David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

now. The weather outside had suddenly turned colder. It was snowing. She remembered that Candace hadn’t dressed warmly. She began to pace between the window in the front of the house and the kitchen window in the back overlooking the alleyway. Candace might come in from either direction. The minutes passed. It was time to pick up her husband. She packed up her other two children, got in the car, and drove slowly along Talbot Avenue, the road that connected the Derksens’ neighborhood to Candace’s school. She peered inside the windows of the 7-Eleven, where her daughter sometimes lingered. She drove to the school. The doors were locked. “Mom, where is she?” her nine-year-old daughter asked. They drove to Cliff’s office.
    “I can’t find Candace,” she said to her husband. “I’m worried.”
    The four of them went back home, watching each side of the street. They began calling her friends one by one. No one had seen her since that afternoon. Wilma Derksen drove to see the boy Candace had been flirting with before she called home. He said he had last seen her walking down Talbot Avenue. The Derksens called the police. At eleven that night, two officers knocked on their door. They sat at the dining room table and asked Wilma and her husband one question after another about whether Candace had been happy at home.
    The Derksens formed a search committee, recruiting people from their church and Candace’s school and whomever else they could think of. They put up “Have you seen Candace?” posters all over Winnipeg, mounting the largest civilian search in the city’s history. They prayed. They cried. They did not sleep. A month passed. They took their two young children to see the movie Pinocchio as a distraction—until the movie got to the part where Geppetto is wandering heartbroken, looking for his lost son.
    In January, seven weeks after Candace Derksen’s disappearance, the Derksens were at their local police station when the two sergeants assigned to the case asked if they could speak to Cliff alone. After a few minutes, they took Wilma to the room where her husband was waiting and closed the door. He waited and then spoke.
    “Wilma, they’ve found Candace.”
    Her body had been left in a shed a quarter of a mile from the Derksens’ house. Her hands and feet had been tied. She had frozen to death.

5.
    The Derksens suffered the same blow as Mike Reynolds. The city of Winnipeg reacted to Candace’s disappearance the same way that Fresno reacted to Kimber Reynolds’s murder. The Derksens grieved, just as Mike Reynolds grieved. But there the two tragedies start to diverge.
    When the Derksens came home from the police station, their house began to fill with friends and relatives. They stayed all day. By ten at night, only the Derksens and a few close friends were left. They sat in the kitchen, eating cherry pie. The doorbell rang.
    “I remember thinking that somebody probably left some gloves or something,” Derksen said. She was sitting in the backyard of her home in Winnipeg in a garden chair as we talked. She spoke haltingly and slowly, as she remembered the longest day of her life. She opened the door. There was a stranger standing there. “He just said, ‘I’m a parent of a murdered child, too.’”
    The man was in his fifties, a generation older than the Derksens. His daughter had been killed in a doughnut shop a few years earlier. It had been a high-profile case in Winnipeg. A suspect named Thomas Sophonow had been arrested for the killing and tried three times. He had served four years in prison before he was exonerated by an appeals court. The man sat in their kitchen. They gave him a slice of cherry pie—and he began to talk.
    “We all sat around the table and just stared at him,” Wilma Derksen said. “I remember him going through all the trials—all three. He had this little black book—very much like a reporter does. He went through every detail. He even had the bills he’d paid. He lined them all up. He talked about Sophonow, the impossibility of the trials, his anger that there was no justice, the inability of the system to pin the crime on anybody. He wanted something clear. This whole process had destroyed him. It had destroyed his family. He couldn’t work anymore. His health. He went through the medications he was on—I thought he was going to have a heart attack right there. I don’t think he divorced his wife, but the way he spoke, it was kind of like that was