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The Expert Witness from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Canadian True Crime
01:03:48
<p>When police arrive for a welfare check at the home of a Vancouver fashion store owner, they're confronted with the lifeless bodies of two women lying on the kitchen floor, their faces covered with dishcloths. It looks as if Doris Leatherbarrow and her daughter Sharon Huenemann were killed just as they were serving up dinner for two mystery guests. Who were they? And where had they gone?</p><p><br></p><p>This is an episode from Canadian True Crime, The Huenemann and Leatherbarrow Murders - Part 1.</p><p><br></p><p>Listen to Part 2 now – search for Canadian True Crime wherever you listen to podcasts, including <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/canadian-true-crime/id1197095887" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5YNYcVmxKGsd8Q73mssWT9" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Spotify</a>, and <a href="https://music.amazon.ca/podcasts/fbe63977-5737-4910-a067-1745b99fae36/canadian-true-crime" rel="noopene...
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- [00:02]
Christie Lee
This is a CBC podcast. Canadian True Crime is a podcast hosted by Aussie Canadian Christie Lee as she delves into the dark underbelly of the Canadian justice system, piecing each case together from court documents, news archives, trial reporting and input from victims and survivors. With a range of cases, from historic to recent, well known to obscure. Canadian True Crime episodes are detailed, factual and nuanced, going beyond the superficial to examine the underlying causes of crime. This episode is all about the murders of Doris Leatherbarrow, the owner of a successful chain of women's fashion stores in Vancouver, and her daughter, Sharon Huneman. It looked as though the two women were ambushed in the kitchen just as they were about to serve dinner for two mystery guests. But. But as the investigation progressed, an even more shocking tale emerged. Now here's part one of Canadian true crime series the Huneman and Leatherbarrow Murders.
- [01:11]
Narrator
Hi everyone. Today's case has been requested many times over the years. It's a complicated story from British Columbia and we've pieced it together from multiple court documents and the news archives, particularly the reporting of the Times Colonist, the Vancouver sun and the province. As always, please respect the privacy of the people involved in this case. It's a Friday night in October in the province of British Columbia and Ralph Heunemann is waiting for his wife Sharon to arrive home for Thanksgiving weekend. They live on the southern end of Vancouver island, but Sharon has been on the mainland for a couple of days helping her mother, who owns a small chain of clothing stores. Sharon always catches the same 7pm Ferry back. It takes about 90 minutes. Arriving at the terminal on Vancouver island just after 8:30pm she would typically collect her car from the parking lot and drive home to the Victoria area, arriving at about 9pm It's a little past that time and Ralph figures his wife has probably just been held up. It's 1990, well before everyone had cell phones. There's nothing he can do but wait. At about 10pm Someone arrives home. Ralph gets his hopes up. But it's not his wife, Sharon. It's Darren.
- [02:51]
Christie Lee
Who?
- [02:51]
Narrator
Her 18 year old son from her first marriage. Although he was only about four or five when she married Ralph Heunemann, the teenager tells his stepdad he's going to bed. He'll catch up with his mum in the morning. Growing more worried by the minute, Ralph eventually decides to call Sharon's mother, Doris at home on the lower mainland area of Vancouver. Doris usually drives her daughter to and from the local ferry terminal, so she'll at least know if Sharon actually Got on the ferry, but the phone just keeps ringing. Ralph continues to wait up, trying Doris number again periodically, but there's still no one home. He decides to call the Delta police on the lower mainland and asks them to do a welfare check. At Doris home, it's now past midnight. Sharon should have been home about three hours ago and Ralph is extremely anxious as he waits for word his wife is okay. On the mainland, officers with Delta police arrive just before 3am and enter the home of Sharon Heunemann's mother, Doris. It looks like it's been completely ransacked. There are scattered dresser drawers everywhere with the contents dumped and strewn about. When officers enter the kitchen, they're confronted by the lifeless bodies of two women lying on the floor. Their faces are covered in dishcloths and they each have a large gash across their throats. There's blood everywhere. The older woman has an 8 inch knife still embedded in her throat. It's 69 year old Doris Leatherbarrow and the other woman is her 47 year old daughter Sharon Heunemann, who has another knife lying on her chest. They've suffered an extremely violent attack and it looks like it happened right as they were about to serve dinner. The microwave oven door is open with 4 servings of lasagna ready to be served. There's veggies in a pot on the stove and four plates on the counter with salad ingredients. It looks like the women had two guests over for dinner and someone killed them just as they were serving up. But who were the guests and where were they now? A few hours later, back on Vancouver Island, Ralph Heunemann rushed to the front door when he heard a knock. It was the Saanich police sent to deliver the distressing news that his wife Sharon had and her mother Doris had been murdered on the mainland. Ralph was devastated and when Sharon's teenage son Darren heard the news, they both collapsed on the floor in a wave of emotion. It couldn't be real, but it was. Initially it was thought that they'd likely been dead for up to 20 hours by the time their bodies had been found. Investigators soon narrowed it down to less than nine hours. Sharon and Doris had last been seen at around 5pm at their clothing warehouse in Surrey, a city in the metro Vancouver area located about 30 minutes drive from Doris home. With this information, investigators formed a theory that the women must have been murdered between about 5:30pm at the earliest and and about midnight at the latest. Their bodies had been found just before 3am Police had no immediate motives or suspects. At first they thought it must have been a robbery because the house had been ransacked and money had been taken from both women's purses. But there was no sign of forced entry. There was expensive jewellery and other cash in the home left untouched. Investigators had found no forensic evidence at the crime scene, no fingerprints or anything else that could point them to someone who might have done it. And with no obvious motive for the murders, investigators began by speaking to the people closest to the mother and daughter to get any information they could. Also, a priority was to get their alibis for the time frame in question. Friday, October 5th of 1990, between 5:30pm and midnight in the small community of Tsawwassen on the mainland. Delta police were speaking to Doris Leatherbarrow's neighbours, who reported that two teenage boys had been seen loitering about near her home at around 6pm that Friday night. Doris, of course, had a teenage grandson. Maybe it was him, and there was a perfectly innocent explanation. 18 year old Darren Heunemann told the police he was on Vancouver island the whole night, adding that he was very close to his mother and grandma and would never hurt them. He said that after he finished school that afternoon, he brought his girlfriend Amanda home with him. He recalled giving some polished rocks to a neighbour and made dinner for his stepfather, Ralph, at about 6:30pm Darrin said he and Amanda drank tea and read tarot cards together. And then a neighbour phoned to thank him for the rocks and inquired when his mother, Sharon, would be home. He told that neighbour that she'd be catching the 7pm ferry home as usual. Darren told the police that at about 8pm he and Amanda drove to downtown Victoria to meet two of his school friends for dinner. He then dropped them all home and arrived back at his own home at about 10pm Ralph Heunemann was of course, home the whole night and confirmed that his stepson had a loving relationship with both his mother and his grandmother. He also confirmed Darren's alibi. So, too did Darren's girlfriend, Amanda. Investigators had no doubt that Darren was telling the truth about being on Vancouver island all night, so he couldn't have been one of the teenagers seen loitering near his grandmother's house on the lower mainland. Doris Leatherbarrow grew up in extreme poverty in Saskatchewan during the Great Depression. At some point she moved to the Vancouver area and when she was 23 years old, she married a local shipyard worker named George. She gave birth to Sharon not long after that, in 1943. But when the baby girl was just three months old, George fell 30ft from scaffolding at the shipyard and passed away with no husband. Doris realised it was solely up to her to provide for her baby and she decided she would do everything she could to make sure Sharon had a different childhood to the one she experienced. Sharon would not grow up in poverty. As Doris worked as hard as she could to save money for their future, little Sharon spent a lot of time with her grandmother. A decade after her first husband's tragic death, Doris found love again. In 1953 she married a lacrosse player named Renee Leatherbarrow and they settled in the city of Delta in the greater Vancouver area. Specifically in a small beachside community and tourist destination called Tsawwassen. Located on the ancestral home and lands of Tsawwassen First Nation, the name means land facing the sea. In 1959, Doris decided to open a local fashion store to sell brand named clothes to women and she named it Renee's Ladies Apparel Ltd. After her husband. According to some sources she only started it as a hobby, but others say it was all part of her long term plan to build a business and ensure Sharon's future. The store took off to the point where it became Doris full time job. Within four years she'd opened a second store, one for her to manage and one for her daughter Sharon, who was by this point 20 years old. An article in the Surrey Leader would describe how the mother daughter duo became known in the community thanks to the charity fashion show they put on three times a year that benefited various causes including the Surrey Memorial Hospital. Doris and Renee ended up divorcing and she focused on expanding her successful business. Before long she would have eight stores and a warehouse all in the lower mainland area of Vancouver. Sharon continued to work at her mother's stores as she got married and had a child of her own. That marriage did not last and when Darren was about 5 years old, Sharon married Ralph Heunemann, a well to do economics professor with a PhD from Harvard. He was a widower with two grown children of his own. Darren reportedly adapted well to this change of life circumstance and was known to call his stepfather Ralph dad. The family lived just a few blocks from where Doris lived and Darren visited his grandmother all the time. When he was old enough, he mowed her lawn on Sundays. Sharon still worked at Doris Fashion stores where she gained a reputation for being both friendly and impeccably dressed and groomed. Their lives changed when Sharon's husband Ralph got a new job. The University of Victoria had appointed him to the prestigious position of professor of Economic Relations with China, which necessitated a move to Vancouver island on Canada's Pacific coast. It was an exciting time. Sharon designed a custom built home for them in an exclusive district in Saanich, just a few kilometres outside of Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia. But it was about a 90 minute ferry ride away from the mainland where Sharon worked with her mother Doris. Too far for her to commute there every day. But they soon reached an agreement that worked for both of them. Every second Wednesday, Sharon would drive to the Swartz Bay ferry terminal, leave her car in the parking lot and catch the ferry over to Tawwassen on the mainland. Doris would pick her up from the terminal and they would work together in the stores with Sharon staying over with her mother for two nights. By this point, Doris had taken advantage of great market conditions and had sold four of her stores so she could focus on the four that performed the best. She still ran them all herself and managed the warehouse in Surrey. So she was glad to have Sharon help out for a few days a week. On Friday, Doris would typically drop her daughter back at the terminal to catch the 7pm ferry back home to Vancouver Island. It worked so well that Sharon kept that same routine and would make the trip every week or second week for the next three years. That is until she and Doris were murdered. When news of the murders was made public, everyone was shocked. The autopsy had concluded that when the mother and daughter were at Doris home cooking dinner, they were ambushed and struck on the head with a blunt instrument rendering them unconscious. 47 year old Sharon Heunemann suffered two two skull fractures, a split right forehead and her throat had been cut. Her mother, 69 year old Doris Leatherbarrow, had a broken right jaw, her ear was torn and the right side of her skull was fractured. There were two deep wounds on her neck where a knife had been thrust into it. So deep that it was left there. Neither of the women had any defensive injuries. A friend of both women told the Vancouver sun that she couldn't believe that quote, two very kind and gentle people had been murdered in such a brutal way. In the meantime, investigators were also looking into any possible motives for murder. They discovered that Sharon Heunemann had launched a lawsuit against a contractor who built her two storey home in Sannich. According to the Vancouver sun, it was an impressive custom build that cost $380,000. But Sharon reportedly wasn't happy with it. Apparently she had so many complaints that she almost put the contractor out of business. That had nothing to do with her mother. But police soon discovered another possible motive that Did Doris Leatherbarrow's sister, who was also the executor of her will, gave investigators some very interesting information. Unlike the impressive home owned by Ralph and Sharon Heunemann, Doris still lived in a tidy but modest split level home. From the outside, there was no indication that the 69 year old may have been wealthy. But she certainly was. Through her success with her Renee's Ladies Apparel stores and her shrewd financial management, Doris Leatherbarrow had amassed an estate worth around $33 million. And that was in 1990. Doris sister told investigators that Sharon was the primary beneficiary of the estate with Darren next in line. But because he was only 18 years old at the time, there were the usual stipulations to withhold the bulk of the estate to give his brain enough time to mature. The will stipulated that if both Doris and Sharon died before Darren turned 25, he would receive his grandmother's car, her house and its contents and the proceeds of a $200,000 life insurance policy. But he would have to wait until he was 25 to access the rest of her estate. And he knew this. Doris sister told investigators that four days after the murders, Darren phoned her and quizzed her over the details of his grandmother's will. At this point investigators realised that Darren Hyunemann had a very serious motive to want his mum and grandma dead. But there was no way he could have been the murderer. Remember, it wasn't exactly, exactly easy to get between where the Hunemans lived on Vancouver island and where Doris Leatherbarrow lived on the lower mainland. The only way to get between them was by boat. That ferry, which took 90 minutes. His stepfather Ralph had confirmed that Darren was mostly home on the evening of October 5th. Apart from the period between about 8 8pm to 10pm where he and his girlfriend had dinner in downtown Victoria. It was barely enough time to catch the ferry to the mainland. One way, it would have been impossible for Darren to go to his grandmother's house, kill her and his mother and then catch another 90 minute ferry ride back. To fully clear Darren, investigators set out to speak speak to his known acquaintances, starting with the two friends he and Amanda had dinner with in Victoria. That night. They arrived at the home of Derek Lord, a 17 year old who attended Mount Douglas High School with Darrin and worked part time at Kmart. Derek was in the yard with some other teenagers when the police pulled up and he came over to the police cruiser. He was told they were investigating the murders of Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Heunemann and wanted to speak with him. Derek got in the cruiser and he was asked if he knew Darrin's mother, Sharon. He smiled and said she was a nice lady. Derek said he'd never been to Darren's grandmother's home in Tsawwassen on the mainland, but told police he'd gone shopping to the Tawwassen Town Centre Mall about a week before the murders. The 17 year old said he caught the ferry over with a friend called David Muir and pointed to one of the other teenagers in the backyard. The police realised that this was the name of the other teenager who had dinner with Darren and Amanda that night. They would speak to him later. The police asked Derek Lord what he was doing the evening of Friday, October 5, and Derek told them that Darren Heunemann and his girlfriend had picked him up along with David Muir and the four went to Chinatown and downtown Victoria for dinner at around 8pm Darren then dropped them home. After that, Derek was asked if he'd heard any talk at school about the murder of Darren's mother and grandmother or any rumours about who might have been involved. Derek said no. An investigator told him that they were a little suspicious of Darren, but asked him not to mention anything about their conversation to him because they knew he was obviously going through a difficult time and if he heard any rumours about Darren, not to spread them around. Before they left, the police asked Derek if there were any other friends they should talk to. He mentioned that he was part of a group who played Dungeons and Dragons and that Darren was in charge of the games. He gave them the names of some of the other players. With that, investigators chased down the Grand Master or key organiser of the Dungeons and Dragons group, learning that Darren Heunemann had answered an ad in the local paper looking for people to play the fantasy role playing game, which was at peak popularity at the time. The Grandmaster was in his early 20s and told police that Darren joined the group the summer of 1989, when he was just about to turn 17. This was just over a year before the murders. The Grandmaster told police that Darren started playing with them every Friday night, describing him as confident and clever, with a wild sense of humour, an incessant talker, according to a later article in the Calgary Herald magazine by Lisa Hobbs Burney. According to the Grandmaster, Darren always played the character of a priest and became somewhat of a de facto leader for the group. He soon invited two of his friends from school to play occasionally, David Muir and Derek Lord. Derek and David frequently referred to him as Lord Darren or Commander, as a Joke. They even had fake business cards made up that read, quote, his celestial transcendency. Viscount Darren Charles Hunemann Cognito Ergo Sum. Players noticed that Darren seemed to get bored with the game and would try to manipulate the game's role playing scenarios. In one, he would invade Borneo with an army of 10,000 men dressed in double breasted silk suits. Investigators learned that Darren's suggested scenarios started to end with a character that he said represented his grandmother and the game would end with him cracking that character's neck. Darren was heard mentioning snapping or cracking his gran's neck many times after that. Darren started to mention in passing that his grandmother was quite wealthy, but he never said anything bad about her. In fact, he told the players that his gran had always been good to him, giving him a fully loaded $30,000 Honda for his 16th birthday and making sure he had all the clothes and money he wanted. But Darren told the members of the Dungeons and Dragons group that if his gran were out of the picture, he was in line to inherit it all. At one point, he offered one player $10,000 to do the job. That player thought he was joking. They all did. By June of 1990, Darren had been in the DND group for about a year. But things started to turn sour. He wanted to change his usual character from priest to an evil wizard, but the group consensus was that he wasn't allowed to. So he quit the group in a huff. By that point. It was about three months before the murders. But Darren Heunemann didn't confine his strange comments about his grandma to the DND group. A classmate at Mount Douglas Secondary School reported that in the months leading up to the murders of Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Heunemann, Darren frequently mentioned the money he stood to inherit. That part was highly believable to his classmates. They could see that he had money and took a lot of pride in what he wore. He was often seen wearing suits and silk shirts to school. The friend told investigators that Darren mentioned he'd get half his gran's money if he killed her, but if he also killed his mother, he'd get the rest of it. All of it. But once again, everyone thought he was joking. It was just too blatant to be anything else. That fall of 1990, Darren began grade 12 and started dating Amanda. Classmates described him as a prominent figure in drama class, a gifted actor with a flair for the dramatic. At the time of the murders, he was in rehearsals for the school play. He was playing the lead role of Caligula, the cruel Roman Emperor. By this point, the potential motive involving Sharon Huneman's dispute with the contractor who built her home had fizzled out instead. Instead, investigators honed in on Darren Heunemann as the prime suspect. But the 18 year old's alibi was rock solid. If he was involved in any way, he couldn't have been the murderer himself. More people had to have been involved. About three weeks after the murders, Delta police learned that a taxi driver on the lower mainland had remembered picking up two teenage boys who'd just caught the ferry over from Vancouver island to Tawwassen. He picked them up from the terminal just before 5pm and drove them to the Tsawwassen Mall. This happened on Friday, October 5, a little earlier on the same evening that Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Heunemann were murdered. The mother and daughter had been seen at the warehouse in Surrey at the time, but would have been close to finishing up work and driving home so Sharon could get ready for her ferry back to Vancouver Island. This new information was notable to the police for a few reasons. The Tsawwassen Mall was only about a 10 minute walk from where Doris Leatherbarrow lived. That same night, neighbours had reported seeing two teenage boys loitering around her home. And when police spoke with Derek Lord in the cruiser outside his home, he had told them that he and David Muir had done just that. Caught the ferry to the mainland to go shopping at the Tsawwassen Mall. But Derek said their trip happened the week before the murders. It was now time to speak with the other teenager, 16 year old David Muir. He and his parents agreed to an interview at their home, where he was asked where he was the night of Friday, October 5th. Between 5:30pm and midnight. David Muir echoed a similar version of events already given by Derek Lord. He told the police that Darren Heunemann had picked them both up after school in the afternoon and dropped them off in downtown Victoria. He and Derek then walked around the shops there until about 8pm when they met back up with Darren and his girlfriend Amanda for dinner. Then Darrin drove them all home at about 9:30 or 10pm Apart from a few minor variances, the alibis given by the four teenagers were largely consistent with each other. Investigators needed to go back to the Delta taxi driver to see if he could identify the two teenagers he picked up that night. They put together a line up with photos of Darren Heunemann, Derek Lord and David Muir together with photos of other random teenage boys to make it as fair of an identification process as possible. The Taxi driver picked out the photo of David Muir and tentatively identified him as one of the two teenagers he picked up from the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal and drove to the mall. The same line up of photos were then shown to Doris Leatherbarrow's neighbours, who pointed to both David and Derek's photos as the teens they saw loitering outside Doris home In the early evening. After that, and at around the same time, investigators also received some new information. The taxi company reported that at about 6:45pm that same Friday night, someone using the name Dave had requested a taxi to pick him up from the Tsawwassen Mall and drive him to the ferry terminal. The driver who took the request told investigators that he picked up two young men who were in a hurry to make the 7pm ferry back to Vancouver Island. This was, of course, the very same ferry that Sharon Heunemann was supposed to have caught that night. The taxi driver told police he pulled up outside the terminal with only minutes to spare. And just before the two young men ran to catch the ferry, one of them tossed over a $10 bill as payment. The driver wasn't able to recall what they look like, so investigators went to BC Transit to get a list of passengers on that 7pm ferry. One of them was a university student who remembered the journey vividly for two reasons. It was the busy Thanksgiving holiday weekend and the ferry was late arriving at Swartz Bay Terminal on Vancouver Island. And also she saw a boy she went to high school with on that same ferry, Derek Lord. She told the police that she knew him from Mount Douglas High School. It was at this point that 17 year old Derek Lord and 16 year old David Muir joined Darren Huneman as primary suspects in the murders of Sharon Heunemann and Doris Leatherbarrow. In the meantime, believing the investigation had stalled, their remaining family members, friends and business associates pooled their funds to provide a $30,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. It was by this point six weeks since the murders and investigators had a theory, but they needed to gather more evidence. They obtained a warrant for a wiretap and within a few days they were intercepting phone calls made and received by Darren Heunemann, Derek Lord and David Muir. Then they went to speak with Darren's girlfriend Amanda again and told her they thought she might be lying to them. Panicked, she amended her statement slightly. While she'd first told police that she and Darren had dinner with the boys in downtown Victoria that night, she now admitted she actually ate dinner at home. The police still believed she was lying, but it didn't really matter. The actual point of their visit was to rattle Amanda enough to say something to Darren. They hoped it would motivate a flurry of phone calls they would be listening into. They didn't have to wait long. Long. That very same day, Darren called Derek Lord's mother, Eloise, and asked what time she saw Derek arrive home on what he referred to as the night in question. Eloise Lord sounded a little flustered and told her son's friend she wasn't certain, given six weeks had elapsed since that night, but she thought it was somewhere between 8:30pm and quarter to 9. Somewhere in there, but she didn't know. Then the police dropped another bomb. They went back to the home of David Muir, the youngest of the three suspects, and told him and his parents that they had information that proved the 16 year old was with Derek Lord in Tsawwassen on the mainland the same night the murders were committed. David's mum said she was going to be sick and left the room. It worked. The following day, David Muir phoned Derek Lord and the police were listening. All of the excerpts from these wiretap conversations have been edited slightly for clarity and brevity. Derek answered the phone. House are Derek's lucifer speaking. David told Derek, they know where we were on the 5th. They say they've got positive ID on us on the ferry and the cab drivers. Derek said, they've got to be lying. Later in the conversation, David suggested, if they're going to come after you, we've got to change the story a little bit. He said they needed to fess up and tell police they really were in Tawwassen that day picking up a package of knives which they were going to sell to kids at school. Derek said, are you sure that's wise? David replied, it's better than being a suspect. Hey. Derek said later in the conversation that they'd have to be lying, otherwise they would have done something. At one point, they made a comment about hoping there was no wiretap on the phone. Derek Lord immediately called Darren Heunemann and asked him to meet in person about a phone call he'd just had with David Muir. Darren told Derek to calm down and just say what he had to say. Over the phone. Derek said, quote, they've. They're insinuating that they have positive id, that Dave was over there and if I was with Dave that night, it means they must have something to do there because Dave. I'm Dave's alibi. Darren said, no, because you weren't over there. Derrick replied, no, I know I wasn't there, but I'm Dave's alibi. If they're saying that he was over there, they've got to say that I was over there. They're insinuating I committed a murder. Darren. Darren told him, shh, Calm down. Calm down. Is that all you had to tell me? Derek said there was more. David had retained a lawyer and had confirmed to that lawyer that he had been in Tawwassen. Darren said, obviously he's on the wrong day. It doesn't matter. I don't care what he's saying. Darren then phoned David Muir at home to discuss the situation. But David's mother answered the phone and refused to let Darren talk to her son. So Darrin called Derek Lord back and described David's mum as the Iron lady and that David was letting the police bully him into changing his story. Derek Lord said, well, by changing it, he's insinuating that I helped kill them. Darren replied, quote, oh, well, shh. He hasn't insinuated that at all. Thank God he wouldn't dare. Cause then I'd sue the bastards on Dave's case. There is no problem. I'm going to laugh in their faces. They are a bunch of idiots if they push Dave to say anything. I don't care because I saw myself pick you up and so did Amanda and so did you. If Dave was somewhere else in his own little mind, I don't know. Derek said, well, unlike Dave, they aren't going to bully me into changing my story. I'm sticking with it because that's what happened. Darren said later that, quote, dave does not know what he's doing when dealing with these guys. You don't. God, he's out of line. He's out of line. Darren, in the same sentence as talking about his shoes filling with rain, said, quote, dave's the most malleable boy I've ever met. The lead investigator would later say that during these phone calls, Darren was extremely entertaining and would often impersonate various characters, putting on realistic voices for each one. The police noticed that he was very skilled at communication and manipulating people. Time to drop another bomb. On November 25 of 1990, five days after the wiretap started, the police went to see Derek Lord at the Kmart where he worked part time. They told the 17 year old that he had been identified as being in Tsawwassen the night of the murders. As expected, Derek immediately called Darren Heunemann and asked him to meet at Mount Douglas High School. A police officer watched as Darren drove into the school and Derek got in the car so they could talk in person. After obtaining all of these phone interceptions, the police firmly believed that Darren Huneman was the mastermind, the one who planned the murders of his own mother and grandmother. But they didn't have quite enough evidence to arrest him. What they did have was enough to arrest Derek Lord and David Muir for physically committing the murders. The police hoped that one or both of them would confess and provide them with more evidence that Darren Huneman was the mastermind. 16 year old David Muir and 17 year old Derek Lord were arrested separately on the same day. Derek did not confess and David refused to give any statement to the police on the advice of his lawyer. By this point, Darren had made sure that both David and Derrick had lawyers and was reportedly paying for them both. But a few hours later, after David Muir's lawyer had left and while his parents weren't there, the Police told the 16 year old they wanted to offer him a deal and asked him if he wanted to hear what it was. David said yes. If he confessed to his involvement and agreed to testify at Trump trial, they promised he'd be tried as a young offender and would only serve a maximum of three years in prison. David agreed to the deal and wrote out an eight page confession that all but confirmed the police's theory about the case. But the following day, David's lawyer found out what had happened and told the Crown Prosecutor that whatever deal they had made with the 16 year old was off. He would not be testifying for the Crown at trial. And further, the police had violated David's charter rights by not informing him of his right to legal counsel at the time they made the deal, so whatever he'd written down would be inadmissible as evidence. Anyway, the police had made a huge mistake. But what they did know, thanks to David Muir, was that Darren Heunemann's girlfriend, Amanda probably knew a lot more than she'd told them.
- [44:41]
Christie Lee
Foreign.
- [44:49]
Narrator
Darren Heunemann was a bit of a chameleon. At Mount Douglas High School. Darren was regarded by some as a bright guy who seemed to have it all. He had money, drove a $30,000 special edition Honda to school and took a lot of pride in what he wore. War. Some thought of him as highly entertaining, flamboyant, someone who made school life easier. Others saw him as more of a quiet, bookworm type who didn't have too many friends. One student described him as a genius. Darren was known as a model student who was liked by teachers. He got as and Bs, listened attentively and tried his best. Best. It seemed that no one had anything bad to say about Darren Heunemann. Until now. Not long after David Muir and Derek Lord were arrested, investigators brought Darren Huneman's girlfriend Amanda back in and told her they'd received information that could see her charged with being an accessory to murder after the fact. The 16 year old cracked immediately. She told police that in the months before the murders, Darren had told her multiple times that he planned to kill his mum, Sharon, grandmother Doris and his stepfather Ralph. This was news to the police. According to Amanda, the reason Darren said he wanted to kill his stepfather grandfather was because he thought Ralph Huneman might become executor of the will. Since he was married to Sharon, Darren wanted to eliminate all possible barriers that stood in the way of his being the sole beneficiary of his grandmother's estate, which he thought was between 4 million and 6 million. Amanda told the police that, according to Darren, he had arranged for his friends Derek Lord and David Muir to commit the murders in exchange for his promise to give them plots of land, cars and gifts, as well as a monthly allowance of $1,000 from the proceeds of his grandmother's estate. This information all came directly from Darren Heunemann. Amanda said Derek and David never mentioned anything about the plans to her. She then described the development of the plan, which at first included ideas like using a gas line to blow up Doris Leatherbarrow's home at a time where she would be there with Sharon and Ralph Heunemann. But Darren decided not to go through with that one because he thought it would look like his grandma had been assassinated. Another plan was to blow up his own family home in Saanich, the one his mother had custom built at a time when his grandmother was staying over. But Darren scrapped that plan because he didn't want to destroy the art in the house. He thought he might disable the burglar alarm in the home so that David and Derek could enter and kill Sharon, Ralph and Doris. But that plan came to a halt as well when he realized that his grandmother rarely ever stayed the night at their home. In another plan, Darren thought about tampering with the brakes on either his mother's car or his grandmother's car. But he scrapped that plan when he again realised it would be too hard to get all three people in the same car together. Amanda told police she didn't take Darren seriously until mid August. When he told her he realised he no longer had to kill his stepfather, father Ralph. Turns out his worries about Ralph becoming the executor of the estate were unfounded. But the planning continued, with Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huneman as the targets. Amanda told the police that after school started for the year in September, she and Darren were in rehearsals together for the school play Caligula. Playing the lead role of a Roman dictator who killed people at random. He told her he'd be able to act the part better after he'd killed his mother and grandmother and promised to dedicate his performance to their memory. Eventually, Darrin told Amanda he'd come up with a new plan that involved his mother's periodic trips to the mainland to help his grandmother out in her stores. He said the plan was for Derek Lord and David Muir to catch the ferry over to the mainland and show up at his grandmother's home in Tawwassen, kill her and his mother, Sharon, and stage the scene to appear like a robbery. They would then catch the ferry back to Vancouver Island. Darrin and Amanda would pick them up when they arrived, and they would all establish an alibi. Amanda told the police that she and Darren waited for them at the ferry terminal that evening, but the ferry was late and didn't arrive until almost 9pm she had no way of knowing that the university student on that same ferry had already given that specific detail to the police, Amanda said. After Derek and David got in the car, they drove around for a while. The pair confirmed that they had successfully carried out the plan Darren had described to her earlier. His mother and grandmother were dead. Based on everything Amanda had just told them, investigators believe she was now telling the truth because what she said matched up with the timeline and evidence they had collected so far. Amanda and her mum were put in protective custody for quite some time, and with that, David Muir and Derek Lord were charged with the first degree murders of Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huneman as minors. Under the Young Offenders act, their names were put under publication ban. But for a crime like this, the prosecution was likely to apply for them to be tried as adults, meaning their names would go public and they could face a longer prison sentence. David Muir and Derek Lord were released on $10,000 bail with conditions. The following day, November 29th, Darren Heunemann was arrested at school and charged with two counts of first degree murder. Since he was 18 years old at the time of the murders, there was no discussion needed about youth court. He was charged as an adult and his name was announced publicly. If found guilty at trial, he faced a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. After his arrest, Darren swore to his stepfather Ralph that he had nothing to do with the murders. So Ralph agreed to help pay his legal fees and expenses. Darren Heunemann pleaded not guilty and was denied bail. After the announcement, the press started to look into Darren's childhood and life. Photos showed a young man with red hair and a wide beaming smile, often in the company of his mother and grandmother. He certainly looked like the perfect son and grandson. And according to relatives, Darren's mother, Sharon Heunemann was known to be a perfectionist, someone who was meticulous about her home and appearance. Sharon was described as being on the controlling side, determined to fashion her only child Darren into a perfect little gentleman. According to Lisa Hobbs Burney's long form article in the Calgary Herald magazine, Sharon Heunemann reportedly monitored all of Darren's activities and didn't allow him to play in the streets or hang out with others in the neighbourhood. All play dates were carefully arranged in advance by elementary school. Darren felt so much pressure that if he got one answer wrong, he would cry in class. And according to relatives, Darren was the perfect child and the apple of his grandmother's eye. There was reportedly a lot of emphasis put on wealth in his childhood and Doris Leatherbarrow reportedly spoiled her only grandchild, giving him money when he got good grades, buying him clothes as well as a special edition brand new Honda for his 16th birthday. Relatives described him as spotlessly clean, exquisitely well mannered, consistently helpful and desperate to be seen as nice. At high school it was reported that his classmates and teachers spoke highly of him. So when he was charged with the first degree murders of his mother and grandmother, many who knew him were shocked. Darren was 18 years old at the time of the murders, an adult for the purposes of the criminal justice system. But his two friends, 17 year old Derek Lord and 16 year old David Muir, were minors under the Young Offenders act so their names were put under publication ban. Obviously the youngest of all 3, 16 year old David Muir still had a baby face and wore his dark brown hair in a classic bowl cut. David Muir grew up in a stable, affectionate and well regarded upper middle class family. He was the eldest child of three to parents who were highly educated in plant and forest pathology. David Meule was known by teachers as a quiet, conscientious student with a superior iq. He was on the honour roll and brought home awards in science and industrial arts. Fellow high school students remembered him as a quiet, studious Nice guy who played the flute in the high school band. Someone who was calm and not easily excited. Although he played Dungeons and Dragons with the group that included Darren Heunemann and Derek Lord, David preferred reading sci fi books if given the choice. Both he and Derek Lord really liked knives, and their parents knew they had a collection of ornamental weapons. But what their parents didn't know was that they were operating a mail order business together, taking advantage of an unusual border crossing on the mainland just south of Tsawwassen, where Doris Leatherbarrow lived. The area, which is part of the city of Delta in the Greater Vancouver area, narrows down to a peninsula that is divided in half by the Canada US border between British Columbia and Washington. Tsawwassen is on the top half of the peninsula and provides the only road access to the US territory on the bottom half of the peninsula, which is known as Point Roberts. David Muir and Derek Lord would order knives from companies in the US where they were much cheaper than buying them in Canada, and have the order sent to a post office box in Port Roberts, Washington. They would catch the ferry from Vancouver island across to the mainland, cross the border, pick up the knives and smuggle them back over, intending to sell them to fellow students at high school. But at the time of their arrest, no one knew about this little business. Derek Lord, the eldest of the two, had overgrown dark brown hair and a face with sharp features that perhaps looked even older than his 17 years. Derek Lord was the middle of three children in a family described as stable and quite close knit. His mother, Eloise, was a schoolteacher. According to court documents, Derek had a somewhat strained relationship with his father, David. To avoid confusion with David Muir, we'll call him William instead. Derek Lord's father, William, had worked an unusual number of jobs over the prior 20 years, which meant the family moved to various locations around British Columbia. At the time of the murders, William was working away from home most weeks, only returning on weekends. Derek was described as shy, someone who had difficulty making friends at new schools. Although he got good grades. He attended Mount Douglas High School with David Muir and Darren Heunemann, where he was described as an oddball by fellow students. According to the Times colonist. Some remembered him carrying a knife around the school, occasionally flicking it, and at one point threatening a teacher with was also known that Derek had a green belt in judo and had a great interest in martial arts. One classmate said that Derek was depressed because his girlfriend of a month broke up with him over the summer at about the same time. In the months before the murders A co worker at his part time job at Kmart said that after she complained about an annoying co worker, Derek told her to hire a hitman to take care of it, adding that it would only cost about 10 to $50,000. Just a month before the murders, another co worker at Kmart complained to Derek about someone harassing her and he reportedly pulled out a knife and told her that for 50 bucks he'd stick the pig. She told police she didn't think he was serious. They were assessed by a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to help the judge decide if they should be tried as youths or or adults. It was noted that Derek Lord had never been in trouble with the law and was of above average intelligence. He had no significant psychiatric or psychological problems, although he was subject to depression and showed a suicidal tendency. As for 16 year old David Muir, the experts noted that he had very high intelligence. He did have a couple of previous misdemeanors, including a minor shoplifting offence. The psychiatric and psychological experts concluded that both Derek Lourd and David Muir were less mature than other teens their age, were impressionable and craved peer approval. They were able to be manipulated by Darren Heunemann into doing something, something they otherwise wouldn't have done. As such, they were both considered unlikely to reoffend and it was recommended that they be kept in the youth system. But the judge didn't agree, pointing out that this may have explained why they agreed to Darren Heunemann's alleged plan, but it didn't explain why they allegedly went through with that plan after they left Darren's sphere of influence when he dropped them off at the ferry that day. The judge found that the calculated and brutal nature of the murders involving defenceless women for profit showed a level of maturity and resolve far above mere immaturity or peer pressure. They would both be dealt with in adult court along with Darren Huneman. The Crown star witness would be Darren Huneman's ex girlfriend, Amanda. With explosive testimony about what she saw and heard. Darren would testify in his own defence and give his side of the story. Derek Lord would provide a completely different version of events. His mother Eloise would also testify about an alternative alibi. But there wouldn't be a word from David Muir, the youngest of the three accused. And the public wouldn't hear about his written confession until later. There would be multiple court outbursts and details of a plot to escape prison that seemed too strange to be true, but years later would result in national headlines. All that and the aftermath is coming up in Part two. It's available right now. Visit canadiantruecrime CA to see the full list of resources we relied on to write this episode and anything else you want to know about the podcast. Thanks for listening.
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Christie Lee
That was the first episode of Canadian True Crimes coverage of the Huneman and Leatherbarrow murders. But you can listen to part two right now. The link is in the show notes, or you can search for Canadian True Crime wherever you get your podcasts and you'll find more than 170 episodes waiting for you. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC CA Podcasts.