Dennis Cheeseman and Sean Hennessey insisted all along that they were innocent. But yesterday, both men finally admitted to what the RCMP has long suspected: that they played a supporting role in the 2005 murders of four Mounties in Mayerthorpe Alta. Their guilty pleas—to manslaughter, rather than the original charge of first-degree murder—included an agreed statement of facts that sheds even more light on exactly what happened that fateful morning, when James Roszko gunned down the young officers before taking his own life. It turns out that Cheeseman and Hennessey drove the notorious cop-hater back to his farm in the hours before the ambush, and instead of calling the police to warn them of Roszko’s presence, they gave him a rifle and concocted a cover story. “Somebody could have stopped it, but they didn’t. That’s disturbing,” said Margaret Thibeault, a former RCMP victim services member who has lived in Mayerthorpe for more than 30 years. “How horrendous is that?”
The Edmonton Journal