossip in the whole of Medicine Hat.
Over the years since then, the old lady living at Number 662 had moved away to Pincher Creek, and new people had moved in. By then, the gossip had been elevated to persistent rumour. The old house was bought and sold a few times. Each new owner eventually came to hear the old rumour, but took no notice of it. The backyard had a vegetable patch and a profusion of flowers in the borders surrounding the fine lawn. One family even built a small playground for their children, with a little slide and a swing.
So it came as quite a shock when one day, 17 years after the gossip first started, something strange happened at Number 662. Quietly and without any fanfare or fuss, a few nondescript vehicles parked outside the neat little house, and a team of men moved in silently behind the high fence. They were police officers. When they’d finished digging, they had turned the infamous backyard, the source of decades of gossip and rumour, into a full-blown crime scene. They had found the bones the gossips always said were there.
Tadeus (Ted) Gawron and his wife, Sofia, had moved into Number 662 in the 1970s. They were a Polish couple who had met when they were both interned by the Nazis in a Polish concentration camp towards the end of the Second World War. In Medicine Hat they were known as a hard-working couple. Ted was a pensioner who had built a career working for Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), and Sofia worked in a large greenhouse in the city. They had four children, two sons and two daughters, all of whom eventually moved away, leaving Ted and Sofia living in the house alone.
By 1980, things were not going well between Ted and Sofia. They were both 63, and Ted’s health was seriously deteriorating. According to Sofia, they decided to separate in July and agreed on a division of their property. There was no divorce. Ted took his share in cash and was no longer seen at Number 662. Sofia said Ted had agreed that all his pension cheques should keep coming to the house, and that he was happy for her to continue cashing them.
It seemed like a perfectly ordinary separation, one repeated hundreds of times in every city. Couples find they can’t live together any longer; one of the partners moves out, and the other stays in the house. After some time, Sofia tired of living at Number 662 on her own and decided to move west to Pincher Creek, where she would be nearer some of her children. She had a giant “moving-house” garage sale, sold the house and moved away. She settled into a quiet, solitary life in Pincher Creek and seldom spoke of her husband, who she said had left her.
Sofia wasn’t talking much about Ted, but back in Medicine Hat everybody else was. People didn’t buy the story about old Ted simply leaving home as part of a separation. They said he’d disappeared, vanished off the face of the earth. More precisely, he’d disappeared under the face of the earth, said the wagging tongues, buried in the backyard of Number 662.
There was plenty of fuel for the gossip. Shortly after Ted disappeared, neighbours noticed that Sofia had a high fence built around the yard. They could hardly help noticing it, as it was reckoned to be the highest fence in Medicine Hat. It was built of six-foot slab boards and was topped with barbed wire. “She put braces up to support it with two rows of barbed wire,” said one neighbour. “It was like the Berlin Wall.” All the neighbours asked themselves the same question: “Whatever could a person be doing in their backyard that would warrant such a barrier to keep out prying eyes?”
They couldn’t see what was happening inside the yard, but they could see what was coming over the barbed wire. Thick, foul-smelling smoke rose over the fence for several days. It was obvious something substantial and stomach turning was being burned in an old barrel behind the fence. And what was the significance of all that topsoil? One evening around this time, a great mound of topsoil was delivered and dumped into the driveway of Number 662. Sofia made numerous back-and-forth trips with her wheelbarrow, moving the whole lot into the backyard.
As the gossip flourished, passing remarks from Sofia assumed major importance, and people convinced themselves more and more that old Ted had been done away with. One elderly neighbour in her eighties remembered a most illuminating conversation she had with Sofia shortly after Ted had “left home.” For the previous two years, Ted, known to all as a helpful and hard-working man, had rototilled this neighbour’s garden, as it was too much for her to handle. Not knowing the Gawrons had split up, the neighbour went to the house to ask Ted if he could tackle her garden again that year.
Sofia told her he had left, and naturally the neighbour asked her when he’d be back. “He’s never coming home,” said Sofia. Soon, these words of Sofia were to be firmly embedded in the gossip. For the rumour mongers, Sofia’s sure knowledge that old Ted wouldn’t be coming home had nothing to do with him having left her. Everyone reckoned they knew the real reason. The clincher was Sofia’s huge garage sale. The neighbours noticed that Sofia was selling all of old Ted’s most prized possessions: his gardening tools, bicycle and fishing gear. If he had left her, as Sofia claimed, he would have taken all those items with him, said the gossips. No, she was selling them off because she knew he had no more need of them.
Although these rumours were rampant in the neighbourhood, not a word reached the ears of the police. It was one thing to gossip and whisper about such ghastly suspicions over a cup of coffee in the privacy of your own kitchen, but it would be too awful to voice these outrageous and scandalous accusations out loud. So, eventually, the neighbourhood around Number 662 settled back into its normal routine. The scuttlebutt only resurfaced on the occasions when the house was sold and new occupiers arrived. When one family moved in, they employed a professional landscaper to redesign the backyard for them. They’d heard the rumour and mentioned it in passing to their gardener, telling him to watch out for human bones in the yard. He didn’t find any.
While Ted and Sofia’s children understood their parents had separated, they grew concerned over the years that none of them had heard a word from their father. They knew he was still alive. After all, their mother was still cashing his pension cheques regularly. One day, the couple’s son Kenneth, who hadn’t had any personal contact with Ted since 1980, checked more carefully with his two sisters and his brother. Only then did the realization hit home that none of them had actually heard from Ted in the past seven years.
In 1987, Kenneth went to Medicine Hat city police and reported his father as a missing person. As soon as the Canada Pension Plan authorities were informed that Ted was officially listed as missing and hadn’t physically cashed his own pension cheques for the past seven years, alarm bells started ringing. They contacted Sofia telling her she had no legal right to be cashing the cheques. She stopped doing it. The CPR police also opened an investigation into where Ted Gawron’s company pension had been going.
Kenneth and the rest of the family spent the next four years trying to track down where Ted had gone. One neighbour, a truck driver who knew him back in 1980 before he disappeared, said Ted had talked about perhaps becoming a trucker. But he obviously never did. Kenneth checked everywhere. The various pension offices had no records of him for the past decade. The family contacted every known friend and every contact at CPR, but no one had seen him since 1980. Police missing persons inquiries across Canada turned up no trace.
Finally, in 1991, after Ted had been missing for more than 10 years and his children had searched for him everywhere for four years, Kenneth applied to have his father legally presumed dead. On November 5, 1991, a judge in the Court of Queen’s Bench at Lethbridge made it official. He declared Ted was no longer just missing—he was dead.
Another six years passed. Only a few old-timers still lived in the same neighbourhood that Ted and Sofia had left all those years before. Some of their original neighbours had moved, and others had passed away. Their old house had changed hands a few times over the years, and those presently living there had never heard of them.
By 1997, the old neighbourhood was modernizing as it approached the 21st century. Several new families moving into the street had their yards converted, adding swimming pools and even a Jacuzzi or two. So when a few vehicles pulled up outside Number 662 in May 1997, and a group of workmen went through into the backyard carrying heavy tools, neighbours assumed it was just another swimming pool in the making. The men worked in overalls and jeans, like any other crew of workmen, and turned up every day for nearly a week, about the average time it takes to build a swimming pool. Then they left.
But they weren’t workmen at all. They were police officers and crime scene investigators on an undercover operation, and when they dug up the backyard of Number 662, they found human bones. Because it was a suspected crime scene, the police had been keeping it all under wraps. At the time, it was the most closely guarded secret in Medicine Hat. Their covert investigation had begun five months earlier in January 1997. City police decided to look again at the Ted Gawron missing persons file, which had been unsolved for 17 years. Lead investigator Sergeant Mick Nieman and his partner, Sergeant Andy McGrogan, had started by interviewing anyone who knew Ted nearly two decades previously. They swore everyone they interviewed to silence, to protect their undercover operation.
After months of inquiries, they were pretty sure that digging up the backyard of Number 662 was the only way to solve the disappearance. But they still wanted secrecy, hence the few “workmen” in nondescript vehicles who arrived in the street without a police car or police uniform in sight. Not a word got out about what they’d been doing, and no one knew what they’d found. The human remains were sent to the medical examiner’s office in Calgary, where it was some time before forensic pathologists there were finally able to determine that the bones were all that remained of Ted Gawron.
Still, no one in Medicine Hat was any the wiser. Even the media had no suspicion of the drama that had played out unseen at Number 662. The veil of secrecy drawn over the affair had been a total success. That is, until someone sworn to silence could stand it no longer. Amazingly, the story didn’t break in Medicine Hat at all, but 400 kilometres away at the Calgary Sun, where a certain crime reporter had heard a whisper. He did his own digging and came up with an exclusive three-page scoop, revealing all.
On the day his newspaper story hit the streets, Medicine Hat police called a press conference and confirmed that officers had discovered Ted Gawron’s remains, chopped into pieces and buried in his own backyard. The gossips had hit the nail on the head 17 years ago. They were dead right all along.
Detectives hadn’t yet been able to determine how Ted had died or who had dissected and scattered him, and a full-blown criminal investigation was still underway, they said. Very soon police let it be known publicly that none of the four Gawron children was suspected of having any involvement in his death. Each had been completely eliminated as a suspect. But investigators weren’t making any comment either way about Sofia. Staff Sergeant Lou O’Reilly of the Medicine Hat police said no one had been arrested and no charges had been laid. He predicted it would be a lengthy investigation.
As the story was breaking, Sofia was where she had been for the past few years, in the long-term-care ward of the Crowsnest Pass Health Care Centre in Blairmore in the Rocky Mountains. Staff members were careful to let no one speak with Sofia, and wouldn’t talk about her. It was known that the facility was home to some of the most seriously ill seniors in southern Alberta, many suffering advanced Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Most required round-the-clock care and supervision. But, said the facility’s administrator, Pat Rypien, just because Sofia had been there for a number of years no one should assume she was confused or incompetent.
A dramatic breakthrough came in August 1997. Crime scene investigators thought they’d finally solved the mystery of how Ted Gawron had died. They discovered poison in the soil that had been kept as evidence from around the dismembered skeleton at the crime scene. Crown Prosecutor Darwin Greaves said it was a major find. It was thought to be an insecticide widely used in industrial greenhouses 15 to 20 years previously, at the time Ted Gawron died. It was now known to be so toxic that it had since been banned. Greaves pointed out that Medicine Hat was the greenhouse capital of the world, a comment that wasn’t lost on those who remembered Sofia had worked for years in one of the city’s industrial greenhouses.
No Alberta crime laboratory had the facilities to positively identify the mysterious poison, so Greaves ordered police to send it to an independent laboratory, even in the United States if necessary, to get it identified. Whatever it was, it was frighteningly toxic. “It’s the bad stuff. It would make you glow in the dark,” he said.
Forensic pathologists studied the bones again to see if any showed signs of being contaminated by the poison. Greaves wanted to know if there was evidence the poison had been the instrument of death for Ted. The answer came in October. Medicine Hat police travelled to Sofia’s bedside in the Blairmore nursing home on October 9 to charge the 80-year-old widow in connection with her husband’s death and with fraud over the pension cheques. It was immediately clear that they hadn’t found any evidence that poison had killed old Ted, and there was no evidence that Sofia had any hand in actually killing him. She was charged with “offering an indignity to a human body by dissecting and concealing it.” It meant police were confident that after 17 years they probably had strong enough evidence to secure a conviction if the case went to trial. They believed they could prove that Sofia had dismembered her husband and buried the pieces in various parts of her backyard.
Sofia was also charged with fraud over $5,000 for claiming Ted’s CPR pension after he was dead. She faced a similar charge for claiming Ted’s Canada Pension Plan money after his demise, and a third fraud charge for claiming his Old Age Security money.
Medicine Hat Crown prosecutor Stephanie Cleary pointed out that no murder charge had been laid against Sofia as no cause of death had been established. The police allegation was that one way or another Ted Gawron had died. He was known to be extremely ill and may have died of natural causes, or it was possible some unknown person may have given him poison. But whatever had happened, Sofia had been faced with his death. Police were alleging that even if she had done nothing wrong prior to his death, what she did next was criminal. Instead of revealing his demise, which would cause his pensions to end, she chose to dismember and bury him and pretend to the world that he had left her and was still alive. His pensions would continue to roll in, and she could live off them. Police were alleging that their evidence showed this ruse was successful for at least seven years. This was why the body concealment and fraud charges were linked.
At a press conference, the police took the unusual step of thanking the neighbourhood around Number 662 for its part in the marvellous conspiracy of silence it maintained during the investigation. Staff Sergeant O’Reilly praised all the residents in the neighbourhood for keeping everything confidential. “Their tight lips and co-operation” greatly assisted the investigators as they made discreet inquiries at a critical stage, he said.
O’Reilly also singled out the current residents of Number 662 for their “total co-operation, patience, and understanding for all the inconvenience” caused by having police almost living in their house and backyard.
The occupiers of Number 662, Patsy Walker and her family, eventually did speak to reporters. She said the family had never felt uncomfortable that bones were found in their backyard. “The only thing that has ever haunted us is the media,” she said. After the story broke, the house became an object of fascination for reporters and voyeurs who repeatedly drove past it. “I feel very sorry for the Gawron family, but we’ve just been bystanders,” said Patsy.
In late January 1998, Sofia, who was then 81 years old and confined to a wheelchair, was wheeled into a Medicine Hat courtroom by her two daughters for the legal proceedings. In question was Sofia’s mental fitness to stand trial. Legal and psychiatric experts agreed she didn’t know what was going on around her and was unfit to go through a trial. Crown Prosecutor Cleary presented a vital report by Dr. Kenneth Hashman, the clinical director of the forensic unit at the Peter Lougheed Centre in Calgary. Legally, his report meant Sofia didn’t understand what was being alleged against her, didn’t know how to instruct her own lawyer and had no idea of what could happen to her as the outcome of a trial.
The judge accepted the report and on January 22, 1998, he declared Sofia unfit to stand trial. It meant she was unlikely ever to do so, as there was little likelihood her mental powers would improve in time. He ordered that she should continue living at the Blairmore hospital. He said he was satisfied the public was adequately protected by her being in there, and she didn’t pose any risk to anyone. Some people questioned why the law had gone after Sofia at all after 17 years. Cleary spelled it out very simply. “This is to demonstrate that justice will catch up with you, no matter how much time passes and no matter where you go,” she said.
As for all the gossips in Medicine Hat who could say, “I told you so” when Ted’s remains were found, one person summed it all up more accurately than any other. One of Sofia’s neighbours was an author. When the rumours were at their height, years before Ted’s bones were discovered, this neighbour was attending university. For her contribution to a short-story writing course, she penned a fictional story based loosely on local gossip. Only when Ted’s remains were discovered in his backyard, years later, did she realize how aptly she had titled her work. It was called “And How Does Your Garden Grow?”