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Family appeals for help on autopsy

An agonizing wait

Famed author helps tackle real mystery

Novelist aims to get facts

“Family appeals for help on autopsy”
By CHRIS MORRIS
 

FREDERICTON -- The sister of a New Brunswick missionary killed in Guatemala 20 years ago is appealing for help from the federal government in finding out how and why her brother died.

Andrea Leger said yesterday time is running out for a planned autopsy on the remains of her brother, Raoul Leger, by a team of forensic experts in Montreal.

Ms. Leger said that while the New Brunswick government has agreed to exhume her brother's body from a graveyard in Bouctouche, N.B., and transport the remains to Montreal, Ottawa has yet to respond to her request for money to cover the actual cost of the autopsy, estimated at $10,000 to $20,000.

"When I was in Guatemala last year retracing Raoul's final steps, people talked about him like he was a national hero," Ms. Leger said, referring to her brother's work as a missionary among the poor.

"But here in Canada, he's a forgotten soul in a grave."

The team of experts ready to examine Mr. Leger's remains includes Kathy Reichs, a best-selling mystery writer and forensic anthropologist whose books about coaxing secrets from the dead include Death Du Jour and Déja Dead.

Dr. Reichs has worked in Guatemala where she helped uncover one mass grave and examined numerous skeletons of people tortured and assassinated during the Central American country's bloody, 35-year civil war.

Ms. Leger and her family, who live in southeastern New Brunswick, want to know whether Raoul was tortured and assassinated by the Guatemalan army.

The official story of his death is that he was in a house attacked by government troops hunting rebels.

If he was murdered, the family may pursue legal action against Guatemalan authorities.

Ms. Leger said the autopsy is scheduled for Dec. 15. She said she has been waiting for weeks for word from officials at the federal Foreign Affairs Department.

"Obviously, they're not too interested," she said.

New Brunswick MP Dominic LeBlanc, whose riding includes Bouctouche, said he is still trying to get an answer for Ms. Leger.

He said autopsies are a provincial, not a federal, responsibility and any help from Ottawa would be an extraordinary gesture.

"Foreign Affairs officials have made it clear to me that they recognize the family's desire to proceed quickly," said Mr. LeBlanc, a Liberal.

"But after a 20-year wait, to put a 20-day deadline on a complicated technical problem such as this autopsy may not be feasible."

Ms. Leger said it's extremely difficult to bring together a team of highly qualified experts who can answer questions about her brother's final moments.

The autopsy would need to first establish that the body in the coffin buried in Bouctouche is that of Mr. Leger, who was 30 years old when he died. Dr. Reichs would work on the bones, looking for cuts and breaks that suggest torture.

Mr. Leger was first buried in a common grave in Guatemala. His body was exhumed after two months and sent home to New Brunswick.

Maclean's

March 18, 2002

 ”An agonizing wait”

BY JOHN DEMONT

Andrea Leger stood in the unseasonably warm sun of an early winter day, waiting for the remains of her brother Raoul to be returned to the family plot in tiny Bouctouche, N.B. It was a far cry from the first time he was laid to rest some 20 years earlier. Then, more than 1,500 mourners -- including 40 clergy -- filled the nearby church to pay their respects to the 30-year-old lay missionary who had died violently in the midst of Guatemala's bloody civil war. This time, only six people surrounded the grave site. But Andrea felt something close to happiness as she watched her brother's steel casket being lowered into the ground. Just two days earlier, an autopsy -- performed by a team that included forensic anthropologist and novelist Kathy Reichs -- finally confirmed her brother had at least escaped the torture inflicted on so many other victims of Guatemala's military dictatorship. "I felt peace knowing Raoul had not suffered," she says. "I said, 'You can finally rest, my dear little brother, we will finish the mission you started.'" Leger is as much a folk hero in the mountains of Guatemala as in the Acadian villages of his home province. He spent his short, turbulent life trying to help the poor, sick and powerless. On July 25, 1981, he died during a firefight -- carried live on local television -- that ended with an explosion killing everyone inside a house in a rich Guatemala City neighbourhood. The government of the day claimed he was a commando holed up with members of a guerrilla group known as ORPA (Organizacion del Pueblo en Armas) who committed suicide rather than surrender. To his family, and countless others, he was a martyr. But in the absence of irrefutable evidence, the doubts gnawed: was he, in fact, a gun-toting guerrilla fighter or a do-gooder murdered by government soldiers?

The son of a farmer and homemaker, Leger grew up a devote Catholic who wanted to help others less fortunate than himself. As a lay missionary in Guatemala for Montreal's Catholic Foreign Mission Society, he taught hygiene, coached soccer and ran literacy programs in one of the poorest regions of the abysmally poor country. He quickly learned the dangers of trying to help the downtrodden peasants: in 1979 he spent three days in a church belfry hiding from soldiers searching for foreign subversives. On his last trip home to New Brunswick in December, 1980, he was so jumpy he dove for cover at the click of an automatic garage door. And he told his family it would be too dangerous to write to him when he returned to Central America. "He was saying goodbye," his sister Andrea maintains, "and we just didn't realize it."

By then, Leger seems to have decided there was another way to change society: by allying himself with ORPA, the guerrilla movement fighting for the rights of the descendants of Guatemala's ancient Maya people. It was a dangerous choice in 1981. The country's CIA-backed regime was determinedly slaughtering the Mayan majority, and anyone who tried to take up their cause routinely disappeared. A fellow Guatemalan aid worker, Montrealer Dr. Charles Godue, now an adviser with the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, says Leger joined ORPA because he believed the only way to help the Maya was to overthrow the military regime. Still, Godue contends Leger would not have taken up arms for ORPA: "He just sympathized with their goals."

After the shootout, Leger's corpse was thrown into a mass grave. In official records he was identified only as "XXX age 30 years, son of unknown and unknown, civil status unknown." Ottawa eventually got wind of his fate and, after two months of negotiations, convinced Guatemala to exhume the body. In October, 1981, Leger's body, identified by dental records, was returned to Canada in a hermetically sealed steel coffin. Despite the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death, an autopsy was not performed at the time.

The Legers grew tired of pushing Ottawa to pressure the Guatemalan government for a full accounting and eventually gave up. Then, last summer, Andrea and Leger's other sister, Cleola, accompanied a National Film Board of Canada crew to Guatemala and met peasants who had known Leger. For Andrea, in particular, the trip was an epiphany: she returned to New Brunswick, quit her job as a truck driver and devoted herself full-time to organizing shipments of school supplies and helping Guatemala's farmers from her farmhouse in the hamlet of Cocagne.

She also set out to finally answer the riddle of Leger's death. Her first step was to assemble a forensics team, including Reichs, who is an old hand in Guatemala. In 2000, Reichs, who divides her time between Montreal and Charlotte, N.C., helped find a mass grave and examined numerous skeletons of people tortured and murdered during the nation's 36-year civil war. (Also the best-selling author of four novels, including Deja Dead, she plans to open her next mystery, Grave Secrets, with her forensic anthropologist heroine, Temperance Brennan, exhuming a mass grave in Guatemala.)

When the New Brunswick government refused to pay all the costs of an autopsy, the Leger family agreed to raise the rest. After 20 years underground, the un-embalmed body was surprisingly well-preserved. "There were no signs that the fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been burned with cigarettes, hacked with machetes or any other physical indications of torture," says Reichs. But the team did determine from metallic fragments embedded in Leger's tissue that he'd died violently in an explosion.

There was more detective work to be done. The family hired a ballistics expert to try to determine what type of explosive was used in the blast that killed Leger. The answer to that question could reveal whether the army murdered him. The family is still waiting for the report. In the meantime, they have contacted Amnesty International to help track down relatives of another foreigner who died beside him. In the search for clues, Andrea, using the Access to Information Act, has already discovered one person in the house didn't die immediately. She also learned that a security officer from the U.S. Embassy visited the house 30 minutes after the raid, an intriguing revelation considering the American government's involvement with the Guatemalan regime during the 1980s.

If the army took Leger's life, the family wants the killers brought to justice. Ottawa insists it was stonewalled by the Guatemalan government back in 1981. But since then, the civil war ended and, in 1999, the Central American country held presidential elections. Ottawa is once again pressing for further information, including whether there are any internal reports on what happened.

Still, after all this time Andrea isn't holding her breath. On some level the family just wants to finally know by whose hand Leger died. Then, at last, maybe they can bury the ghosts of the past along with the body in the Bouctouche cemetery.

The Montreal Gazette

November 24, 2001

“Famed author helps tackle real mystery: Kathy Reichs to autopsy slain N.B. missionary”

By DON MACDONALD

 

Best-selling Montreal novelist Kathy Reichs hopes an autopsy on the body of a Canadian lay missionary killed 20 years ago in strife-torn Guatemala will help bring those responsible for his death to justice and deter future atrocities.

Reichs, who is also a renowned forensic anthropologist, is set to participate in an autopsy Dec. 15 on the remains of New Brunswick missionary Raoul Leger, killed in murky circumstances at the hands of the Guatemalan military in July 1981.

Reichs, whose best-selling mysteries - including Deja Dead and Death du Jour - are based on her work, said she agreed to participate on the autopsy team to help the Leger family find out what happened, document the incident for history and gather evidence for a possible prosecution in Guatemala.

"It (could also) be a deterrent in the sense that this is on the record. We know what took place," Reichs said in an interview. "Someone's not going to come along and say this never took place. Canada is bringing back its citizens and following through on what happened to them." Reichs was contacted by Raoul Leger's sister, Andrea Leger of Cocagne, N.B., who says the novelist has become a mentor to her and her family in their efforts to get to the bottom of the 30-year-old missionary's death.

"She's heaven-sent. She's like Raoul chose her," Leger said. "I don't look at her as a world-famous person. I look at her as a mentor because I knew nothing and she really guided me through this."

Raoul Leger was originally buried in a common grave in Guatemala but his remains were exhumed and transported in 1981 to New Brunswick, where they were reburied.

The New Brunswick government recently agreed to pay the $4,000 to $5,000 cost of exhuming the coffin and transporting it to Montreal for the autopsy. The family is now lobbying the federal government to come through with the $10,000 to $20,000 the autopsy will cost.

Andrea Leger said her older brother, who held a master's degree in social work, was unaware of what he was getting into when he traveled to Guatemala to help poverty-stricken Mayan Indians in the country's highlands.

A gruesome civil war between the army and leftist rebels was coming to a boil. The Leger family believes Raoul joined many tens of thousands of Mayan Indian non-combatants who fell victim to torture and death at the hands of the military.

Leger said she and her sister retraced the steps of their brother this summer as part of a National Film Board documentary about his case. The sisters saw that the living conditions of the Indians are worse now than when their brother went to Guatemala and decided to pursue his case.

"It's to seek justice for the people he died for, because the Mayans themselves have no means of going after the army or the government," Andrea Leger said.

"What the family can do for those people today is find the truth of what happened to our brother and then take it to court and hold somebody responsible; point the finger at the assassins. Because they didn't kill only my brother," she added.

Reichs divides her time between Montreal, where she works as director of forensic anthropology for the province, and Charlotte, N.C., where she works with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

She has just completed a novel based on her experiences in the spring of 2000 examining a mass grave in Guatemala containing 23 bodies, mostly women and small children killed by a military unit in 1982.

"I was very moved by that so when (Andrea Leger) contacted me I could certainly empathize with her."

 

Montreal Gazette

December 16, 2001

“Novelist aims to get facts”

By DON MACDONALD

A Montreal forensics team including best-selling mystery novelist Kathy Reichs performed an autopsy yesterday on the remains of a Canadian missionary killed 20 years ago in war-torn Guatemala.

The remains of Raoul Léger were exhumed from a cemetery in Bouctouche, N.B., this week and transported to Montreal for the autopsy. Léger's family is seeking evidence to help them to bring those responsible for his death to justice in Guatemala.

"It's going well," Reichs, a renowned forensic anthropologist who writes novels based on her work, told the Gazette yesterday. "I'm not going to make any comment (on the condition of the remains) until the family has been told."

Reichs, who divides her time between Montreal and Charlotte, N.C., has just completed a novel based on her experiences examining a mass grave in Guatemala in 2000. She has said the experience also led her to want to help the Légers. The team also includes a forensic dentist, a forensic pathologist and a doctor representing the Léger family.

This week, Reichs explained the first order of business would be to identify the remains as those of Raoul Léger. Then, the team would search for evidence of what happened to him in Guatemala in July 1981 when he died at the hands of the military.

"There are varying versions of what actually took place and the family would like answers to those questions," Reichs said. "Is there evidence of torture ... can we say something more specific about the cause of death?"

The New Brunswick government agreed to pay the $5,000 cost of exhuming the coffin and transporting it to Montreal. The family tried unsuccessfully to persuade the federal government to pay for the autopsy, and will have to cover the estimated $18,000 cost itself, said Andrea Léger, the Catholic missionary's sister.

The Guatemalan government said the missionary and several other people were killed by a grenade explosion. They were in a house that was attacked by government forces hunting leftist rebels. But the Léger family believes Raoul Léger was tortured and killed by the military.

A brutal civil war in Guatemala cost the lives of tens of thousands of Mayan Indian non-combatants. Léger had traveled to the country as a lay missionary to help the poverty-stricken Indians.

Andrea Léger said the federal government is co-operating with the family and has made an official request to the Guatemalan government for police or military reports on the circumstances surrounding the death.

Andrea Léger and her sister traveled to Guatemala this summer as part of a National Film Board documentary about their brother's story.

The misery they saw there persuaded them to fight to bring those responsible for their brother's death to justice and to help the Indians, Andrea Léger has said.

Links: Guatemalan Forensic Efforts

AAAS Science and Human Rights Foundation

The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team

Massacre at Tunaja

Massacre at Rio Negro

Massacres of Rabinal

Recommended Reading on Guatemalan Forensic Work

The Story of Raoul Leger (in French), the only Canadian killed in Guatemala by the government.