Death's Shadow

by Jon Wells

  Carl continued. He told Shane that he went to this guy’s apartment and noticed a white van outside the building. He walked up the stairs, had a baseball bat. A fridge blocked the door from the inside, but he was able to get it open. Inside, he saw this guy on his knees, beside a table. Carl hit him in the head with the bat. And again. He heard gurgling sounds. Carl knew it was serious. And then another person came in the room. A woman. Carl’s voice grew sharper telling the story, almost angry.

  “She wasn’t supposed to be there, Shane,” he said, his body shaking. “I knew what I had to do.”

  Shane Mosher outside the rehab centre where he met Carl Hall.

  Ron Albertson, Hamilton Spectator.

  Carl asked Shane not to tell his story to anyone. And he said that he was scared. Not of the police, but that karma would get him. That’s why he kept his door propped open at night in the Holmes House rehab centre, he said: because he was scared of what might happen to him behind closed doors.

  Shane kept his expression calm, but inside he was terrified. A killer, a double murderer — and maybe he had killed more than two people, he thought — was sitting on his bed, and had confided in him. What was he supposed to do? Carl left his room and walked back down the hall. Shane did not sleep all night. He made a decision.

  The next morning, Friday, August 24, he packed his suitcase, waited for Shannon to pick him up to go home for the weekend. He was scheduled to resume rehab at the centre on Monday. Shane stood at the front door. Carl walked up to him, looked at the suitcase.

  “Are you coming back?” he asked.

  “Sure, Carl. I’ll see you Sunday night,” Shane said, trying to keep his voice friendly. Then Shane looked down at his own suitcase and saw it, right there on the tag: SHANE MOSHER. Along with his name, there was also his phone number, his family address in Brantford. Right there for Carl to see.

  Shannon’s car pulled up and Shane moved outside with his bag. She walked up the sidewalk to greet him, along with Riley. They were bathed in sunshine, yet there was a chill in the air.

  Shane could feel himself shivering with fear, blood draining from his face. He looked back over his shoulder. There was Carl, on the veranda, looking down at his wife and child, this evil presence having now entered his family’s life. And Shane had let it in. He was very quiet in the car as Shannon drove back to Brantford. Shannon, who had been heartened by her husband’s progress in rehab for his crack addiction, knew something was up. Shane looked like he hadn’t slept, was very pale.

  Finally, he spoke. “I’m not going back,” he said.

  — 12 —

  Hate Machine

  Detective Don Forgan had no fresh leads in the double homicide and it was getting to him. The killer had been living free for 16 months. While the case remained ongoing, it was no longer on the front burner for the Major Crime Unit. He was ordered to move the Clark/Del Sordo file boxes out of the homicide office project room and into a storage area. Forgan met with Charlisa’s father, Al Clark, who had been shattered by his daughter’s death. It was a courtesy call, Forgan had no news to pass along. He continued receiving calls from the mothers, Ruth Del Sordo and Sue Ross, both seeking updates and offering suggestions for the investigation. Were police looking in the right places, they asked? Had they looked hard enough at Charlisa’s ex as the suspect?

  Forgan had planned to arrange a new polygraph for the ex, and he was still pushing for Pat’s father, Flavio, to take the test as well. He even wondered about having Eugene sit with a hypnotist to see what other details he could remember from the night of the murders. There seemed no other avenues to pursue. He was getting tapped by his senior officers to work other cases, including revisiting the Sheryl Sheppard cold case, the first of his career in homicide, which still remained cold.

  At that same time, Detective Dave Place was revisiting key witnesses in the Jackie McLean investigation. On October 25 Place interviewed a woman who had worked as a waitress at Big Lisa’s bar on King East. Two months had passed since the murder, but she had good recall on details from Jackie’s last night alive. She remembered Barry Lane, the guy with the teardrop tattoos, who had sat with Jackie in the bar. And, she said, there was another. He was about 25 years old, around five foot nine, strawberry red hair, trimmed goatee, lots of freckles. He wore a white, ribbed shirt and a grey coat. He had introduced himself as Carl. So far in the investigation Place had heard no mention of anyone named Carl. She said that Carl sat with Jackie at the bar, asked if he could buy her a beer, but she had said no. Later, she had seen Jackie with both Carl and Barry. It looked like the men were trying to convince her to get them some crack.

  Back at the station, Place logged on to the Hamilton police mug shot retrieval system. He typed in the name Carl and the physical description. Up popped a name: Carl Ernest Hall. His last known address in Hamilton had been on Ferguson Avenue North. He was 27, sometimes known by the nickname “Reds.” He had several prior convictions, and an outstanding charge for an assault in 2000 in Hamilton against a girlfriend named Crystal.

  Lately, Carl had been causing trouble in Brantford, as well. On September 12 he was convicted in that city for uttering threats against a police officer and obstructing police. Place contacted the jail in Brantford. Carl was still incarcerated, but only for a couple more weeks on the Brantford charge. He had had one visitor: a woman named Lise, who wrote “friend” on the register.

  Place later learned that Carl was filing a guilty plea on the Hamilton assault charge. He knew the plea offered an opportunity, and called the assistant Crown attorney prosecuting the case. Place wanted the Crown to push hard to have the judge order Carl to give a DNA sample as part of the sentence. The judge granted the request.

  The importance of getting Carl’s DNA increased when Place received a call from the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto about a disturbing, and critical, piece of evidence that had been developed from the crime scene. A semen sample taken from Jackie McLean was determined to have been confined to the “high vaginal area.” The substance had not migrated. Place knew what that had to mean. Whoever had intercourse with her had done so on the loft floor of the apartment above the Sandbar, after she had been dragged up the stairs — when she had been either dead, or nearly so. Place believed that the one who deposited that semen had to be the killer.

  On October 30 the waitress from Big Lisa’s came to the station to view a photo lineup — a series of portraits that included the suspect, and others. She pointed to the picture of Carl Ernest Hall as the man she saw in the bar with Jackie.

  Meanwhile, Place worked to track down Carl’s ex-girlfriend, Crystal. He learned that at one time Crystal had worked at a fast-food place downtown in Hamilton. Place reached her on the phone. She was wary of police, didn’t want to get involved. He told her she was not in any trouble.

  “This is a murder investigation,” he said.

  “Oh, no, not Carl, no way — this is the one above the Sandbar, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Place wrote her words in his notebook. An interesting response. With little prompting she had specifically referenced a two-month old homicide, and was definitely not surprised they were looking for Carl.

  On November 5 he interviewed Crystal. She told Place that she had dated Carl for a few years, and that when he was high on crack, he would stay awake sometimes for two or three days, wired, paranoid.

  “God knows what that man is capable of,” she said.

  Their relationship had often been violent, she said. Carl had hit her, choked her; once he had stabbed her in the leg with a steak knife because she burned dinner. Crystal had responded to his attacks as well. She had punched him. Once she bit him on the leg, drawing blood. She said that Carl liked to rip her underwear before having sex. An interesting bit of detail, Place knew, given that the underwear of the victim had been ripped as well.

  “The time frame that I’m most interested in,” Place said, “is when you last saw Carl.”

  Crysta
l said that had been very early on August 20 — in the hours following Jackie’s murder — when they met at the Wesley Centre downtown. She could smell crack on him, and a woman’s perfume.

  “I said to him, ‘Well you’re obviously rocked up. You’re drunk and you smell.’”

  She tried to break up with him. He begged her not to; said he loved her, he could change.

  “He said that he did something bad, and I can’t leave him now.

  “I asked him, ‘What did you do?’

  Police surveillance video of Carl Hall with ex-girlfriend Crystal.

  Hamilton Police Service.

  “He said he couldn’t talk about it. He said he wanted to hitchhike out of the province. I said I wasn’t going; I told him, ‘You use your thumb and away you go.’”

  After she repeatedly refused to leave with him, Carl punched her and spit in her face.

  The interview with Place lasted an hour and a half. “Is there anything else that you can tell me, something I’ve forgotten to ask you or anything that’s come to mind?” he asked.

  “Whatever happens to him ... I will be there every court date to watch him go down,” she said. “And I will testify against him. I hate Carl Hall with a passion. I hope that he rots in hell.”

  Carl was looking good as a suspect in the detective’s book; he would look even better if his DNA matched semen from the crime scene — although Place knew that getting a sample processed through the National DNA Data Bank and then jumping through procedural hurdles to get a DNA warrant for a homicide investigation would take time.

  Place had to tighten the case, eliminate other suspects. He knew that he couldn’t be seen to have tunnel vision in the investigation. The murder was a circumstantial case; in court the defence could point to several men who had been with Jackie that night. One of those suspects was Barry Lane. Barry’s footprint in blood had been found in the Sandbar apartment, but Barry had said he had only viewed the body. More importantly his DNA did not match the semen found on the victim. And then there was the man named Ken, who had also been seen arguing with Jackie that night. Place learned that Ken had died two weeks after the murder, of an Oxycodone overdose.

  Carl had got into trouble in Brantford in the days following his release from rehab in Simcoe. He had met a girl in rehab; they had hooked up for a while — all good, he reflected — but then he went and shot off his mouth to the local cops in Brantford. Not very smart, he reflected later. Got 45 days dead time on that one.

  After getting transferred from Brantford to Hamilton to be sentenced on the assault charge against Crystal, he was moved to a prison in Penetanguishene, an hour north of Barrie, to serve a five-month sentence. He figured: just do the time and get out. And as for other skeletons in his closet, Carl figured he was okay. The cops had shown no indication they had anything on him for the murders. In Penetang he told a couple of inmates that he was trying to lie low, avoid getting tagged for “a high-profile break and enter in Hamilton.”

  In jail he ripped off a thousand push-ups a day. At five foot eight, he bulked up to 225 pounds; bragged that his arms were 18 inches in diameter. He grew one fingernail very long and sharp, just in case he needed to eye-gouge. He imagined that he was building himself into a “hate machine.”

  On his ever-expanding chest, he had a tattoo of a shining cross, just like his dad had back east. His dad had always been tatted up. Young Carl once watched the old man carve an image of a snake on his own thigh using cork and a needle.

  No one was tough enough to fight him one-on-one in prison. In the Penetang jail, he knocked a guy out in a fight, got disciplined for it. One time six guys jumped him, packing cups — Styrofoam cups, stuffed with wet toilet paper until they are hard and heavy — that had been stuffed into a sock, which was swung like a club. But it wasn’t all bad. Carl got together with a couple of guys for parties. They drank homebrew: liquor made from crushed oranges, apples, bits of pineapple, and about 50 packets of sugar — all left to ferment in a garbage bag for a week. It was like pure alcohol. Carl got pretty wasted on it. Fruit schnapps with a kick, he called it.

  A new name appeared on Don Forgan’s radar in January, 2002: Carl Hall. The information had come through a circuitous route. An informant had passed the tip about Hall on to the RCMP. An RCMP officer out of their London, Ontario, branch had then contacted Warren Korol, Forgan’s old partner in homicide. Korol demanded more: What was the name of the informant? He pressed the RCMP to reveal the identity so that they could interview the person. It could assist the investigation. But the RCMP was treating the source as a confidential informant and would not divulge the name.

  Forgan had never heard the name Carl Hall in relation to the Clark/Del Sordo case. The name was now forwarded to ident officer Hank Thorne. He had been sending palm prints from the crime scene to Dave Sibley at the OPP lab to check against the palm print found on the rubber grip of the murder weapon: the baseball bat. Now Thorne checked Hamilton’s palm print manual card file, containing such things as all break-and-enters in the city, for Carl’s name. He found a card on file for Hall, Carl Ernest. Thorne called Sibley and told him he was sending a new palm print for comparison.

  Sibley had other work on the go, and after trying without success to match more than 25 palm prints already in the Clark-Del Sordo case over more than a year and a half, he was in no hurry to get to the latest.

  On Thursday morning, February 25, Don Forgan arrived at Central Station to start his day shift. Guys were talking in the homicide office, joking around; it was loud that morning. His phone rang.

  “Forgan, Major Crime Unit,” he answered.

  “It’s Dave Sibley. I’ve identified your print.”

  “Just a minute, Dave,” Forgan said.

  Over the racket of detectives in the homicide office, he could barely hear Sibley tell him the news. He held the receiver to his shoulder. Forgan was not one to curse. This time was an exception.

  “Shut up!” he yelled, but with added emphasis. And then: “Go ahead.”

  “It’s Carl Hall.”

  “It’s Carl Hall!” Forgan shouted.

  Finally, 20 months after Charlisa and Pat’s murders, Forgan knew who held the baseball bat that night. He had told Eugene he would catch the bad man. Looked like they had him — and that the mystery informant had been bang on.

  Detective Mike Thomas walked over to Forgan. “Hall?” he said. “We’re about to charge him on Jackie McLean.”

  — 13 —

  Pipe Dream

  The detectives could see the walls closing in on the killer — for all three homicides. They knew that Carl was still in jail up in Penetanguishene, but time was not on their side. He would soon be a free man; on March 16 he was due to be released for the assault conviction he was serving. In fact Carl had been due to get out sooner than that, on March 9, but had been kept for another week due to bad behaviour. He had been fighting and had also pulled the fire sprinkler in his cell. Extending his sentence in prison was a costly mistake. Dominos were falling quickly.

  On March 11 a judge granted Hamilton police a DNA warrant for Carl. The next day he was ordered in jail to provide a DNA sample. Four days later, on March 15, at 5:00 p.m., Detective Dave Place received a call from the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. It was a match: Carl Hall’s DNA matched the high vaginal semen sample taken from Jackie McLean. That night, at 7:00 p.m., Place and Thomas checked out an unmarked white Crown Victoria and drove two hours to a Best Western hotel in Midland, 20 minutes from the jail in Penetang.

  The next morning broke sunny and very cold. Just after 8:00 a.m., a guard called on Carl in his cell. He had visitors. Carl knew something was up after having been asked to give a DNA sample, but just what, he was not sure. He was led into an office where he saw two large men in suits. And now he knew what was happening. They’re gating me, he thought — arresting him just as he was about to be released. Dave Place towered over Carl, diminishing him in the space.

  “I am arresting
you for the first-degree murder of Jackie McLean,” he said. “You may also be charged with the murder of Charlisa Clark and Pasquale Del Sordo. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Carl was cuffed with a waist chain and leg irons, and loaded into the Crown Vic. A Hamilton police cruiser followed behind. The detectives had a two-hour drive back to Hamilton. Dave Place got Carl talking.

  “Any of your family know you’re getting out today?” he asked.

  “No, don’t have any family,” Carl said. “Black sheep. I have one sister; haven’t talked to her in four years. My parents, four or five years.”

  “The girl that visited you in Brantford — is it Lise?” Place asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “She’s from rehab.”

  “When were you in rehab?”

  “In Simcoe, I’m not sure exactly the date. I figured you guys would know I was there.”

  “No, we missed that one. What’s the name of that place?”

  “Holmes House.”

  Carl told the detectives he had to use a bathroom. Mike Thomas pulled the car in at a sprawling highway service centre. The two detectives escorted him in, trying to conceal the cuffs. Thomas wondered what people would think if they knew they were in the presence of a triple murderer.

  Back at Central Station in Hamilton, Place checked Carl into a cell just before 11:30 a.m. At 2:00 p.m. Place interviewed him. He asked about that night with Jackie McLean. Carl said they had sex in unit 4 above the Sandbar, but that he did not harm her; he said that they had both left the unit and returned downstairs to another where people had been smoking crack.

  “Here’s the problem we have,” Place said. “She’s killed in the apartment ... the one you’re in with her. That’s where she’s found dead.” Place told him about the high vaginal swab, indicating Carl’s DNA on the victim.