The B.C. Supreme Court has dismissed the appeal of the father of one of Victoria’s best-known convicted murderers.
David William Lord, who has spent the past 25 years proclaiming his son’s innocence, wanted the court to throw out his conviction for trespassing and mischief at the prison where Derik Lord is being held.
Derik Lord, now 42, is serving a life sentence for the first-degree murders of his friend’s mother and grandmother. He was convicted in 1992 of murdering Sharon Huenemann, 47, and her mother, Doris Leatherbarrow, 69. Derik Lord and David Muir, both 17 at the time, killed the women after their Mount Douglas Secondary school classmate, Darren Huenemann, promised them part of a $4-million inheritance from his mother and grandmother.
All three were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Since his son’s conviction, David Lord has unsuccessfully taken every possible legal step to try to establish his son’s innocence. He has also come in conflict with the law with convictions for resisting arrest, obstructing police, causing a disturbance and trespassing at the penitentiary.
Lord has also been fighting with the Correctional Service of Canada for permission to visit his son. He has appealed three Parole Board rulings denying him visiting rights.
“He is aging and in failing health; he fears he will not see his son before he dies,” Justice Neill Brown wrote Friday in a B.C. Supreme Court judgment.
On June 14, 2015, David Lord went to Matsqui prison but was told by the correctional manager that his visiting rights had been suspended and he was not allowed on the property. When David Lord refused to leave, the prison called Abbotsford police. David Lord began walking along a perimeter fence in a restricted area.
He ignored the manager’s orders to return to the main entrance and started yelling at some prisoners who were in an outdoor yard. The prisoners had to be taken back inside the unit.
David Lord was arrested and charged. After a five-day trial, he was convicted of trespassing and mischief, for interfering with the operation of the prison. He was placed on two years of probation.
At sentencing, the trial judge said that if David Lord were a different man, in different circumstances and a little younger, he would impose a jail sentence because Lord had three trespassing convictions on his criminal record.
David Lord responded: “I’ll have four when this is over with because I’m going to go back and do it again.”
The next time, the judge noted, “jail would be the only thing left.”
David Lord appealed his conviction. But on Friday, Brown dismissed the appeal, finding the trial judge made no errors. Brown said it was evident at both the trial and the hearing that David Lord wanted the court to compel the Correctional Service of Canada to allow him to visit his son.
Derik Lord, who has fiancée and a child, continues to deny the offence and has been denied parole 10 times. Muir, the only one of the three to admit his role in the killings, has been on full parole since 2003.
“The law requires that the Parole Board base its decision on evidence of significant and lasting change in attitude and behaviour,” said Patrick Storey, spokesman for the Parole Board of Canada, Pacific Region.
“However, if the board is able to come to a conclusion that his risk to the community is not undue, they could still grant him a release. But [with] his failure to take responsibility for the offence, especially since one of his accomplices has done so and is out on full parole, it becomes difficult to overlook.”
