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

over. He didn’t talk much about his daughter. It was just this huge absorption with getting justice. We could see it. He didn’t even have to tell us. We could feel it.” His constant refrain was, I’m telling you this to let you know what lies ahead. Finally, well after midnight, the man stopped. He looked at his watch. He had finished his story. He got up and left.
    “It was a horrifying day,” Derksen said. “You can imagine, we were just nuts. I mean, we were—I mean, I don’t even know how to explain how—kind of numb. But yet having this experience sort of broke through that numbness, because it was so vivid. I had this feeling that this is important. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s kind of like, take notes, this is important to you. You know, you’re going through a hard time, but pay attention here.”
    The stranger presented his own fate as inevitable. I’m telling you this to let you know what lies ahead. But to the Derksens, what the man was saying was not a prediction but a warning. This is what could lie ahead. They could lose their health and their sanity and each other if they allowed their daughter’s murder to consume them.
    “If he hadn’t come at that point, it might have been different,” Derksen said. “The way I look at it in hindsight, he forced us to consider another option. We said to each other, ‘How do we get out of this?’”
    The Derksens went to sleep—or tried to. The next day was Candace’s funeral. Then the Derksens agreed to talk to the press. Virtually every news outlet in the province was there. Candace Derksen’s disappearance had gripped the city.
    “How do you feel about whoever did this to Candace?” a reporter asked the Derksens.
    “We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people’s lives,” Cliff said.
    Wilma went next. “Our main concern was to find Candace. We’ve found her.” She continued, “I can’t say at this point I forgive this person,” but the stress was on the phrase “at this point.” “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.”

6.
    Is Wilma Derksen more—or less—of a hero than Mike Reynolds? It is tempting to ask that question. But it is not right: Each acted out of the best of intentions and chose a deeply courageous path.
    The difference between the two was that they felt differently about what could be accomplished through the use of power. The Derksens fought every instinct they had as parents to strike back because they were unsure of what that could accomplish. They were not convinced of the power of giants. They grew up in the Mennonite religious tradition. The Mennonites are pacifists and outsiders. Wilma’s family emigrated from Russia, where many Mennonites settled in the eighteenth century. During the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist years, the Mennonites were persecuted—viciously and repeatedly. Entire Mennonite villages were wiped out. Hundreds of adult men were shipped off to Siberia. Their farms were looted and burned to the ground—and entire communities were forced to flee to the United States and Canada. Derksen showed me a picture of her great-aunt, taken years ago in Russia. She said she remembered her grandmother talking about her sister while looking at that same picture and weeping. Her great-aunt had been a Sunday school teacher—a woman whom children flocked to—and during the Revolution, armed men had come for her and the children and massacred them. Wilma talked about her grandfather waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares about what had happened in Russia, and then getting up in the morning and going to work. She remembered her father deciding not to sue someone who owed him a lot of money, choosing instead to walk away. “This is what I believe, and how we live,” he would say.
    Some religious movements have as their heroes great warriors or prophets. The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle’s ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken