News and Features
A Pacific Spirit Murder
By Frances Bula published Jul 1, 2009
Friend, sister, wife, mother, athlete, hippie. Roundly loved, incomprehensibly killed. The life and death of Wendy Ladner-Beaudry
The last time Cathy Jewett saw her friend was in mid-March. It was a typical Wendy day, with a whole gang of girlfriends and their kids skiing together. Wendy had called Cathy, who lives in Whistler, out of the blue and said, "We're here. You've got to come." It was puking snow, driving many off the mountain, but Cathy, a ski patroller, took the gang to some of her best secret spots. Afterwards, she had Wendy over for dinner since Wendy's husband, Michel, was away on a five-week skiing and writing trip in Europe. As always, Wendy insisted they play Scrabble. This day, atypically, she lost. That was because, with her well-known generosity, she nudged Cathy to rethink a move. Gestures like that have made it impossible for friends to imagine who could have been so angry with Wendy that, when her family came to the UBC RCMP station, police told them that photos of her face wouldn't be enough to identify the person whose body they'd found in the woods.
Cathy and Wendy met in the 1980s; both were in their late 20s and had begun competing in telemark skiing. But once their children started racing themselves, the mothers had abandoned ski competitions in Europe for chauffeur duty. Wendy, who surrounded herself with overlapping circles of family and friends, stayed connected to Cathy. They both lived in large, active groups that played and vacationed together, the grown-up version of the best communal student house ever. Wendy had a couple of those circles going: her own big Ladner family, which included five brothers and sisters, who gathered every August long weekend on Pasley Island; plus her high-school Crofton and York House friends, who had their own weekends on Pasley. Cathy was one of the group of "ladies," as they called themselves, who gathered periodically at the new Nelson Island cabin that Wendy and Michel had bought with World Cup skiier Rob Boyd and his wife, Sherry.
Physical play was part of their bond. Wendy belonged to the generation of women who, liberated from old roles, expressed their new freedom through cycling and skiing, triathlons and hikes and running. Running was the activity of first and last resort, easy to fit in around kids and meals and jobs. Wendy had started running more than 30 years earlier, with her friend Celia Plottel, when they both took the lowest-mental-effort jobs they could find after getting their university degrees, so they could play field hockey and, on the side, run. Wendy and Celia kept running after their first babies came along. They'd leave the kids at the Dunbar Community Centre and take off for the University Endowment Lands. Hundreds of women turned to those woods as their outlet during the heavy family years.
Running was Wendy Ladner-Beaudry's final act. Her death is one of the most mysterious cases the RCMP has faced. Their perplexity showed in the Mounties' reluctance to say for weeks whether or not her murder was random. And it showed in their requests, more than a month after Wendy's death, to interview Wendy's girlfriends to figure out if there was anyone in her life who would want to kill her. Wendy's murder is a compelling mystery to strangers as well, who still puzzle over it publicly and privately. There have been many murders in Vancouver in recent years, but hers stands out, and not just because she was from the Ladner family, which constitutes a kind of minor royalty in the city. She wasn't a gang member or a drug dealer or a young kid outside a downtown club. She was a West Side mother, the kind who rode her bike everywhere and kept trying to convince her dubious friends and family that they should practise communal gardening.
