The Beast Is Dead

Ding Dong! The Beast is dead, the wicked, wicked Beast is dead...!

He lived too long, far too long. He lived, though he brutishly caused the horrible deaths of the young and the trusting. He lived to see old age; they left life with the promise of youth still before them. He offered nothing to the world he inhabited but the grief and misery he brought to others. They were capable of giving loving pleasure to others beyond those who already loved them.

He represented the utter degradation of human nature, besotted with a belief that he could destroy with impunity to serve his pleasure.

And, we, as a society, taking the high road, infusing our system of justice with a morality that will not seek to impose that extreme penalty as punishment upon those who carelessly impose the darkness of limitless night upon the innocent, saw fit to care for such a monster.

Tried, found guilty because of undeniable evidence he himself provided at yet another painful cost to extract it from him, we as a society, incarcerated him, kept him safe from revenge even in the prison system; fed and clothed him, and ensured he had medical care.

This comforted society, to know that a man whose unimaginable depths of human depravity - preying on those whom society most wishes to protect - would be placed in secure custody and all would return to normal. This return to normal escaped the notice of the grieving families of the murdered children, all eleven of them, from age 9 to 18 whom the Beast had taken from them.

What we call - for want of a better description - evil, is ever present in the minds of the psychopaths among us. Evil stalks the land, doing its dark work in many ways, most of them in ways that impact society but not quite in the league that Clifford Olson managed to do.

His demented id craved sadistic pleasure, of a kind seen again and yet again, perpetrated by other evil men whose works are beyond understanding, let alone forgiveness.

There are many, many smaller evils that are done throughout the course of time and events that occur within those spans; few exact the pain and loathing that Clifford Olson's practised predations did, for his targets were children.

A smaller evil might be pointed out to have accompanied his gargantuan ones, that of his wife insisting on retaining the $100,000 her husband extorted from the then-attorney-general, anxious to recover the children's bodies.

Clifford Olson and his wife were attendees of a Baptist congregation. Evil and its counterparts appear everywhere and anywhere. We do not always see it when we meet it. It does, eventually, reveal its face.

Clifford Olson revealed his and when he did, and the full extent of his carnage on society was known, society carefully tended to his needs.

The anguish of the distraught parents, well, not so much. They did what they could to honour their children, and to care for what they had remaining.

One family, whose 16-year-old son, Daryn Johnsrude, was among the victims, did something more, and quite extraordinarily. Together, Sharon and Gary Rosenfeldt in 1984 formed a victim's rights charity. They worked tirelessly on behalf of victim's rights, and it is yet another tragedy that Gary Rosenfeldt died before he could find some closure in the death of the bestial sub-human who murdered his step-son.

Glenn Baglo-Vancouver Su Gary and Sharon Rosenfeldt, at a parole hearing for Clifford Olson in 1997.Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun Files, Vancouver Sun