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Leesa’s Ride

W
hile
the Swift Current Broncos played out the first half of their 1986–87 WHL season, Leesa Kraft was attending school in Moose Jaw. Originally from Penticton, British Columbia, she was a student at Aldersgate Bible College, a private school. She didn’t attend Warriors games; she didn’t know anything about the Broncos. In fact, she wasn’t even close to being a hockey fan.

Near the end of December 1986, as most of the Broncos players headed home for Christmas, the twenty-one-year-old Kraft was on a Greyhound bus, en route to Penticton and Christmas with her family.

Prior to the 1800s, Penticton, located in British Columbia’s south Okanagan, primarily was inhabited by the Salish, and the name Penticton means “a place to stay forever.”

“It sure was a great place to grow up,” Leesa Kraft — now Leesa Culp — says, adding that every time she returns for a vacation she wonders why she left. The eldest of three children, she grew up in a bungalow-style house on Toronto Avenue, alongside her mother, Sharon, and father, Len, and with sister Shawna and brother Trevor.

Len was a mechanic, and worked in the motorcycle shop — Kraft Cycle — operated by his father. So, as Leesa says, she grew up “knowing more about motorcycles, snowmobiles, hot rods, and race cars than I did about hockey.”

One of her few experiences with hockey came in the early 1980s when she accompanied Shelley Webber, a high school friend, to a few British Columbia Hockey League games at Memorial Arena. Webber was dating Penticton Knights goaltender Norm Foster, who would go on to a fourteen-year professional career that included thirteen NHL games. (During his career, he would be teammates at one time or another with five of the 1986–87 Broncos: Tracy Egeland, Ian Herbers, Clarke Polglase, Peter Soberlak, and Bob Wilkie.)

During the eighteen-hour bus ride home for Christmas in 1986, Leesa had a lot of time to think about changes she was about to make in her life. She had met Bill Culp, a musician, and was planning a move to the Toronto area in order to be with him. As the bus sped west, she was trying to figure out just how she was going to break this news to her folks.

“I dreaded telling my family of my plans to move even farther away from home,” she remembers. “My family was quite happy knowing I was living in a fairly sheltered environment surrounded by solid Christian influences on the Aldersgate campus. I wasn’t sure how my parents would react to this move.”

As she rationalized it at the time, “The idea of living in a big city excited me. It was a thrill to think I would be making a move to a part of the country about which I knew very little. I had gone from a sheltered home environment to a sheltered college environment, and I knew this move to Ontario would allow me to experience a lifestyle very unlike the one I’d had.” But she knew there would be parental resistance.

“For this very reason, and the fact they had never met Bill, I knew my parents would be extremely reluctant to support this move,” she says. “Knowing Bill was in a band put visions of a long-haired, tattooed, drug-smoking musician in my parents’ heads. No amount of convincing otherwise was going to change their minds.”

(In truth, Bill Culp had short hair, didn’t have any tattoos, and didn’t do drugs. From Dunnville, Ontario, he is the youngest of four children. His father, Herb, was the vice-president of the Dunnville Minor Sports Association and even coached minor hockey for a number of years. Bill’s older brother Jamie played for Mount Royal College in Calgary and for the Dunnville Terriers, a junior C hockey team. In recent years, you may have seen Bill Culp on tour in “The Sun Records Show,” a tribute that includes the music of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis.)

Shawna, Leesa’s sister, had recently moved to Barrie, Ontario, in order to be closer to her future in-laws. So Leesa sold her parents on the move by telling them she would be closer to Shawna.

“I was sure my parents would find comfort in knowing I wouldn’t be too many miles away from her if things didn’t work out,” Leesa says.

After Christmas, the plan was for Leesa to ride a bus back to Moose Jaw, where she would begin preparations for a January 20 flight from Regina to Toronto. However, in an effort to save some money, Leesa’s parents suggested that she cash in her bus ticket and catch a ride with Mel Shepherd, a neighbour who drove a big rig back and forth between Penticton and Calgary. He would drop her off at the Calgary bus terminal and she would then take a Greyhound to Moose Jaw.

Never having been in a big rig, Leesa remembers it as “the biggest truck I had ever been in.” She also remembers chatting with Mel and listening to 1980s pop songs like Glass Tiger’s “Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone” as the trip began.

“Other than having to stop once to chain up before heading up a steep hill,” she says, “it was a pretty uneventful drive.”

That began to change as they approached Calgary. With the weather about to change for the worse, Mel told Leesa that he really wanted to unload his trailer, reload immediately, and head right back to Penticton. This meant he wouldn’t be able to get her to the downtown bus terminal. Instead, he said, he knew a guy who was driving all the way to Montreal, and suggested they could hook up with him at the next truck stop. Essentially, Leesa would hitch a ride to Moose Jaw with another trucker, one she had never met.

She was apprehensive but, she says, “I figured Mel must think I’d be safe or he wouldn’t suggest such an option.”

Leesa and Mel grabbed a bite to eat at the truck stop, then got her luggage and headed for the other trucker’s rig. That’s when she saw the mural painted on the cab and immediately wondered if this was such a good idea.

Both sides of the glossy red cab of the truck were painted with an image of a scantily clad woman. Everything inside Leesa was screaming
Danger!
but her options were rather limited, so she clambered into the truck’s cab.

They hit the road, and it wasn’t long before the truck driver, a total stranger, started talking about the problems he was having with his wife. Which made Leesa think, “What trouble have I gotten myself into this time?”

Leesa knew exactly what was happening. A married, overweight veteran trucker was hitting on a naive college student. Attempting to let this guy know she wasn’t available, Leesa mentioned “my boyfriend Bill” as often as possible.

And then, a few hours into what normally was an eight-hour run to Moose Jaw, the trucker chose to pull over, saying that he was going to get some sleep. It was in the middle of nowhere and traffic was minimal, but Leesa was thankful that it still was daylight.

As the trucker made his way to the back of the cab, where his bed was located, he told Leesa, “You should come back in the cab and get some sleep, too.” Terrified, she clung to the door handle and wondered,
If I had to escape, what would I do? He would have all of my luggage and I’d be somewhere in Saskatchewan with nary a town in sight.

About fifteen minutes later, the trucker climbed back into his seat. “I can’t sleep if I know you’re just sitting out here awake!” he said disgustedly. And just like that, they were back on the road to Moose Jaw.

By then, the snow and wind were increasing, and it wasn’t long before the truck was caught in blizzard-like conditions. It may have been mid-afternoon, but it looked and felt more like early evening. It was in these conditions that they drove through Swift Current. As they reached the city’s eastern edge, the trucker eased off the gas to allow a bus to merge in front of his rig. About five minutes later, the Trans-Canada Highway veered to the right a bit. The bus appeared to lose its grip and started to slide sideways.

With the bus slowing, the trucker geared down. Leesa and the trucker could only watch in disbelief as the rear end of the bus continued to slide down the steep roadside and into the ditch. Eventually, the bus fell over onto its right side. Then, after only a split second, it bounced right back up and continued to fly forward, still on the same steep angle.

Leesa remembers seeing things ejected out the windows, onto the road and into the ditch. At the time, she wondered,
Are those clothes flying out the windows?
Once they got closer to the bus, they realized it wasn’t just clothes being tossed around like toothpicks in a storm — it was also people.

After several seconds of bone-jarring turbulence, the bus came to a crashing halt in the snowy ditch, again on its right side.

As the trucker pulled up beside the bus, he grabbed the handset for his CB and radioed for emergency assistance. Without further thought, he jumped out of the truck, yelling at Leesa, “Stay in the truck! Stay in the truck!”

There was no way she was going to stay in the truck. She climbed out and walked briskly around to the back of the bus.

“Suddenly,” she recalls, “I noticed two boys.…”

In her words: “Lying all alone, one boy — years later I would learn that it was Scott Kruger — was face down in the snowy grass, and the other was on his back. I didn’t know much about emergency situations, but I knew you shouldn’t move someone in case of neck or back injuries, so I chose to rush over to the boy who was on his back, and I knelt down. I was wearing a full-length, wool-tweed winter jacket, and was tempted to sit him up and wrap my coat around him.

“At the time, I felt a tremendous fear. Coming from a Free Methodist background, movies had been prohibited. I was twenty-one years of age and had seen only one scary movie in my life —
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge
. Although Bill found the movie disappointing, it had scared me silly. And now I think I was afraid that if I touched Trent [Kresse] he might make a sudden move and it would freak me out. I didn’t reach down quickly and take his hand. I was hesitant, and I was trembling as I reached for his left hand. It was so much bigger than my own.

“His eyes were open, but sadly it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to help him. As I held his hand, I watched in horror as the colour of his face transformed from a pasty white to a stony shade of blue. I had never felt so helpless. I kept thinking that maybe if I knew how to perform CPR — something, anything — I would be able to help. But it was too late. As I stood up and stepped back, a man approached and started to perform CPR on the boy whom I had been kneeling beside.”

Leesa then took a moment to glance around. “It was then when I noticed the unimaginable — there were two more bodies trapped under the bus,” she says.

With the bus on its side and the front door inaccessible, the trucker helped the remaining players and passengers out through the shattered windshield. The survivors began collecting themselves. They were looking around to see if everyone was okay. All around her, Leesa could hear moaning and crying, and people calling out for each other. She just stood there in disbelief.

It wasn’t until almost twenty-one years later that Leesa learned that it was the Swift Current Broncos whose bus she had watched crash. In 1986, she didn’t follow hockey, nor did she hang out with anyone who did.

One morning in January 2007, a headline on Yahoo! — “Fifth Teen Dies from Injuries in Meaford Crash” — practically leapt off her computer screen and caused flashbacks. The story chronicled an accident that had occurred on a wet, slushy highway and claimed the lives of five teenage hockey players. That was enough to awaken memories that had been mostly dormant for more than twenty years.

And so it was that Leesa Culp, who had watched in agony as the Broncos’ bus crashed, finally began to learn about what she had witnessed. She started by doing a Web search for “Swift Current bus accident 1986.” That led her to Brian Costello.

By then, Costello was with
The Hockey News
. In 1986, he had been in his second year as a sports writer with the
Swift Current Sun
and had been sitting at the front of the bus. Costello, who suffered cuts and bruises in the crash, told Leesa that he distinctly remembers hearing the trucker’s call for help before he was helped out of the bus.

Aid started to arrive within minutes, and the trucker, anxious to get back on the road, came looking for Leesa. Obviously in shock, she felt only numbness as she climbed back into the truck.

“I was confused and scared and wondering what I had just seen,” she says. “I couldn’t stop thinking about holding the hand of that boy in the field. My eyes were filled with tears, but I could still see his face etched clearly in my mind.”

That boy turned out to be Trent Kresse, who was one of the Broncos’ leaders.

Leesa Culp and Bob Wilkie, meeting for the first time in May 2007. Wilkie was living in Hershey, Pennsylvania, at the time.
Courtesy of Leesa Culp.

“I came to suspect that it had been Trent from a picture I found on the Internet,” Leesa says. “His eyes struck me right away. But it wasn’t until my first conversation with Brian Costello that I knew for sure. Brian was able to tell me right away from my description of the scene.”

After leaving the scene, Leesa and the trucker rolled through the ugly weather, getting closer and closer to Moose Jaw. It was a quiet ride as driver and passenger found themselves lost in their own thoughts.