Rage

by Jerry Langton

  Rage

  The True Story of a Sibling Murder

  Jerry Langton

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1—Teenage Romance, a Tape Recorder and a Brutal Murder

  Chapter 2—A Stepson’s Revenge

  Chapter 3—The Truth About Goths: Why Kids Want to Be Vampires

  Chapter 4—Kevin’s a Very Troubled Boy

  Chapter 5—Big Brother, “Vampire Boy” and Friend Go to Court

  Chapter 6—The Truth About Pretty Girls

  Chapter 7—Starting Over

  Chapter 8—Big Enough to Know Better?

  Chapter 9—Another Year Older

  Plates

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  Like everything, for the wife and kiddies

  Acknowledgements

  I’m at the fortress-like Toronto Police Central Station at Bay and College when Detective Sergeant Terry Wark greets me and takes me upstairs. He was the lead investigator on the Johnathon Madden murder case, and looks every bit the part. Except for the modern-cut suit, Wark looks like he just walked out of a Clint Eastwood movie from the 1970s. He’s a homicide cop from central casting with an inscrutable face seemingly made of granite.

  Upstairs, he introduces me to Detective Sergeant Glenn Gray, another big player in this drama. Gray has a much more jovial look about him, but still doesn’t look like someone you’d want to piss off. I’m a pretty big guy, but Wark towers over me. Gray is taller than him.

  Wark apologizes that the Toronto homicide headquarters doesn’t look like they do on TV. I point out that I was thinking exactly the opposite.

  They take me to a nicely appointed conference room and make a little small talk. Gray jokes about how often his name is misspelled in the media and recalls some of the worst ones, including the time he was called “Gray Glenn” by a local paper. I ask them a few questions about the case and I can tell that they are relieved that I know what I’m talking about.

  Wark brings up a point about the tape. The tape is a key element in the case. A group of girls secretly tape-recorded some boys telling them they were going to murder a family. When they called the police, it set the wheels in motion for the eventual arrest of the boys. Not surprisingly, it was a valuable piece of evidence that both prosecution and defense tried to use for themselves. I admitted that I had not heard the tape, but had only read transcripts.

  Wark then played it. Much has been written about how chilling the tape is to hear, and it truly is. The boys casually talk about murder as though it is no big deal. And the girl, taping them without their knowledge, appears to egg them on. One boy boasts about the plan, as though murder is something he does for fun. Another talks about it ambitiously, as though it will be his one great achievement and the solution to all his problems. The third treats it as a mere matter of fact, an annoyance he simply has to put up with.

  So I have to thank Wark and Gray, not just for letting me hear the tape, but for giving me hours of their time and speaking frankly and accurately about every element of the case and trials. They set me straight on more than a few things I thought I knew, and I’m always grateful for that.

  And if there’s anyone who should be thanked for the existence of this book, it’s Joseph Brean. It was Brean who uncovered the mountains of online evidence the police and lawyers missed. It was he who risked a contempt of court charge and potential humiliation by writing about it. And it was he who caused the first trial to end in a mistrial, forcing a second one with a more accurate picture, not just of the evidence, but of the people involved. When I approached him to help me with this book, he went well beyond the bounds of professional courtesy and provided me with an extensive amount of data and background. Very few true-crime books have heroes in them; but you’re it for this one, Joe. It’s not often a journalist can change the course of history just by reporting the facts, but he did. And on his first murder trial, too.

  I also have to thank all the other police officers, emergency workers and journalists—particularly Peter Small—who helped out. And my thanks also go to the parents, friends, neighbors and other people who selflessly gave their time to help give me a clearer look at this complicated drama.

  And of course, I must thank Joanne Champagnie, Johnathon’s mother, for her cooperation.

  As usual, I thank the team at Wiley Canada for backing this book. And Leta Potter, just because she doesn’t want to be mentioned.

  And this book, like most things I do, never would have happened if not for the help, patience and encouragement provided by my wife and two sons.

  Introduction

  I was talking with my agent in New York when I told him about a story. It was about a happy-go-lucky 12-year-old boy. He was a pretty ordinary boy—not special in any way—but a good kid with a kind heart. The problem was that he had a 16-year-old brother who wasn’t quite so nice.

  The big brother had some real problems. He was overweight and funny-looking. He’d failed both the seventh and eighth grades. He had severe anger issues, which led him to be passed around from school to school because nobody knew what to do with him. He’d been in the mental health departments at area hospitals so often that the staffs there knew him by first name.

  The big brother hated the little brother. He tortured him, physically and emotionally. His hatred was rooted in the fact that his parents clearly preferred the little brother. Well, his mother at least. His father had abandoned the family on Christmas Eve when the brothers were four and eight. He was soon replaced by another man, but that caused even more problems. The stepfather not only favored the younger brother, but he tried to instill a system of discipline the older brother couldn’t cope with. As an added twist, the stepfather was black and the son, white, an avowed racist.

  The bigger brother brought a few other problems to the mix. He dabbled in Nazism Satanism, and vampirism. One day, he skips off school and invites over his friends—one of them a self-professed vampire who claims to kill people and drink their blood. They call the vampire boy’s girlfriend and tell her all about the plan they have to kill the big brother’s family. She hangs up, asks them to call back and tapes the conversation.

  Then the big brother and his friends drink wine, smoke cigarettes and ransack the house. They are looking for money and credit cards so they can finance a killing spree in which they will target crowded public places with guns and bombs. When the younger brother comes home from school, he becomes the target of fatal violence.

  That, I tell my agent, is when things get weird.

  He stops me there. Misunderstanding me and thinking I was pitching a novel, he tells me that it would never sell, it’s just not believable. Brother-on-brother violence? It’s been done—since Genesis. A Nazi with a black stepdad? Come on. Teenagers who claim to be vampires and want to kill everyone because they think life is unfair? A little too Columbine, don’t you think?

  When I tell him that it all really happened in Toronto, he’s surprised. “Truth is stranger than fiction, eh?” he says to me.

  It really is. And, when I investigated the story that would later become Rage, I found that it was much stranger still. There are so many elements in the story, the murder of Johnathon Madden, that it would be hard to believe—a bit too pat to be true—if it were presented as a novel. In pursuit of the strange and the true, I take the reader along with me to some of the more extraordinary—and bizarre—interviews.

  The victim really was an innocent young lad, who was remembered, more than anything, for being kind and thoughtful. The perps were lonely, nerdy, hateful boys attracted (in varying degrees) to racism, Satan and vampires. One of them—in a highly unlikely Romeo and Jul
iet scenario—became romantically entangled with a wealthy, talented, successful and beautiful young girl.

  While the murder, arrests and investigation were almost pedestrian, the trials weren’t. The first trial involved a tape recording of the boys detailing a plan not only to kill Johnathon, but his family and as many of the public as possible. It seemed like an open-and-shut case, until one of the prize witnesses was caught delivering compromising testimony.

  My agent, as usual, is right. If this story was something I made up, I’d be embarrassed at how obvious it all is, how blatantly dramatic it is, and how well it all fits together. If I made it up, I’d be a total hack.

  But, of course, I didn’t.

  Johnathon, as innocent as he was, did die. He was hacked to pieces by his older brother. And what happened before and after was a veritable soap opera of the obvious, the cliché, and the hard-to-believe.

  While that may make for an unbelievable novel, it can make for a fascinating true-crime story.

  NOTE: The names of many of the youth in the book are not their real names, as their identities are protected under the provisions of Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act. For that reason, care has been taken not to include identifying information.

  CHAPTER 1

  Teenage Romance, A Tape Recorder And A Brutal Murder

  It all began innocently enough. Two young high schoolers—a 14-year-old girl and a boy who’d just turned 15—were on a first date at Toronto’s Kew Beach in the autumn of 2003. They walked along the boardwalk, talking in the moonlight and listening to the lapping of the waves. It was the most romantic thing Tim Ferriman could think of on his very limited budget.

  And it was also something of a re-creation of their first meeting. A week or so earlier, the two of them first saw each other when two groups of kids met up on the same boardwalk.

  The two groups went to different high schools and came from somewhat different worlds. But they mixed and mingled, talking about this and that and laughing frequently.

  Tim was shy, even among the kids from his own school. But something about him somehow caught the attention of the most attractive girl there. They started talking and, much to his surprise, she agreed to go out with him.

  The date ended on one of those huge concrete blocks that jut out into Lake Ontario, that give visitors a chance to watch the waves and maybe throw a few stones into the water. They talked and talked until it got dark. At the end of the date, he got what he was after—she promised to see him again.

  They made a strange pair. Ashley (not her real name) was pretty, verging on beautiful. Tim could tell a couple of things about her from what she wore: She had money and she was into a few things many of the other kids weren’t. Ashley was not decked out in full Goth regalia, but there were subtle clues—her makeup, her jewelry—that indicated an interest in the occult. Tall and physically advanced for her age, she was often mistaken for a much older girl. She had thick dark hair, almond-shaped eyes and a long, almost regal, nose. In addition to her physical traits, Ashley was smart, personable and had a healthy sense of humor. A talented drama student at the prestigious Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, she was also an accomplished amateur photographer. She lived in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city, was well traveled and was surrounded by a well-to-do family dedicated to her cultural enrichment and her protection.

  But because she was so very attractive at such a young age, she spent much of her time fending off the advances of prospective suitors. Her parents would not allow her to date at such a young age, but she decided it was time and defied them. She’d actually been dating regularly for about a year, switching from boy to boy without feeling much attachment to any of them.

  Her choice of Tim was surprising, almost perplexing. He was not a particularly good-looking boy. He had the kind of face you could see a million times a day and never look twice at. He had small eyes, thin lips and a round, almost childish face. But he wasn’t cute like a child, just plain. One girl I spoke with who remembered him from high school wondered aloud what Ashley saw in him, saying rather coldly: “No face, no body, no reason.” Ashley’s friends unanimously derided him as a loser.

  Nor did Ashley (by her own admission) find him particularly intelligent, witty, well spoken or charismatic. He tended to wear the same clothes—almost always black—all the time and had few, if any, real friends. He lived above a second-rate sandwich shop with his dad in a run-down area of town. His mom had left when he was two years old after she decided that she’d rather feed her drug habit than her child. His dad’s only source of income was a series of monthly disability checks from the government, and Tim had no identifiable income at all.

  Part of what may have attracted her were the visual cues he displayed that indicated he wasn’t just another jock, stoner or boy next door. Like Ashley, Tim didn’t dress up in what has become the instantly identifiable Goth uniform. He was, instead, more subtle—although probably without realizing it. Tim showed his interest in things Goth with his jacket, his choice of T-shirts and his modest jewelry.

  Tim was headed for a life on a downhill treadmill at a tough middle school until a guidance counselor intervened on his behalf and suggested he apply to one of the city’s better high schools.

  Although neither his marks nor his personality indicated that he deserved a better school, he was accepted by one and given an opportunity to escape the trajectory he’d been on.

  But while he was accepted by the school, he wasn’t entirely accepted at the school. A chronic truant with poor marks, frequently in trouble, Tim was also very unpopular at his new school. Most of his classmates I spoke with considered him something of a weirdo. None of his peers could name a single close friend of his at his new school.

  Without an established social circle, Tim relied heavily on his old friends from middle school. But that all changed when he started seeing Ashley. She became his whole world. He saw nobody else, he spoke with nobody else and he thought about nobody else.

  She wasn’t as sold on their relationship as he was. They saw each other after school and in the evenings and kept in touch via e-mail and MSN Messenger—a popular real-time chatting application—every night for about a week or so. But while she was his only MSN contact, she had many. In fact, she maintained her enviable standing in all of her existing social circles. That included speaking with and flirting with other boys (which, of course, enraged Tim) and she spent a lot of time at home socializing through e-mail and on a number of different social networking websites. Tim—more cunning than intelligent—could sense that he was losing what little grip he had on her.

  He was right. On one of their walk-around-the-neighborhood dates, she tried to gently break it off with him. She wasn’t successful. After she broke the news to him, he panicked. He began crying and screaming about how much he loved her. Then he started breaking things—street signs, lawn ornaments—and smashing his fist into a wall. Unsure of what to do, she partially retracted her comments. She didn’t exactly give him a vote of confidence, but she did somewhat ambiguously take back the dumping.

  Although Tim did his best to deny the fact Ashley wasn’t actually interested in him anymore, he knew she was on the verge of actually leaving him, so he decided to bring out what he thought was his only trump card. While their backgrounds were disparate, they had a few things in common—one thing in particular. Both of them had an interest in what he called “the dark side.” Tim and Ashley talked for hours, fascinating each other with intense discussions about death-metal and Goth music, horror movies and the occult. Sensing that this was his quickest way back to her heart, he tried to appeal to her own dark side—something he later maintained had worked for him with girls in the past.

  As their relationship waned, he convinced her to cut class one afternoon and took her to a coffee shop not far from her school. That’s when he broke his big news to her—he told her he was a vampire. He could tell she was interested, but not really all that impressed. He told
her that he liked to cut himself and drink his own blood. When she still didn’t react enough, he added “before sex.”

  When that didn’t get the reaction he wanted either, he looked around to see if anyone else was listening and began to tell her that he also drank other people’s blood. He told her that he hid in the trees of the Don Valley—a ravine near where they both lived—ambushed unsuspecting joggers, killed them and drank their blood. It was a desperate ploy, and she seemed to recognize it as such.

  A few days later, on Friday, November 21, 2003, Ashley called Tim at home to tell him it was over. Again, she tried to break it to him easy, to spare his feelings. She knew he was really into her and correctly surmised he was a very fragile person. But she knew she had to end their relationship to get on with her own life. She didn’t want to be saddled with this guy any longer. He was just too immature and way too needy for her.

  When Ashley dropped the bomb, he totally freaked out. Tim made a loud, strange noise, then burst into tears. Weeping, he told her that he loved her; he loved her more than anything. “How can you do this?” he asked. He was screaming and babbling, which made her even more sure her decision was an astute one. He said a lot of things, much of which she didn’t understand because he was so frantic. So in an effort to calm him down, she let slip: “Forget it, never mind.”

  Tim was deluded enough to interpret the brush-off as a reprieve, so he called her again on Monday morning. After a great deal of pleading, she said she would allow him to visit her at her home the next day. She said she wasn’t feeling well and was planning on calling in to school sick in the morning. But when he got in touch with her via MSN Messenger that morning, she told him he couldn’t come over because her family had workmen in, renovating the house and she would get in trouble if her parents found out he had come around.