Joyce Milgaard’s faith in her son’s innocence never wavered

Opinion

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This article was published 21/03/2020 (1643 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If I had to tell just one story about Joyce Milgaard, what would it be?

Joyce, who died Saturday night after a lengthy illness, was certainly the author of many stories. She was truly a force of nature. She was a bulldozer in a cardigan sweater. A mild, grandmotherly figure with the heart of a street fighter.

It was spring 1989 when I was first invited into Joyce’s universe, although it was some months before I would meet her in person. I had been contacted by a young Winnipeg lawyer, David Asper, who said that he had a client who was wrongfully convicted 20 years earlier of murdering a Saskatoon nursing assistant, Gail Miller. David Milgaard was languishing in Stony Mountain penitentiary, forgotten by most of the world.

Asper made no mention of Joyce when he turned over two boxes of case files. He told me how a prominent national television journalist had worked on David’s story for months and then, without warning, walked away from the story. I was a very young and inexperienced reporter but even I could see the improbability of the case against David. No physical evidence, no eyewitnesses, no confession.

I was intoxicated with the story, but my editors were skeptical to the point of discouragement. I was losing faith and on the morning of the day when I planned to send the case files back to Asper, I got a call. It was Joyce.

She asked me how the story was going. When I started to equivocate, she asked to see me in person.

She was staying at a friend’s house, and had turned the basement into the command centre for campaign to free her son. Boxes of case files lined the walls. Heaps of papers — newspaper clippings, court transcripts, correspondence — seemed to cover every horizontal surface, even the floor.

We sat for about an hour and discussed the case. She didn’t twist my arm. She didn’t cry or make any kind of a fuss. She just told me exactly how long and hard she had fought to clear her son’s name. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney, who met Joyce outside a Winnipeg hotel in 1991, put it best when he recalled in an interview with the Free Press years later, “even the most devoted and loving of mothers would not continue their crusade for 22 years if there was any doubt in her mind.”

Many people who were drawn into Joyce’s orbit can describe a moment similar to the one I experienced right then and there. My doubts still existed but I was shamed by her lack of doubt.

Which brings me back to that opening question: if I had to tell a single Joyce Milgaard story, what would it be?

Over the years, I experienced moments of pure wonder watching Joyce in action. She was with me when I visited Gail Miller’s grave in a tiny cemetery outside of Saskatoon, walking directly from my rental car directly to Miller’s headstone as if she was drawn there by some unseen force. I was at the West End Cultural Centre with Joyce in May 1990 when she recorded “Please, madam minister,” a song urging then-justice minister Kim Campbell to re-open her son’s case.

If I had to tell just one story, it would be the morning of May 10, 1990, the only time I believe that Joyce got to meet Kim Campbell face to face.

In town for a conference, Campbell dashed off an elevator on the second floor of a downtown hotel only to find Joyce, her daughter Maureen and a throng of media. When Campbell saw Joyce, she took a hard left to avoid the trap. Campbell kept walking briskly away from Joyce, protesting that they were not allowed to talk because David’s case was still under consideration by her department.

And then she made another right hand turn and found herself in a corridor with no exit. In a panic, she pivoted and was forced to walk back past Joyce and the cameras like a movie star trying to escape a pack of paparazzi. She never did stop and talk to Joyce, and it was never clear this publicity stunt did anything to help David; nine months after Canadians watched a flustered Campbell fleeing Joyce, she turned down David’s first application for a new trial.

It’s my favourite Joyce story not so much because of what happened that morning, but because it did not shake Joyce from her mission. Most people would have been crushed by Campbell’s brush off. It only hardered Joyce’s resolve.

Consider that it would take another two years after that incident before David was released from prison on the advice of the Supreme Court of Canada, which quashed David’s conviction and ordered a new trial.

It would take five more years before Saskatchewan agreed to do DNA testing on semen found on Gail Miller’s dress, which confirmed that serial rapist Larry Fisher, and not David, was responsible for the killing.

It would take seven more years after that fateful morning at the hotel before Saskatchewan apologized for David’s miscarriage of justice. And nine years before David was paid $10 million in compensation.

It’s my favourite story because both on that morning at the hotel, and in all the years I knew Joyce, I have never before witnessed anyone with such unshakable devotion to a cause, and such indefatigable faith that she would eventually triumph.

Those of us who were lucky enough to witness Joyce’s faith and devotion first hand are truly blessed. And we are changed forever.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca