Family of B.C. murder victim fights to keep offender behind bars
Credit to Author: Matt Robinson| Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 01:32:38 +0000
For more than a decade, family members of Linda LeFranc have fought to keep people safe from the hands of her killer.
When Christopher Maurice Alexander sits down Wednesday for his eighth parole bid since being sentenced to life for the brutal 1998 murder of LeFranc in Terrace, LeFranc’s sister Anita LeFranc-Johnstone will be there as usual, seated right behind him and opposed to his release.
Murder victim Linda LeFranc.
The sisters were close. After LeFranc’s seven-year-old daughter found her mother dead in her townhouse, stabbed 83 times, police asked LeFranc-Johnstone to view the crime scene to see if anything was out of place. In the end, Alexander, a then-17-year-old neighbour, was tried and convicted of second-degree murder.
Alexander has sought release since 2008. In 2014, he was granted day parole, despite the protests of LeFranc’s family members, and having been “assessed at a moderate risk to reoffend generally and violently,” according to parole board documents.
About two years later, LeFranc-Johnstone was out for dinner in downtown Victoria when she received a call of the sort she had feared might come. A warrant was out for Alexander’s arrest.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I hope someone else hasn’t been hurt,’” she said. “I just broke down and said this is exactly what we were trying to avoid.”
Alexander was arrested and charged with two counts of sexual assault, according to parole board documents. His release was suspended and later revoked in relation to claims he had non-consensual sex with his girlfriend while she was sleeping. The charges were ultimately stayed because the court had been unable to locate the victim, according to parole documents.
Alexander was sent back to Mountain Institution, a medium-security prison in Agassiz, LeFranc-Johnstone said. It would have been a giant step back for Alexander, who had previously resided at the Kwìkwèxwelhp Healing Village, a minimum-security, Indigenous-focused facility.
Family members of murder victim Linda LeFranc, father Marcel LeFranc, mother Barbara LeFranc (centre) and sister Anita LeFranc-Johnstone pictured shortly after a 2011 parole hearing for Christopher Alexander, who was murdered in Terrace, B.C., in 1998.
LeFranc-Johnstone said Alexander is now back at the healing village and is seeking escorted temporary absences — a limited form of release where an offender is accompanied by officers. But LeFranc-Johnstone said her confidence in the system was shaken after his last parole and she does not believe Alexander can be properly supervised.
“He’s proven that he can’t be trusted on every single occasion,” she said.
In April of this year, Alexander was denied day parole. He was, however, found at the hearing to be working with elders, participating in ceremonies and “walking the Red Path,” as the parole decision put it. And while his psychological risk assessment still showed a moderate to high risk of violent recidivism, the psychologist concluded that risk was manageable.
During the hearing, an institutional elder and an Aboriginal liaison officer, among others, offered support for Alexander’s release with an emphasis on developing healthy relationships given trauma he had experienced as a child, and unhealthy relationships he had been exposed to, according to the decision.
LeFranc-Johnstone remains unsatisfied. She said she has failed to see from Alexander during previous parole hearings any kind of true behavioural change that might befit a person asking to be released from prison. She feared Alexander has attempted to glean sympathy with disingenuous actions and statements that he has determined will help his chances of being released again.
“Victims are nobody in this process,” LeFranc-Johnstone said, reflecting on a decade of parole hearings that have taken their toll on her family. In the end, she said she simply does not want to see there be another victim and she and her family remain opposed to Alexander’s release.
“Is one not enough?”
CLICK HERE to report a typo.
Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.