In the first Johnathon trial, the Internet was barely mentioned before it caused a mistrial. McCaskill did ask Ashley about her “Biteforblood” e-mail address, but when she told him it was the name of a band, he accepted her answer without question. He didn’t have a choice, because he didn’t have any way to challenge her word.
After Brean broke his story, Lenzin told the judge that he had conducted a Yahoo search of Ashley’s name, but it revealed to him nothing of importance.
Who knows how much crucial evidence in this case—and countless others—was missed because the people in charge of finding the truth don’t know where or how to look for it?
While many parents will claim they monitor their children’s Internet activities closely—Ashley’s said they did—it’s not all that realistic an assertion. Younger people just understand the Net better and are quicker to adapt when they have to. They have developed acronyms like CD9 (code 9, parents are around), KPC (keeping parents clueless) and POS (parent reading over my shoulder) to prevent their parents from knowing what they are doing. It’s closer to the truth to say that parents have no clue what their children are seeing and posting online.
This lack of parental or official oversight has turned much of the Net into a sort of Lord of the Flies scenario where young people largely rule themselves. Want to see the effects? Get an account on VampireFreaks.com and check out some of the profiles closed to non-members.
What all the young people involved in this case had in common other than the Internet is a strong sense of entitlement.
It became very obvious in the second trial when Lindsay had a run-in with Hank Goody. She and some of the other girls started listening to their iPods in court when the subject matter didn’t interest them. At first, everybody in the court ignored it—pretended it wasn’t happening—but when Lindsay started singing along, it was just too much. A number of court officers told her to stop. She refused. Eventually, Goody himself told her to stop. She refused again. Goody then told her that if she didn’t lose the iPod, she would be banned from the courtroom. Lindsay exploded, threw something of a tantrum and told Goody that he couldn’t ban her from the courtroom. She was a citizen and she had a right to be there. Goody banned her from the courtroom.
They all had that same sense of entitlement. Kevin clearly felt it was his right to torture and then kill his younger brother because the world had not been fair to him. Tim considered himself entitled to Ashley’s affections despite her not considering him worthy of them. Even Gabriel—though bitter, lonely and clearly stupid—thought he was in a position to mentor Kevin and to tell the whole world what it was doing wrong. Sadly and predictably, he exorcised his own inadequacies at the expense of those who had different ancestors than he did.
And it wasn’t just the disadvantaged, the losers. Ashley had it all. She was beautiful, rich, intelligent, talented and charismatic. And Ashley felt that she—apparently—was perfectly within her rights to lie under oath as a star witness in a brutal murder case in order to get the use diet she wanted.
That all-pervading sense of doing what’s right for oneself no matter the situation that tied them all together isn’t a psychological malady or disorder, it’s adolescence.
But when this particular group of adolescents—admittedly more malevolent and less disciplined than most—coalesced, it ignited the fuse on a series of events that culminated in the horrific death of Johnathon Madden.
It kind of makes you wonder who’s to blame. Obviously Kevin killed his little brother, but Tim and Pierre did encourage his outrageously destructive behavior that day. Ashley praised his murderous plan with her accepting phrase “good job.” Joanne and Ralston embittered Kevin by lavishing affection on his brother and showing little but scorn for him. Even if you don’t believe Ralston abused Kevin, he did keep pushing his buttons and punishing him in a way that only made his bubbling anger even worse. Kevin’s best friend Alex and his girlfriend Katie betrayed him not just by hooking up, but by flaunting it in his face.
Gabriel amplified and helped focus Kevin’s hatreds, and lectured him on the “beauty of death.” Kevin’s teachers, principals and counselors decided to pass him onto one another like the proverbial hot potato, rather than take the responsibility to deal with his problems or remove him from their system. The healthcare professionals who saw him before the murder failed to recognize how disturbed and potentially violent he really was, or if they did, they failed to do anything about it.
While I sincerely doubt too many of them will share the blame, I’m sure at least some of them will share the guilt.
When students went back to class at Rosedale Heights School of the Arts after the holiday break in January 2008, grief cousellors went with them. The students there were grieving over another murder, one that hit even closer to home than Johnathon’s.
Stefanie Rengel was a cute, vivacious 14-year-old in ninth grade. She was well known for her intelligence, good marks in school and kindness. She dyed her hair dark and streaky, wore black a lot and had a ring in her nose, but she was no Goth. “More like a hippie chick,” a friend of hers told me, quick to point out that there was nothing “dark about her soul,” that she was upbeat, caring and optimistic.
Although the case is still before the courts, her friends, neighbors and police tell a remarkably consistent story. On the afternoon of January 1, Stefanie was at home relaxing when she answered the door. The caller was Dave (not his real name), her ex-boyfriend. Stefanie and Dave had gone out together earlier that year and he was the first guy she’d ever really called her boyfriend. But there were some problems.
Dave was very insecure. He carried quite a bit of weight—always had—and was very sensitive about it. For various reasons, he was not popular with kids his own age (he was 17), so he tended to hang out with those much younger than he was. At first, Stefanie was impressed that an older guy would be so interested in her, but soon grew tired of his emotional immaturity and told him their relationship was over.
When he showed up at her door on New Year’s Day, my sources say, she was surprised to see him. But because he told her he had something important to talk about, she agreed to go for a walk with him.
Not far from home, police allege, Dave stabbed Stefanie repeatedly in the abdomen, then left her desperately clinging to life in a snowbank.
A friend of hers, who may have witnessed the attack, called 911. Because of the darkness, snow and the fact that Stefanie was still ambulatory for some time after the stabbing, it took hours to find her. She was eventually discovered near the intersection of Northdale Boulevard and Hollinger Road, not far from her house, by what newspapers described as “an off-duty cop.” He then called an ambulance, and she was rushed to a nearby hospital and pronounced dead on arrival.
Ordinarily, the details of a case like this would never be released to the media—after all, the victim was 14 and the alleged murderer 17. But there were some extenuating circumstances at play in this one.
Perhaps the most important one came as a result of Stefanie’s popularity and her friends’ familiarity with the Internet. Within hours of her death, postings all over the Internet, mainly Facebook, not only announced her death, but named the suspect and accused a conspirator, among other details. The posts, literally hundreds of them, alleged that Dave’s new girlfriend, Diana (not her real name), had pressured him to kill Stefanie because she was suspicious that he still loved her and because seeing Stefanie every day at school made her jealous. Both David and Diana were arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Another mitigating circumstance was that her parents asked the court to make some details of the case public, including Stefanie’s name. While it’s not uncommon for parents to make such a request, it’s not often granted. But the court had reason to believe that Stefanie’s parents knew what they were doing—they were both cops. In fact, not only were both of her biological parents cops, but so were both of the people they married after they split up. Stefanie lived with he
r mother and stepfather, and they were no strangers to homicide. Her mother, Patricia Hung, became known to many in Toronto in July 2004 when she heroically tried to save the life of four-year-old Scarlett Chen, who was murdered by her mother. Stefanie’s stepfather was James Hung, who coincidentally had led the ETF assaults on 90 Dawes and Tim Ferriman’s place. It was later revealed that her stepfather was the off-duty officer who found her near-lifeless body, about three blocks from where Kevin Madden and Pierre were arrested for Johnathon’s murder.
In preliminary hearings, Diana’s defense strategy has been to maintain that since she wasn’t present at the attack, she is not guilty of the murder. Her lawyer, Marshall Sack, told Justice David McCombs that she is a “straight-A” student and a “very bright young lady.” He answered the charge that she pressured David into killing Stefanie by maintaining that his client was misinterpreted by a disturbed and overzealous young man. “My client is alleged to have indicated at some point in time that she wanted the deceased not to be alive. Beyond that, I see nothing, and that’s not first-degree murder,” he said. “All of us, all of us in our daily lives express feelings, but very few of us know something’s going to happen. There’s no indication in any of the material that my client, for want of a better expression, put this young man up to this.”
When he requested bail for her, Sack pointed out that Diana had been compelled to spend her 16th birthday at Syl Apps. Crown Attorney countered that argument by saying: “Parents would prefer their children not go there [Syl Apps] . . . but parents would also prefer their children would not be in the grave.”
She was denied bail.
The Rengel case is pertinent to the Johnathon murder not because of its many similarities and co-incidences, but because of its differences. Just 25 months earlier, when Kevin, Tim and Pierre went to trial, what could be gathered from the Internet was considered largely inconsequential to a murder case. Only when it was introduced as inarguably important evidence, did anyone involved give it any credence—and even then, many were still reluctant.
That was 2005; things are different in 2008. Soon after Stefanie’s body was found, hundreds of people were discussing the case online. Almost all of them posted evidence that was contrary to the Youth Criminal Justice Act and many complained about the existence of the Act itself. Not only did the posters go unpunished for breaking the law, they accomplished something they wanted—many details of the case were made public.
Justice McCombs has clearly learned to respect the power of the Internet after his experience with the first Johnathon trial. An argument could be made that his hand was forced by the Internet again. What good would it do to prevent the mainstream media from publishing the details of the case when hundreds of bloggers and other individuals are already doing so? It’s not realistic to think that all of them could be tracked down through their ISPs. It’s possible, but it would cost millions, take a long time and, most likely, yield little of value in court. While nothing is ever truly anonymous online, the chances of getting punished for what you say or do are very slim, and that degree of unaccountability is made exponentially more sure if you are part of a large group.
Just as the Internet played a key role in determining the outcome of the Johnathon case, so it has already changed the Rengel case and perhaps endangered a law many disagree with. This successful public defiance of an unpopular law through the power of the Internet won’t go unnoticed among politicians, the judiciary and others who set policy. While it would take more than the found blogs of a star witness or the defiant postings of a few hundred grief-striken Torontonians to change public policy, what these cases show is that the Internet is a powerful force.
The era in which the Internet and other forms of electronic communication are commonplace and vital is clearly well underway. But the era in which those forms of communication are recognized as being of the same value as more traditional media is just dawning. Those who fail to acknowledge it—as many did in the Johnathon case—do so at their own peril.
Plates
Johnathon Madden’s sixth-grade school portrait, taken shortly before he died. At 12 years old, Johnathon was about five feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds.
Kevin and Johnathon Madden lived with their mother, stepfather and another family member at 90 Dawes in Toronto’s east end. The boys shared a bedroom behind the window on the upper left.
The backyard of 90 Dawes. The window on the right is where Kevin confronted his stepfather, Ralston Champagnie, before letting him in the house.
Ashley and Pierre both attended Rosedale Heights School for the Arts.
After the murder, Kevin and Pierre hid and then spent the night in nearby Taylor Creek ravine. They emerged from the other end of the park the following morning.
Both Kevin and his friend Pierre were arrested at the corner of Coxwell Avenue and O’Connor Drive, not far from the murder scene. Identified by a concerned commuter, the boys were arrested by separate sets of police officers at about the same time.
The jeans that Ralston struggled out of were still in front of 90 Dawes the day after the murder. The police left them and other evidence in place until forensics experts finished their investigation of the crime scene.
The presence of police and emergency vehicles at 90 Dawes drew attention from people in the neighborhood, especially school-age children—many of whom were familiar with Johnathon, Kevin or both.
Kevin’s mugshot. After a year in custody, he appeared in court much trimmer, but his behavior was still very immature.
Tim’s mugshot. He was arrested at home while Kevin and Pierre were still hiding out.
Tim Ferriman was held at the Syl Apps Youth Centre in Oakville, Ontario, not far from Toronto. Kevin, however, was held at Sprucedale Youth Centre, a more secure facility about 90 miles away in Simcoe, Ontario.
Investigators found three potential murder weapons at 90 Dawes. Though much of the testimony involved the green-handled butcher knife (bottom), at least one expert claimed that the meat cleaver—with its distinctive notch—must have been involved.
Reporter Joseph Brean discovered Ashley’s blogs and wrote about them in a front-page article for the National Post. His revelations forced a second trial.
Robert Nuttall defended Kevin in both trials. He argued that the brutality of the attack indicated that Kevin was not in control of his actions at the time.
Dennis Lenzin represented Pierre in both trials. He described his client as “shy” and “non-confrontational,” claims that were backed up by witnesses and Pierre’s behavior in custody and in court.
Detective Sergeant Terry Wark was the lead investigator in what the media called the “Jonathan” case. After the second trial, Wark spoke on behalf of Joanne and Ralston.
After the verdict came down in the second trial, Wark drove Joanne home. It was 27 months after the murder and not long before what would have been Johnathon’s 15th birthday.
Copyright
Rage: The True Story of a Sibling Murder
Copyright © 2008 by Jerry Langton
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Originally published by John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd. in both print and EPub editions: 2008
First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in this EPub edition: 2013
First HarperCollins Publishers Ltd EPub Edition OCTOBER 2013 ISBN: 9781443430357
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