Burning Bush
The next day, around noon, two officers came by to give us more details.
They told us that Candace’s body had been found in a shed only about four hundred and fifty metres—roughly five hundred yards—from our house. It was at the end of the railway tracks that branched off Talbot Avenue. They believed she had taken her usual route home and was forced off the road where Talbot intersects with the tracks.
The shed stood on private property, tucked into a desolate corner of a brick and lumber yard. It had been built nearly fifty years earlier to house machinery used for hauling sand, but it had long since fallen into disuse. No one from the company had entered the building for at least two years—until the day before, when a foreman went in searching for a missing machine part. He said he saw the body immediately.
The motive was unclear, but the case was being treated as first-degree murder. That stunned us. We had assumed that, since she had died of hypothermia, the charge would be kidnapping or abduction or unlawful confinement. The officers explained that when a death occurs while a victim is being unlawfully restrained or held against their will—it is classified as first-degree murder, even if the killing was not planned or deliberate. Their initial assessment of the crime scene suggested a street person. No car appeared to have been involved.
They assured us they would keep us informed.
After they left, I sat at the kitchen table.
The house was empty—strangely empty. There were no guests. Someone, anticipating we would be overwhelmed, had taken the children for the day. Cliff had gone out to take care of practical matters. I was left alone.
It was the first time I was truly alone. The last two days had been one trauma after another, going to the police station, identifying the body, late night visitor, funeral director at the funeral home, choosing a white coffin and then coming home to this report.
All I could think of was First-degree murder. It was first degree murder!
The phrase vibrated through my mind.
To my surprise, my first response was relief Not the answer we had hoped for, but after seven weeks of speculation and uncertainty, there was now a conclusion. Murder—finally, a definitive answer.
But the relief didn’t last long. It gave way to horror.
Candace had been murdered!
Who? Why?
The word itself was unbearable. Murder. It didn’t belong in our world. It wasn’t part of our experience. I had no framework for it—no grid by which to understand it. Or did I?
And then I remembered. Candace and I had talked about murder only a few months earlier.
She had gone to babysit at a neighbour’s house across the back alley. Then around ten o’clock - she had phoned me. “Mom, the kids are in bed. I’m playing video games. Can you come? I’m scared.”
So I went over. I sat beside her on the rug and let her beat me at a few video games while we munched on peanuts. Then I asked her why she was afraid. She wasn’t usually scared—at least not that I knew. Was there an actual threat?
No, she said. No threat.
Last night she had a nightmare. In the dream, someone had tried to murder her. She described it in detail. Because I believed dreams were the language of the unconscious, I listened carefully, asking gentle, practical questions. After examining every detail, I concluded it was nothing more than ordinary school anxieties—perhaps amplified by a recent horror movie she had watched against our wishes.
Still, I wanted to honour her fear as real. So I offered what I believed was wise counsel—how to live with fear without letting it rule you.
“Candace,” I said, “when you’re afraid, pray and ask God to protect you. Believe that He will, and then lay your fears aside. You can’t let fear control your life.”
I will never forget the way she looked at me—those expressive blue eyes, searching, intelligent.
“Mom,” she asked quietly, “can you honestly tell me that if I pray for God to protect me, nothing will ever hurt me again? That I will never be murdered?”
So much for Sunday school answers.
My daughter had grown up.
In truth, Cliff and I had asked the same question ourselves years earlier, after Cliff had been held at knifepoint for hours while managing a trading post. Though a missionary in the village eventually rescued him, we could not bear the lingering trauma. We left the community carrying a deep sense of vulnerability—of failure—that we struggled to name, let alone resolve.
Later, we met a second cousin of Cliff’s who had also served in ministry up north and had faced comparable threats—perhaps even worse. Yet he was returning, and he seemed at peace, reconciled somehow to the constant danger. We asked him how he lived with the knowledge that his life was always at risk.
With an unusual peace in his eyes, he told us he had come to an understanding with God: that God had assured him that if his life were to end prematurely and violently, God would use his death to have a greater impact than the rest of his life ever could.
Cliff and I talked about it afterward. We loved his cousin’s understanding—and adopted it as our own.
So, I told Candace that story I said that committing our death to God—our murder—meant that if we were killed, our death would carry the weight of martyrdom; that God would bless our death even more than our life. I assured her that if she were to die violently as a young person, God would somehow use her death to have greater impact than if she had lived a long, full life.
The important part, I told her, was to commit – take off your shoe.
I was referring to the story of Moses: tending sheep in the wilderness, Moses comes across a bush burning in the desert that is not consumed. He stops. He examines it. The bush, ordinary and fragile, mirrors Moses himself. From within the fire, God calls Moses by name then instructs Moses to remove his sandals, for the ground is holy—not because the place itself is sacred, but because God is present there. By removing his shoes Moses signifies reverence, humility, repentance, and the recognition that he stands at a crossroads—between loyalty to heaven and allegiance to earth.
In other words, for God to transform a threat—or a fear—we must commit it to God. I then told her that even after the fact, that commitment had given us a new understanding of that moment
Oh, how glibly we speak.
She just sat there.
“Are you okay, Candace?” I finally asked.
She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. “Yes, Mom.”
I knew by her tears that she had taken my words seriously—her fears had been transformed from a nightmare to a sacred moment.
We had never talked about it after that. think we even played a few more video games before the parents came home. I assumed our conversation was a non-issue—irrelevant—because there was no threat on our lives.
However, I did notice that she no longer carried fear. She seemed to radiate a new confidence.
Now, in hindsight, I wondered….
What had I promised her?
“Oh God,” I whispered, “what have we done?”
Just then Cliff came home, I told him what I had remembered and we talked it through. He had the same questions. Again, we were out of our depth.
So we did the only thing we knew how to do. We prayed our way through it—just as we always had – then we let it go.
We had to. Our own lives had a new agenda.
Yesterday, as our friends flooded into the house in response to the news, they noticed the steady pressure of the media gathering at our door. Quietly, throughout the evening, they signaled to us that this was far from over. What lay ahead would be public. We would need to organize a funeral worthy—so they implied—of this new, tragic hero in our family’s story. Expectations were already forming.
People wanted to know the date of the funerals. We had been told it might take up to five days before Candace’s body would be released. No one seemed to know how long it would take for a body to thaw.
When we had discussed this with the funeral director earlier that morning, he had promised he would contact us as soon as she arrived. Then he added, gently, that didn’t mean we couldn’t begin planning.
He laid out a list of practical decisions.
A memorial card?
He showed us two samples. We chose one adorned with a simple shaft of wheat—humble, earthy, hopeful.
Bulletins for the program?
We agreed to pick them up on our way home.
Which coffin would we choose?
He led us into a room lined with them—a quiet, solemn gallery of final resting places. That was where we had our first major meltdown. The full reality of everything struck us all at once. Strangely, it was the perfect place to fall apart, with the perfect person standing beside us—someone who understood, someone who didn’t rush us, who simply let our tears come.
Eventually, we returned to his office.
Which church?
Our own, of course.
Whom would we invite?
“Anyone who wants to come,” we answered instinctively.
A flicker of concern crossed his face. Perhaps, he suggested gently, we might want to consider a larger church.
And then the final question.
Which organization would we like people to donate to in Candace’s memory?
Apparently, there is always a memorial gift—often given in lieu of flowers—a way for people to express grief through generosity. The funds usually go to a cause connected to the life or values of the one who has died, something meaningful, something that carries their name forward.
When he presented the idea to us, we hesitated. In our case, we wondered whether we should even have one. People had already given so much—meals, time, presence, care.
“No,” the director said firmly. “People need a way to express their sympathy.”
All we had to do, he explained, was choose a cause.
He told us the amount usually ranged anywhere from two thousand to seven thousand dollars—more if the person was well known. With Candace being so well known, he expected people would be generous.
He suggested Gideon Bibles.
Gideon Bibles at Candace’s funeral?
No. That didn’t fit. She needed something more alive. More playful. More her.
What would Candace have chosen?
Immediately, images surfaced— Candace diving into the deep water behind her father, then hovering near the bottom, beckoning for me to follow, fully aware that I couldn’t. The younger children had loved watching her do something I couldn’t do—so capable, so confident, so free.
Perhaps it should be something connected to her love of swimming.
Camp Arnes had a swimming pool in their future plans—I had seen it in the blueprints. Candace and I had even talked about it once, imagining how much a swimming pool would add to the winter family camp we hosted every year.
The thought lingered.
*****
When, Dave Loewen called from Three Hills, Alberta, to say he wouldn’t be able to return until the evening before the funeral. He was so sorry…
We understood, but we had a question for him.
We knew that Camp Arnes had a swimming pool in its future plans for the motel lodge, could we raise the seed money for that pool in Candace’s memory?
Dave said it was a good idea, but he would need to talk to the board.
And then there was the media. We needed his advice. We had promised them we would speak to them the next day. How should we handle this?
Dave took a long breath. He suggested that the search committee might be willing to help us with the funeral preparations – would we want that. We agreed immediately, and he said he would call them.
A meeting was arranged. When the committee learned that we intended to open the funeral service to the public, they hesitated. Gently but firmly, they warned us that the crowd could be enormous. The search had become a public event. People across the city had begun to identify with us. Strangers—people we had never met—had grown emotionally invested in our story. They felt they knew Candace.
Were we sure we were ready for that?
We thought about it carefully. But in the end, it only confirmed what we already would be the right thing to do. If the people of Winnipeg felt that close to Candace, then they also had the right to say good-bye.
The committee exchanged glances, then drew a collective breath. They suggested that the funeral be held at Portage Avenue Mennonite Brethren Church—the largest Mennonite church in the city. It could seat two thousand people. Our own church would host the lunch afterward.
Harold Jantz contacted the media and arranged a press conference for the next day.
Then they helped us think through the morning.
*****
The next day, Len DeFehr picked us up and drove us to the press conference. With Dave still out of town, Harold Jantz chaired the gathering, and Cliff read the prepared statement. He thanked the media for their sustained and careful coverage of the search, then thanked the public, invited them to the funeral, and finally announced that anyone wishing to express their sympathy could donate to the dream of building a swimming pool at Camp Arnes.
Their first question was – how did we feel. We told the reporters that we were tremendously relieved that Candace had been found—but that now we were trying to accept her death. We were still in shock but were already feeling the pain which we knew was probably current in all of those who had fallen in love with Candace during the search.
We talked about that for awhile in different ways.
Eventually, someone asked how we felt about the perpetrator.
Cliff and I paused. We didn’t even need to look at each other – we could feel the same tension. Should we be honest? Would they understand?
We had no choice. Our only strategy throughout the ordeal had been to be completely honest.
Cliff, always decisive, said that we were “going to forgive:—that he already had forgiven. For him, making the choice itself was somehow conclusive. It fit his nature.
I live in the past and the future, only dipping into the present occasionally. For me, forgiveness would take longer. I told the reporters that I had chosen to forgive. I wasn’t sure whether I actually had—yet. In hindsight, I can see how strange our answers must have sounded to them. They had no idea about the seven weeks of anticipatory grief we had already endured, nor the intense spiritual journey we had been on during the last two days.
When the lights went down, the reporters stayed seated and began asking questions informally. It felt less like an interview and more like curiosity—almost as if they wanted to understand what made us tick.
I would have loved to explain it to them. But I didn’t yet understand it myself.
We tried to describe our faith, but it was a pitiful attempt—halting, inadequate, incomplete.
As we talked, I forgot they were the press and felt instead that we were among friends – Candace’s friends. In some strange way, they had been with us for the last month, tracing the search alongside us, carrying Candace’s story into the city. It felt right that they should be allowed to walk with us to the end.
So, we invited the media to the funeral.
They told us that Candace’s body had been found in a shed only about four hundred and fifty metres—roughly five hundred yards—from our house. It was at the end of the railway tracks that branched off Talbot Avenue. They believed she had taken her usual route home and was forced off the road where Talbot intersects with the tracks.
The shed stood on private property, tucked into a desolate corner of a brick and lumber yard. It had been built nearly fifty years earlier to house machinery used for hauling sand, but it had long since fallen into disuse. No one from the company had entered the building for at least two years—until the day before, when a foreman went in searching for a missing machine part. He said he saw the body immediately.
The motive was unclear, but the case was being treated as first-degree murder. That stunned us. We had assumed that, since she had died of hypothermia, the charge would be kidnapping or abduction or unlawful confinement. The officers explained that when a death occurs while a victim is being unlawfully restrained or held against their will—it is classified as first-degree murder, even if the killing was not planned or deliberate. Their initial assessment of the crime scene suggested a street person. No car appeared to have been involved.
They assured us they would keep us informed.
After they left, I sat at the kitchen table.
The house was empty—strangely empty. There were no guests. Someone, anticipating we would be overwhelmed, had taken the children for the day. Cliff had gone out to take care of practical matters. I was left alone.
It was the first time I was truly alone. The last two days had been one trauma after another, going to the police station, identifying the body, late night visitor, funeral director at the funeral home, choosing a white coffin and then coming home to this report.
All I could think of was First-degree murder. It was first degree murder!
The phrase vibrated through my mind.
To my surprise, my first response was relief Not the answer we had hoped for, but after seven weeks of speculation and uncertainty, there was now a conclusion. Murder—finally, a definitive answer.
But the relief didn’t last long. It gave way to horror.
Candace had been murdered!
Who? Why?
The word itself was unbearable. Murder. It didn’t belong in our world. It wasn’t part of our experience. I had no framework for it—no grid by which to understand it. Or did I?
And then I remembered. Candace and I had talked about murder only a few months earlier.
She had gone to babysit at a neighbour’s house across the back alley. Then around ten o’clock - she had phoned me. “Mom, the kids are in bed. I’m playing video games. Can you come? I’m scared.”
So I went over. I sat beside her on the rug and let her beat me at a few video games while we munched on peanuts. Then I asked her why she was afraid. She wasn’t usually scared—at least not that I knew. Was there an actual threat?
No, she said. No threat.
Last night she had a nightmare. In the dream, someone had tried to murder her. She described it in detail. Because I believed dreams were the language of the unconscious, I listened carefully, asking gentle, practical questions. After examining every detail, I concluded it was nothing more than ordinary school anxieties—perhaps amplified by a recent horror movie she had watched against our wishes.
Still, I wanted to honour her fear as real. So I offered what I believed was wise counsel—how to live with fear without letting it rule you.
“Candace,” I said, “when you’re afraid, pray and ask God to protect you. Believe that He will, and then lay your fears aside. You can’t let fear control your life.”
I will never forget the way she looked at me—those expressive blue eyes, searching, intelligent.
“Mom,” she asked quietly, “can you honestly tell me that if I pray for God to protect me, nothing will ever hurt me again? That I will never be murdered?”
So much for Sunday school answers.
My daughter had grown up.
In truth, Cliff and I had asked the same question ourselves years earlier, after Cliff had been held at knifepoint for hours while managing a trading post. Though a missionary in the village eventually rescued him, we could not bear the lingering trauma. We left the community carrying a deep sense of vulnerability—of failure—that we struggled to name, let alone resolve.
Later, we met a second cousin of Cliff’s who had also served in ministry up north and had faced comparable threats—perhaps even worse. Yet he was returning, and he seemed at peace, reconciled somehow to the constant danger. We asked him how he lived with the knowledge that his life was always at risk.
With an unusual peace in his eyes, he told us he had come to an understanding with God: that God had assured him that if his life were to end prematurely and violently, God would use his death to have a greater impact than the rest of his life ever could.
Cliff and I talked about it afterward. We loved his cousin’s understanding—and adopted it as our own.
So, I told Candace that story I said that committing our death to God—our murder—meant that if we were killed, our death would carry the weight of martyrdom; that God would bless our death even more than our life. I assured her that if she were to die violently as a young person, God would somehow use her death to have greater impact than if she had lived a long, full life.
The important part, I told her, was to commit – take off your shoe.
I was referring to the story of Moses: tending sheep in the wilderness, Moses comes across a bush burning in the desert that is not consumed. He stops. He examines it. The bush, ordinary and fragile, mirrors Moses himself. From within the fire, God calls Moses by name then instructs Moses to remove his sandals, for the ground is holy—not because the place itself is sacred, but because God is present there. By removing his shoes Moses signifies reverence, humility, repentance, and the recognition that he stands at a crossroads—between loyalty to heaven and allegiance to earth.
In other words, for God to transform a threat—or a fear—we must commit it to God. I then told her that even after the fact, that commitment had given us a new understanding of that moment
Oh, how glibly we speak.
She just sat there.
“Are you okay, Candace?” I finally asked.
She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. “Yes, Mom.”
I knew by her tears that she had taken my words seriously—her fears had been transformed from a nightmare to a sacred moment.
We had never talked about it after that. think we even played a few more video games before the parents came home. I assumed our conversation was a non-issue—irrelevant—because there was no threat on our lives.
However, I did notice that she no longer carried fear. She seemed to radiate a new confidence.
Now, in hindsight, I wondered….
What had I promised her?
“Oh God,” I whispered, “what have we done?”
Just then Cliff came home, I told him what I had remembered and we talked it through. He had the same questions. Again, we were out of our depth.
So we did the only thing we knew how to do. We prayed our way through it—just as we always had – then we let it go.
We had to. Our own lives had a new agenda.
Yesterday, as our friends flooded into the house in response to the news, they noticed the steady pressure of the media gathering at our door. Quietly, throughout the evening, they signaled to us that this was far from over. What lay ahead would be public. We would need to organize a funeral worthy—so they implied—of this new, tragic hero in our family’s story. Expectations were already forming.
People wanted to know the date of the funerals. We had been told it might take up to five days before Candace’s body would be released. No one seemed to know how long it would take for a body to thaw.
When we had discussed this with the funeral director earlier that morning, he had promised he would contact us as soon as she arrived. Then he added, gently, that didn’t mean we couldn’t begin planning.
He laid out a list of practical decisions.
A memorial card?
He showed us two samples. We chose one adorned with a simple shaft of wheat—humble, earthy, hopeful.
Bulletins for the program?
We agreed to pick them up on our way home.
Which coffin would we choose?
He led us into a room lined with them—a quiet, solemn gallery of final resting places. That was where we had our first major meltdown. The full reality of everything struck us all at once. Strangely, it was the perfect place to fall apart, with the perfect person standing beside us—someone who understood, someone who didn’t rush us, who simply let our tears come.
Eventually, we returned to his office.
Which church?
Our own, of course.
Whom would we invite?
“Anyone who wants to come,” we answered instinctively.
A flicker of concern crossed his face. Perhaps, he suggested gently, we might want to consider a larger church.
And then the final question.
Which organization would we like people to donate to in Candace’s memory?
Apparently, there is always a memorial gift—often given in lieu of flowers—a way for people to express grief through generosity. The funds usually go to a cause connected to the life or values of the one who has died, something meaningful, something that carries their name forward.
When he presented the idea to us, we hesitated. In our case, we wondered whether we should even have one. People had already given so much—meals, time, presence, care.
“No,” the director said firmly. “People need a way to express their sympathy.”
All we had to do, he explained, was choose a cause.
He told us the amount usually ranged anywhere from two thousand to seven thousand dollars—more if the person was well known. With Candace being so well known, he expected people would be generous.
He suggested Gideon Bibles.
Gideon Bibles at Candace’s funeral?
No. That didn’t fit. She needed something more alive. More playful. More her.
What would Candace have chosen?
Immediately, images surfaced— Candace diving into the deep water behind her father, then hovering near the bottom, beckoning for me to follow, fully aware that I couldn’t. The younger children had loved watching her do something I couldn’t do—so capable, so confident, so free.
Perhaps it should be something connected to her love of swimming.
Camp Arnes had a swimming pool in their future plans—I had seen it in the blueprints. Candace and I had even talked about it once, imagining how much a swimming pool would add to the winter family camp we hosted every year.
The thought lingered.
*****
When, Dave Loewen called from Three Hills, Alberta, to say he wouldn’t be able to return until the evening before the funeral. He was so sorry…
We understood, but we had a question for him.
We knew that Camp Arnes had a swimming pool in its future plans for the motel lodge, could we raise the seed money for that pool in Candace’s memory?
Dave said it was a good idea, but he would need to talk to the board.
And then there was the media. We needed his advice. We had promised them we would speak to them the next day. How should we handle this?
Dave took a long breath. He suggested that the search committee might be willing to help us with the funeral preparations – would we want that. We agreed immediately, and he said he would call them.
A meeting was arranged. When the committee learned that we intended to open the funeral service to the public, they hesitated. Gently but firmly, they warned us that the crowd could be enormous. The search had become a public event. People across the city had begun to identify with us. Strangers—people we had never met—had grown emotionally invested in our story. They felt they knew Candace.
Were we sure we were ready for that?
We thought about it carefully. But in the end, it only confirmed what we already would be the right thing to do. If the people of Winnipeg felt that close to Candace, then they also had the right to say good-bye.
The committee exchanged glances, then drew a collective breath. They suggested that the funeral be held at Portage Avenue Mennonite Brethren Church—the largest Mennonite church in the city. It could seat two thousand people. Our own church would host the lunch afterward.
Harold Jantz contacted the media and arranged a press conference for the next day.
Then they helped us think through the morning.
*****
The next day, Len DeFehr picked us up and drove us to the press conference. With Dave still out of town, Harold Jantz chaired the gathering, and Cliff read the prepared statement. He thanked the media for their sustained and careful coverage of the search, then thanked the public, invited them to the funeral, and finally announced that anyone wishing to express their sympathy could donate to the dream of building a swimming pool at Camp Arnes.
Their first question was – how did we feel. We told the reporters that we were tremendously relieved that Candace had been found—but that now we were trying to accept her death. We were still in shock but were already feeling the pain which we knew was probably current in all of those who had fallen in love with Candace during the search.
We talked about that for awhile in different ways.
Eventually, someone asked how we felt about the perpetrator.
Cliff and I paused. We didn’t even need to look at each other – we could feel the same tension. Should we be honest? Would they understand?
We had no choice. Our only strategy throughout the ordeal had been to be completely honest.
Cliff, always decisive, said that we were “going to forgive:—that he already had forgiven. For him, making the choice itself was somehow conclusive. It fit his nature.
I live in the past and the future, only dipping into the present occasionally. For me, forgiveness would take longer. I told the reporters that I had chosen to forgive. I wasn’t sure whether I actually had—yet. In hindsight, I can see how strange our answers must have sounded to them. They had no idea about the seven weeks of anticipatory grief we had already endured, nor the intense spiritual journey we had been on during the last two days.
When the lights went down, the reporters stayed seated and began asking questions informally. It felt less like an interview and more like curiosity—almost as if they wanted to understand what made us tick.
I would have loved to explain it to them. But I didn’t yet understand it myself.
We tried to describe our faith, but it was a pitiful attempt—halting, inadequate, incomplete.
As we talked, I forgot they were the press and felt instead that we were among friends – Candace’s friends. In some strange way, they had been with us for the last month, tracing the search alongside us, carrying Candace’s story into the city. It felt right that they should be allowed to walk with us to the end.
So, we invited the media to the funeral.
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