I FORGIVE YOU
WILMA Derksen knows exactly what it means to be the public face of forgiveness, having been both lauded and vilified for forgiving her daughter’s killer.
Labelled by the media as the voice of mercy, she’s spent the past 37 years facing the relentless forces of public scrutiny, coming to terms with a tragedy that has both defined and consumed her.
For many it makes no sense at all why Wilma and her husband, Cliff, decided to forgive the man who took their daughter’s life; and in particular why they made this decision just hours after the body of 13-year-old Candace was found on a bitterly cold January day in 1985, bound and frozen in a shed in Winnipeg, Canada.
The hunt for Candace Derksen, who disappeared on her way home from school, stretched over seven weeks, and so to locals her killing has always felt both intimate and personal.
When I met the Derksens, nearly 30 years later during a visit to Canada in 2013, the story was still imprinted on many people’s psyches, not least because the man who had been convicted of the crime six years earlier was now appealing his prison sentence.
I was invited to share a meal around the Derksens’ kitchen table with a couple of their oldest friends, who, like them, were both practising Mennonites [a Christian group named after Menno Simons of the Netherlands who was an influential Anabaptist church leader].
Afterwards, Wilma took me into their front room and here, among her books and family photographs, she proceeded to explain exactly why the couple had chosen to forgive their
