Chris's Crime Forum

Today, The Journal presents the first in a special series of stories on the Mayerthorpe massacre, the slaying of four young Mounties by Jim Roszko in 2003.

Written by David Staples, one of Canada's top crime reporters, the series will provide Journal readers with new and dramatic insights into the murders and the manhunt that followed-an elaborate RCMP sting operation that earlier this year resulted in guilty pleas from Shawn Hennessey and Dennis Cheeseman, two young men from the Mayerthorpe area.

The sting and whether it was right or wrong is at the heart of The Journal series. Based on exclusive interviews and an exhaustive study of the documents, Web of Lies is the first comprehensive public accounting of Roszko, the RCMP, and Cheeseman and Hennessey in this troubling case of mass murder.

It explores allegations from Hennessey's family that it was a terrible injustice to send the two young men to jail for the heinous crimes of Jim Roszko.

Where we start to explore the lies, mysteries and allegations surrounding the RCMP's mass murder investigation of Shawn Hennessey and Dennis Cheeseman

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Shawn Hennessey and Dennis Cheeseman are brothers-in-law, friendly, hard-working, partying, skidoo-and-quad-loving, small-town boys from Barrhead. They are also convicted killers, together and forever bound at the heart of a mysterious and confounding murder case.

The opportunity to get easy answers about the infamous Mayerthorpe massacre of March 3,2005, ended when Jim Roszko shot himself shortly after murdering four RCMP officers at his Mayerthorpe-area farm. It was the single most murderous attack on the RCMP in more than 100 years, and it left behind not only devastated families and an upset, angry police force, but also the unrelenting need to answer one question:How could Roszko pull off such an attack?

Roszko, the real culprit, wasn't around to tell his story, take his punishment, absorb the justified hatred of the nation. Instead, the question cut deeply in several directions, both at the RCMP, which had failed to apprehend Roszko, allowing him to sneak back into his Quonset hut to prepare his ambush, and at Hennessey and Cheeseman, who had assisted Roszko in the hours before the mass murder. Because the case has been tied up in the courts, and is still under appeal, neither the RCMP nor Hennessey and Cheeseman have been particularly keen to provide answers about their actions. But the issue hasn't been helped by the thousands of lies surrounding the case.

When they were being investigated, Hennessey, Cheeseman and many of their friends and family members lied repeatedly to the RCMP. For its part, the RCMP lied repeatedly to Hennessey and Cheeseman, particularly in one phase of the investigation, the police's controversial undercover Mr. Big operation.

As well, there's Roszko's life of crime to consider, one that remains shrouded in lies and deceit. He repeatedly committed a particular kind of act--the seduction, coercion and sexual assault of young men in a small town --that no one ever wanted to talk about, certainly not Roszko, but not his victims, either. It now appears likely that for years before the Mayerthorpe mass murder, Roszko got away with both sexual assault and possibly even murder, partly because of a dysfunctional justice system, but also because of the shame and terror of his victims.

It's now alleged that one such victim was Dennis Cheeseman himself.

During the investigation, Cheeseman told an undercover RCMP officer that Roszko had

once stalked him. Cheeseman also hinted that Roszko had molested him at gunpoint. In jail in Drumheller, Cheeseman refuses to say anything more publicly about his previous allegations. But in April 2009, Shawn Hennessey's father, Barry, wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and to Alberta Justice Minister Alison Redford asking for help for Cheeseman and blasting the police for not treating him as the victim of a sex assault. "Dennis sits in prison with this in his head and his mind failing fast," Hennessey Sr. wrote.

"Dennis Cheeseman may have been molested at gunpoint by James Roszko. He confided in my daughter (Alicia) about this. The several million (dollar) sting operation was launched on Dennis even though they (the RCMP)knew this. He was suicidal at the time and very depressed. If he was female, I'm sure this undercover operation would have ended very fast."

Hennessey Sr. believes RCMP murder investigators had tunnel vision, focusing on charging his son Shawn and Cheeseman with murder. He says the RCMP failed to look at the entirety of Roszko and Cheeseman's relationship and how it might have impacted Cheeseman's state of mind on the night of March 2,2005, when Roszko showed up with a gun demanding help from Cheeseman and Hennessey. "They just wanted a confession of murder," he says.

In response to Hennessey's letter, Redford said the matter is still under appeal so it would be inappropriate for her to comment: "I understand this has been a difficult time for you and your family, however, it is important to allow the legal process to take its course."

Barry Hennessey Sr.

Deputy commissioner Rod Knecht, the RCMP's top cop in Alberta, who closely monitored the investigation, says that during the investigation, he was unaware of allegations that Roszko sexually assaulted Cheeseman.

"This would be the first time I would have heard this," he says.

Kelly Johnston, the wife of Leo Johnston, one of the murdered officers, says her heart goes out to Cheeseman if he was sexually assaulted by Roszko, but Cheeseman and Hennessey are still criminally responsible for assisting the mass murderer. After they dropped off Roszko at his farm on the night of March 2, 2005, Roszko was out of their vehicle and no longer threatening them, Johnston says. All the two young men had to do was make an anonymous phone call alerting the police to Roszko's armed presence. "They are victims of their own poor judgment ...I understand they were afraid, even terrified, but all it takes is you go and you tell the police your story.

"I don't have sympathy for anybody, or for anybody's reasoning and fear, that prevented them from saving my husband when it was so simple to do ... Roszko might have pulled the trigger, but they enabled him ... The blood is on their hands."

One other issue complicating the public's pursuit of answers about the Mayerthorpe massacre is that the matter was decided by a plea bargain instead of a lengthy trial. A complex crime, the final act of Roszko's lifelong war with authority, was followed by a complex police investigation that lasted more than two years, involved more than 300 RCMP officers and cost more than $2 million, but it was all boiled down into a brief and somewhat vague agreed statement of facts.

Both Hennessey, 30, and Cheeseman, 25, said in court that they accepted the accuracy of the agreed statement of facts, but they have since backed away from that position and are now appealing both their guilty pleas and their sentences, 15 years for Hennessey, 12 years for Cheeseman, on four counts of manslaughter for the deaths of the four RCMP officers, Johnston, Peter Schiemann, Brock Myrol and Anthony Gordon.

Hennessey Sr. argues his son and Cheeseman aren't killers, that it's unjust and perverse to blame them for the criminal acts of the real culprit, Roszko. The two never knew Roszko was going to kill and only provided help to Roszko at the point of a gun, Hennessey Sr. says. Even then, they only helped Roszko because they believed he was going to his farm to burn down his Quonset.

"If Dennis and Shawn were guilty of knowing there was police there and they were guilty of maybe not stopping four murders, leave them in jail," Hennessey Sr. says. "Leave them there as long as you feel fit. I'm with that. But this case isn't that way. Somebody should stop and have a look at this case and intervene."

Hennessey Sr. says the RCMP had an ulterior motive during the murder investigation, a determination to blame someone else for the crimes of Roszko. "They had to cover up the mess they made in Mayerthorpe somehow.

"Unfortunately, (in) the whole case the boys were guilty until proven innocent, and they never got the chance to prove it. The RCMP put 'guilty'and wrote it on their forehead and then they pressed to make it stick."

Hennessey isn't alone in making such allegations. After the attack, former RCMP superintendent Clyde Kitteringham, who spent much of his career in rural Alberta, offered a harsh critique of the RCMP's handling of the matter to reporters, saying that in light of the failure to arrest Roszko, a tactical team should have been called in to secure the property, not just two junior officers, Gordon and Johnston.

More recently, Jay West, the Edmonton parole officer who spent dozens of hours interviewing and assessing Hennessey and Cheeseman after their guilty pleas, wrote he has grave concerns. "Based on what I believe to be the truth, at this point in time, they are victims of both James Roszko and of a misguided witch hunt by the RCMP," West wrote in a report obtained by Hennessey Sr.

The victim's families, the RCMP and the public were outraged by Roszko's mass murder, but were deprived of their pound of flesh when Roszko killed himself, West wrote. "Had he been captured and prosecuted for murder, Hennessey and Cheeseman would almost certainly not be in prison today ... The RCMP may very well have been trying to deflect blame in their relentless pursuit of Hennessey and Cheeseman."

West didn't blame Cheeseman or Hennessey for failing to warn the RCMP of Roszko's presence. "They didn't call the police because they didn't know there was going to be violence."

One key factor, West said, is the alleged, previous sexual assault by Roszko on Cheeseman. "The fact that it never came out in court played a major role in this mis-justice."

In the face of such allegations are the two guilty pleas, which clearly spell out that Hennessey and Cheeseman knew Roszko was angry at the police, that they knew violent conflict was possible, but that they still provided him with a rifle, drove him back to his property and afterwards failed to call the police and alert them of his malignant presence. The agreed statement is mainly based on roughly a dozen confessions made by Cheeseman to friends, co-workers, RCMP officers and undercover agents, confessions that the judge in his preliminary hearing suggested would provide abundant reason, if accepted as the truth, to convict Cheeseman of first-degree murder.

But Cheeseman's family believes that Cheeseman's ever-changing confessions are unreliable at best. After the mass murder, he was both consumed by guilt over any role he did play and also determined to take the entire fall so that his friend, Hennessey, wouldn't have to go to jail. For those reasons, Hennessey Sr. says, Cheeseman lied repeatedly and provided false and embellished confessions to the police.

These are serious charges, but how much validity do they have?Are they not simply the typical allegations from a family that can't accept some of its members were involved in an extremely nasty crime?

The RCMP's Knecht says he understands that people are often unhappy with the results of police investigations, especially those folks who have been arrested, convicted and jailed. "We're in the business of taking away people's rights from time to time," he says. "We sometimes do things that are unpopular for some people."

In this case, Knecht says his officers took great pains not to develop tunnel vision in chasing down Hennessey and Cheeseman. The goal, he says, was to gather all the facts, both those that pointed at guilt and those that pointed at innocence. "All good investigators will always challenge themselves,' What am I doing? How am I doing? Is this the person or could it be somebody else?' " he says.

Knecht also stands by the officers who were at the Quonset. "They weren't novices, they were well-trained police officers," he says. "I don't think all the experience in the world would have changed the outcome. I think this was an unprecedented, unimagined situation that took place.

"It's an act of violence by a single individual against four police officers and such a situation has never happened before."

Even someone coming back in an effort to destroy evidence at a crime scene is extremely rare, Knecht says. "Usually if somebody knows the police are coming, they are headed in the other direction."

In the end, Knecht is left with a tremendous sense of respect for the officers who brought Hennessey and Cheeseman to justice. The lengthy investigation took a tremendous toll on the investigators, physically and mentally, but they saw it through. "Towards the end (of the investigation), I said, 'Where did we get such incredible people that are that dedicated and work that hard?'...I saw people that were doing their very best under the most extreme and trying circumstances."

While the debate rages on, without a lengthy trial and with the fatality inquiry into the matter yet to come, the public remains very much in the dark about the complexities of the case. Much of the story of the RCMP's investigation into Cheeseman and Hennessey came out during the May 2008 preliminary hearing, but there was a publication ban in place during that hearing, so no daily media reports could be made to the public. One particular area of rumour and innuendo is the RCMP's now controversial Mr. Big operation, which featured everything from an RCMP officer dressed up as a Santa Claus to the staged romantic seduction of Cheeseman by an RCMP officer.

While many in the public have already formed strong opinions both for and against Cheeseman and Hennessey and the RCMP and their tactics, it's fair to say such opinions can only be based on incomplete and often misleading information. As Jay West wrote in his report, "There are a myriad of questions that need to be answered before this matter comes to a just close. I seriously doubt that the truth has yet surfaced in a number of areas."

In this series of stories of the case --an attempt at a comprehensive retelling of what went on -- it's The Journal's intention to provide readers with a detailed account of the RCMP's investigation, and an accounting of all the main players, from Roszko and the RCMP to Hennessey and Cheeseman and their friends and family.

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Part 2

Mayerthorpe - In an attempt to make sense of all that went on during the lengthy police investigation into Shawn Hennessey and his brother-in-law Dennis Cheeseman, one place to start is the dubious story that Roszko's mother Stephanie Fifield told to the police about Hennessey in the early days of the murder investigation.


Fifield's initial police statement about Hennessey is a major mystery in the case, mainly because in March 2005 she labelled him as a partner in Roszko's marijuana grow up, at least according to RCMP search warrants. But, several years later, when she took the stand at Hennessey's preliminary hearing in May 2008, Fifield denied ever knowing a Shawn Hennessey. She didn't even know that her son Jim ever had a marijuana operation, she testified, let alone that Hennessey was his partner.


It's worth noting that a strained relationship with the truth has sometimes been a feature of Fifield's relationship with her twisted son, Jim.


Jim Roszko stuck by his mom through her difficult, sometimes violent relationships with the four different husbands she had before her current husband, Warren Fifield. Stephanie also generally stuck by Jim, even as his run-ins with the law started in 1976, and other family members grew weary of his violent antics.


When Fifield's last child, Doug, claimed that his elder half-brother Jim was violent with him, and showed his mother a crack against the bedroom wall where Jim had allegedly thrown him, her response was, "What crack? I can't see no crack?"


Doug would later testify in court: "(Jim) was always kicking the shit out of me in the yard. We would be working on something and he would get mad, throw wrenches around, grab me, kaboof in the head. Mom never said anything."


In the late 1980s, Roszko started to sexually abuse a child at the farm. Years later, in 1994, that child, now a grown man, decided to press charges against Roszko. Stephanie scoffed at the young man's allegations, telling him, "If it really happened, why didn't you say something then?"


But Stephanie was also torn up about the sex assault allegations, denying them one day, admitting Jim had a problem the next, her son George has said. In the end, Jim Roszko was convicted of sex assault and got a 2 1/2 year prison term.




Part of Jim's hold on his mother was intimidation, George has said. Jim would rage and throw dishes at Stephanie when he didn't get his way. She was scared of him. Over time, she also came to weary of his constant legal issues. But it was to Stephanie that 46-year-old Jim Roszko first turned to on March 2, 2005, the day before the mass murder.


Two bailiffs had come to the farm that Roszko shared with the Fifields to repossess his truck. At once Roszko fled with the vehicle. He then tried to get in touch with Stephanie, but without any luck. She had gone to Barrhead for the day with her husband Warren to shop and play the VLTs.


To find his mom, Roszko called up Stephanie's sister, his aunt Anne Chayka, who lived on an acreage 36 kilometres from the Roszko/Fifield farm. Roszko sounded anxious, desperate even, to Chayka. "There is a situation in my yard," he said.


Stephanie got home to her tidy trailer home with the manicured lawn, bird houses, rock garden and patio lanterns early in the evening of March 2. She looked out the window to check her cattle. It was then that she saw police cars across the field, over near Jim's Quonset and trailer, high up on a hill, 1.3 kilometres in the distance and visible from miles around.


About that time, Jim again called his mother. "The first time he called I was so shocked and so shook up because I seen all these vehicles on his property there, police cars and that," Fifield testified at Hennessey and Cheeseman's preliminary hearing, the first and only time she has spoken at length in public about the key events. "It kind of frightened me, and I was just going to pieces and I didn't know what was happening.


"I was just worried about him going to jail. I went through enough."


For all of Stephanie's anxiety about the situation at Jim's farm, Jim himself didn't sound out of the ordinary, at least according to Fifield testimony: "He just sounded the same as he always did. . He just sounded normal."


She had difficulty recalling exactly what she and Jim talked about that evening, she testified, but he did ask her if he could park his truck at Anne Chayka's place.


That night, Chayka went to bed at 10 p.m. only to be woken up by a call from Stephanie. Stephanie asked her if Jim could park his truck at her farm. Stephanie tried to assure her sister it was OK to assist Jim. "Nothing will happen," Stephanie said, according to Chayka's testimony.


Chayka said she was already stressed and wanted no part of Jim Roszko and his troubles, so at first she refused Stephanie's request, saying the bailiffs would look everywhere for the truck. "Whatever's going on, I don't want no part of it," Chayka said.


Stephanie told Chayka if anyone asked about the truck, she could just say a neighbour left it there. If it would make her feel any better, Stephanie promised she would come out the next morning herself to pick up the truck. At last, Chayka gave in. As she would later testify: "Then I just got teary-eyed and I guess I gave up and didn't say yes or no. I just left it at that."


Chayka then waited. She sat, stressed and fearful in her living room, looking out the window. No one showed up in her yard. At last she went to bed. She prayed her nephew Jim Roszko would change his mind and not park the truck at her place.


Fifield also had a restless night wondering what was happening at her son's property. "I couldn't sleep .," she testified. "I was so worried. Nobody came to let me know what was going on."


At 9:30 a.m. the next day, Jim Roszko ambushed four RCMP officers as they entered his Quonset, which housed an illegal marijuana grow op and chop shop. He fired 19 shots from his semi-automatic rifle, killing all four officers. Const. Peter Schiemann was shot in the chest, wrist and thigh. Const. Anthony Gordon was shot twice in the chest and abdomen. Const. Leo Johnston got off one shot, hitting Roszko's belt, then had his gun jam before he could fire again. Roszko shot Johnston four times in the chest, neck, face, pelvis and lower extremities. Const. Brock Myrol was shot in the head.


A fifth officer, Steve Vigor, who was just outside the Quonset when Roszko sprung his ambush, got into a gunfight with Roszko as the villain attempted to leave. Vigour wounded Roszko, but not mortally. Roszko retreated into the Quonset. In the following hours, he shot himself dead with a bullet through the heart.


That same morning of the mass murder-suicide, Anne Chayka awoke to spot Roszko's truck in her yard. At once Chayka called up Stephanie, only to find her sister to be in a hysterical state, saying there was strange things happening in Jim's yard, that ambulances were there and helicopters were flying overhead.


Chayka demanded that Stephanie come to get Jim's truck, but Stephanie said she couldn't get out because all the roads were blocked. Chayka threatened to call the police.


"You better call the police or I'll call the police," Stephanie shot back.


Chayka did call, telling the police that a truck fitting the description of the one they were looking for was in her yard.


On March 4, one day after the mass murder, RCMP investigators interviewed Stephanie. As Crown prosecutor Dave Labrenz would later summarize in court, Stephanie said her son Jim had called her up between 7 and 8 p.m. on March 2, the night before the mass murder: "He (Jim) told her that the police were there to repossess his truck and that he left with the truck and was going to talk to police about it," Labrenz said.


"He also told his mother to read her Bible and pray on a rosary. She thought that aspect of the conversation was different than usual. And Roszko told her that he would call her after he spoke with the police."


The next day, March 5, 2005, the RCMP also interviewed Chayka, who has testified that she lied to the investigators about a key point, doing so on the advice of Stephanie Fifield. "Like a fool, I listened to her (Fifield), I guess," Chayka said in her tearful and emotional testimony at Hennessey and Cheeseman's preliminary hearing. "The first statement that I give to the RCMP, I kind of didn't give them the truth because Stephanie told me to lie about it."


In her lie, Chayka told the RCMP that Roszko hadn't left the truck at her place, but that some neighbour's truck had broken down and the neighbour had parked it there. But the deceit didn't sit well with Chayka. One week later, on March 13, she called up the police and this time told the truth about all that had transpired that night.


The RCMP would interview Fifield four more times in March and April 2005. The police also asked her and her husband Warren to take polygraph tests, but they refused. When the murder investigators asked her about Shawn Hennessey, she essentially painted a big target on the young Barrhead man. As Labrenz would say in his summary of what she apparently said to the RCMP: "She did know a person, known only as Shawn to her, that was an associate of Roszko's, and she had in the past seen Shawn riding a motorbike around in Roszko's yard. She did not know his last name.


"She indicated that when Roszko called her on March the 2nd, the number was subscribed by a person whose last name began with an 'H,' and she believed the calls were being made from Shawn's place. She herself had been offered a job by her son cleaning marijuana heads, but she declined that."


According to an RCMP search warrant from March 2005, Stephanie made it clear to the police that Hennessey was a partner in Roszko's marijuana grow op: "She believed that James Roszko and Shawn Hennessey were involved in the drug trade and that Roszko grew the marijuana while Hennessey sold it," the warrant reads. "The connection between Roszko and Hennessey on the date prior to the homicides illustrates that Hennessey is a person on which Roszko would turn for assistance."


On the witness stand, however, Fifield contradicted her earlier statements to the police. She testified that she knew nothing about any grow op or chop shop on her son's property.


"Do you know Shawn Hennessey, Mrs. Fifield?" she was asked.


"No, I don't. I've never met the man, and I've never seen him before, and I've never heard his name before."


It was the RCMP who had brought up Hennessey's name, she suggested. "The police said after it was a Hennessey."


During her testimony, Fifield was asked if she herself had any involvement in the mass murder. Had she, for instance, supplied her son with a gun?


"Oh, heavens no," she testified.


She didn't know of any plan her son had to kill police, she said. "No, I wish I would have, but I didn't."


She got emotional testifying about the mass murder and suicide. "All these poor boys, five boys, I feel for them all," she said. "This should've never happened."


RCMP deputy commissioner Rod Knecht says the police considered Fifield's contradictory statements and testimony, but no more charges are going to be laid in regards to the Mayerthorpe incident.


"In this case we chose not to (lay a charge)," Knecht says in regards to Fifield. "We had two individuals charged with very serious offences and we wanted to focus on the most serious offences in this case."


Stephanie Fifield refused to be interviewed for this story.


The Hennessey family is now left to wonder why Fifield said what she did to investigators about Hennessey if she didn't even know him. "I have no clue," says Hennessey's father Barry. "I'm so confused with that (Roszko) family. I don't know what to think."


For his part, Shawn Hennessey told a friend during the investigation that Roszko must have told his mother a bunch of lies about him being involved in the marijuana grow op. "Where would she get my name from?" he wondered. "I never met her before."


At the preliminary hearing, Hennessey's mother Sandy watched Stephanie's testimony. "I thought she just wants to wipe her hands of this and forget it," Sandy says. "She's terrified. She wants it over."


The two mothers spoke briefly at the hearing. "She actually walked by me and said, 'Good luck,' but in a caring way. It was a kind gesture on her part," Sandy says.


But not all members of the Hennessey family are so forgiving of Roszko's mother. Shawn's sister Alicia says, "She was quick to place the blame on Shawn, because when they interviewed her they (the RCMP) were putting Shawn's name out there, so she was right away, like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, here you go, here's all the info.' Then she realized, 'I was putting all the blame on some guy I didn't really know and didn't really know what happened.' And she tried to take it back."


Whatever Fifield's reasoning, there's no doubting the impact of her information. It was a key part of the reason RCMP investigators came to focus the full power of the state to investigate, to probe, to shadow and to wiretap Shawn Hennessey. Of course, Hennessey didn't help his own cause. As the RCMP quickly discovered, he had many lies of his own regarding Jim Roszko and the mass murder.

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Part 3

Shawn Hennessey was in a tight and bewildering spot in the days following the mass murder of March 3, 2005.On the radio, the TV and in the newspapers one message pounded out repeatedly:How did mass murderer Jim Roszko get home to his farm? Did someone help Roszko kill the four RCMP officers?

"It was over and over and over and over, every day in the paper," says Hennessey's wife, Christine. "Shawn was saying, 'This is extremely scary. They're going to blame this all on me. I know it.'

RCMP deputy commissioner Rod Knecht says the police never set out to blame anyone for Jim Roszko's mass murder of four RCMP officers, just to gather all the facts. Roszko's truck had been found about 38 kilometres from his farm, so the big issue was to figure out how he had gotten from his truck back to his farm. "We were really presented with a lot of unknowns," Knecht says.

The Mounties had an officer walk that distance and it took him more than eight hours, so it didn't seem likely Roszko had made that hike in the early morning of March 3 after ditching his truck at his aunt's house. "That didn't seem viable," Knecht says. "So the questions are: How did he get back there? Did he have any help in getting back there? Were there other persons involved? What had transpired there in any way, shape or form?"

Hennessey understood he had some explaining to do, but he was no career criminal, just a young, inexperienced small-town guy, an assistant manager and labourer at the Barrhead Kal-Tire. He wasn't sure that he should tell anyone the truth about what had gone on between him and Roszko, not even his own family, let alone RCMP murder investigators.

Some facts in the case are uncontested. Late on the evening of March 2, 2005, Roszko showed up at Hennessey's acreage south of Barrhead. Roszko was packing a handgun. He demanded both a rifle and a ride. Hennessey provided both. He gave Roszko a rifle registered to his grandfather, John, then drove Roszko back to near his farm, 60 kilometres away, just outside the town of Mayerthorpe. The next day, Hennessey's rifle was found beside Roszko's corpse in the Quonset hut where Roszko had ambushed and murdered four RCMP officers.

After the mass murder, images of the rifle were all over TV and the newspaper. Hennessey knew

it would only be a matter of time before the gun would be traced to him. He had to do something. But what?

The Hennessey family now says that Shawn wanted nothing to do with Roszko on the night that Shawn gave him the rifle and the ride. Hennessey apparently knew nothing of Roszko's history as a sexual predator and violent foe of the RCMP, but he had seen enough to make him wary of the man.

Roszko had gotten to know Hennessey after Roszko's release from jail in 2001, after Roszko's first and only sexual assault conviction. Roszko was no longer welcome in his hometown of Mayerthorpe, so he started to travel 50 kilometres down the road to Barrhead, a larger and far more prosperous town. He went to do business, but also to strike up friendships with young men. A violent, serial sex offender, Roszko was always looking for future sexual partners and victims, says a former RCMP officer who had numerous dealings with Roszko.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Roszko was investigated repeatedly for allegations of sexual assault against young men. He was only charged twice and convicted once, both because

of the nature of the crime and of the perpetrator. None of Roszko's victims were keen to come forward and be branded as the victims of homosexual molestation, certainly not in a small-town environment.

Any teenage victims or witnesses who did have the nerve to take some steps against Roszko found themselves stalked and threatened by the

predator, sometimes with a firearm. He would threaten or pay the friends of his targets to find out where the young man was going, what he was doing. In three cases, young men who went to the RCMP about Roszko ended up dead. Roszko's name has come up in all three suspicious deaths because he clearly had motive, the former officer says.

Roszko didn't just succeed through intimidation. He was also a clever manipulator. He wooed the young men skilfully. He let them fire off the array pistols and rifles at his farm, fixed their trucks for them, paid off their small debts and purchased them car insurance.

He tried to gain Hennessey's friendship with some of his usual tricks, namely offering easy work for excellent pay at his farm, as well as marijuana at a good price.

Hennessey was no pushover. He was a popular young man around Barrhead, known for his love of a good time, his strong work ethic at Kal-Tire and his excellent success as an amateur boxer. But he was still an inexperienced young man and he got pulled in by Roszko, now and then buying some of Roszko's pot and selling it to his own friends and family.

Hennessey's marijuana connection to Roszko is a crucial matter in the case, as it was cited as a reason for Hennessey's lengthy 15-year-sentence. Justice Eric Macklin felt Hennessey helped Roszko on March 2, 2005, partly out of self-interest, hoping Roszko would burn down the Quonset, which housed a marijuana grow-op that was allegedly linked to Hennessey.

But it's clear Hennessey was no major partner in Roszko's marijuana operation. The police never produced any strong evidence at Hennessey's preliminary hearing suggesting that the young man was a full or even minor partner. Hennessey told his family he had never been in the Quonset, which had a big padlock on the door. And as Crown prosecutor Dave Labrenz said during Hennessey's bail hearing, "I don't want to make him out to be a big-time drug dealer, because he clearly wasn't.Any trafficking he did was at a very social level among family and friends."

Roszko had also hired Hennessey to do some work at his farm, including installing a stereo in one of Roszko's trucks. Hennessey's father, Barry, believes Roszko had nefarious purposes. "There were two or three things that happened that was cagey. I think he was trying to get Shawn, as well."

One day, for instance, Shawn Hennessey showed up at his father's acreage riding a motorcycle. When his father heard that the motorcycle didn't belong to his son, but was a loaner from an older man, he got suspicious.

"Come on!" he recalls telling his son. "People don't lend you dirt bikes. You should question the guy who lent it to you."

Shawn Hennessey told his dad it was no big deal, but later became suspicious himself when he noticed that Roszko had lent a truck to another young Kal-Tire employee.

"I don't know why Roszko is giving him a truck," Hennessey told his father.

"You better watch yourself with this bike thing," his father replied.

Another time, Shawn Hennessey lent a rifle to Roszko. At Kal-Tire one day, Roszko had overheard Hennessey boasting about shooting coyotes, and had mentioned he was having trouble with a bear. Could he maybe borrow that rifle for a few days to shoot the bear? Hennessey handed it over. Roszko returned the gun a few days later. But from that point on, Roszko knew where to go when he needed a rifle, and so to Hennessey he went on March 2, 2005.

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