• Home
• Portfolio
• About

I'm a designer in Vancouver, Canada. I work at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, am a director of the 221A Artist Run Centre, and a member of Fieldwork design collective. I'm an Emily Carr and University of Victoria graduate and have worked in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Netherlands. I'm a cycling advocate and race on the Garneau Evolution team.

film In the News, February 4, 2004 10:37 PM 0 comments

Lethbridge Alderwoman: The Film

One of the stranger news stories I read two years ago has returned even stranger, so I read in today's Globe and Mail. It will make a great movie along the lines of A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, et all. The gist: in ‘02, Lethbridge, Alta. city official Dar Heatherington vanishes while on business in Montana and shows up dazed three days later in Vegas. Tells Vegas' Finest that she'd been kidnapped, sexually abused. Thing is the cops charge her…with lying, after she admits the story is her own fabrication.

Today it comes to light that at the same time as the Vegas thing she also had her hometown police searching for a man who'd been stalking her with anonymous phone calls, obscene notes, letters, risqué lingerie and jpegs with her head on other women's bodies. It gets real mid-movie plot twisted when Lethbridge's Finest catch her studying library books on stalking that contain verbatim passages as her stalker's notes, notes which were then found on her PDA with her "trademark misspellings." Even better - and extra confusing: she had suspected her husband of being the stalker but then destroyed evidence to protect him but then told police that she had suspected him but doesn't anymore. Take a breath. Then Dave (the husband) tells police he's been weirded lately by the improvement in their sex life and Dar is all of a sudden into buying – get this – "racy thongs, panties, and bras."

Currently, she's on trial up here for public mischief, re: all the lying to police. And here's where our scriptwriter can go two directions:

1) She really is telling the truth…in her mind. She doesn't realize she's totally bonkers. The way she admitted in a police interview that the whole situation looks crazy, that "99 per cent of the population" is pointing at her (she actually said this), but pleads that she really needs help…that's creepy and compelling movie watching. Or

2) She really is telling the truth. As in the stalker turns out to be her husband, who fools the whole country, takes her job. And if it's a quasi-indy release from like New Line Cinema, her husband gets away with it and drives her totally bonkers. Then the way she had told everyone that it wasn't her…that's creepy and compelling movie watching.

And Lethbridge would be portrayed like Fargo, and Steve Buscemi would be in it, but be the one cop who believes her story.