Over a couple of columns I've talked about the origins of Deadly Lessons, its protagonist Winston Patrick, and its story of a teacher accused of killing one of his students to cover up an illicit affair. That is the principle plot line of the book.
But as the story progresses, Winston determines that the motive for the murders may go beyond just the inappropriate alleged relationship between teacher and student. My motivation for the motivation comes from real life (this is also the case in Last Dance - we'll cover that in another column).
I went to McPherson Park Junior Secondary in Burnaby. When I arrived as a scared adolescent in grade eight, I knew almost no one since McPherson was not the junior high the vast majority of my elementary colleagues went to. I think I knew four people.
One of the people I remember meeting early in my junior high career was Sandra Ignatovic. She was in grade ten - the top of the school - and while we weren't exactly friends she was nice to me. For a grade eight boy new to the school, having a grade ten girl be nice to you is, well, kinda good. And if she's a pretty grade ten girl, well, that's kinda great. Heck, this one even went on to win the "Miss Burnaby" pageant.
We didn't get to know each other well - it was more of a smile as we passed in the hallway kind of relationship - and by the end of my first year, Sandra 'graduated' to senior high school and we parted ways. There were no emotional goodbyes, no tears, there may not even have been much more than a wave. But she did sign my yearbook. And she was in grade ten. To be sure, we hadn't kept in touch. In fact, I'm sure it's quite likely I never actually saw her again after she left McPherson Park.
In 1992 she was murdered.
Her death stuck with me. How many people does one know who get murdered? Sadly, I know more than one. But the circumstances around Sandra's death were particularly unusual: her murder was paid for by her mother-in-law (notice I'm not being particularly cautious here and using the term 'alleged'; her mother-in-law was tried and convicted for her crime. The case was apparently at least in part the inspiration for a television movie starring Tyne Daly in 1997.
Sandra, or Alexandra Pesic, as she was known by then, had been in what had been described as an acrimonious marriage and subsequent divorce from Joe Pesic, whose mother was reported to have been domineering and a very controlling influence in Alexandra's life. After the divorce, as the couple fought over custody of their then three year-old son, Jelka Pesic hired a hit man who gunned down Alexandra as she left her job in a dental office in Coquitlam.
Mother-in-law jokes aside, it was difficult for me to conceive of a mother killing her son's wife. Not being close to any of Alexandra's friends, I didn't know the details and rumours were plenty. One of the storylines had as a principal motive for the murder the fact that one family was Serbian and the other was Croatian. This turned out to be untrue. But it was another element about which I always wondered: could feuds dating back hundreds of years in the Balkan region still carry that kind of weight today?
Of course, I don't seek to mine stories directly from the suffering of others but to make Deadly Lessons' story more than a simple forbidden love story, and having known someone killed by family - even the family into which she married - had me wanting to explore darker, harsher motivations for violence that occur. Though far from the story I eventually wrote, Sandra's tragic marriage and murder were the original inspiration for the story.
Jelka Pesic, applied for early parole in 2008 under Canada's notorious "faint hope clause." I have not been able to determine if she was successful or if she remains in prison today, where she'd be eligible for parole from her first-degree murder conviction in 2018.
Next week: getting published.
