Interviewing Curtis Dagenais after the Spiritwood, Sask., shooting and manhunt
CBC reporter Dan Zakreski recalls speaking to Dagenais at correctional centre
It was early July 2006 and Curtis Dagenais was armed and six days on the run when I met his uncle, Herb Jaster, in a field near Spiritwood, Sask.
I wanted to know more about his nephew, the man accused of grievously wounding two young RCMP constables who had answered a domestic dispute call at Dagenais' mom's house in town.
The wanted posters nailed all over the countryside made him look scary; those angry eyes glowering out from beneath a defiant mullet. For a dozen days that glare informed everything news crews from across the country did, once we left the relative safety of Spiritwood.
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Reconstructing the chase for the camera, we convoyed east to Mildred and then south into a labyrinth of roads, swamps, coulees and poplar stands, to the lonely dead end where Dagenais killed Robin Cameron, 29, and Marc Bourdages, 26, and wounded Michelle Knopp.
The unspoken question only laughed about nervously later, over beers: Is Curt watching us right now through a rifle sight?
If I shot and killed him, I'd feel about as much remorse as if I shot a mangy coyote.- Herb Jaster, Curtis Dagenais' uncle, to CBC in 2006
Word is that he shot them with a Winchester; that Cameron never even got her seatbelt off; that he was heading for the farm to get his dad's guns.
Now, in a field near Spiritwood, Jaster squares up to the camera.
"If I shot and killed him, I'd feel about as much remorse as if I shot a mangy coyote," he says of his nephew.
Setting it up
Dagenais mailed a rambling, self-justifying five-page letter to the Edmonton Sun while he was on the run. That's when I knew that I'd have a chance to talk to him, if he survived getting caught.
And then he turned himself in, just like that, and it was over.
Interviewing Dagenais
He convinced Curt and, some four months after the shootings, I sat across a table from him at the Saskatoon Correctional Centre; no lawyer or guards in the room.
He had a haircut and looked smaller and puffier than I'd expected. And spooked.
He'd get angry and then quiet, just like his dad.
The story came out in a fractured chronology: highway patrol officers picking on Curt, RCMP picking on Curt, court clerks picking on Curt, family picking on Curt, all threads leading to that bloody July 7 night.
"All the complaints I've gone to them with, you get the runaround," Dagenais said. "Yet any complaint against me, they round up the whole force."
He glosses over the fight at his mom's house.
As for Cameron and Bourdages, it was self-defence, he finally says. He panicked when they arrived and he took off in his truck for his dad's farm so that he'd have a witness when they pulled him over.
He describes how they closed on him and rammed his truck, forcing his hand.
In court
The RCMP communication centre recording of the 27-kilometre chase that ends with Cameron and Bourdages dying is played once in court and then sealed with an order that it never be played again.
Knopp weeps on the stand, describing arriving seconds after the shooting, the bang and her face burning and seeing Dagenais through the bullet hole in her windshield standing at his truck with a rifle.
How Cameron was strapped in her seat, Bourdages still alive in the grass by his truck door; she's wounded and he's too heavy for her to lift; leaving for help and not finding her way back for two hours.
The jury comes back after two days and finds Dagenais guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.
He appeals and it's heard in October 2012. The judges dismiss it after deliberating 10 minutes.
Dagenais is serving three life sentences.
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