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Just days before his trial was set to begin, Michael White called from the Remand Centre with one more news scoop: Larry Anderson was no longer his lawyer.

It would now be Provincial Court Judge Larry Anderson.

I put in a call to Anderson for comment but his secretary said he wasn't available (meaning he may have stepped out for a smoke).

Larry Anderson's appointment to the Bench surprised Michael White but it didn't surprise White's mother.

Carol Forbes recalls that in the summer of 2006 she called Larry Anderson's office to discuss her son's case. Anderson was not in.

She says a secretary told her that Anderson was down east attending a course ... "something to do with him becoming a judge."

Right after Anderson's swearing-in ceremony at the Law Courts Building, I met up with him at a wine-and-cheese type of get-together in a small conference room at a downtown hotel.

I never pass up on a chance for free booze – especially if it's from a government department that wrongly accused me of getting into the Remand Centre under a false name.

I circulated through the crowd of court clerks, lawyers and judges.

In an attempt to ingratiate myself with the legal community, I asked the odd person if they could name a judge who had not been appointed by a corrupt government.

One never knows when there's an opening in Communications at Alberta Justice. A number of former reporters now work there.

Later that year, I was yanked off the Michael White case – the first time in 25-plus years of reporting that I was ever pulled off a file.

A reporter told me the reason I was yanked off the file was that I was getting "too close."

That detective I met in the bar turned out to be more accurate than Sylvia Browne.

A reporter in Toronto who himself was hit up with a police search warrant because of his work on a homicide case would ask, "Too close to what?"

I was not permitted to take in any of Michael White's trial, and it wasn't because I'd been pulled off the file.

I was down as a witness at the trial. I would not be allowed in until I took the stand.

Surprisingly, that never happened.

I could have run off to the Rockies with Carol Forbes and no one at the trial (anyway) would have noticed.

That's because neither Forbes (nor some other searchers who saw Liana's body in the ditch that day) ever got to tell the jury their side of the story about the branches.

I didn't learn I wouldn't be called as a witness until the trial was just about over, and only then after I approached a lawyer.

He said, sorry, forgot to tell you.

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deadmonton - michael white - the untold story - 28