Rage

by Jerry Langton

  Goody began his questioning by asking her about the first phone call she received from Kevin’s house on the day of Johnathon’s death. He wanted to know what was so frightening about it that it made her call back and tape the second call.

  Ashley said she was “disturbed” by the call. Goody pressed her as to why, he asked her to take him and the court through the call. Ashley testified that she was home in bed because she had called in sick that day. She had been trying to end her three-week romance with Tim, but he just couldn’t seem to accept it. When he called, he was crude and a little bit abusive: he was clearly showing off. Ashley said that she heard the voices of two other boys. Goody then asked her what Tim said that offended her. Tim asked Ashley if her mom (whom he’d never met) was “hot,” if her older brother had ever been raped and if she knew that “people shit their pants when they died.”

  After that last recollection, Joanne started crying.

  Ashley continued her testimony. She said that she heard the beep of call waiting, excused herself from Tim and answered the other call. It was her dad, calling to check up on her because she had taken the day off school, telling her parents she was sick. She assured him she was okay, then went back to Tim. As she reconnected, Ashley overheard him tell someone else that he was “not going to be home tonight or ever.”

  She asked him what he was talking about. Tim told her that she could find out what was up by watching the news “that night or tomorrow morning.”

  When she asked him what he meant by that, she testified that he screamed: “It doesn’t concern you, bitch!”

  She told the court that his abuse made her want to hang up, but she didn’t because she heard Tim ask his friends if he could tell her about what they had planned. Goody pressed her on. “And they responded, ‘As long as she doesn’t tell,’ ” she told him.

  Intrigued, Ashley stayed on the line. Tim unveiled his plan. At that point, Tim spoke of a plot to kill Kevin’s family. Further, he told Ashley of a long-range plan. She testified: “He told me they were going to steal all the parents’ credit cards and buy bombs and ammunition and suicide bomb either malls or highways.”

  Goody asked her why she didn’t go to her parents or the police. Ashley told him that she didn’t think the police or her parents would take her very seriously. Goody asked why not. She replied: “I didn’t have any evidence.”

  Cross-examining so jury-friendly a witness as Ashley could be hazardous for the defense lawyers. If they appeared to be too rough on her, it could easily turn the jury against them. But up until this point, the case had appeared open and shut. The overwhelming weight of evidence supported the theory that the boys, led by Kevin, brutally murdered Johnathon and attempted to kill Ralston. Hell, the jury had already heard them—all three of them—on tape telling Ashley that they were planning to do as much.

  The defense team’s only hope, it would seem, would be to discredit Ashley’s testimony. To make it appear as though Tim, at least, and also perhaps Pierre, were trying to impress her with fabricated stories of murder and mayhem, not knowing that some of it would actually happen. Kevin was clearly a lost cause—let him try an insanity defense—but Tim and Pierre had a chance to be portrayed as puffed-up young men eager to impress a pretty young girl with tales of what they took to be manliness. It wouldn’t take much to convince the jury that Tim and Pierre were stupid and deluded; the real challenge would be to get them to believe that Ashley could be impressed—even turned on—by their nihilistic claims. If they could prove that Tim and Pierre were only pretending to be murderers because they thought it would make her like them better, they had a chance of painting the two younger boys as blameless—if not entirely innocent—stooges.

  McCaskill, Tim’s lawyer, dove in and asked her if she believed Tim’s claims that he was a vampire. “I didn’t take seriously that he was killing people in the Don Valley,” she answered.

  He asked if it was true that Tim had drunk her blood. Ashley sighed. She told the court that she and Tim were messing around at her house—her parents weren’t home—and they were throwing some fruit, she recalled they were pomegranates, at each other. One of his throws went wild and she tried to catch it with a plate. The plate shattered, and one of the pieces made a small slice in her forearm. Before she knew it, Tim was at her arm, licking up the blood. She told the court that she found it disgusting. Blood was his thing, not hers. As if to put an exclamation point on the statement that buried Nuttall’s argument, Ashley told the court that Tim’s interest in blood and violence was what made her want to dump him in the first place. That stuff was just too weird for her.

  McCaskill then asked what the entire courtroom was wondering—what did a beautiful girl with all the advantages in life ever see in a loser like Tim? “He was nice to me most of the time,” she answered. Ashley then said that she only liked Tim for “about four or five days.”

  “And after that?” McCaskill asked.

  “I didn’t like him anymore and I had wanted to get out of the relationship,” she answered. “My friends didn’t like him—I didn’t like him.”

  Again he brought up the fact that Tim told her that he drank blood. Ashley deftly told him that she didn’t take that seriously, that she didn’t take much of what Tim said or did seriously. That he was the kind of boy who spoke in the voices of his favorite cartoon characters. McCaskill asked what that was about. “Fourteen-year-old boys tend to talk like that,” she said with a sigh. Some members of the jury laughed.

  He asked her to describe their relationship. “He thought he was in love with me,” she said. McCaskill asked her if she was in love with him. She looked at him as if he was crazy and then said she wasn’t. In fact, she said, she “found him silly” and “told him pretty much blatantly that I didn’t want to see him anymore.”

  McCaskill then asked her why she didn’t end the relationship earlier then. She told him that she couldn’t. When she tried, she testified, Tim got angry and started breaking things. She tried to let him know subtly, to give him hints that she wasn’t interested in him, but he was, she maintained, “too dense” to pick them up.

  She hadn’t seen him for about a week before Johnathon died. But he’d called her the day before. She told the court that she was just stringing him along when she told him she’d see him the next day. When he got in touch with her via MSN Messenger that day—the day she called in sick—she made up a story about how there were workmen at her house and he couldn’t come over.

  They then skipped to the second call from Kevin’s. McCaskill asked her why, if she was so disturbed, did she go to see her school friend instead of her parents. Ashley told the court that Heather “takes me more seriously than my mother does.”

  At McCaskill’s urging, Ashley then detailed how the girls went to Heather’s house, called Kevin’s house and taped the boys. The jury had already heard the tape and knew what she was talking about. McCaskill asked her if she did anything to try to stop the boys from putting their plan into action. Ashley admitted that she no longer wanted Tim to be her boyfriend, but she still cared about him as a person. She told the court that she offered to meet Tim somewhere away from Kevin’s. The tape backed her up. She then said that Tim refused, telling her: “I have to kill somebody today.” Again, her account was corroborated by the tape.

  After that, she testified, it was out of her hands. Heather took the tape downstairs and played it for her mother, who called the police. While this was happening, Ashley testified, she was still upstairs, crying.

  McCaskill asked what happened after that. Ashley testified that Tim called her back. McCaskill asked her what he said. She told the court that Tim had told her: “I wanted to let you know that if anything happens to me—if I go to jail or anything—I want you to know that I love you.”

  If the boys’ lawyers wanted to unnerve, upset or discredit Ashley, they did a terrible job. She left the stand as she arrived, pretty, popular and utterly believable.

  The next witness, Dr. Do
minique Bourget of the Royal Ottawa Hospital, testified about Kevin’s mental state. She examined him after the arrest in a series of interviews in Ottawa. She said that he was of “about average” intelligence and suffered from no brain abnormalities or injuries. But there were many aspects of his personality that lead her to decide that he was “quite disturbed.”

  He told her that he had almost no contact with his biological father, who had abandoned the family on Christmas Eve when Kevin was just eight years old. She also testified that he said his stepfather, Ralston, physically and emotionally abused him frequently. He also spoke of a mounting resentment for his mother as a result of her inability or lack of desire to protect him from Ralston’s abuse.

  Kevin told her that he had very little success at school, in sports or at any other activity other than perhaps video games. Despite this, Bourget testified that Kevin had a feeling of grandiosity—excess self-importance. She said he demonstrated “hostility, attitudes of bitterness, social alienation and distrust of others” in their interviews and as she described it, his life was “going nowhere.” He had been encouraged to seek professional help for his psychological state many times, but, Bourget testified, “he has a history of minimizing reporting of his own mental condition.”

  That alienation sent him into what she called a “marginal subculture,” along with other troubled youths. With them, she said, Kevin experimented with Satanism and vampirism. He admitted to her that he and Tim had tasted each other’s blood.

  Bourget testified that Kevin had told her that he had woken up “pissed” on the morning of November 25, 2003 and that “he felt angry for no particular reason” and “basically felt like breaking things.”

  Alone in the house, he slept in late, took a shower and headed downstairs. Before long, Pierre showed up. Kevin had told Bourget that the two had skipped school together frequently and that Kevin was not at all surprised to see him. The pair then went upstairs to the room Kevin shared with Johnathon and played video games.

  While they were up there, she continued, Tim called and told them he had been stood up by his girlfriend. Kevin invited him over and he showed up a few minutes later. After he arrived, the boys started to drink red wine and smoke cigarettes. Bourget testified that Tim egged on Kevin’s bad mood and encouraged him to let his frustrations out. Bored with the video game and emboldened by Tim, Kevin then took the boys downstairs, smashed the mustard jar, beer bottles and TV. With the three of them riled up, Kevin told them to ransack his parents’ room, to look for money, identification and credit cards. They took what little money they found to a nearby convenience store, bought snacks and cigarettes and returned to 90 Dawes.

  That’s when, Kevin told Bourget, Tim suggested he call Ashley. He was pissed off at her and, emboldened, wanted to give her a piece of his mind. At first, Kevin was against the idea, but relented because Tim had told him about her interest in vampirism and Kevin thought that she might be impressed by their boldness that day.

  About three hours later, Johnathon came home to get his money to take back to the cyber café. Kevin told Bourget that something Johnathon said—Kevin couldn’t recall it exactly—indicated that Johnathon was going to tell Ralston about the mess Kevin and his friends had made. That “set him off.” Johnathon’s words, Bourget testified, “triggered a rage state” in Kevin. He told her that he “grabbed a knife, ran to his brother, pushed him down the stairs and ended up attacking him.” He told her that he was alone in the basement with Johnathon during the stabbing. He described the attack as “a dream-like state” and told her that he could only recall stabbing his little brother once, despite the 71 wounds he suffered.

  “What happened between 1 and 71?” Goody asked.

  She replied that Kevin was undergoing an “emotional surge” and totally lost control of what he was doing. She said that people in that state “can’t stop the impulse.” She also pointed out that while Kevin did not remember all the events of killing his little brother, he did admit he had done it.

  Bourget then testified that she asked Kevin about the link between the phone call in which all three of the boys boasted they would kill Kevin’s family and the fact that he later killed Johnathon. He described it, she said, as the “worst and biggest coincidence of his life.” He claimed, she said, that the call was just typical teenage boasting and he hadn’t planned to kill anybody.

  Not long after the attack on Johnathon, Ralston came home. Kevin told Bourget that after Tim left the house apologizing and Ralston found evidence of Kevin’s smoking and drinking, his stepfather attacked him. Ralston was, Kevin told her, choking him when Pierre tried to fight the older man off with a baseball bat. After Ralston gave up his attack and ran out the front door, the two boys fled and spent the night in a nearby ravine.

  Under cross-examination, Bourget was asked to typify Kevin’s mental state, to put a name to any psychological disorder he might have.

  She said that Kevin told her about episodes of depression, anger and violence, during which he enjoyed an adrenalin rush. He also told her that “anything in his way, objects or people, was a target.” When asked what triggered these bouts, the doctor replied: “The episodes happened when he felt everything was falling apart for him—a loss of control in his life.”

  Bourget was asked if Kevin’s problem had a name. She said it was called “Intermittent Explosive Disorder.” But she warned that it was a temporary diagnosis. When Nuttall asked what that meant, she replied that Kevin could have any number of mental disorders developing, but it was too early in his life to diagnose them accurately. She gave her testimony four days before Kevin’s 18th birthday.

  The first of the accused to take the stand was Tim. He looked pale, thin and nervous. He began his testimony by describing his life before the attack.

  He hadn’t seen his mother since he was two years old. He told the court that she’d dropped him off at his father’s apartment one day and never come back to get him. He was doing very poorly in school because he cut classes so frequently. He freely admitted to being a petty thief and habitual vandal. And, when asked, he admitted that he had a “fetish” for drinking blood and that he had told more than a few other kids that he’d killed people in the Don Valley to drink their blood. Asked if he’d describe himself as a vampire, he replied that he would.

  Tim then detailed his brief romance with Ashley. Though he admitted that it was “going downhill” by the day of the attack, he thought it was still salvageable. He was delighted that she had agreed to see him that day, so excited in fact that he called her at 8 o’clock in the morning. She told him it was too early and that he should call back later. In order to be marked on the official attendance list as present,

  Tim then went to school for his first class, then left. He immediately went to a nearby cyber café (not the same one Johnathon went to) and played some video games. Asked to describe them, Tim said they were “shooting games” with “terrorists and stuff.” Tiring of them, he logged on to MSN Messenger and saw that Ashley was online. He asked if it was okay to come over now. She replied that he couldn’t come over that day at all.

  Angered, he testified that he pulled out his cell phone and called an old friend he hadn’t talked to for a long time. It was Kevin. He too was cutting class and had another friend at his house with him. Kevin then invited him over.

  When he arrived, he let himself in and went up to Kevin’s room. Among other small talk, he testified that he asked Kevin why he hadn’t seen him for more than a week. Kevin told him he was “depressed” and explained that it was because his family was bothering him. Although Kevin often complained about his family, Tim testified, he was “more intense” than usual on that day and revealed for the first time that his stepfather had physically abused him. Tim told Kevin that Ashley had blown him off earlier that day. “Sucks to be you,” his friend replied.

  Goody asked Tim about the rampage in which he, Kevin and Pierre smashed the bottles and TV. Why he had gone along with it. Tim
seemed bewildered at the question. “I always broke things,” he eventually replied, “so it just came natural to me.”

  He testified that when Johnathon came home and saw the mess they had made, he told Kevin that he was going to tell their parents because he didn’t want to be blamed.

  Tim then said that Kevin then dragged his little brother down the stairs to the main floor and let him go at the top of the basement stairs. As Johnathon turned around to walk down the stairs, Kevin knocked him to the bottom, ran down the stairs and begun stabbing his little brother.

  His lawyer, McCaskill, asked him what he was doing during the attack. “I didn’t say or do anything,” he said, trembling visibly. He then described how he could see Johnathon trying in vain to protect himself with his hands as Kevin just kept slashing. “I could barely believe what I was seeing,” Tim testified. “I was shaking very violently and felt very nervous.”

  McCaskill asked him where Pierre was. Tim told him he was in the living room, not watching.

  Then, he said, Kevin—still fuming and red-faced with anger, his hands covered in blood—came up the stairs and told him to help hide the body. Tim added that the knife in Kevin’s hands was pointed at him, but did not say that Kevin was actively threatening him. McCaskill asked him if he helped Kevin, if he dragged Johnathon’s body over the broken glass and then stuffed him the crawlspace. Tim admitted that he had. He said he complied because “I’d just seen Kevin kill his little brother and I didn’t think he’d think twice about killing me.”

  McCaskill then asked Tim if he’d taken part in the killing, encouraged Kevin to kill Johnathon or even if he knew Kevin was planning to do such a thing. He said no to each of the questions.

  Goody got tough with him. He told him that he believed that Johnathon was just the first of the family they planned to kill that day. “You planned to get Johnathon out of the way before Ralston came home,” he said.