A Conspiracy Theory Is Born

Executive Summary: 

In January 2000, a couple of newspaper reporters in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, came up with a crank conspiracy theory. It was, as one of the reporters would later say in an interview, the post-Christmas doldrums. News was slow; when two native Canadian men, Rodney Naistus and Lawrence Wegner, died of hypothermia on consecutive nights, the reporters, Dan Zakreski and Les Perreaux, jumped to the erroneous conclusion that the only possible explanation was foul play. Since both men had recently been in police custody, the “obvious” explanation was that the police had been responsible for both deaths.

The two reporters quickly expanded the conspiracy to include a third “victim”, Darrell Night. Night was a violent career criminal with a lengthy criminal record who had been arrested for assaulting two veteran police officers the day before Rodney Naistus died. The two officers, Constables Ken Munson and Dan Hatchen, had 19 years and 7 commendations between them. Both had a history of working well with the native community; in fact, each of them had saved the life of at least one native child. Sadly, this did not stop Zakreski and Perreaux from branding them as murderous racists. 

Once they had Darrell Night in custody, the two officers agreed that his actions were more “drunk and stupid” than criminal, and that nothing was to be gained by taking him downtown. They saw no point in taking him to jail; he didn’t want to go to jail; and the two experienced cops reasoned that, once he had a chance to calm down, he posed no threat to the general public. 

They offered him a deal; if they dropped him off two miles from his home, which would allow him time to walk off his anger, he could avoid going to jail. Night readily agreed, and promised to go straight home. 

At no point was Mr. Night in any danger: he was wearing a winterized jacket with a sheepskin lining; it wasn’t snowing and the wind was a light breeze; he was only 20 minutes from home following a paved and ploughed road; and the temperature of -22 degrees Celsius was not cold enough to cause either frostbite or hypothermia in the time it would have taken him to walk home. 

Instead of going home after the two constables dropped him off, however, he walked to a nearby power plant, 14 minutes away, and called a cab to take him back to the same neighbourhood where he had been arrested. 

A week later, after Lawrence Wegner’s body was found near the same power plant, Night remembered things very differently. In this new retelling of the story, he had been driven out into the middle of nowhere, forced out of the police cruiser in freezing temperatures, and left to die

In a highly inflammatory and poorly researched story, published Feb. 17, 2000, Dan Zakreski started off with multiple mistakes:

Darrell Night says he remembers the racial slurs, the blue-and-white police cruiser, and having his jacket stripped off by the uniformed officers who drove him outside the city and abandoned him. He said he can also recall the badge numbers of the two officers who left him in a desolate stubble field near the Queen Elizabeth II Power Station in the first week of February.

1. There was no evidence of “racial slurs”, and no other members of the aboriginal community had ever heard Munson or Hatchen address natives in that way. In fact, Lucy Matechuk, the Cree woman who was the apartment manager at the Clancy Village apartment complex, where Night was living at the time, later spoke highly of their professionalism, and remembered how they had once calmed down a rowdy, drunken party in minutes by joking and reasoning with the party-goers. When her son died in 2021, she asked Ken Munson to be one of the pall-bearers.
2. The police did not take his sheepskin-lined jacket; according to two eyewitnesses, he was still wearing it when he arrived at the power plant fifteen minutes later. The Star Phoenix did later print a correction to this error, but buried it within a follow-up story.
3. He was not dropped off outside the city; he was released at the junction of Spadina Crescent, Hodgson Road, and Dundonald Avenue, within the city limits.
4. Not only did Night not recall the names or badge numbers of the two officers, he couldn’t remember the number of the cruiser. If Munson and Hatchen had not voluntarily come forward to tell their side of the story, it is highly unlikely they would ever have been identified.

Coroners’ inquests would eventually determine that both Naistus and Wegner had simply died of hypothermia as the result of heavy drinking and poor judgment, with nothing to indicate any foul play. 

By that time, however, Zakreski, Perreaux, and another reporter by the name of Les McPherson had already convinced the public that the SPS was filled with sociopathic racists: ready, willing, and able to murder aboriginal men for no apparent reason.

Darrell Night was never in any danger, and survived with no adverse effects. Despite this, Constables Munson and Hatchen were charged with “unlawful confinement” – in effect, for “failure to arrest a native” – and sentenced to 8 months imprisonment.