Leslie Beck’s friends were urging her to move on.
But at age 20, having lost her husband to cancer, she simply wasn’t ready.
“I just got really tired of people saying, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’” recalls Beck, now 55.
She hatched an unusual plan to get people off her back. Having heard that the RCMP were accepting women, she told everyone she was going to join the Mounties.
If that sounded like a stretch, that’s because it was. At the time Beck was more likely to be at the scene of some sort of mischief that attracted the RCMP rather than wearing a badge herself.
Beck was raised in a home where alcohol abuse fuelled domestic violence. In response, she mastered independence at an early age. If she left the house at 5 o’clock in the morning, nobody came looking for her.
She became a mother figure to three younger siblings with whom she shared a bedroom in the family’s mobile home in Regina. Later, when the family moved to Broadview, Saskatchewan, the children watched their father’s alcoholism worsen.
At 15, convinced life had nothing to offer, Beck attempted suicide by swallowing 25 Tylenol 3 (T3) pills. She then sat alone and began wondering how much longer she had left.
She called the Broadview hospital and asked whether so many T3s would kill a person. “Yes,” a nurse told her. When the worried nurse asked follow-up questions, Beck hung up.
“The next thing I know my mother is pounding on my door,” she recalls. “And I go, ‘What do you want?’ ‘Did you swallow a bunch of pills?’ So I go, ‘Who told you?’ Well, the hospital had recognized my voice.”
Beck was taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. She came out of the experience knowing that no matter how bleak things looked, she would persevere.
When she was 17, she began dating Jimmy Brown, a man five years her senior. No one around Beck was supportive of the relationship, but she was too enamoured to care.
“We just knew that he and I eventually, at some point in our lives, were going to get married,” she says.
After Beck left high school in 1978, she and Brown ended up in Whitewood, a small town near Broadview, where he worked at a grain elevator.
One day in 1980, Brown fell viciously ill. He was soon diagnosed with testicular cancer that had spread up around his spine and into his lungs.
The couple married that summer, between Jimmy’s treatments, but the outlook was not good. Eight months after his diagnosis, Brown succumbed to the disease. He was only 24.
“You don’t ever get over it,” says Beck.
“When I hear people say things to people like ‘Oh, you’re young’ or ‘You’ll find somebody else,’ those are such terrible things to assume that people will do when they’ve lost somebody really important to them. It doesn’t really matter how young you are, what part of your life you’re in, a small piece of you remains tied to that person.”
Just 20 and widowed, Beck began the slow process of healing by spending two months with her father, who was now living in Hudson Bay. Then it was back to Broadview and the rest of her life, whatever that meant.
She found a job in a local bar and began relying on alcohol to ease her pain.
“I just didn’t give a sh-t,” Beck recalls.
When friends started asking her to chart her life’s course, Beck devised her fictitious plan to join the RCMP.
She walked into the Broadview RCMP detachment and announced her insincere intention. She was told she would need her Grade 12, which she lacked, so she wrote and passed a ridiculously easy high-school equivalency exam.
Beck returned to the detachment and filled out the RCMP application, convinced that given her troubled past and family connections, she would be cast aside. She wasn’t.
On July 22, 1982, she reported to the RCMP training academy, known as Depot Division, in Regina. Coincidentally, she had lived across the street from Depot as a child without really knowing what went on inside.
The stress of the training program is still visible on Beck’s face as she recounts living in close quarters with 21 other women and being maligned by her instructors.
During one public march, Beck recalled an instructor – picture an over-the-top drill sergeant – yelling at her, “How tall are you?!”
“I go, ‘Five-foot six, Corporal!’”
“How tall’s a pile of
sh-t?!”
“I don’t know!”
“Five-foot six!”
The humiliation had its purpose, however.
“[They want to] break you to the point so that when you’re out on the street, there is nothing that anybody could ever say to you [that will rattle you],” Beck says.
When Beck graduated from Depot in 1982, there were only about 400 women in the RCMP out of many thousands of officers. Her first posting was in Beausejour, Manitoba, northeast of Winnipeg, where she was the only female officer.
Officially, the RCMP was one big family, open to both genders. In Beck’s reality, her male counterparts were sometimes sexist, going out of their way to make her job and life difficult.
The intolerance didn’t always originate with colleagues. A few years into her career, when she was stationed in Roblin, Manitoba, her male shift partner would have coffee with her only if they met at his house.
It turned out that the man’s wife forbade him from having coffee with Beck alone. Beck stopped going to his house and made it clear that she had zero interest in her colleague.
Years later, after Beck had transferred to Flin Flon, she was forced to chase down suspects when she was seven and a half months pregnant.
When she put her foot down, the Mounties relented and gave her light duty.
Still, Beck stresses that throughout her quarter-century policing career, only five per cent of her colleagues were difficult to work with or for. The other 95 per cent shared her desire to keep the peace and help others – including each other.
“Many don’t realize that life is lonely and restrictive as a frontline worker,” she says. “All eyes are watching, and these days recording, your every movement. The job is so rewarding, but the reward often is shortchanged by events beyond a person’s control.”
Beck spent the final 21 years of her 25-year RCMP career in Flin Flon, where she was gradually woven into the civic fabric. Yet being so entrenched in the community had a down side, as she admits she became complacent in her job from time to time.
One day she responded to a call involving a mentally ill man going through an episode. She had already dealt with him on countless occasions and felt like she knew what he was capable of.
Beck confidently told her shift partner to wait in the RCMP cruiser while she went inside to defuse the situation. If she needed help, she would radio him.
“I went into the house and very quickly [the man] was able to get between the door and me,” she recalls. “He wasn’t speaking English and his eyes were glazed over. He wasn’t anywhere within that space. He didn’t know who I was. He was gone.”
Beck realized she had made a mistake going in alone, but her radio wasn’t working. Fortunately her shift partner intuitively knew Beck was in danger and forced his way into the house.
“The two of us were in the fight of our life,” she recalls. “We were in a small kitchen and there were knives all over the place. There was a real brief moment where I didn’t know if we were actually going to have to shoot him, because it was tough going.”
The man eventually gave up, but Beck had learned a valuable lesson: a police officer never lets her guard down. Period.
When Beck retired from the Flin Flon RCMP as a corporal in 2007, she was bowing more to pressure from superiors to transfer than to any hatred for the job.
By that time, Beck had remarried and given birth to two children, a son and a daughter. She didn’t want to leave the community, but she didn’t want to quit working, either.
She spent time in various jobs and started her own workplace health and safety business. In 2010 she ran for mayor of Flin Flon, finishing second in a three-way race, and in 2011 unsuccessfully vied for the Flin Flon NDP MLA nomination.
Undeterred, Beck ran for Flin Flon city council in 2014 and easily won a seat. In an era of some pessimism around the long-term future of the community, she is staying positive.
“My fight is that this town has the ability to be anything it wants to be,” she says.
After a life of ups and downs, Beck declares herself a realist. Life can still be tough, but to find the strength to move forward, she need only think back to when she was a suicidal 15-year-old.
“I am the person I am today because of the people and events that have surrounded my life,” she says. “I have no regrets. I blame no one for the times that were tough because they just made me more resilient, more empathetic and more tolerant.
“I always know that tomorrow can be a better day.”
