In the fall of 2020, Helen Naslund was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the death of her abusive husband. Even with only the sparest details made public, her case and the lengthy sentence she received sparked outrage around the country, and exposed serious issues with how the justice system treats abused women.
Wes was 26, and he’d been imagining his father’s death most of his life. He pictured it, planned it, even. Thought about how easily he could steer the truck off the road some night, speed straight into a power pole with his father in the passenger seat. And it hadn’t been long since Wes had downed a bottle of whiskey and drove to the Holden Hotel, where he stalked into the bar and raised a loaded rifle to his father’s forehead, telling him: “Either you do it or I’m going to.
She was the youngest of eight, and had spent most of her life moving farm to farm with her family. Her only involvement with boys had been one little fling in school. Miles was 20, just three years older, but a lot more experienced than Helen. It wasn’t even really accurate to say Helen met Miles. It was more like Miles decided he wanted to get to know her, and started following her around until she agreed to go out with him.
They found a place not far from his parents, between the towns of Holden and Daysland, outside Camrose. There was a little house and a big red barn, a boundless panorama of fields and a vast, ever-changing sky.Corleen LeClercq, the Naslunds' former neighbour, became a friend and got Helen involved in barrel racing.
They had Darrell in 1988, Neil four years after that. Helen loved children, and she thought having more might make it better. But Miles had very little to do with the boys, and as he pushed to expand the farm, he increased her workload until she was handling almost everything herself. It was Helen in the bitter cold checking the cows every hour when they were calving in January, coming in to nurse the baby Neil and tend to the older boys, then doing it all over again.
Helen Naslund's sister, Sharon Heslop, with Zeus the cat. She, too, survived an abusive relationship. But sometimes she could hear Miles yelling, the sound of his fury carrying across the fields more than a half mile, all the way from the Naslund farm. Miles was drinking a lot, and he seemed to be growing more erratic and violent. His health was poor and he’d gotten a head injury in a fight outside the Holden bar a few years earlier, which seemed to have exacerbated his swings of mood and temper. Helen was worse, too. She’d tried to kill herself multiple times, and she felt increasingly broken and hollow. To Wes, she seemed like a ghost. Barely recognizable, as though she wasn’t even herself any more.
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