Father’s and daughter’s lives shattered by separate murders
A father and daughter both had their lives torn apart by murder cases, at almost the same age, three decades apart.
In reporting on a horrific murder-suicide that occurred in Alberta on Dec. 15, 2011, W5 has discovered that the father of the lone survivor was also involved in a murder 30 years earlier. And Scott Conway is haunted by echoes of his past.
“I see the whole thing play over and over and over like a video,” he says. “I hear all the sounds. It’s never far from my mind.”
Last week, in a one-hour special report from Pyramid Productions of Calgary called “Road to Murder”, W5 told the story of a horrific triple murder-suicide that occurred on a dark stretch of highway outside the small town of Claresholm, Alta.
Derek Jensen, enraged that his girlfriend Tabitha Stepple was breaking up with him, tracked her down along with three friends and rammed their car from behind. When they stopped, he opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol. He reloaded twice, shooting 28 times, killing Stepple and promising baseball players Mitch MacLean and Tanner Craswell, on their to way home to Charlottetown for Christmas. Jensen then took his own life.
There was a lone survivor, 20-year-old Shayna Conway, Craswell’s girlfriend. Shot in the leg, side and back, she was left lying on the pavement, cold and bleeding. Eventually, she was taken to hospital, clinging to life. One of the bullets had broken her neck. Doctors were concerned she had permanent nerve damage and might never walk again.
The news reached Shayna’s father the next morning. It would rock any parent, but for Scott Conway it held a terrible irony. He had lived through it before.
Thirty years earlier, in 1982, at the age of 21, Conway was in a fight over his ex-girlfriend. It happened at a corn roast in a farmer’s field outside of Ottawa. He stabbed 20-year-old Warren Leach 16 times. It was in the days before cellphones, and it took more than an hour for an ambulance to arrive. Leach bled to death on the way to the hospital.
Conway ran from the scene. He says he thought he was headed back to the main road, but got lost in a swamp instead. He didn’t find his way out until morning. Police found him wandering down a road near the incident. “When the officer told me Warren had died, I had to get out of the car and throw up on the side of the road.”
Conway was charged with second-degree murder. Over the next decade, he had four trials and was finally convicted of second degree murder in 1990. Just days before his sentence began, he witnessed the birth of his daughter Shayna. He says his baby girl gave him something to live for.
“The main thing that I wanted to avoid was becoming institutionalized, somebody who goes and sits in prison for a number of years and then gets out on a parole and has no skills. I kept moving down in security every chance I got and getting the better jobs so I could make a little extra money and send it home to buy plane tickets to fly her and my parents from PEI for trailer visits, every three or four months, as often as I could.”
Scott worked hard. He signed up for university correspondence courses. He was released on parole in 1997 and now has his own homebuilding and renovation business.
When Conway got the horrifying news in December 2011 that Shayna had been shot, the first thing that went through his mind was, “I can’t believe that the same sort of thing ruined all those kids’ lives that ruined mine when I was the same age, jealousy.”
Conway says Leach, who was much bigger, started the fight. “I was standing near the bonfire opening a beer with my buck knife when Warren kicked me in the back. The whole thing lasted maybe 15 to 20 seconds until I could get free and ran.”
Leach’s friends claim it was Scott who attacked. Lori Hoddinot says when she and several of Leach’s friends and family saw Scott on the W5 special report “Road To Murder”, they became “spewing mad” because, in their words, “he did the same damn thing,” committing murder in a jealous rage.
Hoddinot admits she and others are bitter. “It’s the worst karma come around. I have five daughters so I feel for (Shayna) immensely, but there is a small little, tiny piece of me that takes the littlest bit of comfort in the fact that Scott, not the girl, but Scott as a parent, every time he talks to his daughter, and every time he goes through the next however many years with his daughter as she recovers mentally and physically, and he watches his child’s pain, he knows in the back of his mind he put others through the same pain.”
In an interview tonight on W5, Scott Conway speaks for the first time on television about his regrets and concerns for his daughter.
“What happened to me basically took my life off the tracks for many years, and it’s the same type of thing that’s now taken the lives of Shayna’s friends and almost took hers as well.”
Conway lives with constant regret. “The toughest lesson I’ve learned over the years is that your whole life is changed by a mistake, one mistake. And it doesn’t just change what happened that day, it changes what happens the rest of your life.”
W5 contacted the mother of Warren Leach. She did not want to appear on camera, but she says she forgave Scott years ago.
When Scott heard those words, he broke down and cried.
“I’ve never tried to say I’m not responsible for what I did,” Conway says. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry. I’d give anything to turn the clock back, but I can’t. And I know that the fact I spent years in prison and am on parole for the rest of my life isn’t a comfort to them. They lost their son, and I know the pain that I caused them. I’m sorry and I’ll always be sorry for that, and I just wish I could change what happened.”
With files from Kirstie McLellan Day.
Larry Day is a documentary filmmaker whose company Pyramid Productions produced “Road to Murder” for W5. Kirstie McLellan Day is a best-selling author whose recent books include Playing With Fire (Theo Fleury), Tough Guy (Bob Probert) and Cornered (Ron MacLean). W5’s update on the Conways’ story, “Echoes of the Past”, airs Saturday at 7 on CTV.
