Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Nov 18/02) - There's a thick file in Martha Bernard's house. She keeps it in a secret place. In it are news stories, witness statements, court transcripts.

This is what remains of her brother, Leonard Bernard, who died Sept. 2, 1975. His death is a murder mystery with the last pages torn out.

He was 19 at the time, she was 16. They had just lost their eldest sister in a house fire 10 months earlier. They were the only siblings left in their family.

Bernard is now 44. She has a husband and an adult daughter. She works. She lives. She has done her best to carry on. But always in the part of her mind where memories sleep, is her brother, and those last unknown moments of his life.

"My life after his death was never the same," Bernard says. "And it still isn't the same. I've gone over the statements over and over, at times trying to piece together a sequence of events. But there are always gaps."

Death on the river

What is known of the death is recorded in a News of the North article after the first coroner's inquest, dated Dec. 3, 1975. The torn yellow newsprint is at the top of her file. Bernard has read the story countless times during the last 27 years. It's a story that has shaped her adult life. She knows it almost by heart, yet each time she reads it, she searches for clues she might have missed all these years.

On Sept. 2, 1975, Leonard and another man, John Gardebois, 37, went missing from the Norman Wells barge where Leonard worked.

According to witnesses on board the Northern Engineering Services barge, people were drinking heavily, a fight broke out, one man was stabbed, Leonard and Gardebois disappeared.

That night, workers cleaned up a pool of blood on the floor of the barge kitchen before police arrived. The man who was stabbed, John Schnitzer, initially reported to police that he had fallen on his hunting knife, but later recanted and said Bernard had stabbed him in a scuffle. Three weeks later, the two bodies surfaced on the Mackenzie River near Norman Wells. The autopsies showed that Gardebois had died of a blow to the head with a blunt object, and Bernard had suffered a massive skull fracture and then drowned.

Their deaths were ruled accidental, but three days of testimony at the 1975 inquest failed to answer lingering questions. How were the two men injured? How did they end up in the river? How did they die?

In another twist to the story, the man who conducted the autopsy, T. Angelo di Stefano, was arrested in February 1976 for practising medicine without a licence and extradited to Italy where he was wanted for forging his medical diploma.

But by then, Leonard was buried and nothing more was made of the case until Bernard pressed to reopen the investigation 15 years later.

"After his death, I became very mixed up," Bernard says. "Everything about me was not at peace. I could laugh, talk, carry on a conversation like anybody else, but there was something eating at me. I felt he was murdered and I felt it was my duty to say and do something. I just couldn't let it go."

Investigation re-opened

In 1991, Bernard was 31, working as a reporter for the Inuvik Drum, and she was sorting though and straightening out loose ends in her life. Above all, she wanted the mystery of her brother's death solved. To help her, she sought out Owen Beattie, the University of Alberta anthropologist who in the mid-1980s led expeditions to exhume crew members of the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition. It was hoped Leonard's body would have been preserved by his permafrost grave and that new evidence might uncover how he died.

In June 1991, six months after Bernard made her first attempts to have the case re-opened, her brother's body was exhumed from the Aklavik cemetery. Beattie and Dr. Graeme Dowling, Alberta's chief medical examiner, conducted the second autopsy.

"I believed in my heart when they took that body out, they were going to find something that confirmed my suspicions," Bernard says. But the results came back the same -- inconclusive. The body had been in water and in the ground too long. The best experts could tell her nothing Bernard didn't already know.

"It was really, really hard to take," Bernard says. She was going to school at the University of Alberta when she heard of the results. "I was crying. I hadn't cried in a really long time. I was crying with frustration. I really pinned my hopes on the pathology investigation but nothing came out."

Despite her disappointment, Bernard says today she's still glad the case was re-opened. "It helped me because I finally had a voice," she says. She also believes it helped her family.

Her mother had always been bothered that Leonard wasn't buried in a proper casket. Times were tougher back when he died, and he had been buried in a simple plywood box.

"My mother wanted to see him buried in a really nice coffin," Bernard says. "And for her, that was closure."

Regret

She often wishes it could have been closure for her too, but after all these years, Bernard says she still struggles with the loss.

At the original inquest, one of the barge workers testified he had heard someone yelling the night Leonard disappeared. When he went on the deck to investigate, he saw someone swimming in the water, grasping at loose strips of timber that kept breaking off and floating away. Inexplicably, no other mention is made of the man overboard, no mention of any attempts to help him. This testimony is the closest Bernard has ever gotten to Leonard's last moments alive.

Anger remains

"I don't know if it was my brother or the other native guy," she says, reading over the transcript one more time. "But it could have been him, drowning, screaming, swimming back and forth, trying to grab onto something but not being able to get out. That's what haunts me."

Although Bernard says she has learned not to lay blame, her anger remains. She may never know what happened to her brother.

"I'm still angry about it and I'll probably be angry about it for the rest of my life," she says.

Angry at what? After a long pause she answers, "I'm angry at being young at the time. Having no experience about life. Angry I wasn't older so I could have done something right away. I think a lot of times, I'm mixed up. I can't seem to find grounding. I want to live my life with less regrets."

Now in her middle age, Bernard has the peaceful face of a person who smiles easily. She is a woman who has refused to be crippled by the past. She likes to read, sew, do beadwork and crafts. Lately, she's gotten into surfing the Internet and taking online courses. And she has a fascination with forensics and TV crime shows, a fascination her daughter shares.

Today, Bernard is working on a book about Leonard. She hopes writing it will help her finally move past his death.

"People, when they're on a healing path, they do all kinds of different things," she says. "Somebody might think it's morbid or it's a waste of time, or she's stuck in the past. But regardless of what anybody says, it's my way. I think something has to be done for me to move on. I want closure."