CHAPTER
10
Wilma Brown had never been so happy. Tomorrow, she was leaving Calgary with her husband and their two teenaged boys for a vacation to see her relatives in Trinidad, her birthplace. Her folks in Trinidad in the West Indies were just as excited. They couldn’t wait for her to arrive.
Les Brown, Wilma’s husband of 16 years, went off to work early that morning as he always did. Today he was happy. In just a few hours he’d be on vacation, relaxing on a beach in Trinidad under a tropical sun, far away from the ice, snow and wind chill of Calgary. At 7:30 a.m. the phone rang in his office. It was one of his sons, sounding extremely agitated and upset. Apparently, Mom hadn’t turned up for work, and she wasn’t anywhere at home. She had suddenly disappeared. It was the start of a nightmare for Les that would last for years, and it led to an almost unbelievable ending.
Wilma worked as a loans manager for the Bank of Nova Scotia in Calgary. Les checked there to confirm for himself that she hadn’t shown up for work. She hadn’t. He asked the neighbours. None of them had seen her. Growing ever more worried, he contacted her friends, but they hadn’t heard from her that day either. Finally, desperate, he reported Wilma as a missing person to Calgary city police. That was March 25, 1982.
Officers in the missing persons unit have heard all kinds of reasons why attractive women go missing. Wilma was 37 years old and definitely attractive. From all the inquiries police made, it was obvious she and Les had been happily married for 16 years. There had been no major problems between them in all that time, and she was a devoted mother to her two sons. But police had known such cases before. A wife becomes bored with her routine life and finds a new man who injects excitement into her humdrum existence. Police files were full of cases where “happily” married women had gone away with lovers. Often, police tracked down the errant wife. Once they were satisfied she was alive, safe and well, their job was done. If the wife didn’t want to go home, it wasn’t their job to make her go. She was simply removed from the missing persons list.
In this case, Wilma had taken with her the airline ticket for Trinidad and a suitcase full of presents, which she’d packed ready to give to her relatives when she arrived. She had left behind her extra clothing and all her valuable and beautiful jewellery.
In the first few days after Wilma disappeared, checks with the airport showed that she hadn’t used her airline ticket, but as she’d taken the presents with her, Les believed that she must have decided to go to Trinidad on her own. It seemed he was right when, six weeks after Wilma went missing, rumours circulated that she had been seen in Port of Spain, the island’s capital. Les contacted her brother who lived in the United States, and at the end of April the brother went to Trinidad. He searched all over Port of Spain for her with no success.
Les was desperately anxious. His two sons, aged 15 and 13, were taking the disappearance of their mother “very hard,” and he was sure the answer to the mystery must lie somewhere on the Caribbean island. When police were interviewing friends and neighbours as part of their missing persons inquiry, everyone said Wilma had been extremely excited about her upcoming visit to Trinidad. In July, three months after Wilma’s brother had searched in vain, Les travelled to Trinidad and scoured the island from one end to the other. He too drew a blank.
City police called in Interpol, as it had resources to hunt for people in other countries, but Interpol had no more success than Wilma’s brother or Les. As the efforts to find Wilma dragged on without results, it was too painful for Les and the boys to remain living in Calgary in the house from which she had disappeared. To make it easier for his sons to cope, Les moved them to North Vancouver.
By September, when Wilma had been gone for six months, police decided a new blaze of publicity might prompt someone to come forward with information. One story appeared under the headline: DISAPPEARANCE BAFFLES POLICE—DEVOTED MOTHER VANISHES. Constable Bob Hancock, the co-ordinator of missing persons, said foul play wasn’t suspected, but it was “out of character” for this religious and devoted mother not to have contacted her family in all this time. It ended with a carefully worded appeal from Hancock, which gave a clue as to what police really thought had happened. He asked for anyone with information to contact Calgary police. “Her location will not be revealed to her family by police if she requests it to remain confidential,” he said. Here was the way out for anyone in whom Wilma may have confided. If she had a new life somewhere else that a confidant knew about, he or she could tell police, and Wilma’s secret would remain intact. At least then she would no longer be a missing person.
In January 1983, ten months after she disappeared, Wilma’s missing persons file was handed over to the city police homicide unit, almost as a routine step. Staff Sergeant Ray McBrien, the head of homicide, said his squad was now dealing with the case because the missing persons unit “has done everything they can, but can’t trace her.”
In the next few years, Calgary’s homicide unit was busy with scores of murders, shootings, stabbings and beatings, but they had nothing new in Wilma’s case. She had dropped out of the newspapers for six years, forgotten and just another name added to the long, sad list of women known to be missing across western Canada.
But on April 8, 1988, something amazing happened. Police officers descended on a copse of trees on a remote property many miles north across the Saskatchewan prairies. They were obviously preparing to go digging among the trees. What was most peculiar was that here in Saskatchewan two of Calgary’s top homicide detectives were in charge of whatever was taking place. A shovel dug into the earth struck metal only a foot under the surface. Carefully, the soil was scraped away from the metal, and in a few hours the police had retrieved a fridge from under the ground. The detectives believed they had found Wilma Brown in this lonely field, 16 kilometres northwest of the farming hamlet of Shellbrook and 275 kilometres north of Saskatoon. The fridge was opened in the medical examiner’s office in Saskatoon, and they found a woman’s skeleton inside, tightly wrapped in plastic. A forensic pathologist later confirmed the skeleton was all that remained of Wilma Brown.
How did the Calgary detectives know where their crime scene was? Who told them about the exact location amongst dense trees on a remote parcel of land hundreds of kilometres away from Calgary? Who told them to look for Wilma’s six-year-old gravesite in another province?
The dramatic breakthrough had begun two days earlier and two provinces away in British Columbia. A dishevelled wreck of a man, a bum from skid row, smelling badly and looking frail and sickly, walked into a police station. He’d been beaten up and robbed, and he looked badly battered. He started by reporting the robbery—then he started talking about something else. He told an amazing story. He said he could tell police where the body of a woman was buried. Not only was she buried in a shallow grave, but she was also entombed inside a fridge that was under the ground on a remote piece of land in northern Saskatchewan.
The police listened intently. It wasn’t the kind of story they heard every Wednesday afternoon. The drunk from the street seemed to know a great many details of this strange story he was telling. Finally, he said he could take them to the field and direct them to where the fridge was buried. The officers took the details and detained him. His name was Leslie Charles Brown, and he’d just informed them that the reason he knew where the body was buried was because it was his wife, Wilma, inside that fridge—and because he had put her there.
Now, after six years of inactivity, the wheels of justice slammed into high gear. Officers in the North Vancouver station where Les was being held contacted the Calgary homicide unit. Two Calgary detectives travelled west on Thursday, fetched Les and escorted him back to Calgary. Detective Wayne Lauinger of the Calgary police homicide unit and his partner flew with Les to Prince Albert. There, they picked up a team of RCMP officers and forensic crime scene investigators and drove northwest as Les guided them.
Many years later, Detective Lauinger recalled how Les had taken them to a secluded parcel of land, massively overgrown and dense with trees. Way back in the trees was a place where broken branches lay in a pile. It was a scrappy, rough wasteland of trees and rubbish and seemed to have been used as a dumpsite. A derelict old car was lying nearby, upside down and rusting into the undergrowth. They moved the old tree branches from where Les said he had stacked them six years earlier. “We gave Leslie the shovel and he dug. He hit the fridge with his first strike, it was only a few inches down under the surface,” said Detective Lauinger.
Then the crime scene investigators took over. From the moment the shovel hit the fridge, the whole area became a crime scene. The forensic officers began carefully sifting the earth away from the fridge until it became obvious there was no evidence to be obtained from the soil around it. Then they called in a front-end loader to dig the fridge out of the ground, its door still tied firmly shut with the heavy rope Les had bound round it all those years before. By the time police had finished at the scene that Friday, they knew that every word Les had told them so far was true. Les, then aged 49, was charged with improperly interfering with a dead body and kept in custody until his first court appearance.
Wilma Brown’s story was back in the newspapers, this time splashed across the front page under banner headlines: MISSING WOMAN BURIED IN FRIDGE—SIX-YEAR MYSTERY LEADS TO GRISLY FIND. Shellbrook RCMP constable Greg Heck filled in one small detail—Les Brown’s mother owned the acreage where the fridge was discovered. A few days later, Les was released on $1,000 bail, and he returned to his mother’s farm in Saskatchewan, where he lived until the case came to trial.
In the months that followed, forensic scientists, crime scene investigators, homicide detectives and Crown lawyers studied the evidence. Saskatchewan’s chief coroner, Dr. Diane Stephenson, said the cause of death couldn’t be determined because of the state of the “skeletal remains.” But finally it was decided there was enough evidence to charge Les with manslaughter. His trial opened on November 6, 1989, in Calgary’s Court of Queen’s Bench before Justice Russell Dixon. The prosecution outlined a story of homicide and a massive tangle of lies and deceit to cover up the killing. From the mouths of a host of witnesses, including those who’d heard Les Brown’s confessions, the judge put the true story together.
It started the night before the Brown family was to leave for Trinidad. That evening, Wilma told her husband she intended to leave him and stay in Trinidad after their vacation. When he and the boys returned to Calgary, it would be without her. The couple had argued in the bedroom over this. Wilma wouldn’t tell Les why she was going to leave him and the boys and remain in Trinidad. Les told her he wouldn’t let her back in the bed until she explained why.
He then pushed her away. Wilma went backwards over a bedroom chair, which toppled over. She struck her head on a sharp corner and began crying. Les went back to sleep. When he woke later, still in the early hours of the morning, Wilma had obviously climbed back into bed. She was lying there dead and there was blood on the pillow. Right then and there he decided to cover up Wilma’s death and make it look like she’d walked out on him. That’s what he told Constable William Braes on the day he walked into the North Vancouver police station and confessed.
Silently, without his two sons hearing, Les moved Wilma’s body into a storage compartment under the stairs in the basement of their northwest Calgary home and went off to work at his usual time. Then he feigned surprise when he got the first phone call in his office from his son saying Wilma had disappeared. Throughout the day he called neighbours and Wilma’s relatives and friends, building the deception that he was frantically searching for his wife who’d suddenly vanished. He even added to the deception by calling police to report her missing. Les kept up the charade for the first week, all the time knowing her body was down in the basement under the stairs.
After a week, it became clear to Les the body wouldn’t remain undetected much longer, so he moved her from the basement. He wrapped her body in plastic and placed it in a refrigerator. Amazingly, when he found he couldn’t lift the fridge with Wilma inside it, he went and fetched a neighbour. He explained that the fridge had broken down and he needed help to carry it to his truck, so he could take it to be repaired. The neighbour was only too pleased to help, and in no time the fridge, with its door roped shut, was on the truck. The neighbour watched Les drive it off, ostensibly to the repair shop. Instead, he placed it far away from the house in a city storage unit for the next three months.
All this time, Les maintained the appearance of a distraught husband whose wife had disappeared. He even let neighbours know that he’d consulted a psychic, in the hope that assistance from the supernatural world would find Wilma. To prove how earnestly he was searching, he persuaded Wilma’s brother to hunt for her in Trinidad and eventually went to the Caribbean himself, ostensibly looking for her.
Les had told neighbours that when he saw how devastated his sons were without their mother, he decided to take them to their grandmother in Saskatchewan. That wasn’t the real reason. It was all part of the cover-up plan. His real purpose was that he’d decided an old acreage his parents owned would be an ideal site to bury the fridge and its dreadful secret. While the boys were with Grandma, Les took the fridge and secretly buried it. It took him hours with a shovel to dig a hole big enough. Then he slid the fridge off the back of his truck and dropped it in the hole, filled the hole and covered it with a pile of broken tree branches.
When the boys testified at their father’s trial, they both remembered the fridge going with them on the trip to Grandma’s farm. Each recalled that their father said he had to deliver it to someone in Saskatchewan when they got there, and they’d thought no more about it.
But their father thought more about it. After he’d taken the boys to live in North Vancouver, he couldn’t get the terrible secret out of his mind. The guilt that he’d killed his own wife and knowing what he’d done with her body plagued him every day. His appalling secret drove him to drink. Since the day she lay dead in bed beside him, he had never once spoken a word to anyone about what he had done. As drinking took over his life, his guilty conscience gnawed away at him. His lifestyle deteriorated, and over the years he slumped from being a successful businessman to becoming a pathetic drunk. Still, he kept his secret.
Then things got worse. He was thrown out of his apartment as his life spiralled downwards under the ever-worsening impact of chronic alcoholism. He lost 60 pounds, and finally, after six years of mental torment, he could stand it no longer. On that fateful afternoon of April 6, 1988, when he’d been beaten up and his life was at its lowest ebb, he walked into the North Vancouver police station and unburdened himself. Constable Braes told the judge he gave the appearance of a man who had “fallen from a successful position to a skid row bum.” He was gaunt, unshaven, soiled and smelled awful. “I got the impression the guilt had gotten the better of him,” said Braes.
The story poured out of Les Brown that day. “I just gotta get this thing straightened around, get it off my chest,” he said. “I just gotta pay my penance.” He said he’d covered up his wife’s death for the sake of his sons. “I didn’t want them to know that their daddy killed their mom,” he told police. “I didn’t mean to kill her. I didn’t even mean to hurt her.”
After telling police everything he had done with his wife’s body and leading them to the exact spot where they could find the buried fridge, Les was allowed to speak to his sons and tell them what he had done. His eldest son testified at the trial that his father told him he thought the death of his wife was “more or less an accident,” and that when he pushed her backwards she toppled over a chair and hit her head. The son said his father had staged the entire six-year cover-up for the sake of the boys, to save them from knowing what had happened. “He said he was doing it for my brother and me, so he could raise us and let us grow up.”
The judge didn’t believe there was anything accidental about it, or that the cover-up was aimed at saving the boys from the truth. He said the cover-up was to save Leslie Brown. The judge convicted Les of the manslaughter of his wife and of improperly interfering with her body, and sentenced him to six years’ imprisonment, four for the killing and two for burying Wilma’s body in a fridge.
In convicting Les Brown, Justice Dixon said he’d downplayed his involvement in his wife’s death when he confessed to police. “Brown did not fully disclose in his statement the severity in which he pushed his wife,” said the judge. “There is an intentional brutality.” But Alberta’s Court of Appeal thought the judge had gone over the top. When Les Brown’s appeal against his sentence was heard, his prison term was cut from six to two years. The three appeal court judges agreed with his lawyer, who had argued that the trial judge had based the six-year term not only on the facts, but also on the judge’s suspicion that something more than an accidental push had killed Wilma. He also claimed that the original judge hadn’t given Les enough credit for turning himself in and confessing when no one in six years had even suspected he had anything to do with his wife’s death.
With Les Brown behind bars paying his penance, the case left some crime scene questions unanswered. A decomposing body tends to smell terribly. How had he managed to keep his wife’s body concealed in the basement of their family home for a week without the boys detecting it? When he reported Wilma missing, police had visited the house to question him. Were his nerves so ice-cool that he could invite police inside, knowing his wife’s body was in the basement as they interviewed him upstairs? Luckily for him, police had no strong reason to suspect him and therefore no reason to apply for a search warrant for the house. And when he placed the fridge in storage for three months, where it obviously wasn’t plugged in, did no one detect any strange odours?
How could a father have nerve enough to drive his sons to Grandma’s house, many hours away, with a fridge containing their mother’s body sitting in the vehicle beside them? Les Brown did all these things and got clean away with killing his wife—except that his conscience haunted him. It took six years, but guilt reduced him to a wreck of a man before he finally confessed. Detective Lauinger said that police could have searched the area around those trees in Saskatchewan forever and never found where the fridge was buried. If Les hadn’t talked, the disappearance of Wilma Brown would never have been solved.