Chapter 60: Dead End - No Through Road

It took almost a year before our civil lawsuit against Pratt and Samuels came to trial. In fact by the time the civil trial started, both of them were already serving time on several federal charges, including bank fraud and income tax evasion. I think that time period worked to Cyrus’s advantage though. At least he seemed to have found every asset that had been squirrelled away by B. J. Pratt. He’d also run down any funds or properties held by ‘Bishop’ Dwayne Samuels and the other seven men who were members of his cult and who had been involved in hiring Pratt. He even listed several assets that had been hidden from a casual observer, but then he had also worked with the RCMP investigation team during the criminal trial. As a result he had all of the evidence dug up by the RCMP detectives and forensic accountants and even more that was openly available to the general public.

Besides all that evidence, Cyrus had much more because John Coulter, Dad and I had hired a private investigator, given him the name of that screwball church and told him what we thought they were doing. After that Cyrus and I took the detective over to the RCMP detachment in Mountview and introduced him to Don Davis. Then I asked Don if there was any way he could disclose any information he had on the men who had raised so much trouble in town after Bill McAdam had gone on his rampage. By then trials had been held over all the incidents, so Don was able to provide us with names, addresses and even the license numbers on the cars driven by five of the men who had been there. Before we left he asked us to pass on the information if we discovered anything which might be incriminating.

Wow, did that detective ever do a job!

The first discover he made was that B.J.Pratt’s nephew had been the bank clerk who had provide Pratt with the copy of our certified cheque, which is what had started the process that led to the first trial. Not only that, but he was also one of the people who had ‘helped’ his uncle to hide money in various ‘secret’ accounts, but actually the charges against him wouldn’t be levied at the trial I was involved with. As the detective told me, “That’s a freebee for your cop buddy for all the help he gave me that first day. He deserves that too, because he made my job easy with the rest.”

Amongst other things the detective had discovered was that B. J. Pratt was a member of the ‘Church of the United Brethren of Apostolical Unity’ and had at least two ‘secret’ wives, one of whom was only fifteen years old. Since Pratt was over sixty, he was definitely going to be charged with statutory rape. When the detective told Don and Cyrus that, they both stared at him in disbelief. Pratt wasn’t the only one who had a ‘secret’ wife under the age of majority though, so did ‘Bishop’ Samuels and so did another man in the group.

The six other men the detective had set out to investigate were all legally married to one wife, but also had a total of sixteen secret wives. Each and every one of the eight men on trial were not only legally married, but they each had a least one ‘secret wife, ‘ and some of them had several. One guy lived in a five floor apartment block that had been owned by Bill McAdam. The man in question worked in the apartment block as the caretaker and lived there with his wife, but he also had a ‘secret’ wife on each of the other floors of the building.

Then there was the mess that the detective discovered concerning the businesses those men owned. Most of that had already been exposed by the RCMP detectives and forensic accountants, but the detective discovered one business that seemed to be a financial ‘black hole.’ In other words money was funnelled into the company, yet it produced nothing saleable while constantly verging on bankruptcy - someone was sucking it dry, but our detective couldn’t find out who or how. That was one that was turned over to the RCMP’s forensic accountants and I don’t know what happened afterward, but I know something did, because the business died just before the trial I had instigated went to court.

As for the trial itself, it was a romp for Cyrus. He called a total of thirty-six witnesses including Dad, Uncle Tom, Wil and me to prove harassment, attempted blackmail and several other charges.

Then I was asked to give a ‘victim’s impact statement’ so once more I stood at the front the courtroom. I started by decribing how I met Sandy in the hospital, mentioned meeting her parents and what happened that first night. After that I mentioned meeting Jackie at the racetrack and described my first impression of her at that time. Next I mentioned her thirst for knowledge when she had visited the ranch. Instead of detailing the breakup I’d had with the three girls, I skimmed forward to the accident in Calgary and made sure I mentioned how Bill McAdam had disowned Jackie at that time. After that I described meeting and hiring the McAdam brothers and told of the way they reacted to kind treatment and how poorly educated they were at the time I met them. Then I gave a detailed account of Bill McAdams attack on the road and went on from there, describing every detail of what I had witnessed from that point to the moment the McAdam brothers left town. The only thing I fluffed over was the description of turning over Bill McAdam’s possessions to his sons, but as far as I was concerned that was a private matter anyway.

Then I went into how everything had affected me and my family.

“Bill McAdam tried to kill my wife, my first son and myself by running us off the road. Fortunately, I had raced dirt-track stock cars for a few years, starting when I was sixteen years old, and I happened to be driving a street legal version of my stock car when he made his attempt on our lives. It was not my fault that he died. He was stupid and killed himself by trying to use a pickup truck with a high center of gravity to overtake and ram a car with beefed up suspension as we both negotiated a tight curve. Physics and angular momentum caused the less stable truck to skid off the road and into a ravine, where the resultant wreck caused McAdam’s death. I feel no grief for the man, because before he died he had killed his wife and three of my friends, two of whom were his own children, but he also maimed three more of his sons so badly that they are now permanently disabled.

“That’s right, the man had already killed or maimed every member of his personal family before he sought to kill me and mine. I found that fact to be almost unbelievable, but then I considered what I knew of him and realised that he was not a typical member of our society. First of all he was the treasurer of a group that calls itself the ‘Church of the United Brethren of Apostolical Unity.’ Only from what I have learned of that group I think they should be called the ‘Cult of Unruly Bastards committing Avaricious Usury.’

However, it might be best if I explain my contention that my label is more accurate that theirs. I have seen physical proof that all of the accused men have multiple ‘secret‘ wives who are totally subservient to their husbands. I believe those men have virtually enslaved their ‘secret‘ wives and ‘hidden‘ children, forcing them to follow a strange creed that keeps them penniless and ignorant of the real world. The children of those wives are schooled at home and taught to be totally subservient while being raised in conditions of virtual poverty. When the teenaged boys reach an age where they become interested in women, they are thrown out of the family. Since those young men were raised to be ignorant of the real world, they have a hard time finding a job or earning a living and often become little more than unskilled labourers or even vagrants. Meanwhile the girls are kept even more isolated and uninformed for they are expected to become ‘secret‘ wives to the other men of the group. Those ‘secret‘ wives and ‘hidden‘ children do exist though and they are even known to our government agencies, because each of those ‘secret‘ wives receives a monthly welfare cheque as a single mother. Each of those ‘hidden‘ children is also listed with the welfare office as dependents of those supposedly single mothers and every one of those women receives aid from welfare to care for those children. I don’t believe the funds from those cheques is theirs to use as the women wish though. Instead I suspect the men in the family use those ill gotten dollars for their own avaricious purposes.

“My family and I have already spoken of how Bill McAdam’s family came into contact with my friends and family and how we helped them to become productive members of society. However, Bill McAdam found it intolerable that his children should be so rebellious that they would actually go to regular schools, have well paying jobs and become independent citizens. He decided that his wife, his children, and all those who had aided his children to become productive members of society had to die. He killed his wife and two of his children, as well as one of our other friends, destroyed the lives of his three remaining children, attempted to kill me and my family and left a whole town shocked and dismayed at the horror he left behind.

Do you know what the gossips and rumour mongers in Mountview call that man now? They refer to him as ‘Devil’ Bill and although he is dead, they say his ghost haunts the corner where he died. They also use his name to try to scare naughty little boys, but I’m not a naughty little boy, so those scare tactics don’t work on me. ‘Devil’ Bill annoyed me when he disowned his daughter, worried me when he tried to have his sons kidnap that same daughter and angered me when he killed or maimed my friends. Then he infuriated me when he tried tried to kill my family by running us off the road with his pickup, but ‘Devil’ Bill never scared me. However, he and his minions have made me cautious, so I and my personal family have had to take precautions to protect ourselves.

“My wife and I have four children and we live in a hidden valley which is many miles from Mountview, the town where most of the harassment and other forms of attack have taken place. Mountview is not where we live, but it is the closest town to our ranch, so we do shop there and we have a post-office box there. The fact that we use that post-office box as our mailing address is the probably reason why those who wish to harass and attack us come there and act like predators in search of prey. In fact we live so far out of town that the ranch where we live didn’t even have telephone service or hydro electric power until fairly recently. We do have a CB and a shortwave radio though, so even if the phone line is disabled, we always have communication with the people we have hired to watch the gate to our ranch. Those people receive a reduced rent just to keep an eye on our road and let us know if any strangers happen to wander through that gateway and drive down our private road. Since our roadway between the gate and the ranch is quite long and is a meandering dirt and clay trail, we will have plenty of time to prepare a suitable reception for our visitors, depending on whether they’re friendly or not.

“Now I should mention that we have many friendly visitors, but we have also had unfriendly visitors, both human and animal. We had one pair of young thugs who managed to sneak onto the ranch one dark night with a bomb of sorts. What they had was an incendiary device which the RCMP advised me at the time was probably meant to destroy our home while we slept. Those two young men didn’t count on meeting our dogs though, and when our dogs decided the two interlopers were up to no good, they gave chase and herded the invaders away from our home. The bombers thought that a fenced building would be a good place to hide, but didn’t realise it was the home of an old sow who’d recently had a litter of piglets and was quite protective of them. She proved to be even more fierce than the dogs though and as a result they had to climb on the roof of the hog barn to find safety. Only they were surrounded then, with the old sow on one side and the dogs on the other three. That was the situation which confronted me when I was awakened by the ruckus and went outside to investigate, so I called the police who found the circumstances somewhat amusing. They advised me to let the dogs keep the visitors on that roof until a pair of constables could come take them into custody. In fact I had to call off the dogs when the RCMP came, just so those two young fellows could climb down to be arrested and taken into custody.

“The next set of unfriendly visitors was a pack of feral dogs that made the mistake of attacking my father’s cattle and killing one of his calves. My father and my brother chased the pack across their ranch and toward mine. Then when the dogs were slowed by the steep terrain between our ranches, but exposed to our view, we shot them, then took their corpses to town and turned them over to the local authorities. That’s when we first discovered that the leader of the pack had killed a woman before running wild and terrorizing the town.

“Of course since we live on ranch in a relatively untamed area we are accustomed to natural predators. Our stock has been attacked by cougars, packs of wolves and other predators of that sort, so we keep weapons handy to deal with them, but we aren’t often bothered by wild animals. In most cases we are able to frighten them off, but at times we have to destroy the predators to save our animals and ourselves. To put it plainly, the ranch is surrounded by untamed foothills, a home surrounded by wilderness, so when we are attacked by predators our existance can quickly become a life or death situation. Which leads us to the reason we are in court today, because recently we have been attacked by a group of human predators, but Canadian law takes a dim view of using weapons as protection against other humans, even rogues such as the ones who have been attempting to victimize us. So since we can’t legally use our normal methods of protection against the rogue humans who have attacked us and have blatantly broken the laws of our society, we are forced to ask the help of this court in an attempt at stopping their predation.

“And don’t let them fool you, because through the actions I have personally witnessed, I regard B. J. Pratt, ‘Bishop’ Samuels and his compatriots of the ‘Church of the United Brethren of Apostolical Unity’ as predators, first by preying on their wives and children, but also by attacking my friends, my family and me. They made the incredible error of entrusting a portion of their funds to ‘Devil’ Bill McAdam, who made those funds vanish, then died in an accident while attempting to kill me and my family. By some insanely convoluted reasoning, they managed to convince themselves that I had gained control of those funds and they made the erroneous decision to attack me.

“As you can probably tell, I am not easily intimidated and I have proven that I can protect my wife and family. Since I knew that my family was protected, the slander, the harassment, the attempted black mail and all the other annoyances that the accused had thrown at me up until that time had little effect. All they had succeeded in doing was to aggravate and annoy me, but with a last act of supreme asininity they finally managed to anger me, which is the reason for this lawsuit. They hired B. J. Pratt to lead that attack, but as a lawyer he should have known better than to take their case. They broke the law and using a certified cheque which they had stolen and copied. Using that stolen information as a flimsy basis for their mistaken beliefs, they accused me of theft and misappropriation of funds, but in an act of supreme asininity they made those accusations in front of dozens of witnesses. Not only that, but one of those witnesses was an RCMP officer. He realized they were breaking Federal banking laws by misusing a legally protected document in an attempt to harrass, intimidate and blackmail me, so he immediately had them taken into custody and charged.

“That was the last straw. As a result of that action I instigated this lawsuit. I wish to bankrupt these individuals so they will no longer be able to afford to hire the thugs they have been sending to harass the citizens of the town of Mountview, my family and myself.

“You should know that if we win this lawsuit I will not touch the funds we will be awarded. Personally I don’t want any of those funds because that money is tainted by the men who stole from the hungry mouths and threadbare backs of their wives and children. Instead that money will be placed in a fund which will be used to aid and educate less fortunate individuals, especially those who have been victimized by men of the same sort as ‘Devil’ Bill and those of his ilk who are on trial here. In fact some of that money may well be used to assist the ‘hidden’ children and ‘secret’ wives of the nine men who sit before this court as the accused. You see, in my opinion they are all just as guilty of evil as ‘Devil’ Bill ever was, but perhaps you feel that I am wrong. All I can do is hope that this court will find them guilty as charged, because I am not allowed to do any more than what I have done and still have my actions remain within legal boundaries.

“Thank you for permission to speak your honour and I wish to thank the court for listening.”

Then I nodded to the judge and when he released me from the witness stand I rejoined Sandy and listened to the concluding arguments of the lawyers. Then when the jury was sequestered we stepped out of the coutroom to take a break. However, within two hours we were called back to hear the results and learned that the nine defendents had been found guilty of all charges.

I won’t mention the final amount we settled for, but I will say that it was a considerable sum, well into seven figures. Knowing that, I doubt if any of those men left court with enough assets to buy a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of, which suited me just fine. I’m fairly certain that if we didn’t get the last of their ill gotten gains, then either their lawyers or the government did. The important fact of the matter is that my family and I haven’t heard or seen any sign of the group since the day the trial ended. I imagine part of the reason for that is the fact that all nine of those men were arrested for other crimes before they ever left the courtroom. I don’t know why they were arrested, nor do I know what charges they faced, but I don’t much care either! In my opinion those men deserved to be thrown in jail to rot because they had preyed on others and as a rancher, I have enough problems with natural predators.

Since the money was turned over to a well known non-profit society by the courts, it didn’t have any effect on our income, therefore our costs for that trial was negligible. The only thing Sandy and I had to do was to arrange for the society to set up two funds to help two different foundations. The first fund provides money to the Jacqueline McAdam Foundation, which provides university or other educational scholarships to deserving young women. The only requirements are that the applicant plans on going into some form of health care, has good grades, but is having trouble finding funding to continue her education. The second fund administers the John McAdam Foundation and it is set up to aid and educate those women and children who want to or have escaped the clutches of such groups as the ‘Church of the United Brethren of Apostolical Unity, ‘ I like to think Jackie and John would have approved of our use of their names for those two foundations.