Pixie Dust
Just when we thought it was over and that we could lay Candace’s murder and search to rest, something would come up holding our attention. Cliff called animated suspension – I called it a never-ending story.
In early February, two detectives came to our door to deliver the final autopsy report.
We invited them into our living room. They spoke slowly, carefully setting the scene.
Apparently, Candace had died of exposure—hypothermia – they said. The toxicology tests showed that she had not been drugged or poisoned. Her hands and feet had been tied, and she had been abandoned in the shack to die in the freezing cold. The crime scene was disorganized. Some of her belongings appeared to have been partially buried which made no sense because the body had been left in plain view.
Then they offered some details—how they had found her belongings hidden, yet the body had lain in full view.
Candace’s vocal cords had not been swollen. She hadn’t tried to scream. "In fact, it doesn't look as if she was alone. We feel because of this evidence that she was with someone she knew, In fact. it looks now as though someone had spent some time with her.”
I was shocked. No struggle and no screaming spelled terror to me, I remembered the other times she had been threatened. There was the storm on Lake Winnipeg when we had faced waves that could have capsized our boat. She had slept. When she didn’t know how to stop the bike, she just continued peddling. When she was skiing and didn’t know how to glide into shore, she just hung on with admirable resolve.
I wondered who had terrorized her so completely? Was it a knife or a gun or the face of a deranged man that had immobilized her so completely that she hadn’t even cried out for help? My heart twisted painfully, as my mind examined all possibilities.
Or had she been remembering our conversation about murder and accepted her fate? I wasn’t sure what would be worse – her shutting down because of fear – or her focussing on God– waiting for God to leave heaven’s doors wide open. All I knew was that I was feeling her pain.
The officers continued their report. “Because we believe it was someone she knew we are starting to question people who she knew.” they said.
They had arrived at a different conclusion than I had. — a perspective probably based on the difference between being a woman or being a tall, well-built male.
Then one of them dropped another bomb shell. "And she was a virgin," he said. The top button of her “tight” jeans – which had been reinforced with a safety pin was still in tact. It had not been tampered with….:.
I remembered those jeans – she had other jeans , newer jeans, but she liked this old pair the best.
“She wasn’t sexually assaulted?” I asked tentatively.
“No.”
“Was she hurt in any way?”
“No.”
“What could the motive have been?”
They shrugged, watching our faces as if waiting for something to surface.
Their whole presentation that evening had been distant, polite, professional – just the cold hard facts with that slight edge of – something. I couldn't put my finger on. Suspicion? Perhaps? Totally understandable - we pay them to be suspicious. We need them to search for truth.
Then they assured us again that they would be doing their utmost to find the guilty party and that they were positive that they would find him. I wasn't so sure. The police didn't always find their man. The police in Edmonton had never found Jake Plett's wife's murderer. How could they be so sure they would find this one?
As they shut their notebooks, we thanked them for their hard work.
But then after shutting the door behind them, Cliff and I both looked at each other. “She was a virgin?” This meant she not been raped. I had prayed she wouldn’t be violated. Could I consider this an answer to prayer?
It also laid to rest another question. We had heard about another fellow who had insinuated that he had “been with her.”
I didn’t believe him. But do we really know everything about another person. maybe – she had experimented? I didn’t know – but now I knew, she was a virgin. She really had been an innocent little girl— half woman, half child— who had been forced off the street that night and terrorized.
But those stark words, "She was a virgin," also drove home another reality Candace had died before she could even begin to live. Instead of a beautiful white wedding dress, we had been forced to buy a cold, white coffin. Would I ever be able to accept the injustice of that?
I looked at Cliff; he looked drawn, torn...and old. Both of us must have aged ten years in a space of two months. I had lost fifteen pounds. Cliff had grayed.
*****
And then there was the Search Committee. We thought they had done their work – Candace was found
When the Search Committee met four days after the funeral, we thought it was to say good bye.
Cliff and I were dreading it…this remarkable group of people had supported us so faithfully. No amount of money could ever have purchased what they had given us at the moment of our greatest need. We could never have hired others who would have acted so quickly, so intuitively—anticipating our needs, knowing what mattered, and finding the energy to do what had to be done without being asked.
Perhaps the greatest gift they gave us was the assurance that, together, we had done everything possible to find Candace. We were told that the city of Winnipeg had never before seen such an extensive search. Knowing that we had not left one stone unturned, made Candace’s death easier to live with. Nothing had been left undone.
But now was it over? Now that the search had ended, was their mandate finished?
They decided there was still work to do. There were loose ends that required coordination. MBCI still needed help navigating its relationship with the police. Crime Stoppers wanted to reenact scenes for broadcasts planned for late February and early March. There were business and financial matters remaining from both the funeral and the search. And many organizations—Glen Eden, Klassen's Funeral Home, River East Mennonite Brethren Church, and Portage Avenue Mennonite Brethren Church—had donated generously and needed to be thanked, both informally and formally. We were overwhelmed by their generosity.
I did a quick calculation, comparing the funeral expenses with the gifts and donations. We had broken even. We hadn’t benefited a single penny from Candace’s death—but, miraculously, we also hadn’t lost.
Len DeFehr reported that approximately six thousand dollars had been received for the memorial fund designated for a swimming pool, and that there were still four thousand dollars remaining from the search committee’s funds. We also learned that the man who had found Candace’s body had declined the two-thousand-dollar reward, and that the police were deciding where that money should go—most likely into the memorial fund.
The final line in the meeting minutes was the most revealing: “The perpetrators are not a priority project for us at present.” We had chosen other goals.
Then the February 11 meeting was supposed to be the last one—but it wasn’t either.
We met in the Christian Press boardroom. I looked around the table at Harold Jantz, Henry Wedel, Dave Teigrob, Dave Loewen, and Len DeFehr. Len reported that the memorial fund had grown to ten thousand dollars. None of us had expected it to increase after the funeral, yet weeks later, cards and letters were still arriving at our home and at the Camp Arnes office—some with large donations, others with only a few dollars, all marked for the pool.
The committee also expressed concern that the police investigation had begun to focus on David Wiebe. He had been asked to take a lie detector test. We were baffled. David had been in a driver’s education lesson at the time Candace disappeared; there was no possible way he could have abducted her. Other friends had also been questioned. We decided we needed to meet again.
Our final meeting was held on March 5. By then, the memorial fund had reached $16,200. One young girl had donated her entire piggy bank—2,887 pennies. There was a growing sense that the giving had, in some way, only begun.
“When the public gives this much,” someone said, “the business community will want to get involved too.”
The swimming pool had received a quiet but unmistakable vote of confidence from the community.
With gratitude, we disbanded.
But that was not the end. The money kept coming. People who had donated began visiting the camp, asking where the pool would be built. Dave Loewen suggested that it might be helpful to create something people could see—a memorial of some kind. He wondered if a plaque might serve as an interim marker and asked whether we would help design it.
We agreed, but a plaque felt cold. Candace already had a gravestone. We wanted something worth looking at—something that would tell her story. So we asked Dave whether, instead of a plaque, we could design a permanent storyboard: a collection of newspaper articles and photographs, arranged in a durable, historical-style display. That way the camp visitors- who might not even had never heard of Candace could understand why this place existed. It was the story that mattered.
Dave agreed. We designed it and stationed it near the Lodge where the pool might be built.
Maybe the plaque was enough. I remembered again the conversation I had with Candace—when I had told her that committing her life to God meant trusting Him with its impact. Was God going to honor that commitment now? Was a swimming pool going to be part of it? Would there really be a pool at Camp Arnes someday?
The Candace Derksen Memorial Pool was built at Camp Arnes a little more than a year after Candace went missing. On October 26, 1986, we cut the ribbon.
*****
Then there was Child Find.
I remember how at the very first search meeting, I met Ester DeFehr. Dave had invited her to be part of the committee because we would need someone to represent the “mother.”
She had reported to the committee that she had contacted Child Find, as well as the Tania Murrell Missing Children's Society in Edmonton. She had also been in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and we were given the necessary forms to register with them. At that point, the research and contacts Ester was making was exactly what the committee needed.
It was the only meeting I attended and having her there gave me full confidence in this committee. I could let it go and tend to the house functioning which had become the headquarters for the search in other ways.
Soon the search committee were meeting daily and Ester was in constant contact with provincial Child Find offices, coordinating the distribution of Candace’s photograph to be aired across Canada through Child Find publicity programs.
When the public response was not garnering the response the committee was looking for, the director of Child Find Alberta told Ester that she believed that a direct appeal from a mother would be powerful. People, she said, respond to the pain of a mother and her plea for help.
Because of that advice, I became involved. I became the “mother.”
And it never really ended.
As I stepped into that role, I began to sense how vital this Child Find organization was to the search… and was surprised that we didn’t have something like this in Manitoba—and how necessary it was for Manitoba to have its own provincial branch. I began working closely with Ester to help establish one.
On January 29, we met with other community members—who were also interested in this cause and formally organized an interim board to begin the work of creating a Manitoba-based Child Find. We decided that the most logical first step would be to attend the annual Child Find conference in Calgary, Alberta. Five people were chosen to go.
We worked steadily. By April 16, the organization was officially incorporated. By June, we had assembled a full publicity package. By summer, we were beginning to hear from distraught parents—families who were suddenly walking the same terrible road we had walked.
In time, Child Find evolved into what is now the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and Candace was credited with its beginning— “All that we are able to do today for children in Canada, and around the world, is part of her legacy,” said director Christy Dzikowicz in April 2015, when a plaque honouring Candace was unveiled to mark the Centre’s 30th anniversary.
As Cliff and I watched these two projects grow—the Child Find organization and the swimming pool—we would look at each other and smile. Anything that carried Candace’s name, anything touched by her imprint, seemed to take on an otherworldly momentum and flourish far beyond what we had imagined.
I remember meeting with the director and staff of Child Find to offer our emotional support if nothing else, and then apologized for not being more involved.
That was when one of the staff paused to assure me that even though we hadn’t been involved all along – Candace’s presence had been with them and guided them. “It’s as if Candace has an active role in our organization,” she said. “We call her our pixie dust.”
They all laughed—and then started to describe this “pixie dust.”
Apparently, pixie dust is a magical, glittery powder from folklore stories that grants flight or other magical effects. In modern usage, it means unexpected magic, kindness, or special moments often through random acts of goodwill like gifts or treats. Metaphorically, it can also describe anything that magically solves problems or adds wonder.
When they described the role of this pixie dust, it did sound like Candace.
Who would have thought – that our little baby would have such an impact,
She entered our world with eyes already sparkling, and by six months had become a walking marvel—alert, radiant, unmistakably alive. Even then, she seemed awake to joy, as if joy had been expecting her.
By grade one, an uncanny gift revealed itself. She was a bully-whisperer, able to disarm cruelty not through confrontation, but through the quiet authority of innocence and goodness. Meanness simply lost its footing around her.
A few years later, she blossomed into a friend-magnet extraordinaire—the kind of buoyant spirit whose laughter lifted a room without effort, whose presence felt like an open door. Joy followed her naturally, as though it recognized its own.
As a young teenager, she surprised us yet again. She carried an uncommon social awareness, lingering in deep conversations, offering insights that felt far beyond her years. She spoke of God with a rare intimacy—personal, thoughtful, unforced—a faith not handed to her, but something she had quietly discovered and chosen.
When she disappeared, she ignited the largest missing-person search the city of Winnipeg had ever known.
After her death, we watched as she became a story—told aloud for the first time to an audience of two thousand, broadcast live across the city. Her life, once intimate and ordinary, now carried weight in the public imagination.
Then mysteriously the vivid memory of her victimisation inspired Child Find Manitoba and a swimming pool at Camp Arnes. Both program’s maon purpose is to help children.
She lived only thirteen years—yet her love was vast and uncontainable, reaching beyond time, beyond circumstance, far beyond herself.
I watched… and now they were calling it her pixie dust.
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death. Robert Fulghum
In early February, two detectives came to our door to deliver the final autopsy report.
We invited them into our living room. They spoke slowly, carefully setting the scene.
Apparently, Candace had died of exposure—hypothermia – they said. The toxicology tests showed that she had not been drugged or poisoned. Her hands and feet had been tied, and she had been abandoned in the shack to die in the freezing cold. The crime scene was disorganized. Some of her belongings appeared to have been partially buried which made no sense because the body had been left in plain view.
Then they offered some details—how they had found her belongings hidden, yet the body had lain in full view.
Candace’s vocal cords had not been swollen. She hadn’t tried to scream. "In fact, it doesn't look as if she was alone. We feel because of this evidence that she was with someone she knew, In fact. it looks now as though someone had spent some time with her.”
I was shocked. No struggle and no screaming spelled terror to me, I remembered the other times she had been threatened. There was the storm on Lake Winnipeg when we had faced waves that could have capsized our boat. She had slept. When she didn’t know how to stop the bike, she just continued peddling. When she was skiing and didn’t know how to glide into shore, she just hung on with admirable resolve.
I wondered who had terrorized her so completely? Was it a knife or a gun or the face of a deranged man that had immobilized her so completely that she hadn’t even cried out for help? My heart twisted painfully, as my mind examined all possibilities.
Or had she been remembering our conversation about murder and accepted her fate? I wasn’t sure what would be worse – her shutting down because of fear – or her focussing on God– waiting for God to leave heaven’s doors wide open. All I knew was that I was feeling her pain.
The officers continued their report. “Because we believe it was someone she knew we are starting to question people who she knew.” they said.
They had arrived at a different conclusion than I had. — a perspective probably based on the difference between being a woman or being a tall, well-built male.
Then one of them dropped another bomb shell. "And she was a virgin," he said. The top button of her “tight” jeans – which had been reinforced with a safety pin was still in tact. It had not been tampered with….:.
I remembered those jeans – she had other jeans , newer jeans, but she liked this old pair the best.
“She wasn’t sexually assaulted?” I asked tentatively.
“No.”
“Was she hurt in any way?”
“No.”
“What could the motive have been?”
They shrugged, watching our faces as if waiting for something to surface.
Their whole presentation that evening had been distant, polite, professional – just the cold hard facts with that slight edge of – something. I couldn't put my finger on. Suspicion? Perhaps? Totally understandable - we pay them to be suspicious. We need them to search for truth.
Then they assured us again that they would be doing their utmost to find the guilty party and that they were positive that they would find him. I wasn't so sure. The police didn't always find their man. The police in Edmonton had never found Jake Plett's wife's murderer. How could they be so sure they would find this one?
As they shut their notebooks, we thanked them for their hard work.
But then after shutting the door behind them, Cliff and I both looked at each other. “She was a virgin?” This meant she not been raped. I had prayed she wouldn’t be violated. Could I consider this an answer to prayer?
It also laid to rest another question. We had heard about another fellow who had insinuated that he had “been with her.”
I didn’t believe him. But do we really know everything about another person. maybe – she had experimented? I didn’t know – but now I knew, she was a virgin. She really had been an innocent little girl— half woman, half child— who had been forced off the street that night and terrorized.
But those stark words, "She was a virgin," also drove home another reality Candace had died before she could even begin to live. Instead of a beautiful white wedding dress, we had been forced to buy a cold, white coffin. Would I ever be able to accept the injustice of that?
I looked at Cliff; he looked drawn, torn...and old. Both of us must have aged ten years in a space of two months. I had lost fifteen pounds. Cliff had grayed.
*****
And then there was the Search Committee. We thought they had done their work – Candace was found
When the Search Committee met four days after the funeral, we thought it was to say good bye.
Cliff and I were dreading it…this remarkable group of people had supported us so faithfully. No amount of money could ever have purchased what they had given us at the moment of our greatest need. We could never have hired others who would have acted so quickly, so intuitively—anticipating our needs, knowing what mattered, and finding the energy to do what had to be done without being asked.
Perhaps the greatest gift they gave us was the assurance that, together, we had done everything possible to find Candace. We were told that the city of Winnipeg had never before seen such an extensive search. Knowing that we had not left one stone unturned, made Candace’s death easier to live with. Nothing had been left undone.
But now was it over? Now that the search had ended, was their mandate finished?
They decided there was still work to do. There were loose ends that required coordination. MBCI still needed help navigating its relationship with the police. Crime Stoppers wanted to reenact scenes for broadcasts planned for late February and early March. There were business and financial matters remaining from both the funeral and the search. And many organizations—Glen Eden, Klassen's Funeral Home, River East Mennonite Brethren Church, and Portage Avenue Mennonite Brethren Church—had donated generously and needed to be thanked, both informally and formally. We were overwhelmed by their generosity.
I did a quick calculation, comparing the funeral expenses with the gifts and donations. We had broken even. We hadn’t benefited a single penny from Candace’s death—but, miraculously, we also hadn’t lost.
Len DeFehr reported that approximately six thousand dollars had been received for the memorial fund designated for a swimming pool, and that there were still four thousand dollars remaining from the search committee’s funds. We also learned that the man who had found Candace’s body had declined the two-thousand-dollar reward, and that the police were deciding where that money should go—most likely into the memorial fund.
The final line in the meeting minutes was the most revealing: “The perpetrators are not a priority project for us at present.” We had chosen other goals.
Then the February 11 meeting was supposed to be the last one—but it wasn’t either.
We met in the Christian Press boardroom. I looked around the table at Harold Jantz, Henry Wedel, Dave Teigrob, Dave Loewen, and Len DeFehr. Len reported that the memorial fund had grown to ten thousand dollars. None of us had expected it to increase after the funeral, yet weeks later, cards and letters were still arriving at our home and at the Camp Arnes office—some with large donations, others with only a few dollars, all marked for the pool.
The committee also expressed concern that the police investigation had begun to focus on David Wiebe. He had been asked to take a lie detector test. We were baffled. David had been in a driver’s education lesson at the time Candace disappeared; there was no possible way he could have abducted her. Other friends had also been questioned. We decided we needed to meet again.
Our final meeting was held on March 5. By then, the memorial fund had reached $16,200. One young girl had donated her entire piggy bank—2,887 pennies. There was a growing sense that the giving had, in some way, only begun.
“When the public gives this much,” someone said, “the business community will want to get involved too.”
The swimming pool had received a quiet but unmistakable vote of confidence from the community.
With gratitude, we disbanded.
But that was not the end. The money kept coming. People who had donated began visiting the camp, asking where the pool would be built. Dave Loewen suggested that it might be helpful to create something people could see—a memorial of some kind. He wondered if a plaque might serve as an interim marker and asked whether we would help design it.
We agreed, but a plaque felt cold. Candace already had a gravestone. We wanted something worth looking at—something that would tell her story. So we asked Dave whether, instead of a plaque, we could design a permanent storyboard: a collection of newspaper articles and photographs, arranged in a durable, historical-style display. That way the camp visitors- who might not even had never heard of Candace could understand why this place existed. It was the story that mattered.
Dave agreed. We designed it and stationed it near the Lodge where the pool might be built.
Maybe the plaque was enough. I remembered again the conversation I had with Candace—when I had told her that committing her life to God meant trusting Him with its impact. Was God going to honor that commitment now? Was a swimming pool going to be part of it? Would there really be a pool at Camp Arnes someday?
The Candace Derksen Memorial Pool was built at Camp Arnes a little more than a year after Candace went missing. On October 26, 1986, we cut the ribbon.
*****
Then there was Child Find.
I remember how at the very first search meeting, I met Ester DeFehr. Dave had invited her to be part of the committee because we would need someone to represent the “mother.”
She had reported to the committee that she had contacted Child Find, as well as the Tania Murrell Missing Children's Society in Edmonton. She had also been in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and we were given the necessary forms to register with them. At that point, the research and contacts Ester was making was exactly what the committee needed.
It was the only meeting I attended and having her there gave me full confidence in this committee. I could let it go and tend to the house functioning which had become the headquarters for the search in other ways.
Soon the search committee were meeting daily and Ester was in constant contact with provincial Child Find offices, coordinating the distribution of Candace’s photograph to be aired across Canada through Child Find publicity programs.
When the public response was not garnering the response the committee was looking for, the director of Child Find Alberta told Ester that she believed that a direct appeal from a mother would be powerful. People, she said, respond to the pain of a mother and her plea for help.
Because of that advice, I became involved. I became the “mother.”
And it never really ended.
As I stepped into that role, I began to sense how vital this Child Find organization was to the search… and was surprised that we didn’t have something like this in Manitoba—and how necessary it was for Manitoba to have its own provincial branch. I began working closely with Ester to help establish one.
On January 29, we met with other community members—who were also interested in this cause and formally organized an interim board to begin the work of creating a Manitoba-based Child Find. We decided that the most logical first step would be to attend the annual Child Find conference in Calgary, Alberta. Five people were chosen to go.
We worked steadily. By April 16, the organization was officially incorporated. By June, we had assembled a full publicity package. By summer, we were beginning to hear from distraught parents—families who were suddenly walking the same terrible road we had walked.
In time, Child Find evolved into what is now the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and Candace was credited with its beginning— “All that we are able to do today for children in Canada, and around the world, is part of her legacy,” said director Christy Dzikowicz in April 2015, when a plaque honouring Candace was unveiled to mark the Centre’s 30th anniversary.
As Cliff and I watched these two projects grow—the Child Find organization and the swimming pool—we would look at each other and smile. Anything that carried Candace’s name, anything touched by her imprint, seemed to take on an otherworldly momentum and flourish far beyond what we had imagined.
I remember meeting with the director and staff of Child Find to offer our emotional support if nothing else, and then apologized for not being more involved.
That was when one of the staff paused to assure me that even though we hadn’t been involved all along – Candace’s presence had been with them and guided them. “It’s as if Candace has an active role in our organization,” she said. “We call her our pixie dust.”
They all laughed—and then started to describe this “pixie dust.”
Apparently, pixie dust is a magical, glittery powder from folklore stories that grants flight or other magical effects. In modern usage, it means unexpected magic, kindness, or special moments often through random acts of goodwill like gifts or treats. Metaphorically, it can also describe anything that magically solves problems or adds wonder.
When they described the role of this pixie dust, it did sound like Candace.
Who would have thought – that our little baby would have such an impact,
She entered our world with eyes already sparkling, and by six months had become a walking marvel—alert, radiant, unmistakably alive. Even then, she seemed awake to joy, as if joy had been expecting her.
By grade one, an uncanny gift revealed itself. She was a bully-whisperer, able to disarm cruelty not through confrontation, but through the quiet authority of innocence and goodness. Meanness simply lost its footing around her.
A few years later, she blossomed into a friend-magnet extraordinaire—the kind of buoyant spirit whose laughter lifted a room without effort, whose presence felt like an open door. Joy followed her naturally, as though it recognized its own.
As a young teenager, she surprised us yet again. She carried an uncommon social awareness, lingering in deep conversations, offering insights that felt far beyond her years. She spoke of God with a rare intimacy—personal, thoughtful, unforced—a faith not handed to her, but something she had quietly discovered and chosen.
When she disappeared, she ignited the largest missing-person search the city of Winnipeg had ever known.
After her death, we watched as she became a story—told aloud for the first time to an audience of two thousand, broadcast live across the city. Her life, once intimate and ordinary, now carried weight in the public imagination.
Then mysteriously the vivid memory of her victimisation inspired Child Find Manitoba and a swimming pool at Camp Arnes. Both program’s maon purpose is to help children.
She lived only thirteen years—yet her love was vast and uncontainable, reaching beyond time, beyond circumstance, far beyond herself.
I watched… and now they were calling it her pixie dust.
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death. Robert Fulghum
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