Rage

by Jerry Langton

  But while Gabriel was appalled at Kevin’s stories about Ralston that were perhaps fanciful, he considered Kevin’s torture of Johnathon to be par for the course:

  Surely they had a violent relationship. I can vividly recollect Kevin venturing home from school in grade 6, only to encounter his brother passively watching television. Kevin then forcefully smashed his brother’s head against a solid wooden chair. Then grasped the heels of his brother and whorled him almost majestically in circles. Then to let go and watch his 90 lbs brother collide with the wall. Though it was peculiar, despite such unprovoked occurences of irrelevant violence, Kevin never spoke of his brother in any manner.

  Then Gabriel began to portray himself as a teacher molding the unformed personality of his friend. Looking to channel his “cognitive hate,” Gabriel introduced Kevin to “National Socialism”—Nazism. Whether his teachings inspired it or not, Gabriel noted that Kevin espoused a racist philosophy:

  With his father being black this further complicated family life. To which I now assume begun the most atrocious moments of Kevin’s life. Upon venturing to school after being beaten at home, he would frequently engage in fights with all students. Even when the vast forces of blacks encumbered me, Kevin would stand prominently and mutter racial provocative slurs.

  Gabriel said that although Kevin claimed to be a Goth, “it was merely an instrument to shield his fear.” He went on to blame Kevin’s hatreds on the fire (which wiped out Kevin’s beloved collection of Tom Clancy books), Katie (who Gabriel incorrectly said had had him thrown in jail), his “stepfather a black ex convict” and society in general. These factors, along with his own guidance, he said, drove Kevin to Nazism.

  In the six months or so after the fire, Kevin would visit Gabriel and listen to his lectures about “the beauties of death” and other ideas he had.

  Then Gabriel’s e-mail addressed the murder:

  Now as for Kevin’s two associates, Pierre and Tim. I was vaguely acquainted with them, they were more so substitutes for myself. I suppose Kevin felt I had progressed beyond ignorant hatred and devolved my own intellectual beliefs. Thus Kevin and I spoke on a time-to-time basis. satisfied with my prodigy Kevin, i revised my beliefs and continued to incline intellectually. Though I now realize it was to late for him. With his uncouth mother, his abusive step[father], his mentally challenged brother, Kevin could not endure. And so he rejected the system fucking him. He said no, i will not let life lie to me. I will not be encumbered by beliefs, motives and emotions I forbid. And with this contempt Kevin acted, and thus his brother he demised.

  He closed with a recollection of the last time he had seen the boy he believed was his protégé. About two weeks before Johnathon’s death, Kevin called Gabriel and asked him to help him pick out a knife. They went downtown together and Gabriel recommended that Kevin buy a small Swiss Army-style knife, which was not connected with Johnathon’s death.

  Aware that he had once again uncovered relevant evidence, Brean wrote a story about Kevin’s Nazi past for the Post. It didn’t run.

  When Detective Sergeant Terry Wark, head of the murder investigation, found out about Gabriel, he interviewed him. He wasn’t impressed. Neither, apparently, was Hank Goody, head of the prosecution, because Gabriel never spoke in or was mentioned in court. I asked Wark, an intelligent man of few, impeccably chosen words, why not.

  “Guy was a total wing nut,” he said.

  David McCaskill quit as Tim’s lawyer. In fact, he left criminal law altogether and took a job with the Ontario Ministry of Labour. In his place, John Dennis filed a bid for bail on Tim’s behalf. David North, working with Dennis Lenzin on Pierre’s defense, also filed for his client.

  At a hearing on July 8, 2005, the details of the crime and the involvement of Tim and Pierre were presented before Superior Court Judge Mary Lou Benotto, and Dennis could tell which way things were going. He withdrew Tim’s request. North held on until the end. Benotto denied Pierre bail.

  The second trial began November 15, 2005, when a new judge, Justice David McCombs, told 230 prospective jurors not to be influenced by the fact that the first trial ended in a mistrial.

  About three weeks later, the first witness took the stand. It was Ashley, and she was under a very different kind of scrutiny than the last time.

  She told her story much as she had the first time, but without as much flair. Her parents were not present. Ashley admitted that she had gone out with Tim, but was trying to dump him.

  Goody asked why she was trying to break off their relationship.

  Ashley replied that Tim had told her that he killed people in the Don Valley and drank their blood.

  Goody asked her how that made her feel.

  She said she was “weirded out.”

  She testified that Tim called her on November 25, 2003 from Kevin’s house and told her of a murder plot. She was so distraught that she asked her friends for help, ignoring her parents and the police. She and her friends then taped a second call in which Tim, Pierre and Kevin—to varying degrees—boasted that they would kill Kevin’s family. Her friends then called police, gave them the tape and she found out Johnathon was dead later that night.

  Goody played the tape to a hushed jury.

  But under cross-examination, John Dennis, Tim’s new lawyer, introduced Ashley’s online persona of Biteforblood. He asked her to confirm that it was the name of her profile at VampireFreaks.com and that she posted semi-nude photos of herself on the site and expressed an interest in “blood” and “pain.” She acknowledged that it was hers.

  He asked her if she had posted “Blood is good . . . both flowing and . . . yum” on her profile at Xanga.com. She admitted that she had.

  Dennis asked her why she had picked the name “Biteforblood.” She said she knew of a band with that name and it sounded cool.

  “You disagree you employed the term ‘biteforblood’ because of an interest in vampirism?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I disagree with you,” she answered.

  Nobody called her a “force for goodness” that day.

  After the rest of the witnesses, including Ralston, delivered pretty much the same testimony they had in the first trial, Nuttall delivered his closing argument on Kevin’s behalf on February 17. As in the previous trial, he admitted that Kevin, and Kevin alone, killed Johnathon. And again he argued that the appropriate charge should be manslaughter, not murder, because the stabbing wasn’t planned, but had occurred during a fit of rage. “Kevin went berserk,” he told the jury. And, as before, he indicated that the ferocity of the attack proved his hypothesis. “The act speaks for itself,” he lawyer said. “He went on and on and on stabbing him.”

  As for the attack on Ralston, Nuttall attributed it to “ongoing tensions” between the two of them, which he said “sparked a fight.” If he had planned to kill his stepfather, as the Crown claimed, why didn’t he use one of the knives or the meat cleaver, both of which were handy, instead of his fists?

  Goody asked the jury to remember the tape. He reminded them that Kevin had told Ashley that he had planned to kill his entire family one by one as they returned home. When Johnathon got home, Kevin almost immediately murdered him. And when Ralston came in later, Kevin attacked him quickly, with intent to kill. “He said exactly what he was planning and intended to do,” Goody said. He also told them that Kevin’s being diagnosed with Intermittent Explosive Disorder did nothing to change that.

  Dennis and Lenzin argued that Tim and Pierre were nothing more than witnesses to Kevin’s fit of rage. The call, they said, was simply Tim’s only way to try to win Ashley back. He was a young man in love; he was desperate. She was so much prettier, richer, more popular and intelligent than him, he knew he had to work hard. He decided to appeal to the one thing he knew she loved—blood—and offered it to her. Of course, these were just idle boasts, like his claims of murdering passersby in the Don Valley. He had no idea Kevin would actually go through with it.

  As for Pierre, he was sim
ply going along for the ride. He was trying to help his new buddy Tim get back in good standing with his obviously kinky girlfriend.

  Goody argued that the call and the attacks were just too much of a coincidence. Clearly, they had cooked up a plan to murder Kevin’s family, and he had gone through with it. “All were in the house, together, waiting,” he reminded them, and all three, he argued, were guilty.

  On the fifth day of deliberations—February 28, 2006—the jury had come to a decision. The three young men rose as the jurors filed in. The foreman read the verdict. Kevin was found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Johnathon and guilty in the charge of attempted murder against Ralston. Tim was guilty of manslaughter in the death of Johnathon. Pierre was found not guilty in the death of Johnathon and not guilty of the attempted murder of Ralston.

  The courtroom was silent until McCombs looked at Pierre and told him: “You are free to leave the box.” Stunned, Pierre walked away from the box, past the swinging door into the gallery and then ran into the arms of his mother, father and brother.

  Tim began to cry as the court officers handcuffed him and Kevin, preparing to take them away again. Joanne could be heard crying as well while Kevin and Tim were led out of the room.

  Outside the court, Pierre and his family rushed into a waiting minivan and left. They didn’t make any comment to the herd of reporters who had followed them out. Instead, Lenzin spoke on their behalf.

  He thanked the jury for their wise decision. “The only way I can interpret this verdict is that the jury came to the conclusion that that phone call did not indicate a serious plan,” he said. Beaming, he told The Toronto Star’s Peter Small, “I have never in my life been so pleased to reunite a young man with his family.”

  When Small asked him why the family had left so quickly and without comment, Lenzin replied, “I think he wants to sit down with his mom and dad and eat something other than institution food.”

  After conferring with his client, John Dennis came out to the street to tell reporters that, despite the streams of tears running down his face, Tim was happy with the verdict. “His emotions have always been very close to the surface during this whole trial,” he said, adding that watching Kevin kill his little brother “traumatized” Tim and that he felt deep remorse throughout the trial. Dennis summed up Tim’s actions in the killing by saying, “He was at the wrong place at the wrong time.” When asked why his client received a manslaughter conviction despite the fact Kevin had admitted to being solely responsible for the killing, Dennis blamed it on the e-mail Tim sent Ashley in which he told her he gave Kevin the knife, although Tim had twice denied that particular detail in court.

  Nuttall came out last and spoke for Kevin. He said that the jury found him “fully responsible” for Johnathon’s death. When asked why he thought the jury did not take into account the Intermittent Explosive Disorder diagnosis, he said that they probably did, but must have felt that: “It wasn’t sufficient rage to deprive him of the ability to attend what he was doing or plan and deliberate.”

  He also expressed a desire to see Kevin sentenced to a youth facility, so that he could have a chance to get the psychological help he needs.

  Wark spoke for Joanne and Ralston. He said that this was just one point in a long and trying process that had taken a huge emotional toll on all of them, but especially Joanne. “She’s lost two sons, one being the victim, one being the accused,” he said. “God forbid that any one of us should be in that position.” A reporter asked about Joanne’s relationship with Kevin, noting that the two rarely even glanced at one another during either trial. Wark denied that she was ignoring Kevin. “She’s still his mother,” he reminded the media.

  While Kevin’s guilt was now clearly established, his sentence was anything but. If McCombs decided Kevin should be sentenced as an adult, the minimum sentence he would receive would be life in prison with no chance at parole for the first 10 years. But if he was deemed a young offender, the maximum he could receive would be six years in a juvenile facility and four in community supervision.

  Michelle Mandel, a columnist for The Toronto Sun, later learned that the first thing Kevin did when he returned to Sprucedale was to go for a swim in the facility’s pool. She surmised that he needed to calm his nerves.

  CHAPTER 8

  Big Enough to Know Better?

  It was May when the hearings to determine sentencing began. Crown Attorney Anna Tenhouse told the court that the drawings discovered in Kevin’s backpack were a good indicator of how disturbed he really was. She described them as featuring “rather scary figures full of knives and using knives.”

  Nuttall countered that he considered the drawings to be “fairly benign” and explained that Kevin had made them at a troubled time before the murder in an effort to be accepted into an art school like his friend Pierre had been. He suggested that Kevin be given an opportunity to explain the drawings in court.

  Justice McCombs disagreed. Instead, he wanted the drawings to be part of the evidence handed over to the psychiatric professionals who would be examining Kevin and Tim for the next month. He also took a moment to scold both teams for how long it had taken them to assemble their evidence for the sentencing round. McCombs reminded them of how emotional Joanne had been throughout the trial and that every moment it dragged on only made it more painful for her.

  It was the beginning of September before Ian Swayze, a forensic psychiatrist from Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, began to testify on his assessment of Kevin’s psyche. The doctor had been before McCombs once before, in June, to ask for sufficient funding and resources to carry out the task. McCombs quickly agreed.

  After the assessment, Swayze painted a very disturbing psychological portrait of Kevin—one somewhat at odds with the one Dominique Bourget had presented during the trial itself. He described the young man—now 19—as a “smoldering volcano” and said: “He has a serious and pervasive personality disorder. We are dealing with a gentleman who requires, really, a multiple therapeutic intervention over a protracted period of time.”

  Calling Kevin’s “the most serious case, personally and professionally, that I have been involved with,” Swayze described the teen as a “psychopath,” which he explained is a person without “conscience, empathy and remorse.” He said the condition is also “stubbornly resistant to treatment.”

  Tenhouse asked Swayze how much Kevin had progressed since killing his little brother almost three years ago.

  “I would suggest that Kevin is likely very close to being the same individual as the day he was detained,” he said. “So we are starting from square one.”

  The next witness was less strident in his opinion of Kevin’s illness. Marc Levine, a counselor at the Sprucedale Youth Centre where Kevin was being held, testified that Kevin had actually shown him some remorse in custody, once telling him that Johnathon “didn’t deserve to die because he was the most innocent in the family.”

  Nuttall then asked him if he thought Kevin was making any progress. Levine said that Kevin himself seemed to think so. When Levine asked him if he was a risk to the community, Kevin said, “By the time I am finished my sentence, I won’t be.” Levine also testified that Kevin expressed a desire to stay in the juvenile facility—rather than be sent to an adult prison—“in order to achieve his goals.”

  Under cross-examination, Swayze refuted what Levine gave as Kevin’s self-description. When asked what he thought of what the counselor said about Kevin, he answered, “My first reaction is surprise, because it’s different from my direct knowledge of him.” He reiterated his opinion that Kevin was a psychopath, almost certainly incurable and absolutely without the ability to feel either guilt or remorse. Clearly, Swayze thought Kevin was playing Levine and that if he really believed him, Levine was making a dangerous mistake.

  Nuttall then read the court a series of affidavits from Sprucedale employees who generally described Kevin as polite and co-operative in custody.

&nbs
p; Swayze countered that he wasn’t surprised at all. He said that psychopaths are often the best-behaved prisoners because they know how to manipulate people to get what they want. Kevin really wanted to stay in Sprucedale for six years, rather than face adult prison for at least 10 years and more likely the rest of his life, so Swayze said he was of the opinion that Kevin was affecting remorse to fool his keepers at Sprucedale into thinking he was making psychological progress.

  When Levine was brought back to the stand, much of what he said backed up what Swayze had said. He said that Kevin had applied for an intensive behavioral rehabilitation program at Sprucedale, but was denied “because of his emotional detachment and general lack of remorse.”

  When asked his own opinion, Levine asserted that he felt Kevin was more suited to an adult prison than a youth facility. One of the reasons he gave was that he would be much older than most of the other inmates at any facility and that could make him liable to bully them.

  When Swayze was asked his opinion of Tim, he said he should receive psychiatric treatment for two years in jail followed by at least three years of close supervision in the community. He described Tim as having made significant progress in custody, though he did once try to commit suicide by hanging himself.

  Dennis asked Swayze what disorder Tim had. Swayze said he didn’t know. Then, Dennis asked, how did he know what sentence was best to help him?

  About a week later, McCombs heard the victim impact statements. The first to go was Joanne. She said:

  I really don’t know where to start to explain the depth of my pain I have been feeling for the past 2 1/2ars. My two sons were the reason I enjoyed life.

  Kevin slowly began to withdraw from our family and stopped wanting to be involved in family activities and outings, not sure if that was due to his age or the passing of his Nana [grandmother].