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It’s a here-we-go-again situation for many people in Clearwater, as a convicted mass murderer is seeking parole.

David Shearing, who now goes by David Ennis, has a parole request scheduled for July. He was convicted for the gruesome killings of the Johnson and Bentley families in August 1982, when the family of six was camping in Wells Gray Park.

Ennis shot and killed Edith and George Bentley, their daughter Jackie and son-in-law Bob Johnson. The Johnson’s two young daughters, Janet and Karen, were kept alive for almost a week and tortured before he shot and killed them as well on separate days. All six bodies were dumped in the trunk of a car that Ennis then torched.

The Johnson and Bentley families had been on summer holidays, visiting Wells Gray from West Kelowna.

Clearwater mayor Merlin Blackwell says each parole request for Ennis rips open fresh wounds for a lot of people.

“The newer citizens who haven’t been here for a long time, go ‘oh really, that happened here, right.’ The older citizens, some of whom I worked with who personally knew Shearing and worked with him before the murders, it hurt a lot of people. And it still continues to haunt a lot of people in this area,” he says.

“We all kind of wish he would just crawl in a hole and disappear.”

The park where the tragedy happened is an area Blackwell knows well.

“When I started in Wells Gray in 1989 as a 19 year old, this was very fresh on people’s minds. It was pretty much a conversation with everybody who came into the park. But what surprised is this case lasts forever. Nobody forgets this one.”

Ennis has been serving a life sentence since 1984. His most recent parole request was denied in 2012.

A childhood friend of Janet Johnson has started a petition asking for Ennis’ parole request to be denied, which has gained huge traction. At time of posting, it has more than 26,000 online signatures.

Tammy Arishenkoff says she and Janet were both 13 years old and had just finished grade seven together in West Kelowna, before the summer when Janet and her family were killed.

“We were halfway, I think, through September when they were discovered to have been murdered. But it wasn’t until several years later that the true nature of the crime was released,” Arishenkoff tells NL News. “We didn’t know until long after he was convicted that his motive was to get to the girls, and hold them captive and do the things that he did to them.”

She says people haven’t forgotten the seriousness of the crimes Ennis committed.

“The support [for the petition] has been unbelievable, and the comments, and the anger that people still feel. And I think when you have children who were tortured and raped and God knows what else, like Janet and Karen were, it just resonates with people so much.”

Blackwell supports the premise of the petition and the people behind it, who are family members and family friends of the Johnsons and Bentleys.

“I think speaking about it, I think making awareness around the community to sort of rally a little bit around the petition, sure, do that. Add force to the fact that we still care about this, that this is still an issue. For all the other people who have suffered from similar crimes,” Blackwell says.

“This is a really heinous crime. There’s aspects to this that nobody should ever come out of jail for.”

(Photo: Tammy Arishenkoff)