• BC Christian News • MARCH ISSUE 2000 • VOL. 20 #3 • Formerly "Christian Info News" •

Colin Thatcher has found God and still maintains innocence
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By Debra Fieguth

DEWDNEY TRUNK Road meanders along the Upper Fraser Valley, cutting through the communities of Maple Ridge, Haney and Mission and winding through farmland an hour east of Vancouver. North of Mission, just barely beyond reach of encroaching development, the road strays up a hill towards Westminster Abbey, where Roman Catholic monks have chosen to devote their lives to prayer, study, worshipping God and living in community.

From the monastery, one can gaze out at the green valley and see, just a short distance down Dewdney Trunk Road, another community where men live and toil together in a cloistered existence. The residents of Ferndale Institution, however, have not chosen to be there, but have made choices that led them there.

It's a rainy, hazy Fraser Valley afternoon when Colin Thatcher sits down for the first interview he's agreed to in a decade. Wearing a blue plaid shirt, denim jeans and jacket and cowboy boots, at 61 he's trim and fit but moves carefully, wincing occasionally from the pain of broken ribs sustained when a horse kicked him recently.

Ferndale, a minimum-security federal facility, has been Thatcher's home for the past five years. Before that, he spent 10 years in a higher security prison in Edmonton. Unless a judicial review coming up in the next few months grants him early parole, he'll be at Ferndale for another decade.

Heady days of politics

Thatcher's rather bucolic lifestyle (he works with Ferndale's livestock -- thus the horse) is a far cry from the heady days as Saskatchewan's energy and mines minister 20 years ago. Back then, as a rancher, politician and father of three young children, he courted his constituents, aggressively pursued his political aims and regularly flew to Palm Springs for holidays.

Then everything changed. The fast lifestyle came to an abrupt halt when he landed in jail. The man who seemed to have everything was forced to confront the most basic and most profound question in the world: Who is God and what does he mean to me? Thatcher says that he decided the truth of the cross of Jesus was the answer to the question he hadn't even been asking.

"I had to get into this mess to find out that simple truth," he says now.

"This mess" refers to his arrest, trial and conviction for the brutal 1983 death of his former wife, JoAnn Wilson. It was a crime he has always claimed he didn't commit, despite a lengthy investigation and damning evidence. Only recently has a Calgary private investigator come forward with information -- including a discrepancy in a credit card slip found near the garage where JoAnn was beaten, stabbed and shot -- suggesting evidence was planted to incriminate Thatcher.

Numerous documented accounts show that, whether or not he had a hand in her murder, Thatcher was verbally and physically abusive toward his wife. The couple's divorce led to one of the longest and nastiest custody battles in the country. The middle child, Regan, was the subject of a particularly protracted and bitter fight. At one point after JoAnn was awarded custody, Regan was spirited away and taken to live with his grandmother, Peggy Thatcher, in Palm Springs.

(All three Thatcher children now visit their father regularly. Greg runs the family ranch near Moose Jaw; Regan is a lawyer in Winnipeg; and Stephanie lives on the West Coast.)

Thatcher would rather forget those days. He has agreed to an interview on certain conditions: he doesn't want to talk about 'the case' and he doesn't want to talk about his family. Neither does he want to say much about Ferndale, which already has a reputation as the 'country club' of federal institutions.

What he will talk about is his profession of faith in Jesus. Raised and baptized as an infant in the United Church, he always believed in God, he says, "which means nothing." The change started when his father, Ross Thatcher, then premier of Saskatchewan, was invited to open a Leighton Ford evangelistic crusade. The elder Thatcher was led to the Lord by Ford. He told his son about his conversion.

"It went in one ear and out the other," Colin Thatcher recalls. He thought about accepting Jesus himself, but put it off. "It was always something I intended to do -- but I intended to do it tomorrow, and tomorrow never came."

Charged with murder

In May 1984, Thatcher was arrested after a 15-month investigation into his former wife's death. He was waiting for a hearing in a Regina jail when Ray Matheson, then dean of men at Canadian Bible College, introduced himself while visiting another inmate. Matheson asked Thatcher if he could come visit him.

"I opened my mouth to say no -- and I will never ever know why I said yes. It shocked me."

So Matheson returned, they talked and argued, and "after three sessions I had no arguments left," he says. Then Thatcher accepted Christ.

To this day Thatcher sees Matheson, now a pastor at First Alliance In Calgary (Preston Manning's church), as his example of what a Christian should be like.

"I look at him and feel guilty for my own failures as a Christian." After his conviction in 1984, Thatcher was sent to prison in Edmonton. There, another Alliance pastor, Paul Polenenko, and a member of his congregation, visited the ex-politician regularly. They also brought him numerous books and tapes. "I became fascinated with Christian doctrine," Thatcher says.

The most influential teachers In his Christian life are California radio preacher John MacArthur, Atlanta based Charles Stanley, whom he watches regularly on TV, and Jerry Falwell -- although he doesn't always agree with Falwell's politics.

Fundamentalist bent

"I guess the bent I would take would be that of a fundamentalist," he says. Intrigued by prophecy, Thatcher keeps up with world events through daily reading of The Globe and Mail and National Post, as well as by watching CNN.

"It's incredible the way the world is moving towards the days described in Revelation," he comments. "It's really quite amazing, but we shouldn't be surprised," he says, citing corporate mergers, a movement towards the 'New World Order,' the breakdown of trade barriers, and a common currency in Europe.

Thatcher gets up every day at 5:30 to read the scriptures before the 6 am prisoner count and the beginning of the work day. While he speaks easily of prophecy and doctrine, he finds discussion of Christian concepts such as grace a little more difficult. His "rather regimented" lifestyle has something to do with that, he suggests. Nevertheless, he concedes that God's grace has been there for him. For example, if someone had asked him 15 years ago where he'd be now, "I would have said I wouldn't make it this far."

His views on what is important have changed radically. He's "not even remotely interested" in politics anymore. He has come to see politics as "shallow and almost pointless. Sometimes I wonder why I bothered."

If he had his life to live over, Thatcher says he would have accepted Christ a lot sooner. "One of the things that really troubles me is that I didn't find this a long time ago. My children aren't saved," he adds. "I regret that I didn't bring my children up as Christians."

It was relatively recently in his Christian pilgrimage that Thatcher decided he needed to be baptized as a believer. One morning TV preacher Charles Stanley was talking about the importance of baptism. "I sat there amazed. Somehow I had missed that act of obedience, he explains. "It's a consummation of your faith."

Last year, Thatcher applied for a day pass in order to be baptized in a church. When the word got out, the media pounced. He has put off his application for the time being, and now he won't say when or where he will be baptized. He won't even confirm that he hasn't already been baptized.

Maintains innocence

Once accustomed to media scrums, microphones and television lights, Thatcher is now wary about the 'media circus' he might attract by any public action or statement. He agreed to an interview only after several phone calls, consultation with his chaplain and time to think about the questions in advance. Asked if there's anything he wants to talk about that hasn't already been asked, he hesitates, looks at the written list of questions and says: "Number 14. Read that one to me."

"As far as I am aware," the question reads, "you have always maintained your innocence. How have you been able to get through the last 15 years believing you were wrongly convicted?"

"With difficulty," is his short answer. "With difficulty. And especially in recent years, when it has come to light that the evidence that exonerates me was available at the time of my trial, was kept from us and continues to be kept from us despite my taking every single measure to acquire that evidence. When the department of justice answers a request for the same access to my police file that anyone else could receive in this day automatically, and says 'we don't have to give it to you,' that is a pretty hard pill to accept. I won't pretend that I like it."

Prison life consists of work, reading, watching TV, attending chapel services, receiving visitors and some interaction with other inmates. "I'm a loner," Thatcher says. He doesn't believe he has the spiritual gift of evangelism. "I don't know what my spiritual gifts are," he adds.

To outsiders, life at Ferndale might look cushy. The gate isn't locked; there are no barbed wire fences; the property is big and spacious. "But I can't go beyond that front gate," Thatcher points out. "I built the fence that keeps me in here, but I can't go beyond that place, so it's still a prison."

Little things that others might take for granted, like going to the corner store, are impossible. "I'd be thrilled to have that."

Whether it's in a few months or 10 years from now, Thatcher is looking forward to leaving behind his monk-like existence in Ferndale and moving back to his ranch in southern Saskatchewan.

"I hope the day isn't too far away when I'll be able to return to my farm and my grandchildren and live unobtrusively," he says. He has no ambitions beyond his family and his ranch. "There's nothing like a prison to lower your horizons."

But just when that will happen, he concludes, "is entirely in the hands of God." In the meantime, he continues his cloistered life, in the shadow of Westminster Abbey.

Debra Fieguth is senior writer for ChristianWeek.