Canadian City Council member guilty of fabricating stalker
By Emanuella Grinberg
Court TV
(Court TV) -- A Canadian alderwoman who went missing south of the border for three days in 2003 was found guilty of fabricating a stalker and writing lurid letters to herself.
Provincial Court judge Peter Caffaro ordered Darlene Heatherington to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before her September 10 sentencing for lying to authorities regarding the circumstances surrounding and leading up to her May 2003 disappearance.
"I found that Mrs. Heatherington was not to be trusted to tell the truth," said Caffaro, who oversaw the trial without a jury. "I further find there was no stalker."
The ruling on Tuesday brings an end to the bizarre cross-border saga, which put the cattle-feeding town of Lethbridge, Alberta, under media glare once the municipal worker vanished during a city hall business meeting in Great Falls, Montana, Lethbridge's economic sister city.
Her disappearance touched off a three-day, $15,000 manhunt, which brought Great Falls police to Las Vegas.
Heatherington told police who found her in a hotel parking lot that she had been abducted, drugged and raped by a man from Alberta who had been stalking her since 2002.
After she was brought back to Great Falls, officials said she recanted the abduction story and admitted to having an affair -- an admission she claims was coerced -- and charged her with providing police with false information.
Two weeks later, authorities agreed to drop the charge provided she stayed out of trouble and sought psychiatric help. The charge was officially dropped in May after she proved proof of compliance with the terms of the agreement.
Back in Canada, where Heatherington had already been under investigation for nearly eight months before her disappearance, authorities did not relent.
Police in Lethbridge had been monitoring the alderwoman and her city council office since October 2002, at which time she notified them that a sex-craved man was sending her disturbing letters and calling her office.
One of the voice messages said it was nice to see a "sexy alderman who is in shape," according to police documents.
Heatherington later told investigators that she had received several harassing letters. The first arrived November 8 and stated: "I would caress every part of your sexy body and have you begging for more!"
But as soon as police tapped her phone, the calls stopped. Court documents filed to support a search warrant application against Heatherington say her husband confided to investigators in January 2004 that he had begun to question his wife's stalker story.
The documents say he gave police a computer disk which he had secretly copied from one he found in his wife's jacket. They say he also forwarded a draft of a stalking letter he found stored on his wife's Palm Pilot.
Police said the letter contained a direct quote from one of seven books on stalking and rape, which undercover officers said they witnessed the alderwoman reading at the Lethbridge Public Library.
When police confronted Heatherington with their suspicions, she agreed to submit to a lie-detector test. Days later, she was reported missing in Montana.
Once she returned from the U.S., Canadian prosecutors charged her with manufacturing the stalker story.
During the six-month trial, which began in January 2004, in Alberta Provincial Court, Heatherington's lawyer Tracy Hembroff attempted to cast suspicion on Heatherington's husband, David, by painting him as a jealous husband.
She claimed shoddy police work caused authorities to overlook Heatherington's husband as a suspect.
But Caffaro noted in his decision that a "preponderance of evidence points to the accused," including the alleged stalker's letters on Heatherington's computer and Palm Pilot.
Heatherington, 41, a former image consultant and Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman, faces up to five years in jail. However, because she has no previous criminal record and three children, her lawyer Tracy Hembroff said the possibility of jail time is highly unlikely.
"It would be a travesty if you were to physically put her in jail," Hembroff said outside the courthouse.
