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The business of forgiveness

Ten years after Squamish lawyer Bob McIntosh was kicked to death his widow and his killer are speaking tour commodities.

By Vivian Moreau

The photograph of Bob McIntosh lying dead on a hospital bed is a showstopper. The teenagers that had been giggling over Bob’s baby photos and laughing over his class clown adult antics are silenced. Standing at the front of the high school gymnasium, Katy Hutchinson, Bob’s widow, lets the moment linger.

“That was Bob a week later,” she says, a comment on the difference between previous Christmas scenes of Bob with their four-year-old twins Sam and Emma and the photo of Bob after he’d been kicked to death at a neighbourhood party on New Year’s Eve 1997.

It’s a powerful, solitary moment for Katy, and for Bob’s killer sitting nearby but soon to join Katy on stage. In a CBC documentary being aired tonight Ryan Aldridge says he can’t look at the photo, that he hasn’t forgiven himself for kicking Bob four times in the head after being cold-cocked by a fellow partier at an out-of-control Squamish house party. And even though some think it courageous that McIntosh’s widow has forgiven him, to others Aldridge’s actions remain unforgivable.

                                                                

It’s a complicated story, one that almost everyone in the Sea to Sky region has heard. A handsome, gregarious Squamish lawyer, a popular triathlete, husband and father of twins, steps out on New Year’s Eve to check on an unsupervised nearby house party. He gets knocked down by one of the 200 kids at the party and dies after being repeatedly kicked in the head by another. In ensuing months teenagers who’d been at the party close ranks, refusing to point fingers, casting a pall over the town. The beautiful widow quickly moves to Victoria and just as quickly marries her lawyer. After five years the murderer is flushed out and put in jail but the beautiful widow, who has started speaking publicly to teens about the dangers of drinking and colluding with bullies, forgives the remorseful killer and invites him to join her on paid speaking tours.

“I thought ‘Oh, that would make an interesting scene to film,’” said producer Sue Ridout in an interview. With writer and director Helen Slinger they followed Hutchinson and Aldridge, now on parole after serving two years for manslaughter, for almost two years, producing what Ridout calls an intimate psychological portrait of the duo’s relationship.

“We wanted to do something that wasn’t simple, that wasn’t a pretty little story of a pretty widow who forgives a guy and Bob’s your uncle, that’s it,” Ridout said, wincing at the ironic slip.

Ridout worked for 20 years for CBC and CTV before striking out on her own. She’d previously worked with Slinger on several projects and brought her on board about 18 months after meeting Hutchinson. They say although Embracing Bob’s Killer , part of CBC’s new Doc Zone series, is about the Hutchinson/Aldridge relationship, it’s also about the nebulous subject of forgiveness.

In her memoir, Walking After Midnight (Raincoast, 2006), Hutchinson says forgiving the man who killed her husband was a natural outcome of attempting to understand the events that led to McIntosh’s death, an outcome that not many in Squamish have understood. When Aldridge appeared in bail court three days after his arrest in 2002 Hutchinson said the anger in the room was palpable, that the community had had enough of being bullied by a group of thugs it believed Aldridge represented. But Hutchinson said she refused to be drawn into a condemnation scenario, and instead made a conscious decision not to be angry with Aldridge. Anger, she said, was what had fuelled Aldridge to kick her husband when he was down and it wasn’t an emotion she wanted to perpetuate. And so she forgave Aldridge.

But the head of a Vancouver bereavement program says anger is a healthy and necessary emotion in grief.

“We need to have anger because it is a way that our emotions signal to us that something is wrong,” said Kay Thompson, head of Children’s and Women’s Hospital bereavement program. Thompson said anger often spurs action, citing Mothers Against Drunk Drivers “who start up out of that anger, out of someone very close to them dying, and that’s the way they work through their loss.”

At one point in the film Hutchinson admits to being angry when instructors in a police academy heckle Aldridge during his talk. In the parking lot afterward Hutchinson is filmed distraught and crying, saying she feels badly because youth in the audience didn’t get a chance to hear Ryan speak.

One gets a sense from the film that Hutchinson still has work to do with anger. When she reveals to filmmakers that McIntosh was facing accusations of sexual harassment before he was killed and they ask her how she would confront him about that if he were still alive, her response sounds hollow.

“I’d say ‘You twit, what were you thinking?’”

Her tempered response may have something to do with keeping a brave face for her children, now 14 .

The twins corresponded with Aldridge while he was in prison and Emma has actually met the man who kicked her father to death. But Sam refuses to, saying that’s Emma’s thing but is something he doesn’t need to do.

Scott Harris runs Correctional Service of Canada’s victim offender mediation program. The national program receives about 160 inquiries a year from people interested in contacting incarcerated individuals that have harmed them. Harris said reasons for doing so vary from wanting more information about the crime to wanting to gain more control over their lives to needing reassurance that the person will not commit the same crime again. Harris said it’s a way to move beyond the crime.

“They talk about the need for forgiveness so they’re not holding on to that anymore,” Harris said, “and for others it’s confronting that part of their life in a very direct way.”

But Harris said confronting someone and telling him or her about how they’ve harmed you is also a way to de-mystify that person. “It’s seeing that person as human and not a big monster that has been living in their imagination ever since the crime occurred,” Harris said.

In the film Hutchinson said that transition occurred the first time she met Aldridge, when he was being held in Squamish after being charged. Flown by RCMP helicopter from Victoria to meet with Aldridge in jail he dissembled in front of her as she reached for a Kleenex box to pass to him.

“It is all I can do not to reach out and hug him,” she says in her book.

Forgiveness is a misunderstood act, says a senior advisor to Canada’s penal system. Although most people do understand that forgiveness can be about letting go of bitterness and pain it can also be misconstrued.

“Some misunderstand that if you forgive it somehow makes what the person did to you okay or that it is somehow forgivable in the sense that it wasn’t so bad,” said David Molzahn, Correctional Service of Canada’s acting director of victim services. “Ín fact, it’s the opposite. If you can look past an offence, maybe you don’t have to forgive it you can just sort of absorb it.” But Molzahn , a Pentecostal minister, said the complex action requires calling on an inner strength. “It opens people up to a painful journey because they have to confront what it is that happened to them, find language for it, find ways of expressing it — to look at some of the horror and make some decisions about what they want to do with it.”

Hutchinson says in the film that forgiveness has many layers, that sometimes it is gentle and polite and sometimes, dark and scary, “but you still do it,” she said.

Hutchinson herself is a woman of many layers. Some see her decision to not only forgive Aldridge but to incorporate him into her speaking tours as courageous. Others such as friends Gill and Peter Hotston — interviewed in the film but who refused an interview with Pique Newsmagazine — criticize her actions.

Doug Race is McIntosh’s former law partner. In his second floor office after a noon-hour run, an activity he used to enjoy with McIntosh, Race said he and Hutchinson have agreed to disagree on the subject of forgiveness.

“I will happily not forgive him (Aldridge) to the day I die,” Race said. The man who introduced Hutchinson to her second husband, Victoria lawyer Michael Hutchinson, said he understands that she wants to not infect her children with the bitterness that can accompany recovering from a tragedy like theirs but still feels that forgiveness does not have to be a given.

“Where is it written that we have to forgive?” he said. “Not to put these on the same level, but has anyone forgiven the Nazis or Al-Qaeda for what they did?”

In the film Aldridge said that Hutchinson saved his life by forgiving him. Aldridge, who now works in construction in Squamish, also travels with Hutchinson on speaking tours and admits he has not forgiven himself for killing McIntosh.

In the process, he seems to be pulling away from Hutchinson’s pressure to take on more speaking tours on his own. Hutchinson’s quest to make some sense of McIntosh’s death by speaking to youth about the insidiousness of violence has turned into a business and as the film points out, the addition of Aldridge makes a good selling point.

“If you wanted to do this and support yourself doing this you could easily, very easily,” Hutchinson says to Aldridge over a tour breakfast. But Aldridge is reluctant to do so and Hutchinson re-thinks her strategy on camera, telling him that the story is not going to go away and in 10 years he might want to do more.

Doing less doesn’t seem to be an option for Hutchinson, now with a book, documentary and speaking career based on forgiving her husband’s murderer. Even though she admits on camera “this would be too out there for Bob,” she is adamant about her work’s positive results.

“Few people are going to have a story quite like mine to compare to,” she said in a telephone interview. “But we’ve all got life crises that happened to us or are going through life crises and it (the book) was a way that people could play my story off their own and think about ways to respond to things in the future.”

Oddly, or perhaps not, her work does not include returning to Squamish. Although she gave a presentation in the town two years ago book signings scheduled for last fall in Squamish and Whistler were cancelled.

“The story is so intense for a certain group of people in Squamish and I just don’t want to traumatize them,” Hutchinson said, “and I don’t think me being there is going to help them.”

Filmmakers Ridout and Slinger said that even after working with Aldridge and Hutchinson extensively there were still “weird” reality check moments during final filming.

“Even after months of shooting with them it really (was) odd watching the two of them walk together,” Slinger said. “You have that flash again: ‘Yeah, Bob was killed… and that’s the guy that did it.’”  

 

Embracing Bob’s Killer will be broadcast tonight, Thursday, Feb. 22 on CBC at 8 p.m.



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