Pod Insights Canadian True Crime The Huenemann / Leatherbarrow Murders [1] About this episode A two-part series — When police are called to do a welfare check at the home of a fashion store owner, they're confronted with a shocking sight. Lying on the kitchen floor are the lifeless bodies of two women, their faces covered in dishcloths. There's blood everywhere.
It looks as if Doris Leatherbarrow and her daughter Sharon Huenemann were killed just as they were serving up dinner for two guests. Who were the guests? And where were they now?
The intention of this series is to take a detailed look back at a shocking crime often sensationalized and oversimplified, and explore the inner workings of the criminal justice system. Please respect the privacy of the people involved in this case.
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1:32 Speaker 02 Canadian True Crime is a completely independent production, funded mainly through advertising. You can listen to Canadian True Crime ad-free and early on Amazon Music, included with Prime, Apple Podcasts, Patreon, and Supercast. The podcast often has disturbing content and coarse language. It's not for everyone. Please take care when listening.
1:52 Speaker 03 Hi everyone, I hope you're well and keeping safe this holiday season. This is part one of a two-part series to be released a week apart. And as a heads up, these are the final two episodes of the year. We'll be back with a new season in February. 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. And with that, it's on with the show.
2:39 Speaker 03 It's a Friday night in October in the province of British Columbia, and Ralph Huenemann 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.
3:25 Speaker 03 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 cellphones. There's nothing he can do but wait.
3:41 Speaker 03 At about 10pm, someone arrives home. Ralph gets his hopes up, but it's not his wife Sharon. It's Darren, her 18-year-old son from her first marriage, although he was only about four or five when she married Ralph Huenemann. The teenager tells his stepdad he's going to bed. He'll catch up with his mum in the morning.
4:07 Speaker 03 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's number again periodically, but there's still no one home.
4:44 Speaker 03 He decides to call the Delta Police on the lower mainland and asks them to do a welfare check at Doris's 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.
5:12 Speaker 03 On the mainland, officers with Delta Police arrive just before 3am and enter the home of Sharon Huenemann'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.
5:51 Speaker 03 The older woman has an eight-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 Huenemann, 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 four 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.
6:31 Speaker 03 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?
6:48 Speaker 03 A few hours later, back on Vancouver Island, Ralph Huenemann rushed to the front door when he heard a knock. It was the Sanich Police, sent to deliver the distressing news that his wife Sharon 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.
7:29 Speaker 03 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's home. With this information, investigators formed a theory that the women must have been murdered between about 5.30pm at the earliest and about midnight at the latest. Their bodies had been found just before 3am. Police had no immediate motives or suspects.
8:10 Speaker 03 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 timeframe in question,
8:56 Speaker 03 Friday, October 5th of 1990, between 5.30pm and midnight. In the small community of Tawasne on the mainland, Deltar 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.
9:30 Speaker 03 Eighteen-year-old Darren Huenemann 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. Darren 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.
10:15 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann 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.
10:52 Speaker 03 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.
11:18 Speaker 03 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 30 feet 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
11:59 Speaker 03 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 in tourist destination called Tawasun.
12:42 Speaker 03 Located on the ancestral home and lands of Tawasun 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 Limited, 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.
13:17 Speaker 03 The store took off to the point where it became Doris's 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 twenty 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.
13:59 Speaker 03 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 five years old, Sharon married Ralph Huenemann, 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".
14:42 Speaker 03 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's fashion stores, where she gained a reputation for being both friendly and impeccably dressed and groomed.
15:07 Speaker 03 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 Sanich, 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.
15:53 Speaker 03 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 Towson 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,
16:36 Speaker 03 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.
17:12 Speaker 03 When news of the murders was made public, everyone was shocked. The autopsy had concluded that when the mother and daughter were at Doris's home cooking dinner, they were ambushed and struck on the head with a blunt instrument, rendering them unconscious. Forty-seven-year-old Sharon Huenemann suffered two skull fractures, a split right forehead, and her throat had been cut. Her mother, sixty-nine-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
17:57 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann had launched a lawsuit against a contractor who built her two-story home in San Edge, according to The Vancouver Sun.
18:35 Speaker 03 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.
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20:45 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann, 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 $3 million. And that was in 1990.
21:27 Speaker 03 Doris's 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.
22:11 Speaker 03 And he knew this. Doris's sister told investigators that four days after the murders, Darren phoned her and quizzed her over the details of his grandmother's will.
22:25 Speaker 03 At this point, investigators realised that Darren Huenemann 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 easy to get between where the Huenemann 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 8pm to 10pm
23:08 Speaker 03 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 to his known acquaintances, starting with the two friends he and Amanda had dinner with in Victoria that night.
23:42 Speaker 03 They arrived at the home of Derek Lord, a seventeen-year-old who attended Mount Douglas High School with Darren 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 Huenemann and wanted to speak with him. Derek got in the cruiser and he was asked if he knew Darren'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 Tewassan on the mainland,
24:25 Speaker 03 but told police he'd gone shopping to the Tewassan Town Centre Mall about a week before the murders. The seventeen-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 Huenemann and his girlfriend had picked him up, along with David Muir,
25:06 Speaker 03 and the four went to Chinatown in 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
25:50 Speaker 03 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 organizer of the Dungeons and Dragons group, learning that Darren Huenemann 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 Grand Master was in his early twenties,
26:30 Speaker 03 and told police that Darren joined the group the summer of 1989, when he was just about to turn seventeen. This was just over a year before the murders. The Grand Master 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 Grand Master, Darren always played the character of a priest, and became somewhat of a de facto leader for the group.
27:12 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann, 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.
27:56 Speaker 03 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.
28:11 Speaker 03 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.
28:52 Speaker 03 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 D and D 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 Huenemann didn't confine his strange comments about his grandma to the D and D
29:36 Speaker 03 group. A classmate at Mount Douglas Secondary School reported that in the months leading up to the murders of Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huenemann, 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.
30:19 Speaker 03 But once again, everyone thought he was joking. It was just too blatant to be anything else.
30:28 Speaker 03 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.
30:55 Speaker 03 By this point, the potential motive involving Sharon Huenemann's dispute with the contractor who built her home had fizzled out. Instead, investigators honed in on Darren Huenemann 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.
31:32 Speaker 03 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 Tawasne. He picked them up from the terminal just before 5pm and drove them to the Tawasne Mall. This happened on Friday, October 5th, a little earlier on the same evening that Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huenemann 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
32:14 Speaker 03 so Sharon could get ready for her ferry back to Vancouver Island.
32:20 Speaker 03 This new information was notable to the police for a few reasons. The Towassan 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 Towassan Mall. But Derek said their trip happened the week before the murders.
33:01 Speaker 03 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 5, between 5.30pm and midnight. David Muir echoed a similar version of events already given by Derek Lord. He told the police that Darren Huenemann 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.
33:44 Speaker 03 Then Darren 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 Huenemann, 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
34:27 Speaker 03 and tentatively identified him as one of the two teenagers he picked up from the Towassan 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's 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,
35:08 Speaker 03 someone using the name Dave had requested a taxi to pick him up from the Tawasne 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 Huenemann 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.
35:51 Speaker 03 The driver wasn't able to recall what they looked like.
35:56 Speaker 03 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.
36:34 Speaker 03 It was at this point that seventeen-year-old Derek Lord and sixteen-year-old David Muir joined Darren Huenemann as primary suspects in the murders of Sharon Huenemann and Doris Leatherbarrow. In the meantime, believing the investigation had stalled, their remaining family members, friends and business associates pulled 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,
37:16 Speaker 03 and within a few days, they were intercepting phone calls made and received by Darren Huenemann, 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.
38:01 Speaker 03 They hoped it would motivate a flurry of phone calls they would be listening into.
38:10 Speaker 03 They didn't have to wait 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 nine, somewhere in there, but she didn't know.
38:45 Speaker 03 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 Tewasen on the mainland the same night the murders were committed. David's mum said she was going to be sick and left the room.
39:13 Speaker 03 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. How's it, 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.
39:57 Speaker 03 He said they needed to fess up and tell police they really were in Tewasen 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 Huenemann and asked him to meet in person about a phone call he'd just had with David Muir.
40:43 Speaker 03 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. Derek 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.
41:23 Speaker 03 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 Tawson. Darren said, obviously he's on the wrong day. It doesn't matter. I don't care what he's saying.
41:47 Speaker 03 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 Darren 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, because then I'd sue the bastards on Dave's case. Um, there is no problem.
42:30 Speaker 03 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.
42:57 Speaker 03 Darren said later that, "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, "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.
43:42 Speaker 03 Time to drop another bomb. On November 25th 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 Tawson the night of the murders. As expected, Derek immediately called Darren Huenemann 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.
44:26 Speaker 03 After obtaining all of these phone interceptions, the police firmly believed that Darren Huenemann was the mastermind, the one who planned the murders of his own mother and grandmother. 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 Huenemann was the mastermind.
45:02 Speaker 03 Sixteen-year-old David Muir and seventeen-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 Derek 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 sixteen-year-old they wanted to offer him a deal, and asked him if he wanted to hear what it was. David said yes.
45:46 Speaker 03 If he confessed to his involvement and agreed to testify at 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 sixteen-year-old was off. He would not be testifying for the Crown at trial. And further, the police had violated David's charter rights
46:30 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann's girlfriend Amanda probably knew a lot more than she'd told them.
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48:22 Speaker 03 Darren Hunerman 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. 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.
49:03 Speaker 03 He got As and Bs, listened attentively, and tried his best. It seemed that no one had anything bad to say about Darren Huenemann. Until now.
49:17 Speaker 03 Not long after David Muir and Derek Lord were arrested, investigators brought Darren Huenemann'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.
49:36 Speaker 03 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 was because he thought Ralph Huenemann 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.
50:21 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann, 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 Leatherbarrows' home
51:05 Speaker 03 at a time where she would be there with Sharon and Ralph Huenemann. 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 Sanich, 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
51:47 Speaker 03 when he realised 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 Ralph. Turns out his worries about Ralph becoming the executor of the estate were unfounded.
52:29 Speaker 03 But the planning continued with Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huenemann as the targets.
52:37 Speaker 03 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.
53:06 Speaker 03 Eventually, Darren 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.
53:19 Speaker 03 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 Tewasen, 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. Darren and Amanda would pick them up when they arrived, and they would all establish an alibi.
53:47 Speaker 03 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.
54:10 Speaker 03 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.
54:27 Speaker 03 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.
54:49 Speaker 03 And with that, David Muir and Derek Lord were charged with the first-degree murders of Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huenemann. 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.
55:26 Speaker 03 The following day, November 29th, Darren Huenemann 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.
56:10 Speaker 03 Darren Huenemann 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 Huenemann, 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
56:55 Speaker 03 into a perfect little gentleman, according to Lisa Hobbs-Burney's long-form article in the Calgary Herald magazine. Sharon Huenemann 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.
57:28 Speaker 03 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 sixteenth 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.
58:12 Speaker 03 So when he was charged with the first-degree murders of his mother and grandmother, many who knew him were shocked.
58:22 Speaker 03 Darren was eighteen years old at the time of the murders, an adult for the purposes of the criminal justice system, but his two friends, seventeen-year-old Derek Lord and sixteen-year-old David Muir, were minors under the Young Offenders Act, so their names were put under publication ban.
58:49 Speaker 03 Obviously the youngest of all three, sixteen-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 Muir 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
59:34 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann and Derek Lord, David preferred reading sci-fi books if given the choice.
59:54 Speaker 03 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 Tawassee, 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. Tawassee is on the top half of the peninsula
1:00:37 Speaker 03 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 orders 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.
1:01:21 Speaker 03 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.
1:01:58 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann, where he was described as an oddball by fellow students, according to The Times columnist.
1:02:39 Speaker 03 Some remembered him carrying a knife around the school, occasionally flicking it, and at one point threatening a teacher with it. It 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 coworker at his part-time job at Kmart said that after she complained about an annoying coworker, Derek told her to hire a hitman to take care of it, adding that it would only cost about $10,000 to $50,000.
1:03:24 Speaker 03 Just a month before the murders, another coworker at Kmart complained to Derek about someone harassing her, and he reportedly pulled out a knife and told her that, quote, "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 adults. It was noted that Derek Lord had never been in trouble with the law and was of above-average intelligence.
1:04:03 Speaker 03 He had no significant psychiatric or psychological problems, although he was subject to depression and showed a suicidal tendency.
1:04:13 Speaker 03 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 Lord 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 Huenemann into doing something they otherwise wouldn’t have done. As such, they were both considered unlikely to re-offend, and it was recommended that
1:04:55 Speaker 03 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 Huenemann'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 Huenemann.
1:05:40 Speaker 03 The Crown’s star witness would be Darren Huenemann'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
1:06:24 Speaker 03 “too strange to be true” but years later would result in national headlines.
1:06:40 Speaker 03 Thanks for listening. All That and The Aftermath is coming up in part two, available to all in a week. If you're subscribed to our ad-free premium feeds on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music included with Prime, or Patreon, look out for early release. Canadian True Crime donates monthly to those facing injustice. This month, we have donated to Women's Shelters Canada, an organisation that supports over 600 shelters across the country for women and children fleeing violence. You can find a shelter near you by going to sheltersafe.ca.
1:07:20 Speaker 03 Visit canadiantrecrime.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. If you found this episode compelling, we'd love for you to tell a friend, post on social media, or leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. This case was researched by Hayley Gray. Audio editing was by Eric Crosby, who also voiced the disclaimer. Our senior producer is Lindsay Eldridge, and Carol Weinberg is our script consultant. Writing, additional research, narration and sound design was by me, and the theme songs were composed by We Talk of Dreams.
1:08:03 Speaker 03 I'll be back soon with part two, and stay tuned for a special wrap-up episode coming soon after that. See you then.
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