Rage

by Jerry Langton

  Tim denied it.

  “You were worried about the timetable,” Goody said.

  “We weren’t worried about any timetable because there wasn’t going to be a murder,” Tim said.

  After helping Kevin move Johnathon, Tim testified that all he could think about was getting out of the house. His chance came, he said, when Kevin’s stepfather came home. Tim apologized repeatedly to Ralston and slipped out the front door as the man turned to confront Kevin.

  After he left the house, Tim said, he ran away, eventually catching a bus for home. After a couple of stops, Kevin and Pierre got on the same bus and sat near, but not with, him. They acknowledged one another, Tim testified, but did not talk. Kevin and Pierre got off the bus after a brief ride and Tim said he saw them go into Taylor Creek Ravine.

  When he got home, Tim said, he did not tell his father what had happened because he didn’t want him to “freak out.” Tim said he was going out the back door of their apartment to make a phone call when he saw a dozen shotguns aimed at him. He claimed he didn’t realize they were police officers until they arrested him.

  When he was asked about the phone calls he made to Ashley in which he boasted that he, Pierre and Kevin were going to kill Kevin’s family, he too claimed it was just a coincidence. “I made it up,” he told the court and added that the boys did not discuss killing anyone before the call. “I was trying to impress her.” When asked what happened after she rebuffed his advances to come over, Tim told the court: “I kind of felt like an idiot.”

  Although she cried frequently in court and sometimes had to be led out of the room during testimony, Joanne maintained her composure admirably when it was her turn to speak, despite allegations that she showed so much preference for Johnathon that Kevin felt neglected and ignored in comparison.

  Nuttall, Kevin’s lawyer, asked her to describe Kevin’s childhood. Joanne said that her older son had had an anger management problem since he was very young and that he had a great deal of trouble with school, attending 10 different schools and failing both eighth and ninth grades. The problem, as she saw it, was his reluctance to do his homework. “I tried everything I could so that he would finish his projects,” she said, clearly exasperated.

  She spoke of the incident in which he left a note saying “die bitch” for his ex-girlfriend, Katie, and threatened several other students and teachers at his school. Joanne recalled for the court that Kevin had pleaded guilty to two counts of communicating death threats.

  After that, she, Ralston and Kevin went to see a youth counselor. “I told him that Kevin is not active, that he won’t go out,” she testified. “He just sits in front of the computer.”

  “Do you recall Ralston saying that Kevin was a lazy ass?” Nuttall asked.

  “I don’t know if he ever said that.”

  “Did you say that Kevin needed to feel like he meant something to someone?”

  “Yeah.”

  She agreed that she had told police he had become increasingly withdrawn from the family starting two years before the homicide—about the same time his grandmother, with whom he was close, died. “He spent more time with his friends,” she said. “He didn’t want to go to certain places with us.” He had an increasingly difficult relationship with his stepfather, and she was compelled to take over all his disciplining, she said.

  When asked if she had ever seen Ralston abuse Kevin, she said she only recalled her son telling her of one incident of the stepfather beating the boy with a plastic baseball bat, but she hadn’t seen it herself. But she acknowledged that in family counseling her son had accused her of failing to protect him from the stepfather.

  “Do you recall that you and [your husband] were emotional and apologetic?” Nuttall asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  It was the second week of February when Nuttall presented his final argument on Kevin’s behalf. Since Kevin had already admitted to killing Johnathon, the only way to get Kevin off would be to hope that the jury accepted the idea that Kevin was not responsible for his actions when he was suffering from the effects of intermittent explosive disorder.

  “I know it sounds gruesome,” Nuttall said. “But the best defense of Kevin is the attack itself.” He paused and then continued. “The explosion and the animalistic fury demonstrated by 71 stab wounds to the body, to the head, to the hands—hacks, slices,” he told them. “If that is not emotion out of control, I don’t know what else it is.”

  He told them that as horrifying as Johnathon’s death was, Kevin wasn’t truly responsible because of his overwhelming psychological problems. “What we have here is a monstrous act, but an act not committed by a monster.” He asked the jury to consider the crime as manslaughter, rather than first-degree murder.

  He asked them to consider the difficulties Kevin had faced in life, what he described as a “dysfunctional life in a dysfunctional family.” He was 16, failing in school yet again, lived with a neglectful mother and an abusive stepfather who both clearly favored his little brother.

  Nuttall pointed out that Kevin woke up angry that day and it was made worse by having his friends over. Their pointless destruction only served to stir up Kevin’s anger, which many acknowledged he had a very hard time controlling.

  He then surprised many in the courtroom by putting at least part of the blame for Johnathon’s death on Ashley. Nuttall asserted that when she did nothing to dissuade them from their announced plan to kill Kevin’s entire family, she was giving it her approval. “On its face, Ashley is guilty of aiding and abetting a homicide,” he said. “But we don’t hold her to that, because she couldn’t have known that Kevin’s anger would erupt 45 minutes later.”

  The court was still in stunned silence when McCaskill made his appeal on Tim’s behalf. He pointed out that there was no evidence or testimony that indicated Tim had harmed Johnathon or helped Kevin to do so.

  All he was guilty of was trying to impress his girlfriend with a stupid story—which they admitted he had done before. He was sure that he could win her back by convincing her he was a vampire, and the other boys played along. “There was no plan here,” McCaskill said. “This is an improvisation.” The only problem was that Kevin—who he called “a ticking time-bomb”—acted on it.

  Then it was Lenzin’s turn to speak for Pierre. He pointed out that both other boys testified that Pierre—who he described as “shy” and “non-confrontational”—was in the living room at the time of the killing and didn’t not take part in the disposal of Johnathon’s body. He was, in fact, the only one without a speck of Johnathon’s blood on him or his clothes. “The reason is . . .,” the lawyer said, pausing for effect. “ . . . he was not involved.”

  Pierre went along with the murder plot on the phone call to Ashley, Lenzin allowed, only because he was helping his friend try to win back his girlfriend. Even so, he asserted, the tape showed that Pierre’s part of the phone call was “minimal” and “unenthusiastic,” compared to what Tim and Kevin had said.

  After he was done, both Nuttall and Lenzin addressed the attempted murder charge leveled at their clients after the melee with Ralston by claiming that the stepfather actually attacked Kevin, who was defending himself, and that Pierre only stepped in to try to protect his friend from a stepfather he knew had abused Kevin in the past.

  The following day, Goody presented the jury with an entirely different scenario. Reminding the court that Dr. Wood’s investigations led him to conclude that the meat cleaver—and not just the green-handled kitchen knife or black-handled hunting knife—was part of the attack on Johnathon, he surmised that at least two of the boys were involved in the killing. “This common-sense conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, immediately undermines, indeed destroys” the defense’s claim that Kevin, in a fit of rage, was the sole killer.

  He pointed out that all three boys took part in the phone call to Ashley—which they did not know that she was taping—and that each of them separately boasted that they were going to kill that da
y. “It may not have been a complicated plan,” Goody said. “But it was a plan.” And events unfolded according to that plan. Johnathon was the first of Kevin’s family to come home and he was brutally murdered. Ralston came home next and he too was attacked—by both Kevin and Pierre—but he survived to call the police. If he hadn’t, events could have turned out quite differently.

  As for Bourget’s diagnosis of the Intermittent Explosive Disorder that threw Kevin into such an uncontrollable, animalistic fury, Goody pointed out that the doctor only had Kevin’s word to go by and that much of his testimony was at odds with other evidence. And, he said, even Bourget herself considered Kevin’s claim that the call and Johnathon’s murder happening on the same day was a “coincidence” to be preposterous.

  Next, Goody assailed Nuttall’s claim that the nature of the attack indicated that Kevin did not premeditate the crime. He even called it the “defense’s undoing.”

  Goody explained that of the 71 sharp-force wounds Johnathon suffered that day, only the last three—including the one that severed his windpipe—were life-threatening. The others, he said, were generally superficial and much more measured, as though the assailant or assailants sadistically intended to cause him the maximum amount of suffering possible before finally finishing him off. “They were calculated to cause harm and pain, but not death.” Those first 68 slashes, hacks and stabs, he said, certainly would not have come from a 250-pound assailant—whom the defense characterized as a “raging bull”—in an uncontrolled fit of pure passion. Instead, he hypothesized, Kevin finally slashed Johnathon’s throat “because he had decided it was time for his younger brother to die, completing the first phase of the plan to kill his family.” The same plan the boys had detailed to Ashley less than an hour earlier.

  Goody asked the jury to consider the taped conversation once again, especially how freely and easily the boys talked about the plan to murder Kevin’s family. He told them that “it flowed completely naturally” because it was a real plan, not some fantasy made up just to impress Ashley.

  Goody also reminded the court of how the boys had ransacked the house, not just making a terrible mess and damaging property, but stealing cash, identification and credit cards, which they intended to use. Why would they have done this with Ralston expected home at any minute, unless “he was not going to remain alive to tell anyone?”

  After he finished, Justice Watt charged the jury to come up with a verdict. He reminded them that they were only to decide on the guilt of the boys in reference to the first-degree murder charge in the death of Johnathon and the attempted murder charge against Kevin and Pierre resulting from the attack on Ralston. And he warned them not to let the boys’ self-centered personalities and disregard for the property of others influence their decision.

  After the jury left, Watt heard from one more witness. Sarah (not her real name) is the mother of Sean, Johnathon’s best friend. She knew Johnathon very well and noticed that he was acting a bit stranger than usual about ten days before he was killed. When she asked what was wrong, he said he was worried about his mother. “He said, ‘She’s been having a really hard time with my brother,’” Sarah told the court.

  She knew that Kevin had been doing very poorly in school, so she told Johnathon that being a teenager is tough and that he’d grow out of the phase he was in. She assured Johnathon that his big brother loved him.

  “No, he hates me,” Johnathon told her. “He thinks he’s the devil . . . he wants to kill me.’”

  She assumed that Kevin and he had had a fight and it had gotten a bit rough for the younger, much smaller brother. She did her best to convince him that his brother didn’t want to harm him.

  His response shocked her. Johnathon looked at her, she testified, and said: “You don’t know my brother, he’s evil.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Truth About Pretty Girls

  Reporter Joseph Brean was not disappointed by the trial. He’d never covered a murder case before, and this one was a classic. It had young love, sibling rivalry, the Internet and vampires. In various ways, it pitted rich against poor, black against white and children against their parents. It featured a star witness so attractive and composed that she looked like she’d just walked off a movie set, who took it upon herself to try to save the day after three brutish, self-interested young thugs bragged about plans to kill an entire family and to take out their violent frustrations on the public at large. If ever there was a case where a young reporter could make a name for himself, this was it.

  As an added bonus, Brean was huddling with some of the best in the business. He was covering the case for the National Post, and that put him in a group with Vivian Song from The Toronto Sun, Peter Small from The Toronto Star and Christie Blatchford from The Globe & Mail. Brean did his best to learn from them all and was particularly impressed with Blatchford, whose work he had read for years and always appreciated. That they were all friendly and helpful to a young reporter like him was a pleasant surprise.

  But not everyone was as gracious. Many people involved with the case made it obvious they considered Brean the last reporter in line when they were giving out information. Not only was he young—in his late twenties—but his inexperience with the court process and the people involved sometimes showed.

  And he worked for the Post. Although the Post is an influential paper, especially when it comes to business, there are some people in Toronto who consider it something like the foreign press, even though it’s based in suburban Toronto. The Post is new to the scene, having been founded in 1998, and drew much ire from the Toronto establishment in its infancy because much-reviled media baron Conrad Black said he started it as a conservative voice to counter what he saw as the liberal bias of the Star and the Globe. Even the Sun was insulted, as they considered the Post’s job description already filled by their sometimes outrageous tabloid.

  To do the job well, Brean realized he would have to work harder and to be more innovative than the others. One of the first things he did was get to know Ashley. She was clearly the key to understanding the case. Without her, it was nothing more than three pointless thugs sitting around a house until one went crazy and shredded his little brother. Ashley, the beautiful rich girl mixed up with them, was what made the case interesting. She added drama, intrigue and sex appeal. And he wasn’t the only one who thought so. After Ashley’s testimony, Blatchford wrote that she had “impeccable instincts, an unwavering sense of what is right and the courage to act,” and, in her column, called Ashley “a force for goodness.”

  Brean saw his break one day when he was standing behind Ashley in line at the court’s coffee shop. She was fumbling for change, so he told the cashier he’d pay for her Coke along with his coffee. Ashley accepted, turned to thank Brean and flashed him a warm, welcoming smile.

  After that initial meeting, Brean made an effort to talk with Ashley every day. They became friends of a sort and Brean did his best to keep the conversation light. He scored some points with her when he nicknamed her “Jackpot,” a reference to a remark by Tim’s lawyer, David McCaskill, who said that Tim had “hit the jackpot” when a girl so obviously superior to him agreed to go out with him. They talked about some of the things they had in common—Brean had grown up in the same area as Ashley and had even taken the same city bus to school, although about a decade earlier. He would bring up Tim and she would sigh and complain about him, often pointing out which parts of his testimony she claimed were “bullshit.”

  The pair became so close that some parties close to the trial began to jokingly accuse Brean of “coming on” to the girl, and the other reporters even started calling her his “little girlfriend.” It didn’t bother him. Now his youth was working for him, rather than against him. His good looks didn’t hurt, either. And he was finding out things from her that nobody else could.

  When her testimony was finished, Ashley came by to say good-bye to Brean. She told him that she was going to Quebec on a ski vacation and that she would
n’t come back until after the verdict. He wished her well and promised to keep her up to date on the case.

  After she left, something about her stuck with Brean. In an attempt to prove that she was into the same vampire fantasies as Tim and that she actually would have been impressed by his plan to murder and his offer of human blood, McCaskill had asked her why her e-mail address was biteforblood@hotmail.com. It seemed less like the kind of name a sweet, innocent girl like she seemed to be on the stand would pick and more like the kind of name preferred by someone like Tim. Since all of the testimony up until that point had indicated that Kevin, and Kevin alone, killed Johnathon, the only real tie Tim and Pierre had to the murder was the telephone call. If he could prove that Ashley was the kind of girl who could be wooed by promises of mass murder and offers of human blood to drink, maybe he could convince the jury that the call really was just a coincidence. That Tim and Pierre were nothing but big talkers, unaware that their friend Kevin was actually taking everything they said quite seriously.

  But it became something of a non-event at the time. Ashley told the court the e-mail address was inspired by the name of a local band she liked. It didn’t mean anything to her and the court appeared to accept it as just another example of Ashley finding herself in the middle of a place and time in which silly young men like to use the concept of pretend violence to show how cool they are.

  But Brean couldn’t stop thinking about it. He remembered talking with Ashley about Tim’s testimony that he drank her blood after she cut herself and that she said that it totally grossed her out. She was pretty vehement about it. So why would a girl dead set against drinking blood call herself “biteforblood” on the Internet? Brean knew that e-mail addresses are a key part of a teenager’s identity and that they often go to agonizing lengths to pick the perfect one. Surely someone as intelligent and well read as Ashley could come up with something more creative (and more accurate) than “biteforblood.” They must have been one hell of a band.