KAMLOOPS, B.C. — A mother who found her three children dead in her home told a B.C. judge that her estranged husband told her he murdered the children to protect them.
In a secretly recorded jail-house visit, Allan Schoenborn told the mother, Darcie Clarke, that he thought the children were being molested.
“I put them where they would be safe and stay young and innocent,” he told her on the audio tape played in B.C. Supreme Court, where Schoenborn’s case is being heard by a judge alone.
Clarke asked: “You killed them to protect them?”
She can be heard telling him he should have just walked away.
Five-year-old Cordon, his eight-year-old brother Max and their 10-year-old sister Kaitlynne were found dead by their mother on April 6, 2008.
In the June 2008 recording, Schoenborn reassured Clarke that he didn’t torture the children.
“I thought it was going to go quick. It didn’t go quick. It’s not like I knew what I was doing,” he said on the recording.
Clarke agreed to work with police, recording conversations on the phone and face-to-face at the jail.
Clarke testified that the day before she found her three children dead in her Merritt, B.C., home, she told Schoenborn that their relationship was over.
Clarke said she had a long conversation with him on her front lawn on April 5, and told him she had gone to the doctor to get some anti-depressants. She testified that Schoenborn then asked her for one of the pills and she gave him one.
Two months after the murders, Clarke said he sent her a letter detailing how he tried to kill himself several times after the murders, and before he was found hiding in the woods.
She said he told her that he was “longing” to be with the children.
In the letter, Clarke said Schoenborn made several references to suicide.
“My only tickets now are to jump in front of a moving truck or starvation,” he wrote to her. “I was going with them.”
He said he’s was trying “to finish my quest towards the children.”
Schoenborn is on trial on three counts of first-degree murder.
The court has heard that Max and Cordon were suffocated, while Kaitlynne was stabbed to death.
On the wall in the living room, where the boys’ bodies were found, “forever young” was written in soya sauce. In the master bedroom, “gone to Neverland” and “forever young” were written on a pillow case in blood.
The Crown has told the judge that Schoenborn’s mental state at the time of the murders is the main issue for the trial.