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Superintendent Brian Dueck

Dueck is no angel and he is not stupid, either

Dueck's amazing rise to the top of the Saskatoon Police Service

Brian Dueck

Feb. 1, 2002: An update of fifth estate's "Scandal of the Century" has brought us hundreds more visitors and letters from people who cannot understand how such a cop can remain in such a powerful position and why he is not in jail.

Feb. 10, 2001: In the past two weeks this page has received over 400 hits, more than our entire site received in our first three months of publication. Readers, including Corporate City Saskatoon who visit every day, will notice that Dueck's shenanigans include matters not even referred to in the lawsuit or in the Foster Parent scandal. Will Dueck's lawyers, who are paid from city taxes, now try to put these matters into a locked box called "civil discovery?" Even a Saskatchewan judge might balk at taking cover-up to that extreme.

inJusticebusters say the City has no choice but to face the truth that they have been shielding and promoting a corrupt cop. They should have dumped him a long time ago. We say dump him now. Charge him, try him and jail him for his crimes.

May 30: Amnesty International takes notice of Saskatoon's police brutality record

Nov. 28, 2001: Dueck still has his job as the most influential cop in the Saskatoon Police Service. On Nov. 22, injusticebuster Sheila Steele wrote to the mayor, city council and the Board of Police Commissioners expressing her intention to seek a remedy for loss of Charter rights resulting from Dueck's actions. On November 26, Michael Ross and Peter Klassen filed a civil claim against Dueck and 22 other individuals for damages suffered from Dueck's investigation.

Hours of meetings among many highly paid individuals at the city and provincial level are now taking place as those sued decide how to respond to these claims. We hope someone is pointing out to them that they have had seven or eight years to respond and chose instead to hide their heads in the sand and try to keep the facts of this case safe behind court seals. They are being sued for many millions by a couple dozen people so far. There are another couple dozen who have legitimate claims in this case.

Then there is Martensville, a completely different case with completely different players which happened after the charges against the non-convicted Foster Parent defendants had been stayed. This was the most expensive trial in Saskatchewan history.

As recently as March, 2001, Dueck and Len Watkins were sent to a meeting of a special legislative committee chaired by MLA Peter Prebble to address the problems of child prostitution in Saskatchewan.

Dueck had turned his back on Michelle and Kathy Ross when they told him they were being raped by their brother. He called it a touching problem. As far as we know his attitudes have not changed.

So what is the Saskatoon Police Service thinking of when it sends this guy as a representative to a meeting on such a topic? Report of the meeting. This is after the fifth estate show where he smugly assured producer Harvey Cashore he could speak to his lawyers, as he importantly took himself off to another meeting.

At his press conference in July, 1991 he claimed he had begun investigating this case in 1985. He dubbed it The Scandal of the Century.

Dale and Anita Klassen did not become foster parents until 1987. Peter Klassen was charged on a different matter in 1988 and it would seem this brought the Klassen family to Dueck's attention.

Shortly before he went on TV to defend the cops dumping drunk aboriginals at the edge of town, Dueck was severely chastised by a judge for his bullying tactics in the Kim Cooper case.

Witness tampering in the Foster Parent case

Malice and covering malice

Dueck is a ciminally minded cop who has managed to circumvent the law because of his position. His crimes are many. He advanced his career by brazenly manipulating three FAS damaged children to tell lies in court to back his charges against people he knew and who have been shown to be innocent. He lied on the stand himself, and tried to persuade the court that he was the helpless dupe of a ten year old boy whom he characterized as "one of the worst" he had ever seen during his time in Youth Division. He fudged dates by claiming not to have a clear recollection of exactly when things happened.

The publicity throughout the trials kept his name in the background locally: only the Globe and Mail and Alberta Report published his name and his deeds. As recently as June, 1999, the StarPhoenix, while publishing his name and accurately describing the events arising out of his investigation did not implicate him as the mastermind behind the case. Dueck was counting on the system keeping the details of his investigation secret. He almost pulled it off. At least one of the persons against whom he trumped up the charges obtained the disclosure which Dueck had prepared for the Crown. This material -- a dozen hours of videotape and a file full of written matterial was prepared by a clever, corrupt cop with ambition in his mind and malice in his heart. The Saskatchewan Appeal Court was also appalled that the disclosure got into the hands of the accused. It would seem that the system relied on secrets.

Most of the public -- at least those who have bothered to inform themselves at all -- regard the Foster Parent Scandal as a case which went terribly wrong, begun by a bumbling, naive corporal who was misled by a well-meaning but misguided therapist. The scenario goes like his: The cop was, well, a dupe. Remember the original scenario that the children were being sexually used by a Satanic cult? And how there was no evidence that this was true? Dueck and Bunko-Ruys dreamed that one up. The suggestion is that Dueck was just a victim the deranged imaginations of of a ten year old boy and his eight year old sisters. And of course we all know how mischievous kids at that age can be! Dueck didn't have to say any of this. He just played dumb. Dumb like a dingo.

In this version of events, everyone involved was just doing his/her job, seeking only justice and certainly not intentionally hurting anyone. The children were children and most certainly intended to strike back at anyone they ever imagined had slighted them, as children do. They named forty people for Dueck, who knew full well that they would keep naming names as long as he kept promising to pay attention to them.

Dueck knew they were lying. He encouraged them to tell lies. He told them they were brave. He fed them french fries [at McDueck's]. He made no attempt to corroborate any of their lies before presenting his case to the prosecutor as sworn truth. He had visited the Thompson house BEFORE Michael Ross was brought there. He had certainly prepared the Thompson's for a violent boy, no doubt telling them that the ten year old had attacked a three year old in his previous foster home.

Carol Bunko-Ruys

Carol Bunko-Ruys (right) knew very well what she was doing when she suggested -- to the children and to Dueck -- that the children were victims of a vast Satanic cult involving their parents and an inticate network of foster parents and their relatives. Dueck KNEW that Stanley Hepner was a convicted child molester and he used this single fact to get the children to tell lies linking together people who did not know each other. He certainly planted ideas in the imagination of Marilyn Thompson who was able to get Michael warmed up for the return of his sisters. The children were told nothing about the reasons for their various moves and were eager to please any adults who would let them call them Mom and Dad!

Early in the game, and it certainly was a game for Dueck, he must have realized that Peter Klassen was a lone pedaphile whose family was horrified by his actions and had returned him to the fold only after he quit drinking. But Dueck did not quit. He visited convicted killer Beryl Stonechild who had been fostered by Marie Klassen's mother many years earlier and got him to turn snitch against Hepner's son, who would have been nine at the time of the incident he manufactured for Dueck.

Out of the hundreds of children who had been fostered by this family, apart from the Ross children this was the best he could do. Beryl Stonechild claimed to have been sodomized in the bushes when he was six or seven. This tidbit combined with the taped allegations of the Ross children were sufficient to get the crown to okay an arrest warrant. Every single shred of Dueck's evidence was manufactured.

By the time the crown realized that they were not dealing with a Satanic cult, or even with an organized group of child molesters, it was too late. Preliminary hearings had been set. They backed off on the Satan aspect of their case and set about to prove gross indecency and sexual assault. They got convictions on the first set of defendants, two of whom were deaf. The children were turning incredible by the end of the trial of their parents and the preliminary hearing for the foster parents.

Matthew Miazga

The Crown realized that they had only just managed to get their convictions (all of which were later overturned by the Supreme Court) and Prosecutor Matt Miazga (right) wanted to stop.

This would have been an excellent time to stop. It would have been an excellent opportunity to admit that they had been wrong and that the children were completely unreliable.

Meetings and telephone conversations between local prosecutors and head prosecutor Richard Quinney took place in earnest. Stanley Hepner was the weak link and they set out to get a conviction on him. They made him an offer which would give him a two year sentence and the staying of charges on the rest of his family. Hepner agreed to plead guilty to assaulting the Ross children to save his family.

The crown's press reports announced that charges had been stayed against all but one of the defendants because the child witnesses were traumatized by the court proceedings. They could relay the charges if they found more evidence within the next twelve months. But for now they had to release back into the community sixteen people who they believed to be child molesters and worse.

This is what Richard Quinney led the Saskatchewan public to believe. It is what many of the Saskatchewan public believe to this day: that there are monsters among us who are too wiley for the cops to catch.

Richard Quinney

Richard Quinney Masterminded the Whole Thing! Martensville too!

Richard Quinney and his employees, the Saskatoon Police Service and its corporal, Brian Dueck, and Social Services and its contract therapist Carol Bunko-Ruys thought they had got away from the table with a partial win. Dueck got the first of two large promotions. Matt Miazga has gone on to try high profile cases, although Sonja Hansen's career seems to be more or less stalled. Bunko-Ruys expanded her practice.

Imagine their horror when they discovered that the stayed defendants had possession of the disclosure material! Videotapes which were intended only to be seen by prosecutors and defence lawyers, trancripts which cost a small fortune. Therapist reports which acknowledged the severity of the children's problems. All this material contained evidence that Dueck, Bunko-Ruys and the Crown prosecutors all KNEW full well that their case was based on sick fantasies coaxed out of distressed children by interviewers using techniques ANY lay person would immediately recognize as flawed.

The cover-up began in earnest as Dueck and his bosses ordered the arrest of citizens who tried to bring the truth of what had really happened. Some charges stuck, others didn't. In 1998, inJusticebusters posted the material on the Internet. The local server shut us down but we paid for space on a U.S. server. Thousands of people who would otherwise never have heard of this case now follow the developments regularly. Many are interested in the outcome of the $10M lawsuit for malicious prosecution as a victory here would set a precedent for other cases where the Crown has stooped to malice.