last link on the left › deadmonton

Michael White often spoke about how he longed for the country.

I didn't know what to make of this. I wasn't sure if it was just talk, or if he was actually a "farm boy" at heart.

Early one Sunday morning, I phoned White out of the blue and asked if he wanted to go for a drive in the country. I told him we'd be away for half a day.

He agreed – provided he was back home by 10:00 p.m. That was so he wouldn't violate his bail conditions.

We hit the road for Iron River, a tiny hamlet northwest of Bonnyville in east-central Alberta.

I was hoping to get two things done at once.

I'd been looking into the Landon Karas-Doreen Bradley murder case and I wanted to spend time alone Michael White – without interruptions or distractions.

Normally on a Sunday morning I'd listen to Stan Thompson's garden show on 630 CHED, but I kept the radio turned off.

I drove and White talked – a lot. He opened up about his daughter, Liana, their marriage, wedding, his in-laws, trips they went on, their plans, his job, co-workers, financial stresses, media coverage of his case, his relatives, their farm back in Ontario ...

And his time in the military.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Edmonton, White interrupted himself to point out areas where he had been on tank manoeuvres.

In spite of the theft allegations and his court-martial, I got the impression that White missed the military.

The sense I got from talking to White was that he was trusting of authority ... particularly the police (this was before RCMP testimony at the taser inquiry in Vancouver), all levels of government and the military.

It wasn't long before we switched the subject to reporters covering the military.

White thought that reports from journalists on military junkets were legitimate. He also saw nothing wrong with the censorship arrangement that "embedded" journalists agree to.

I said, "Christ Mike, they're not only bend-over boys, they buy the vaseline. You don't think that's propaganda?"

From my talks with Michael White, I got the impression White would be perfect for the military. He followed orders, trusted government leaders that gave the military orders ... and for the most part, he believed the news media.

When a group of Edmonton-based soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, Michael White – by then again inmate White at the Edmonton Remand Centre – called to find out the names of the dead soldiers.

He said he didn't know them.

I commented how boring the terrain was from Edmonton to Bonnyville. White said it was beautiful. I told him he'd really like Saskatchewan.

By the time we pulled into Bonnyville, I was suffering from information overload. For several hours we talked non-stop, touching on so many things.

I also threw in some bad jokes. White laughed anyway but I could see that rough jokes made him uncomfortable.

I wanted to change the subject to something lighter.

Doreen Bradley

I told him about the murder of 58-year-old Doreen Bradley, who was part-owner of the A&W Restaurant in Bonnyville where White and I had stopped for burgers and soft drinks.

It was an A&W worker who first discovered Bradley's body on her acreage in Iron River, just north and west of Bonnyville, after she failed to show up for work.

We headed off to Iron River. On the way I gave Michael White more details on the homicide and how young Landon Karas went down for the killing.

White didn't seem to know a lot about the Bradley killing, even though it was big news for a while.

The RCMP claimed that Landon Karas, for reasons unknown, had murdered Doreen Bradley.

Police crime scene photos show a semi-nude Bradley lying on her back on her living room floor, her eyes open and her body punctured with nearly three-dozen stab wounds.

Her killer had some temper.

From the lack of blood, it looked as though Mrs. Bradley's heart stopped soon after the first few strikes. But the killer did not stop poking her until he was exhausted ... leaving the woman's body covered with small black puncture marks that showed no bleeding.

The only blood was a small trickle coming out of her mouth, just like in the movies.

Some people in the community – namely friends and family of Landon Karas – were suspicious about where RCMP officers got the DNA sample that allegedly linked Karas to the murder.

The issue was this: was Karas' DNA actually recovered from the victim, or was it from a location where Karas had made out with his girlfriend?

With no evidence of a break-in at the Bradley house, some concluded the victim knew her attacker (or attackers) and she let them in.

Landon Karas, who had no record of sexual assaults, didn't know Doreen Bradley. Karas was also madly in love with a woman half Doreen's age.

One thing was certain: there was no love lost between Landon Karas and the RCMP.

Landon's father, Fred Karas, said a Mountie based in Bonnyville once threatened to put his son away "for a long time."

The Karas-Bradley case had more twists and turns than the road from Calgary to Chilliwack.

At Karas' murder trial, a Crown witness testified that around the time Doreen Bradley was attacked, Landon Karas was at a campsite about 20 kilometres away.

In the end, the Karas family theorized that if their son had been "in Vancouver" he would have still been convicted of Bradley's murder. That's because, according to the RCMP, they found Karas' three-day-old semen on the dead woman.

What the Karas family suspected or believed didn't matter. What mattered was how the jury voted, and the jurors trusted the RCMP.

21-year-old Landon Karas was found guilty of first-degree murder, sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

The Alberta Court of Appeal threw out his appeal.

I explained to Michael White that I was on my way to speak with Lacey Watson. Her husband, Cliff, was a suspect in the Bradley murder case.

I couldn't talk to Cliff Watson. No one could. Lacey Watson made sure of that.

Not long after the Doreen Bradley murder, in a domestic dispute gone terribly wrong, the American-born Watson grabbed a shotgun and blew away Cliff in their farmhouse.

The Watson farmhouse near Iron River
Cliff Watson was found dead in the bedroom behind the small window at left

Lacey Watson claimed self defence and the jury believed her.

Lacey's story was that Cliff, in a drunken rage, had chased her in the bedroom and lunged at her with a butcher knife.

After Watson was found not guilty of second-degree murder, she went back to living on her farm with a couple of dogs, some horses ... and some horrible memories.

There was strong talk that Cliff Watson was Bradley's killer, since he matched the description of a man seen speeding away from Bradley's acreage soon after the woman was murdered.

According to a man driving by on the highway, the suspect had shoulder-length hair and he tore off in the direction of the Watson farm.

Watson had shoulder-length hair. Landon Karas was nearly bald.

The welding truck seen tearing out of Bradley's acreage was similar to a welding truck Cliff Watson owned.

Lacey Watson said her husband vanished early that morning and acted "strange" when he returned. She recalls helping him remove the welding unit from the back of his truck.

Watson strongly believed her new husband was one of two people involved in the murder of Doreen Bradley. She believed the second person was a female who still lives in the area.

Watson suspected Cliff had been having an affair with Bradley before they met. She says not long after she married Cliff and moved into their Iron River farmhouse she got a call from a woman who identified herself as Doreen Bradley, who told her she was "Cliff’s wife."

RCMP had Cliff Watson down as a suspect after finding his fingerprints on taps on a sink in the dead woman's bathroom.

Police figure the killer may have washed up there since the bathroom lights were on when they arrived. The lit bathroom is one of the highlights of a police video shot when officers entered through a back door of the Bradley house.

Michael White and I pulled up at the Watson farm.

We petted two friendly dogs that came out to greet us and knocked on a side door which was framed by two dorky-looking pillars.

After complaining that both her hair and her house were a mess, Lacey Watson invited us in.

Michael White and Watson seemed to get along. They talked about their time at the Remand Centre in Edmonton, lamenting about the food there, the noise ... and the lack of exercise.

I had heard these complaints many times from many prisoners. I won't list all their names because this website has only so much bandwidth alloted to it.

I cut in, telling Watson and White about the half-dozen Remand guards who allegedly pounded out a prisoner in an elevator, with one of the Keystone Kops allegedly reaching up to try to cover a video camera that was allegedly catching all the action.

I said, "If you two are going to bitch about the Remand, at least get current."

(Charges against the guards were later dismissed after the Crown allegedly made a mistake with its alleged paperwork).

As the three of us chatted over coffee and cookies in Lacey Watson's living room, it dawned on me I was the odd person out: I hadn't been accused of killing a spouse.

Mrs. Watson gave us the grand tour, showing us evidence of physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband.

She began by showing the walls that were damaged by Cliff ramming her skull into them.

"See? My head fits right in this hole," she pointed out, almost gleefully.

She walked us out to the back porch and showed us the door frame that Cliff had ripped off. Lacey had locked him out after he got drunked-up and said he was going to kill her.

Lacey said her husband was a no-nonsense, straight-shooter kind of guy and if he said he was going to kill her, she got worrired.

She showed us the kind of knife Cliff had in his hands when he attacked her.

Lacey Watson also told us about the beatings her husband gave her ... assaults so severe her bottom was black and blue.

We took her word on that.

White and I walked into Watson's bedroom where the woman showed us a peculiarly-shaped hole in the wall, caused by kickback from the shotgun.

Lacey Watson was a straight shooter too.

With a single blast from Mr. Remington ("What steel dreams of becoming one day," say the ads), Lacey nailed Cliff in the chest. Cliff collapsed on the bed.

Lacey said her dying husband looked up at her but didn't say anything. However, she said Cliff's eyes shouted, "I didn't think you had the balls to do it."

Cliff rolled off the bed and fell to the floor.

Lacey ran to kitchen to phone 911.

No jurors dozed off when Mrs. Watson's frantic call was played in court.

I lifted up a scatter rug, to the right of the bed where Cliff bled to death. A big section of the main rug underneath remained horribly blackened with dried blood.

"You couldn't get this out?" I asked.

Watson shot back, "Christ, I tried everything ... ended up putting that (scatter rug) on top."

In talks with a close friend of Lacey Watson, who lived a few miles down the road, I learned that Lacey tried to kill herself after she was released on bail.

Lacey popped a pile of pills, drew the curtains in her bedroom windows and lay down to die.

But not on the bed.

After Lacey failed to answer her phone, her neighbour-friend sped over and smashed a window in Lacey's bedroom, climbed in and discovered Lacey unconscious.

Lacey was lying on the same spot where Cliff had bled to death.

She told me she wanted to join him.

This is a depressing story.

Be my guest if you want to take a break and skip to a great sports site, a popular porn site – or to singer Donny Osmond's site. I won't be offended.

It was interesting to see Michael White's reaction when Lacey Watson showed us her barn, just down the hill from the house.

The barn smelled of musty hay and horse shit. I said, "This place stinks of horse shit."

That got a reaction from both Lacey Watson and Michael White.

White summed it up in a way only a farm boy could: "It smells great!"

What? After scraping crap off my boots, I was tempted to asked if they'd ever heard of a perfume called "Eau d'horseshit."

White was at ease walking around on the farm. Watson brought us to a stand of trees to the south of her property and the two talked about things like fence lines, crops and the like ... matters I had little interest in.

The exchange at Mrs. Watson's farm was not a set-up to see Michael White's reaction to a domestic homicide scene or real-life tales of domestic abuse.

After we pulled out of the Watson yard, White did not ask about the homicide and I didn't bring it up.

However, now and then Michael White did ask how Lacey Watson was doing. Lacey Watson also asked about Michael.

A few years ago, Lacey Watson took advantage of an opportunity to visit the United States when she was given a free airline ticket. It came with her deportation order.

Watson later e-mailed me that she'd settled somewhere in the U.S.A. and was hoping that Mike, as she called him, was doing okay.

The woman who often complained that when she lived in Alberta she had been dealt a bad hand, Watson now made a living playing poker.

On April 15th, 2009 Lacey Watson died alone in her rented house in Winnemucca, a small town in northern Nevada mentioned at the start of an old Hank Snow song, "I've Been Everywhere."

Watson's body wasn't discovered until three days later. The coroner suspected the woman died from a heart attack, although they were still waiting for toxicology results.

Lacey Watson was 51. A worker at the coroner's office commented, "I couldn't believe how pretty she was."

Albertson Funeral Home in Winnemucca said no funeral service had been planned at their facility, indicating a service was held out of state. Watson's remains were cremated on May 20th and were sent to a relative in Portland, Oregon.

In Iron River, friends and supporters of Lacey Watson planned to have a memorial get-together on her behalf.

Watson had a son and two daughters from a previous marriage.

On the way back to Bonnyville, Michael White and I stopped at the village of Lacorey and pulled in behind the small house where Fred and Bernadette Karas lived.

A tree in the Karas' yard was unlike any I'd seen before: it was decked out with scores of yellow ribbons.

I walked in the back door and I introduced Michael White to Fred and Bernadette. The three talked for a while, White about his murder case and the Karas' about their son's murder case.

Unlike the couple's two small yappy dogs, Fred and Bernadette took a liking to Michael White.

Bernadette later told me, "That guy's no killer," saying that no one "on this planet" could convince her otherwise.

Michael White developed a relationship with the Karas couple that is strong to this day. White continues to phone them collect from the Edmonton Insitution. They also exchange letters and cards.

For a while, Michael White was on the same unit – D – as Landon Karas.

In 2008, the four parents of the two convicted killers went on holidays together in Eastern Canada.

One day I called Fred Karas on his cell phone and discovered he and Bernadette were having coffee in Moncton, New Brunswick with Carol and Larry Forbes.

They were on their way to Maine.

Michael White and I left to return to Edmonton.

The trip to Iron River and Lacorey was mentally draining. For nine hours, I had evaluated information from Michael White, Lacey Watson and Fred and Bernadette Karas.

I could barely keep my eyes open.

We hadn't driven more than a few miles out of Bonnyville when I pulled off the road. I asked White, "Care to drive?"

He said yes and we switched places.

I angled the passenger seat back and was out like a light.

About two hours later, I woke to the lights of Edmonton straight ahead. Michael White was pushing the speed limit to get home on time.

I sat up.

White turned and said, "Byron, at least you know I won't kill you when you're sleeping."

White made his curfew with about an hour to spare.

<< previous chapter | main page | next chapter >>

Enquiries regarding material contained herein should be directed through the contact us link at the bottom of this page.
This material is protected by copyright. Further use of the material requires permission, in advance, before publication or broadcast. Linking on the internet directly to this page is permitted provided such practice adheres to conditions as outlined on the about this site page.

deadmonton - michael white - the untold story - 23