MARTIN: ‘Closure’ rings hollow for victim’s family in brutal slaying

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‘Closure’ is a word that is often used in the criminal justice system.

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It’s what lawyers, judges, police officers and others who work within the system strive to achieve at the end of the day when a criminal case is ultimately resolved.

But it can also ring hollow for many people who are forced to endure tragic events which often result in criminal prosecutions and ultimately judicial sanctions against offenders.

Certainly for some, seeing the person who harmed, or even killed a cherished loved one brought to justice can bring some sense of finality for the victims left behind to mourn.

However, the hope for many that seeing an offender carted off by courtroom sheriffs to begin serving lengthy prison terms will end their grief is often a false one.

Last week, justice finally caught up to killer Ronald James Edwards, nearly a half-century after he repeatedly stabbed a young Calgary mother on a deserted rural roadway west of the city after they’d engaged in consensual sex.

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But seeing a feeble old man sentenced to the equivalent of a 6½-year prison term for manslaughter in the death of 16-year-old Pauline Brazeau a full lifetime ago probably didn’t do much to assuage the grief relatives have lived through for nearly 50 years.

Among the family members who packed a Calgary Court of King’s Bench courtroom for Edwards’ guilty plea was Brazeau’s daughter, Tracy, now a middle-aged woman who was just months old when her mother was inexplicably and brutally slain.

“Closure, what does that even mean?” she said, when asked to present a victim impact statement at the sentencing hearing of the man who killed the mother she never knew.

“There are no memories, nothing shared between her and I. No laughs, no smiles.”

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For his part, Edwards, now 75, vowed he was no longer the “drunken young man” who stabbed Brazeau nine times in the early morning hours of Jan. 9, 1976, after they had sex after he met her in the Beltline and drove to an area along Jumping Pound Road west of Calgary.

He apologized for the pain and suffering he caused not only to those who survived long enough to see justice done, but the many people who never got to learn who was responsible for the teen’s death.

“There was a time I would not have been able to say this,” Edwards said.

“I was a drunken young man.”

Years after the killing, finding himself in jail for another brutal crime, Edwards said he sobered up and began to rehabilitate his life.

“I no longer hated the man looking back at me in the mirror,” he told those in the courtroom.

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According to the admitted facts Crown prosecutor Patrick Bigg presented to Justice Robert Armstrong, booze played a large role in Edwards’ killing of Brazeau.

“The accused admits that he was … intoxicated that night and does not remember many details of what occurred,” Bigg said, reading from an exhibit signed by the offender and his lawyers, Pawel Milczarek and Mackenzie McCaffrey.

That could hardly provide solace to Brazeau’s loved ones, who waited five decades to find out why her life was snuffed out so needlessly and at such a young age.

To learn some “drunken young man” killed the teen for reasons unknown won’t likely create any feelings of closure in them.

According to the facts, Edwards believed Brazeau was a sex-trade worker (she was not).

But perhaps that false belief was his motivation for his deadly attack.

Nearly 14 years after killing Brazeau, Edwards was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the brutal sexual assault and attempted murder of a prostitute.

That victim was able to fight back, likely saving her own life.

Young Pauline Brazeau never got that opportunity, and her family’s left to mourn because of it.

KMartin@postmedia.com

X: @KMartinCourts

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