David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

4. Wilma Derksen was at home, trying to clean up the family room in the basement, when her daughter Candace called. It was a Fri ...

head. The Derksens had one car. Wilma had to pick up her husband, Cliff, from work. But he wouldn’t be finished for another hour ...

She folded laundry. She bustled about. Then she stopped. Something seemed wrong. She looked at the clock. Candace should have be ...

school. She peered inside the windows of the 7-Eleven, where her daughter sometimes lingered. She drove to the school. The doors ...

eleven that night, two officers knocked on their door. They sat at the dining room table and asked Wilma and her husband one que ...

the movie got to the part where Geppetto is wandering heartbroken, looking for his lost son. In January, seven weeks after Canda ...

5. The Derksens suffered the same blow as Mike Reynolds. The city of Winnipeg reacted to Candace’s disappearance the same way th ...

“I remember thinking that somebody probably left some gloves or something,” Derksen said. She was sitting in the backyard of her ...

times. He had served four years in prison before he was exonerated by an appeals court. The man sat in their kitchen. They gave ...

destroyed his family. He couldn’t work anymore. His health. He went through the medications he was on—I thought he was going to ...

said. “You can imagine, we were just nuts. I mean, we were—I mean, I don’t even know how to explain how—kind of numb. But yet ha ...

other if they allowed their daughter’s murder to consume them. “If he hadn’t come at that point, it might have been different,” ...

“We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these peop ...

6. Is Wilma Derksen more—or less—of a hero than Mike Reynolds? It is tempting to ask that question. But it is not right: Each ac ...

and outsiders. Wilma’s family emigrated from Russia, where many Mennonites settled in the eighteenth century. During the Russian ...

a woman whom children flocked to— and during the Revolution, armed men had come for her and the children and massacred them. Wil ...

beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down fr ...

Derksen said. “I was taught it in school. We were taught the history of persecution. We had this picture of martyrdom that went ...

the law could deliver justice for his daughter’s death. At one point, Reynolds spoke of the infamous Jerry DeWayne Williams case ...

Reynolds’s crusade. It highlighted everything that was wrong with Three Strikes. The law could not distinguish between pizza thi ...