Wolves Among Sheep: The True Story of Murder in a Jehovah’s Witness Community

By Jim Kostelniuk

There are tragedies in life. The young child killed by a drunk driver. The family devastated by an early morning house fire. These events sadden us and make us reflect. "There but for the grace of God..." But if tragedy has a degree, there is surely none more unspeakable that the cold-blooded, brutal, shotgun murder of two beautiful children. Such was the case when Kim Anderson's estranged husband, Jeff Anderson, killed her and her two children-Juri, aged 10, and Lindsay, aged 8. Juri died with his arms wrapped around his sister, in a futile effort to protect her. Wolves Among Sheep is unlike any book you have read-or are likely to read again. It is written by the person most affected by the deaths of these two innocent children and their mother-their father and Kim's first husband, James Kostelniuk. Compelled to write the book as an expression of sorrow and love for the family so cruelly taken from him, Kostelniuk also had a deep need to arrive at some understanding of why these senseless murders took place. This question led him to expose the influence of the Jehovah's Witness organization that wielded total control over Kim's life, as it had over himself until he found the resolve to break with the organization. In making that break, Kostelniuk knew he would be forever shunned by the Witness community and, according to its laws, forbidden contact with his own wife and children. The convicted killer, Jeff Anderson, was also a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses. In a bizarre turn of events, Anderson began to correspond with Kostelniuk from prison, and his correspondence provides a chilling look into the mind of a murderer who held back a terrible secret from the world. After serving fifteen years, the Canadian criminal justice system offered Jeff Anderson the opportunity of a faint-hope hearing for early parole from his 25-year sentence. In February 2009, Anderson's file was opened up for public scrutiny at his first National Parole Board hearing at William Head Institution near Victoria, British Columbia. That parole hearing confirmed Kostelniuk's suspicions and revealed even more about this offender than anyone outside the system had known up until that time. Wolves Among Sheep is a riveting read that explores the darkest parts of the human heart and mind, and surprises us with the depth of its love and compassion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Word Alive Press
• Release date: Jan 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781770691902

Book preview

AFTERWORD

Book Reviews and Manitoba Writing Award Nominations for Wolves Among Sheep

A compelling and heartbreaking read, the book makes complex connections between the author’s life, the murderer’s life, the lives of the victims, and the religion they all once shared. Kostelniuk untangles this web in clear, simple prose, writing in a tone profoundly free of anger.

—Quill Quire

The book is the reconstruction of a murder, and of a man. It is a meditation on faith and forgiveness—and the limits of both.

—Ken MacQueen

The Vancouver Sun

No one will ever, could ever, accuse James Kostelniuk of [sensationalism]. His book is the antithesis of trash writing….Wolves Among Sheep is no easy read, but it is wonderfully intelligent and mature, with shining moments of grace and courage on one page, on the next acts of cruelty so casually delivered they knock the breath right out of you. Great true crime writing as it turns out—there’s so little of it, who knew?—is just like real life. There’s nothing as powerful, and nothing more sensational, than truth.

—Christie Blatchford

National Post

This is a book that will follow you through the night while you are reading it and will remain with you, unsettling and harrowing, after you’ve put it down… No one who reads it will be quite the same again.

—Howard Engel

The Globe and Mail

Not since Capote’s In Cold Blood have readers been so close to a killer… Through lengthy correspondence with the killer, generous police contacts and painstaking research, he takes us on a dark voyage into a killer’s heart… But what makes Wolves Among Sheep stand out as a deeply gripping and profoundly heart-wrenching tale is neither the crime, nor the victims, but Kostelniuk himself. He is not a detached spectator sifting through a crime scene. He is the father of the murdered children.

—Darcy Henton

Toronto Star

In an attempt to find closure in his life, he wrote Wolves Among Sheep, a riveting read that explores the darkest regions of religion and the human heart.

—Andrew Armitage

The Sun Times,

Owen Sound, Ontario

Kostelniuk tells his story in a clear and engaging style, transparently fuelled by equal measures of anger, sadness and regret.

—Douglas J. Johnson

Winnipeg Free Press

But James Kostelniuk’s story also strikes me, above all, as a profoundly human one. It is a sensitive, poignant, well-written, gut-wrenching account of nothing less than the great human struggle, the agon of life, and the triumph of sanity, light and hope over despair and darkness.

—David Roberts

The Globe and Mail

From the foreword to Wolves Among Sheep

Kostelniuk’s pain seeps through the pages. Any peace he does derive comes from writing about his children. Wolves Among Sheep is both therapy and their memorial.

—Anna Asimakopulos

The Montreal Gazette

It is a rare occurrence when a published novel is used as a victim’s impact statement in a parole hearing, but that is exactly what will happen with this book in the middle of February [2009].

—Marianne Curtis

The Dawson Trail Dispatch

I believe the story that Jim tells is eminently worth reading because it shows that the quality of mercy is not strained, and that it is possible to overcome evil, at least in ourselves, by manifesting love… Jim’s course of conduct stands out as a bright example of Christian charity.

—M. James Penton

Author of Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah’s Witnesses

He has given the facts and allows his readers to judge those facts for themselves. Secondly, he has shown the complexity of what has happened to a number of people and has demonstrated the intricacy of individual personalities, thereby showing that there is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us.

—Ernesto Vela

James Kostelniuk’s therapist

Wolves Among Sheep: The True Story of Murder in a Jehovah’s Witness Community was nominated for the following Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards on April 28, 2001:

Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book by a Manitoba Author.

Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction.

McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.

Wolves Among Sheep was also used as a text in the Creative Communications journalism course at Red RiverCollege in Winnipeg for two years. Duncan McMonagle was the professor.

foreword

When James Kostelniuk and I first spoke on the telephone, and when we met face-to-face in the autumn of 1996, he did not strike me as a man whose life had been utterly darkened. Soft-spoken and courteous, what struck me was James’s enormous appetite for information, his thoughtfulness, his shyness and, ultimately, his ability to communicate in a way I had never before heard, with a profound depth of feeling that could only result from great suffering.

He told me his ex-wife and two small children had been shot to death in suburban Vancouver in 1985.

This in itself was shockingly sad. But then James began to reveal in haunting and exquisite detail his own story: the story of how he struggled over the years—successfully, I see now—to come to grips with this unimaginable loss and to find a small island of peace in a world torn asunder by grief.

That he had actually met with the killer of his family, Jeff Anderson, in an effort to understand why this horror had occurred—and pressed Anderson for detail about how he had pointed the gun, how far from their small faces—was to me most astounding. Anderson’s own comments, you will see, speak volumes, for they are more multivalent and revealing of himself than he might have imagined: As for victims, I’ve got the best.

In the months and years after our first meeting, James began to share with me drafts of the manuscript that became this book: the sum of his thoughts, feelings, correspondences, interviews.

And as I read I became even more astonished and gripped by it. I felt I was privileged to be given a special gift, a unique insight, as public a witness to a private sorrow. I had been taken to the depths and saw, not defeat, not shattered human remains, but triumph, victory. Certainly I have seen a victim standing in the rain at the serenely peaceful grave of his children. But I have also seen a very courageous man who is able to carry on and live life, not on the boundaries, as Paul Tillich put it, but at the center.

Victims of crime are rarely afforded much of a public voice. They get short shrift. Sometimes the courts offer them the pro forma chance to write a victim-impact statement, which helps judges apply a fit sentence to an offender by taking into account the effects of the crime on others.

Some victims find this process cathartic. All too often victims choose silence. Sometimes, survivors of an especially horrible crime, such as murder, may justifiably choose a self-imposed silence—they do not wish their lives to become a public spectacle. I’ve had a few doors slammed in my face over the years and would not second-guess those who would wrestle with their grief away from the prying eyes and ears of a stranger. But on other occasions, unexpectedly, magically, the doors of grief are flung open and victims spontaneously decide to share their memories and their sorrow. Perhaps they unconsciously know that their burden may be lighter if their pain is shouldered by a wider community.

I don’t know if that is what James intended to share with us in writing Wolves Among Sheep, but I suspect it is part of it. I know that even now the unanswerable questions haunt him: Why did this happen? What could I have done to prevent it? I also know this book was intentionally born of a feeling of responsibility, of doing right for Kim and for Juri and Lindsay.

Of course beyond this, recurringly, there is just a simple sadness: three innocent lives snuffed out. The survivors are left to pick up the pieces of their own shattered existence.

I truly believe Wolves Among Sheep offers unique and important insight into the psychological and spiritual travails of a father consumed by the guilt and existential crises of unimaginable loss.

But James Kostelniuk’s story strikes me, above all, as a profoundly human one. It is as sensitive, poignant, well-written, gut-wrenching account of nothing less than the great human struggle, the agon of life, and the triumph of sanity, light and hope over despair and darkness.

The tangential issues it raises—with its profile of a pathetic, disturbed killer, the justice system’s machinations, and the failures and foibles of an unusual religious sect—all these also are deserving of wide readership and careful consideration by all Canadians.

David Roberts

Bureau Chief

Manitoba and Saskatchewan

The Globe and Mail

PREFACE

I was at home with my wife, Marge, when the RCMP officer arrived. He was dressed in plain clothes, and I guessed by his demeanor that this was not a routine call. I remember thinking that he didn’t look like what you’d expect a policeman to look—that is, calm, and impersonal. In fact, he appeared very nervous, his face grim and flushed.

The officer looked like he needed something solid to sit on, and without thinking, I offered him a seat at the kitchen table. He took the chair gingerly, as though it might break. Marge and I sat across from each other and waited. We watched him reach for his jacket and take a piece of paper from his vest pocket. Looking down, he paused for what seemed like a very long time. I heard the paper rattle in his hands, and it was only then that I noticed that he was shaking. His whole body trembled, and I thought, Something terrible has happened. Then I realized that I, too, was trembling.

Finally the words came, quick and precise. Are you the father of Juri and Lindsay Kostelniuk? I hesitated, thinking I could delay what he had come to tell me. But I knew, whatever it was, I had no choice but to hear it. I braced myself, and told him that I was.

I’m very sorry to inform you that they and their mother, Kim Anderson, were murdered in Burnaby, British Columbia at about 12:30 p.m. today. Jeff Anderson, Kim’s husband, is in police custody.

That day—August 29, 1985—would mark the end of my life as I had known it, and the beginning of unthinkable anguish and unending heartache. It would also mark the beginning of a relentless, almost obsessive quest for answers, one that would shatter my deepest beliefs and convictions, and force me to examine the darkest corners of human nature.

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing,

but inwardly they are ravening wolves."

–Matthew 7:15 (KJV)

1

I grew up on farms in southern Manitoba, a descendent of rugged Ukrainian and Polish immigrants who settled in boreal forest lowlands west of Winnipeg Beach. In memory, there are open fields of black loam plowed into long furrows and scattered with straw. Farm buildings, hedges, shelter-belts, and patches of bush occasionally break the flat monotony, and straight gravel roads and ditches run into infinity. The distant horizon is a thin, infinite line of blue haze. The sky is a vast dome, making everything under it seem small and insignificant.

Most of my childhood was spent on a farm near Clandeboye, Manitoba. My pre-school playground was nearby Medicine Creek, one of the many tributaries of the Red River of the North. I spent many hours exploring its sloping banks and nearby thickets of poplar, cranberry, wolf willow, and sponge-like humus. Puppy, my American Eskimo, was my constant companion, his white coat constantly dirty from long days of digging for badgers and skunks. We ran for miles along that creek, which frequently appears as the artery of my dreams. At night, I am that little boy again, running along Medicine Creek with my dog.

In 1898 my great-grandparents, Woytko and Sylvania Kostelniuk, responded to Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s campaign to settle the harsh, rigorous Canadian prairies with a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat. They and their five children traveled to Canada from Austria-Hungary on a ship called the S.S. Italia, landed in Halifax in early June, and continued their difficult journey westward by train, arriving in Manitoba several weeks later.

The peasant immigrants lured to Manitoba in those years settled their homesteads with great hope for the future and a better life for their children. But these small farmers were accustomed to the rich and open steppes of southeast Europe, and with only a few primitive tools and meager belongings, were ill-prepared for what faced them. Instead of the Promised Land that they had envisioned, they found themselves battling dense northern forest, plagued with mosquitoes, stones, and sloughs. After a generation of backbreaking toil and hardship, few of the original settlers who had come to the region with my grandparents remained on their homesteads, and their descendants have long since scattered.

However, Woytko and Sylvania Kostelniuk managed to endure. As was traditional, their youngest son Peter remained a bachelor and cared for his parents in their old age. Upon their death, the still struggling family homestead, located in what was known then as Foley, was divided between him and Stanley, the elder son. Peter remained single all his life, but Stanley eventually married a neighboring farm girl, Tekla Shewaga, who gave birth to my father, Michael, in 1916 and to his younger sister Mary in 1918. A third child, named Josef, was born in 1917, but he died two years later of Spanish Influenza.

From all accounts, Stanley and Tekla did not have a happy marriage. Their life was difficult; no matter how hard they worked, they could not seem to get ahead and fell deeper and deeper into debt. Mike, a third brother of Peter and Stanley, managed to buy his own farm, but also struggled to make ends meet. The Kostelniuk brother’s dreams of having lives better than their parents grew increasingly remote, and disappeared entirely with the coming of the Great Depression.

At the time, many farm people sought solace and comfort in religion, which promised them a better life in the hereafter. Throughout the 1930s, an extremist religious sect known as Jehovah’s Witnesses started to gain converts in Manitoba, especially among the province’s immigrant farmers. The movement and organization were created in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in the late 1800s by a charismatic businessman who was called Pastor Russell. He and his followers preached a millennial message that appealed to those with little hope in their lives: Pastor Russell told them that the end of the world would occur within their lifetime, and that Jehovah’s faithful would live to see the Promised Land.

There were many positive aspects to the sect: its members were encouraged to be peaceful, honest, cooperative, and the organization later went on to win a number of important legal battles that improved freedom-of-expression laws in North America. However, its emphasis on door-to-door preaching and conversion, rabid condemnation of all other religions and beliefs, outright scorn toward higher education, and what many viewed as a crazy belief in the coming Apocalypse brought frequent persecution and ridicule upon its members. The legal organization also demanded unquestioning obedience, chastity, and austerity from its members, and encouraged highly misogynistic attitudes towards women.

My father’s uncles, Peter and Mike, became Jehovah’s Witnesses in the early 1930s. By all accounts, Peter was a gentle and compassionate man, but Mike personified the stereotypical religious extremist: rigid, domineering, and misogynous. I often saw the more unpleasant aspects of Mike’s personality in my father, and would later be dismayed to discover them in myself.

Tragedy entered my father’s life in the early 1930s. My grandfather, Stanley, fell ill with tuberculosis and had to be quarantined away from his family in a distant sanatorium at Ninette, Manitoba. The family did their best to keep the farm afloat, but eventually lost everything due to unpaid taxes. Stanley died shortly thereafter, and in desperation his wife, Tekla, set fire to the house for the insurance money and ran off to British Columbia with a man she barely knew, abandoning her young children to fend for themselves.

Michael was only fourteen, and his sister Mary twelve. Mary was so crushed by her mother’s abandonment that she attempted to drown herself in Lake Winnipeg, and failing that, took to the streets of Winnipeg. She was eventually rescued by a Polish immigrant three times her age, and agreed to become his common-law wife. Michael also managed to survive, but the harsh circumstances of his youth created the tough-skinned, hardworking, pragmatic, and often harsh man that I knew as my father. Although he eventually forgave his mother for her selfish act, he never lost his bitterness towards her. This aspect of my father’s life had a large impact on my own psyche; it instilled in me a vivid awareness and fear of the consequences of family abandonment, and a deep need for reassurance, approval, and acceptance—especially from my father.

Michael was invited to live with his uncle Peter, whom he came to love and trust as a father. But money was scarce, and my father had to earn his keep by working for farmers during harvest and at other busy times of the year. He diligently saved his money and eventually was able to buy back his father’s farm from the municipality, the farm that had been abandoned by his mother. He built another house in place of the one his mother had destroyed by fire, and in November of 1938, he married the daughter of a neighboring farmer—my mother, Nellie Walchuk—and together they ran a small dairy operation, shipping hand-churned cream and butter to the market.

Both my father and mother were dedicated Jehovah’s Witnesses when they married; their parents on both sides were Witnesses. With the coming of the Second World War in 1939, many men like my father were exempt from military service by virtue of being farmers. But as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses—who were neutral during the war and whose books and activities were banned in Canada—Michael would have refused to enlist had he been drafted. If not for his exemption as a farmer, he might have gone to jail for refusing war duty.

In July 1940, my sister Jeanette was born. Money was still scarce, and in addition to the dairy operation, my father often peddled his bicycle many miles in search of extra cash-paying jobs. He once traveled thirty miles south to a village called Petersfield, where he found work on a local farm. Soon after that, my parents sold their farm in Foley and bought another one close to Petersfield. I was born in Winnipeg in August 1946. By that time, my parents had become alienated from and disillusioned with their Jehovah’s Witness brethren in Foley, and quit going to meetings altogether.

When I was barely able to walk, I had the tendency to wander off by myself, away from the house and yard. After a winter snowstorm, as I played in the yard in my snow gear, I followed our red and white dog Butch out past the barn. The dog left me stranded and bogged down in a snow drift. My mother, frantic at discovering me missing, rushed out of the house dressed only in a light jacket, a skirt and a pair of shoes. Luckily, she had my trail in the snow to follow and found me in no time. But without the necessary snow boots, she wound up freezing her ankles.

Another time, later in the spring, I wandered off again, this time into a poplar bluff along a field. This disappearance was much longer in duration and more serious. The neighbors, concerned I would not be found before nightfall when the temperature would drop precipitously, organized a search party and the RCMP were called out with their police dogs. According to my mother, a dairyman from across

Petersfield Road

, Dennis Donohoe, found me sitting under a tree without a care in the world, singing to myself. He carried me to the safety of my mother’s arms.

One or two years later, when I was four years old, my parents sold their farm near Petersfield and bought another one near Clandeboye where I grew up. I have very pleasant memories of my father on that farm. I remember walking proudly towards him across a field one morning. I had caught a jack fish on the rapids at spawning time and was taking it to him as a gift. I’ll never forget the expression on his face as he looked up, his face burnt from the wind and sun, and saw the full-sized jack fish in my hands. He laughed so hard he had to shut the tractor off. Stepping down from the tractor, the slippery fish wriggled out of my hands and fell at his feet in the soft earth.

On another occasion, I decided to move a rotting rowboat. I was a delicate little boy of five, but somehow managed to drag the boat from the water’s edge, up the steep bank, over a gravel road, and into a ditch in front of our house—a distance of about 150 feet, mostly uphill. It took me nearly the whole day to get it to the desired destination. When my father came home that evening from working on the Canadian Pacific Railway, he asked my mother how the boat got there. When she explained what I had done, he stood on the roadside for the longest time, staring in stunned amazement, first at the boat and then at me. To this day, I don’t remember why it was so important for me to move that boat.

My father loved me, and encouraged me in many ways, but he grew more and more puzzled by me as I grew older. He was a rugged, hard-headed, practical man who brooked no nonsense, and in his eyes I was a soft and dreamy youngster who needed toughening up. We were frequently in conflict over one thing or another, both attracted and repelled by each other. Yet I still longed for his approval and acceptance.

My father’s disappointment in me stung me deeply, for I admired his strength and vibrancy and in many ways longed to be more like him. He was a man of strong emotions and passions, who loved to laugh and socialize with neighbors and friends. Like his father before him, he learned to play violin by ear, and from the time he was fourteen, provided old-time dance music for weddings and community banquets. Though he had no formal training in music, he played remarkably well—soulfully, like a Ukrainian gypsy. And though his music was also a source of extra money, he genuinely enjoyed performing and making people feel good.

As a child, I loved to watch people dance to my father’s music, fascinated by the graceful, coordinated patterns they made as they circled the dance floor. I especially loved to watch my mother dance. Dance was an important part of the cultural and social life in our community, and she loved it. She was a colorful and flamboyant young woman who was more in love with the musician in my father than the farmer. After they married, she did not adapt well to being a farmer’s wife, and I often sensed the keen disappointment they felt in each other throughout their marriage.

I was closer in temperament to my mother, and I now think that my father sometimes resented our relationship. The more distant my parents became from each other, the closer my mother and I grew. She shared her most intimate thoughts and secrets with me, and I cherished our time together. I have fond memories of the colorful house dresses and wide-brimmed hats she wore as she fed the chickens, gathered eggs, or worked in the garden (she sewed her own dresses and was an avid gardener). Every evening, just before nightfall, when the white leghorn chickens would fly over the fence to roost in the trees, I would help her pull them down from the branches so the hawks wouldn’t get them. I remember how they looked like ghostly white spirits as we picked them from the dark foliage, still asleep, and carried them off to safety.

My sister Jeanette was six years my senior, and we could not have been more different. I was fair-haired, respectful, and well-behaved; she was dark, rebellious, and wild. She was a popular teenager in the 1950s who rode around in fast cars with her friends, smoked cigarettes and drank lemon gin at dances. She and her girlfriends were admired by the other kids at school, and I was envious of her popularity. I would watch her and her boyfriend with fascination: Jeanette had pretty, dark hair, and eyes that flashed with emotion, and her boyfriend, Pat Ryan, was devilishly handsome, with sideburns and a Waikiki wave in his hair. As I grew into puberty, there was a part of me that yearned to be like them, to be rebellious and bad.

But that yearning conflicted with the part of me that needed approval of the adults around me, the part that wanted to be good. It also conflicted with my growing interest in religion—an odd preoccupation, given that my parents neither attended regular church services nor provided us with any formal religious instruction. My father’s uncle, Mike, frequently pressured him and the rest of us to return to Jehovah’s Witness meetings. But by that time, my parents had lost all interest in religious matters, preferring a life of hard work by day and a somewhat hedonist lifestyle at night, and neither encouraged nor discouraged my leanings.

My earliest concepts of God were closely associated with the abundance of nature that surrounded me. When I was about three, I overheard my father telling my mother that he was going to help a neighbor move some fuel drums. It was a warm spring morning, and before he left, he cheerfully expressed the hope that God would give him a sunny day, so that he would be working under the sun. Later that morning, I took a walk down the long lane from the house to the letter box stationed by

Petersfield Road

, as my mother was expecting a large can of strawberry jam from the general store in town. As I waited for the delivery to arrive, I would look into the blazing sun for as long as I could, then delight in the pulsating, visual aftereffects when I turned away. Through the dancing lights before my eyes, I gradually began to make out the figure of my father in the distance, pushing bright, shiny drums under the sunny sky he had hoped for. In that moment, my father, the sun, and God became inextricably linked in my consciousness.

The moon and stars held equal enchantment. I would watch for the planet Venus to appear after sunset, and often played in the moonlight by myself, watching moon shadows. Captivated by the soft light of stars against