April 3, 2003
Updated 09/14/03 and 02/06/04
Rapist, M.D.
by Lona Manning
For an instant, Candice Foley didn't know where she
was when she woke up that morning. She wasn't in her own bed. Or on a friend's
sofa. She was in a hospital bed. And while she was familiar with how it felt to
wake up with a hangover, this was also different she felt spaced out, a little
woozy. Had she been in a car accident or something?
What was the last thing she remembered? She closed her
eyes tightly and tried to recall all the events of the previous night. She'd
been at her job at the gas station, and was in a bad mood, because it was
Halloween night and she was stuck behind a counter. Her boyfriend had come by.
Something he said caused her to flare up, one thing led to another, and soon
Candice had lost her temper completely. She was so angry that she had grabbed
her purse and jacket, jumped into her car and screeched away. At the time she
had felt she could have killed her boyfriend, but their fight seemed so distant
and unimportant now.
Then, not really knowing what she was doing, she drove to
the medical center where she knew her girlfriend was working. A nurse there saw
the hysterical young woman and paged her family doctor. Candice agreed to wait
and see him. She liked Dr. Schneeberger. She really liked him, in fact he had
delivered her baby daughter, and he was so intelligent. He was in his 30s and
not bad-looking. And he was originally from South Africa, which in a small town
like Kipling made him quite exotic. The nurse led Candice to Dr. Schneeberger's
combination office and examining room.
By the time Dr. Schneeberger arrived, Candice was sobbing
and still very agitated, face flushed, chest heaving. They talked for a few
minutes, then Schneeberger proposed, "Well, maybe I'll give you something to
calm you down." He left the room and a moment later, returned with a syringe,
closing the door behind him.
Candice eyed the syringe dubiously. "Oh, it's a needle?"
Schneeberger murmured a few words of reassurance, then swiftly pushed up her
sleeve, swabbed alcohol on her arm, and injected her.
Almost instantly, Candice felt the medication -- whatever
it was -- take effect. She felt herself start to go limp, start to go numb. She
felt herself start to slump sideways in the chair, but her doctor grabbed hold
of her firmly, pulled her up and half led, half carried her to the examining
table.
She couldn't speak. She couldn't move.
"My eyes were wide open," she later told the Canadians newsmagazine program W5.
"They were like, stuck wide open. I couldn't even shut them. It was like I was paralyzed."
Like in a dream, her limbs felt rubbery
and heavy as lead. She tried to move, but couldn't. She tried to cry out, but
couldn't speak. Helpless to resist, through her numbness she felt Dr. Schneeberger unsnap the button on her jeans and pull them down. She felt him
pull her panties to one side and enter her.
Her doctor had raped her.
A few minutes later, he pulled her jeans back up and left
the room.
As the events of the night before came back to her, Dr.
Schneeberger suddenly was at her bedside, looking down at her through his black
framed glasses, reaching for her arm to take her pulse.
"What what was that drug you gave me last night?"
Candice demanded.
"Why?" he asked, and smiled gently. "Did it give you wild
dreams?"
Oh, God, she had to get out of there. Now. It hadn't been
a nightmare, it was true. Her own doctor had drugged her, raped her, and was now
lying to her face.
She was still too woozy to confront him then and there, so
Candice got herself home. Thinking back to all the crime shows she'd seen, she
put the panties she'd worn to the hospital into a plastic bag.
But wait. What would happen when she went to the police to
file a charge against the doctor? Kipling was a very small town and Dr.
Schneeberger was one of its leading citizens. She expected to have a tough time
convincing the police as it was; hell, she could hardly believe it herself.
Candice decided to drive to the nearest city, Regina, and report the crime
there.
Realizing that her body might also contain evidence of the
rape, she decided to have herself examined. She couldn't possibly go back to the
medical center where she'd been raped, so she went to a Regina hospital. Candice
knew enough about courtroom science to know that if any of the doctor's sperm
was on her panties or left in her body, then she had all the proof she needed
that he had raped her.
Candice knew that just like fingerprints, every person's
DNA is unique to that person (with the exception of identical twins). In fact,
99.9 of human DNA is identical from human to human, and individual variation
accounts for only 0.01 percent. But that 0.01 percent has become vitally
important in crime detection. If the ejaculate on Candice's panties could be
compared to a DNA sample from Schneeberger, then, Candice figured, it would be
case closed. No matter what he said, he couldn't explain away his DNA on her
clothes. His own body fluids would testify against him.
Almost every day brings a sensational new headline
announcing that a criminal has been exonerated after a lengthy prison term, or
that DNA has helped to bring a felon to justice. Deoxyribonucleic acid is a
complex molecule that contains the genetic code for every living creature. Our
DNA is our genetic inheritance from our parents, which combines to form our own
unique blueprint. DNA is found in the nucleus of every living cell.
DNA evidence was first used in the United States in 1987
to obtain a conviction in a rape case in Orange County, Fla. It has
revolutionized the justice system in a few short years. To date, over 100 people
have had their convictions overturned as a result of DNA evidence that wasn't
available to them at the time of their trials, with hundreds more prisoners
petitioning for DNA tests. DNA captured the public imagination in the O.J.
Simpson trial, which also demonstrated that the jury's confidence in the DNA
profile was only as good as their confidence in the law enforcement officials
who handled the evidence.
The doctors at the Regina hospital examined Candice and
contacted the Regina police on her behalf. Soon the news of her accusation
traveled back to Kipling and to Dr. Schneeberger.
Lisa Schneeberger was a lucky woman, and she knew it. She
was happily married to one of the most respected men in town. It seemed almost
every time she went downtown, someone told her how kind her husband was, what an
excellent doctor he was.
They'd built their own spacious dream home with
his-and-her home offices, and lots of room for Lisa's daughter from her first
marriage and the children they were planning to have together. Her husband also
turned his energies toward fundraising for community projects, like the new
swimming pool. At home, he definitely wore the pants in the family, but that was
what had drawn her to him when they first met. He was so self-confident.
Her reaction, therefore, when her husband came home and
told her that one of his patients had accused him of rape, was understandable.
Who was this girl, to say such things about her husband? Was she crazy, was she
obsessed with him, or was she trying to make a quick buck by dragging her
husband's name through the mud? Lisa's faith in her husband never wavered; her
contempt for Candice was palpable.
Unlike Dr. Schneeberger, Candice Foley could not be called
one of Kipling's leading citizens. At 23, she looked even younger and was given
to emotional outbursts. She was an unwed mother. The petite brunette had a
reputation as a party girl. In the court of public opinion, as conducted in the
coffee shops and sidewalks and backyard fences of Kipling, there was no contest:
popular Dr. Schneeberger had the support of his patients and the community as he
went through the indignity of giving a blood sample to defend himself against
this ridiculous charge.
Candice lived with a noticeable chill towards her, waiting
impatiently for the DNA results to come through. She knew that she would be
vindicated. But she wasn't happy that the Regina Royal Canadian Mounted Police
had turned the investigation of the case back over to the local detachment in
Kipling. She was worried that the local police weren't necessarily objective
when it came to building a case against Dr. Schneeberger. In a town of 1,000
people, everybody knew everybody, but whom could she trust?
After several months of waiting, Candice got a call from
Constable Russ Bevans, who told her that the doctor's DNA had been compared to
the sample she provided, and there was no match. Candice had obviously had
intercourse with someone on Halloween night, but it couldn't have been Dr.
Schneeberger. The tests cleared him completely.
Candice was stunned. And furious. She suspected that there
was some kind of a conspiracy, and the police were protecting the doctor. She
knew the truth she knew that Dr. Schneeberger, who'd been walking around free
for months, going about his life, had raped her and gotten away with it. She
knew that friends and supporters would come up and slap him on the back, and
urge him to "hang in there," then maybe they'd lean in a little closer and
whisper something only the doctor could hear, something about her, and then
they'd laugh and roll their eyes. The rage boiled inside her. She knew she was
right. She knew she was telling the truth. At least her parents stood by her,
even if some of her so-called friends had turned away. They didn't want to hear
about it anymore. But Candice was not going to give up. And so, she demanded
that Schneeberger provide another sample and that another test be done.
Lisa Schneeberger and her husband were amazed to hear that
Candice Foley and her accusations were not going away. There was nothing Lisa
would have liked so much as to tell this girl, to her face, what she thought of
her. But it was best to maintain a dignified silence, and for her husband to
submit another blood sample.
The second test came back negative as well no match.
Candice argued and pleaded with the Kipling police not to close their
investigation of the case, but after Dr. Schneeberger passed two DNA tests,
there was nothing else they could do. They closed the file in 1994, and as far
as the Schneebergers were concerned, that was the end of it. Candice moved away
from Kipling, to the city of Red Deer, in the neighboring province of Alberta,
away from the whispers, the frowns and the gossip. But she didn't forget and she
didn't give up.
Larry O'Brien, a 25-year veteran of the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, hadn't spent much of his career wearing the famous red serge
jacket and wide brimmed hat. He'd done a lot of undercover and intelligence work
in southern Ontario, going after the Mafia. But as he neared retirement, he
accepted an offer from a lawyer to go into private investigation work. Eight
years later, the law firm representing Candice in her efforts to get justice
contacted him and asked him to meet its client. O'Brien agreed to the meeting,
bringing one of his assistants along. "She was at a dead end,"
O'Brien recalled on television's W5 newsmagazine program.
"She told us that we were probably her last resort. If we couldn't
accomplish things for her, she didn't know which way to turn."
O'Brien liked Candice's straightforward manner, and her
careful recall of details. "Without a doubt, I was convinced that she had been
sexually assaulted, and most likely by Dr. Schneeberger." The only problem was
how to prove it.
"Knowing the circumstances, how could it be that he had
fooled the police?" O'Brien wondered. Was Dr. Schneeberger tampering with the
DNA tests, and if so how? "I thought he was actually switching blood in test
tubes. There was talk about a refrigerator with test tubes and it was taking
place in the hospital. I think that was the only logical conclusion at that
time. [But] the only way we were going to get to the bottom of this was with DNA
evidence." This meant O'Brien had to get close enough to Schneeberger to somehow
get a sample of his blood, hair, or saliva. He soon brainstormed a way to do
just that. His assistant talked his way into Dr. Schneeberger's office with a
story about a radio station contest and got his target to fill out an entry form
and lick the envelope.
Unfortunately, O'Brien explains, "somehow or other the
envelope became contaminated. It was an envelope randomly selected out of a
brand new box. It should not have been contaminated." But as he had learned
about DNA testing, "a flake as miniscule as possible from your skin could fall
onto it and contaminate the item [being tested]." (Recently, for example, an
audit of the police lab in Houston, Tex., revealed that leaks in the roof could
allow rain to come in and contaminate the samples. Because of this and other
problems with the testing procedures at the lab, the DNA tests will be re-done.
The re-testing will affect as many as 525 convictions in Houston, including
seven death-row cases.)
In O'Brien's next effort to obtain a sample of
Schneeberger's genetic material, he broke into the doctor's car and plucked a
hair from the headrest on the driver's seat. This effort failed as well, when
the laboratory told them the hair sample was unusable because the hair lacked
the living root bulb at the base of the strand.
The hair that we style, curl, color and fuss over with
shampoo and conditioners isn't alive. The hair shaft is a dead protein strand
that lacks the living nucleus that contains nuclear DNA. More recently,
hair strands have been used to extract mitochondrial DNA. If the nucleus of a
cell can be compared to the yolk of an egg, then the white of the egg is the
body. Floating in the body of every human cell are tiny particles called
mitochondria, which provide a power source for the cell and which contain a
different type of DNA the mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, is
not unique to each person, rather it traces his or her female line of
inheritance. That is, a person's mtDNA is inherited from his or her mother, who
inherited it from her mother, and so forth.
DNA identification has been made using mtDNA, most
famously to identify the bones of the murdered Romanov czar, Nicholas, and his
family, but wasn't used in a trial setting until 1996. Mitochondrial DNA testing
came too late to help Candice.
As Candice absorbed this latest setback, the Kipling
gossip mill kept churning. O'Brien checked out rumors that Dr. Schneeberger had
rented a house to one of the local policemen could this prove a conspiracy
between the doctor and the police, born out of friendship? But the rumor turned
out to be false.
Meanwhile, the friendly neighborhood spies were working on
behalf of the Schneebergers as well. Lisa Schneeberger's cleaning lady knew
Candice's parents and learned that the family had hired O'Brien. She relayed
this information to Lisa. The feud escalated as Candice's parents received a
letter telling them that they were not longer welcome as patients at the Kipling
Medical Center. This meant that the entire medical community of the little town
had turned its back on Candice and her family, along with a good many of the
other residents.
Refusing to give up, O'Brien broke into Dr. Schneeberger's
car again and spotted a tube of Chapstick in the car's ashtray. "I opened [it]
there and I could see that it had been used lately. The edge on it was no longer
sharp. We had some window-type envelopes with us, and I smeared Chapstick on the
inside of the windowpane envelope. We sent it off for analysis." The laboratory
in Regina analyzed the minute trace of saliva or skin cells left on the surface
of the Chapstick. The sample was enough to compare with the semen left on
Candice's panties. "About two weeks later, I heard from the law office that it
had analyzed positive."
And Candice's reaction?
"She was at a dead end," O'Brien recalled on television's W5 newsmagazine program.
"She told us that we were probably her last resort. If we couldn't accomplish things
for her, she didn't know which way to turn."
At last, after
four years, she had succeeded against the odds. Or had she?
Now it was the Schneebergers' turn to dispute the results
of the DNA tests. Dr. Schneeberger agreed to provide a third blood sample, right
in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police forensic lab in Regina, while being
videotaped, with witnesses watching. That ought to settle the question once and
for all.
At first, the technician sought to obtain a small blood
sample, which is all she would need, by pricking the doctor's finger. He
refused, claiming that he had a rare disease that would cause his skin tissue to
spasm and die if he were pricked in the finger. He rolled his sleeve up and
offered his arm, instead.
The video, made on Nov. 20, 1996, shows the technician
swabbing his arm while he held it steady with his other arm. She went to push
the needle into the vein, but the needle wouldn't go in. Perplexed, she tried
another needle and after some difficulty, drew a small sample of blood, which
she noticed looked odd. It was thick and brownish and looked like old blood.
The Mountie watching the proceedings grew a little
suspicious and asked her, "Yeah, that was a little strange, that one, eh?"
Stranger still, the blood was submitted for analysis and the lab was unable to
extract the DNA. "Poor quality sample," they explained.
Now Candice was certain that something was going on at the lab.
"Oh, I was angry," she later explained to the news program W5.
"I was writing letters to prosecutors, phoning them, yelling and screaming, swearing:
'What the hell is going on? Are you guys stupid? This was your last chance probably to
get a sample from him. How can you not get enough blood? How can you not pull enough
blood out of somebody's arm?'
"I mean, we have lots of blood rushing through our system.
How can you not get enough blood out of somebody's body? Give me a break."
On an April afternoon in 1997, Lisa Schneeberger's
15-year-old daughter Lydia asked her if she could go and see her father, her
mother's first husband, for the weekend. Lisa was surprised because the family
had already made its plans for the weekend, and she knew her daughter had a
babysitting job. Her daughter looked pale and upset, and as Lisa gently
questioned her, the girl dissolved into tears.
"Mom, I have something I have to tell you," she said
hesitatingly.
"Well, what is it? What do you want to say?"
"Come with me. I want to show you something." Lydia led
her mother back to her bedroom, flipped back the covers on her bed, and pointed
to a condom wrapper.
"Mom, he's done this before."
Lydia scanned her mother's face anxiously. She knew that
her mother was deeply in love with her stepfather. But her mother didn't
hesitate. In that moment, Lisa knew with horror and conviction, that "he" meant
her husband, Lydia's stepfather. "It was," Lisa said later, ''the day my life
changed forever.''
Lisa comforted Lydia as best she could, helped her pack an
overnight bag, and sent her to her boyfriend's home. She knew that her husband
was driving home from an out-of-town medical conference. She had the presence of
mind to tell him to pull off to the side of the highway when she reached him on
his cell phone.
"Lydia's told me what you've been doing to her. I know.
You've done it to Candice too, didn't you?"
"I'll be home soon," her husband responded. "Of course
this isn't true. I'll explain everything."
The adrenalin coursed through Lisa's veins as she gathered
up her two youngest daughters, the children she'd had with Schneeberger, trying
to smother her emotions as she herded them into the family mini-van. She pulled
out of the driveway and parked up the street, staking out her own house as she
waited for her husband to come home.
The girls were asleep by the time her husband's car pulled
up. Lisa and the girls returned to the house. Few words were exchanged;
Schneeberger was slurring his words and appeared to Lisa to have taken drugs
of some sort. He went to sleep on the sofa and she spent a sleepless night,
still coming to terms with the fact that her marriage, her life, her daughter's
innocence, had turned to ashes. "What part of it was real?" she later wondered,
"Was any of it real?"
As the sun lifted over the prairie horizon, Lisa woke her
husband up, and told him to get out.
The next day, she searched through his home office, which
was right next to Lydia's bedroom. High on a shelf, she found a box containing
gloves, syringes, vials of medicine, and condoms. Lisa looked at the syringes
and she felt sick. Her husband used to treat the children for ordinary ailments
with injections instead of with a pill or a liquid. She had questioned whether
this was necessary, but had acquiesced with he told her that injections were an
accurate and quick way of delivering medicine. He was the doctor, after all, and
the man of the house.
But there was the time that her daughter had awakened one
morning, crying and acting groggy, and complaining that her stepfather had given
her an injection in the middle of the night. When her husband came home that
day, Lisa remembered asking him: did you give Lydia a needle last night? Yes, he
explained. She was coughing. Didn't you hear her coughing? She hadn't, but
dismissed the incident.
Now, she realized with horror, her husband had been
drugging and raping her daughter a few feet away from her. Candice, a woman Lisa
Schneeberger had despised, had been right all along. And if she had only
listened to Candice and believed her when she first made her accusation, maybe
her daughter would never have been assaulted.
She phoned the RCMP and reported her husband for rape.
The news went through Candice like an electric shock. She
had been waiting so long for Dr. Schneeberger to be caught, but not like this.
"I'll never forget the day I found out it happened to [Lydia]," Candice told the
Calgary Herald.
"I bawled and I screamed and I freaked out. It happened to someone else and I was fighting all along
John Schneeberger had to provide another blood sample, and
this time the police weren't listening to his claim that he could only provide
blood from his arm. They pricked his finger. They swabbed the inside of his
cheek for skin cells. They took a hair sample. His DNA his own DNA matched
the Chapstick sample that O'Brien had taken from his car and the semen stain
from Candice's panties.
The DNA-doctor had finally been caught.
In September 1999, Schneeberger faced his accusers in a
court of law. He was charged with aggravated sexual assault on his stepdaughter
and one count of sexual assault on Candice, two charges of administering a
noxious substance to commit an indictable offence, and one count of obstruction
of justice.
The "noxious substance" was the anesthetic Versed. When
Schneeberger told Candice on Halloween night seven years ago that he was giving
her something to calm her down, he was in fact injecting her with a powerful
anesthetic that created amnesia. Medically, Versed is used for patients who are
undergoing painful and unpleasant procedures like colonoscopy. Most patients
will have no memory of the period of time while the drug is in their system.
Lydia may have been semi-conscious and aware of what was happening to her when
her stepfather made his nocturnal visits to her room, but lost all memory in the
morning. She had a memory of being given the injection, but once the powerful
drug entered her bloodstream, she was completely helpless. This amnesiac effect
does not work as powerfully for everyone, which is perhaps why Candice recalled
the rape, which her doctor tried to pass off as a dream. The manufacturers of
Versed warn that a rare side effect of the medication brings about respiratory
arrest, and persons being administered Versed should have their breathing
monitored. This was not a service that the doctor provided to his victims.
When Schneeberger took the stand, Lisa saw the full extent
of the twisted deceit her husband was capable of. In the months before the trial
he had begged for her to stand by him. He had wept copious tears and even tried
to bribe her with presents. He could not admit to her, or perhaps even to
himself, what he had done. In court, he continued to proclaim his complete
innocence. Even with the DNA evidence against him, Schneeberger continued to
deny that he had raped Candice or his stepdaughter. He believed that he could
explain away the condom wrapper in his stepdaughter's bedclothes, the sperm on
Candice's panties. But how could he explain the DNA tests?
He told the court that he had been framed: someone, either
Candice or an accomplice, had stolen some of his ejaculate, probably by breaking
into his house, and used it to accuse him of rape. Because DNA evidence is so
powerfully convincing to a jury, Schneeberger explained, he knew that he was
effectively trapped. "The only way I could distance myself from the complaint. .
.was to provide a false blood sample," he testified.
He had done this, he admitted, by stealing blood samples
from one of his male patients. Then he operated on himself, inserting a slender,
six-inch long plastic tube filled with the pilfered blood in his arm at the
crook of his elbow. Lisa Schneeberger recalled a day when he'd come into the
house from the garage with his arm wrapped in a towel. "It was his left arm. And
he had said that he had been lifting up some glass to move and the glass had
slipped and cut his arm. And I believed his story."
When Schneeberger gave his blood samples for the
investigation, he always offered his left arm, only rolling up his sleeve just
enough to expose the inside of his elbow.
But, as he explained to the judge, he faked the DNA tests
not to cover up his crime but because he had no choice: An unscrupulous woman
was framing him.
Lisa Schneeberger, as she listened to her husband's
testimony, wondered if it was possible that her husband could talk his way out
of trouble, as he had before. Would the judge fall for his lies the way that she
once had?
The prosecuting attorney described Schneeberger as a
cold-blooded predator who took what he wanted without regard. When Candice had
come to the hospital looking for medical care on that Halloween night, "
he
injected her with a potentially dangerous drug, raped her, and left her alone in
a darkened room." As for Candice, so far she had gained nothing and lost a lot
because of her pursuit of justice from the doctor, so "[w]hat did it get her?
She was socially ostracized. She was forced to leave her community, the
community she was born in. She was the subject of malicious rumors."
Judge Ellen Gunn found Schneeberger guilty, explaining
that the DNA doctor was an "inventive, fanciful and imaginative" witness.
"However, an adjective that does not apply is credible."
As Schneeberger was led away in handcuffs to await a
sentencing date, Candice told reporters, "I just want to say this is a glorious day
that I've waited for seven years. And that's all." Supporters of Lisa, Lydia and
Candice laughed, clapped and called, "Bye, John" as Schneeberger was driven
away.
Following his conviction, the Saskatchewan College of
Physicians and Surgeons stripped Schneeberger of his medical license.
The sentence when it came was lenient, even by Canadian
standards. Judge Gunn found Schneeberger guilty of assaulting Candice, but
because Lydia couldn't remember the assaults due to the anesthetic, Gunn
dismissed that charge. She found Schneeberger guilty of injecting Lydia with the
anesthetic, but his total sentence amounted to just six years, meaning he could
possibly be out on parole in two.
And so began the next phase of Schneeberger's story his
demands for visitation rights with his two daughters from his marriage to Lisa.
Lisa was aghast at the idea that she could be forced to take the two little
girls, aged 5 and 6, to a medium- security prison so that a convicted rapist
could visit with them. She figured the courts would see it the same way. But
they didn't. Even before his final sentence, Lisa had been handed a court order
to take the girls to see their father in jail and she had paid a $2,000 fine for
refusing to do so. She had appealed the decision to a higher court, and lost
again in 2001. The judge told her that she must take the children to the prison
or face the consequences.
By that time Lisa's plight had drawn a lot of sympathy and
attention, including from an opposition party politician who vowed to draft a
new federal law guaranteeing that no child would be forced to visit a parent
convicted of a serious crime. "What [it will do] is provide clear direction to judges that
Canadians do not accept forcing children to visit pedophiles, to visit sex-offending parents
in prison against their will," Bob Mills explained to reporters.
But in the meantime,
Lisa's battle to protect her children from trauma came down to a showdown at the
prison gates. On the appointed day, a crowd of around 100 protestors showed up
to support Lisa. As they approached the interview room where their father
waited, the little girls began to cry hysterically, clutching at their mother's
legs. The court-appointed social worker relented and let Lisa take her daughters
back home. Lisa had used up all her savings and couldn't afford to fight the
matter anymore, when Schneeberger finally broke the stalemate by agreeing not to
insist on future visits.
In June of 2001, Schneeberger's case came up for parole.
Perhaps sensing that he would be denied parole, Schneeberger chose not to appear
before the parole board, and let his case be decided on the basis of his court
and prison files. Candice was disappointed because she had geared herself up to
go before the parole board and tell her story again. "That's just so unfair," she told the
Calgary Herald.
"This is so typical. He just gets his way all the frickin' time." Parole, however, was denied.
Meanwhile Lisa decided to fight back on other fronts.
First, she divorced him. Then she went to work to get him deported. She knew her
husband, an immigrant from South Africa, had received his Canadian citizenship
after the rape on Candice. If he hadn't deceived everyone with the stolen blood
sample, he would have been exposed as a criminal and denied citizenship. On that
basis, she argued to the Immigration authorities, his citizenship should be
revoked and he be forced to leave Canada.
Bob Mills, the politician who championed her cause, has
drafted "Lisa's law," a law that would ensure that children are protected from
being forced to have a relationship with a parent convicted of a serious crime.
Mills is currently working with the Justice Committee of the Canadian
parliament, and lobbying all five political parties in the legislature, to
endorse his bill.
In 2002, Schneeberger was in the news again when he was
transferred to a minimum-security prison in British Columbia, a province on the
west coast of Canada, hundreds of miles away from the scene of his crimes.
Ferndale Prison, dubbed "Club Fed," because it houses federal prisoners,
features a nine-hole golf course for inmates. Mills pointed out that when he had
proposed that Schneeberger be taken out of the frightening atmosphere of Bowden
prison for the visits with his daughters, prison officials told him that the
doctor was too much of a security risk.
"I was told by the attorney general that the reason the kids had to go to the prison...
was because this man was too dangerous to be brought out to [a] hotel...
[s]o how can he now live in Club Fed and golf and fish and not have any fences?"
"I can't even read the paper or watch the news anymore without getting angry,"
Candice told reporter Deborah Tetley. "Every time I see his face it just reminds
me of the fact that so many people never believed me."
She still feels unwelcome
in Kipling, where many people still support Schneeberger and believe that
Candice framed him somehow. She says that a Hollywood producer has taken an
interest in her story and is looking for funding.
Lisa, no longer named Schneeberger, has made a new life
for herself and her children but dreads the day when her ex-husband is let out
of prison: She told the Canadian newsmagazine program W5 that her ex-husband "has no remorse for what he's done. He was a doctor
when he was at the office, and he was husband and father when he came home --
and then he was a monster when he wanted to be."
Updates
John Schneeberger was denied parole on April 17th, 2003.
His ex-wife testified at the lengthy parole hearing. Schneeberger admitted to
"crimes and deceits," calling the scar on his arm from where he inserted the
tube of someone else's blood "a badge of dishonor," and apologized for his
"denial." The parole board expressed concern about letting Schneeberger into the
community. One member of the board judged that the DNA doc was "shallow and
self-serving."
Schneeberger will return for his next parole hearing in
November, by which time he will have met the statutory requirement that he serve
two-thirds of his six-year prison term.
In August of 2003, a Canadian federal court agreed that John Schneeberger had lied
to obtain his Canadian citizenship. Schneeberger became a Canadian citizen during
the time he concealed his crimes by substituting another person's blood for his own.
Schneeberger could face deportation as a result.
Immigration officials filed a claim in March alleging Schneeberger lied to a Canadian
citizenship judge in 1993 when he denied having been the subject of a criminal investigation.
In a written ruling, Judge Eleanor Dawson concluded Schneeberger obtained his Canadian
citizenship by concealing information or making false representations.
Bob Mills, a member of Parliament from the opposition
Alliance party, continues to lobby for "Lisa's law." Canadian Immigration
authorities began legal proceedings to revoke Schneeberger's citizenship last
October but have declined to discuss the progress of the case with Mills or the
media. Schneeberger's lawyer also declined comment. Production of I Accuse,
a feature film based on Candice Foley's ordeal in bringing Schneeberger to
justice, is currently underway.
Updated
09/14/03
Schneeberger was reportedly stripped of his Canadian citizenship in December of 2003 and could be deported. Candice Foley's ordeal became a made-for-television movie, "I Accuse," which first aired in November, 2003.
Updated
02/06/04
More about DNA:
http://hope-dna.com/docs/fbi_kids_dnapage.htm
Author Notes:
- Candice's last name has been changed.
- The name of Lisa Schneeberger's daughter has been changed.
- Some of the quotes used in this article originally
appeared in Canadian television and newspaper accounts of this case, notably the CTV
newsmagazine program W5 and articles written by Deborah Tetley for the Calgary Herald.
