by Jon Wells
Maloney knew they didn’t have to immediately visit McLeod at Maplehurst. Not yet. He wasn’t going anywhere. What they needed was evidence putting him in Hamilton at the time of the homicide. On Thursday, January 20, Maloney phoned a security officer at Maplehurst. What personal effects did Cory McLeod have with him? The officer said McLeod had white Nike running shoes, a black ski jacket, grey sweater, beige pants. Maloney passed along the information to the Hamilton constable reviewing the store videotapes.
On Tuesday, January 25, at 9:30 a.m., Maloney called the security manager at Barton Street jail. He asked if inmate Kyro Sparks had received any visitors lately. He had two visitors who came to see him on January 17, and January 19. Names: Katrina McLennan and Sherri Foreman, both of 643 Upper James Street, apartment 2. In the register, Sherri had written “friend,” Katrina wrote “girlfriend.” Maloney called Maplehurst. Cory McLeod had not been receiving visitors. Letters? He had not received any letters — but he had mailed out letters of his own. He had written two females who lived in Meaford, Ontario, and there was a letter he mailed to a woman in Hamilton. The name written on the envelope was “Sherri McLeod,” and the address was 643 Upper James Street, apartment 2. Cory McLeod and Kyro Sparks both had a Hamilton connection. Their girlfriends lived in the apartment around the corner from O’Grady’s Roadhouse.
At 8:20 the next morning, Wednesday, an anonymous caller left a message on Maloney’s voicemail: “I think I might know who one of your suspects is from Kitchener,” the caller said. He said he knew Kyro Sparks, and that Kyro hung out with a guy named Cory McLeod. Said the guy had a big afro and put his hair in a ponytail.
“Cory is the type of guy that snaps when he gets drunk. He brags about it. Brags about killing someone.” The caller added he was offering the information because “the guy they killed was a contributor, a millwright. And now his kids are orphaned.”
At 10:00 a.m. Maloney and Detective Greg Jackson checked out an unmarked car and drove to 643 Upper James. They knocked at apartment 2. No answer. Someone moved a drape in the window. They were there all right. Maloney knocked again. No answer.
The detectives entered a sewing shop at the front of the building. A woman there said her husband was the building superintendent. apartment 2? Tenant was a girl named Katrina. She was a student at Mohawk College, but was from Kitchener. Her parents were really nice people. Back at apartment 2, the woman knocked on the door for the detectives, while Maloney and Jackson stood off to the side out of view. Katrina opened the door. When the detectives stepped out, she looked surprised — and did not invite them in. Maloney and Jackson stepped inside. Sherri Foreman was sitting in the room.
“We’re investigating a murder at O’Grady’s Roadhouse,” Maloney said. “A man named Kyro Sparks has been arrested. We have information that he’s been here.” He said nothing about Cory McLeod.
In fact the detectives had no information that put Sparks in that apartment. But they had a strong suspicion. An eyewitness at the bar who had followed the killers outside O’Grady’s said they had hopped a fence near that building. Sherri said they both knew Kyro from Kitchener, but added that he had not been in their apartment on Upper James Street. Guys come by the apartment, she said, but he was not one of them. The detectives warned them: “This is a murder investigation. Obstruct police and we will arrest you.”
“We’d like to talk to you down at the station,” Jackson said.
They left the building and got in the car; the detectives drove them down the Mountain. Better to take Katrina and Sherri downtown, interview them separately, and get statements from each on the record, on videotape.
“How long have you known Kyro Sparks?” Maloney asked to start the interview.
“I don’t know,” Katrina replied.
As the camera rolled, Greg Jackson transcribed. Sherri Foreman waited in the hallway.
“Are you Kyro’s girlfriend?”
“No.”
“How did you sign in at the jail to visit him?”
“Girlfriend.”
Maloney asked her about January 14, the night of the homicide at O’Grady’s Roadhouse on Upper James Street.
“Do you remember the night it happened? It was Friday night, a week ago last Friday.”
“I honestly don’t know about that.”
“Do you recall where you were that Friday night?”
“At my place?”
“Were you there or are you not sure?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Can you guess when the last time was that Kyro was at your place? I’m trying to assist you in recollecting the last time he was there.”
“Who said he was there? You have people telling you that he’s been there? Did I not tell you how many black guys came to my house? How do you know one was Kyro?”
“I don’t.”
“So how are you going to believe these people?”
“Are you telling me Kyro has never been to your house?
“Hmm.”
“Is that a no? He has or hasn’t?”
“I met him in Kitchener.”
Maloney told her at least two guys left O’Grady’s that night and were seen by a witness heading toward the apartment.
“Did anyone come to your apartment that night? Did anyone come to your place and say, ‘I can’t believe what happened; I just beat up a guy in a bar?’“
She giggled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“It’s not funny. Someone got killed. If that was your father, I don’t think you’d be laughing.”
“I know. I don’t think it’s funny; I just laugh all the time. It’s just me. You say the most serious thing and I’ll laugh.”
“What does Kyro think about all this?”
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
“Do your parents know that Kyro is a friend of yours and has been arrested for murder? What would they say?”
“Why are you going to involve my parents?”
“I’m not involving them; I’m just wondering. What would your parents think?”
“I don’t know; they probably wouldn’t be too happy. But he hasn’t been found guilty.”
Maloney told Katrina she may end up on the stand in court and be asked by a defence lawyer to provide an alibi for Kyro for his whereabouts that night.
“I know, it’s a big show. I know what goes on.”
“You know what goes on.”
“Uh-huh.”
It was Sherri Foreman’s turn. Maloney was careful to not mention Cory McLeod’s name. He knew McLeod had been in contact with Sherri.
“How long have you known Kyro Sparks?”
Sherri Foreman and Katrina McLennan were interrogated by police.
Hamilton Police Service.
“I don’t even know how long I’ve known him, I’ve just met him a couple of times.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, I just met him in Kitchener. I don’t know when.”
“When?”
“It was warm out.”
“Warm out?”
“Summer. That’s all I know.”
Maloney asked what she was doing the night of the homicide.
“Probably was in Kitchener. Or even Hamilton. I don’t remember that far back.”
“I want to explain something to you, Sherri,” Maloney said. “There’s a thing called accessory after the fact. That means if someone committed the crime and afterward you didn’t even know they committed the crime, but you assisted them hiding in your apartment or something like that, you could be charged. It’s a very serious crime.”
“I know, I’ve heard of that.”
“So you didn’t do anything like that; no one came saying, ‘Hey, can we stay here a while?’“
“I’d be, like, ‘Get out of my house.’”
“You know if someone has obstructed us, this isn’t a little shoplift; someone’s life was taken. This is a murder. If someone has lied
to us, we will charge them criminally.”
“Yeah, I’m aware of that.”
“And everything you have told me here today is the truth?”
“Yeah.”
The interviews over, Katrina and Sherri waited in the hallway for the detectives to take them home.
“I hate fucking cops,” Sherri said, loud enough for Jackson to hear.
— 10 —
A Killer’s Shoes
On Tuesday, February 1, the instructor walked into the classroom at Mohawk College at 8:00 a.m. He was an older guy, Katrina thought, but cute. Had some kind of accent. The class started. Katrina wrote the date on her notepad, and began: “Hey baby, how are you doing? Me, I’m tired …”
Katrina took courses at Mohawk in business, commerce, psychology, popular culture, sociology. She had fared poorly in all of them. They had a test coming up today, after the break. She was ready to fail it. What was the instructor talking about, she wondered? Didn’t understand a single word the dude was saying. She continued her letter to Kyro Sparks. “Hope he doesn’t ask me a question. Because for sure I won’t know the answer LOL.…”
After writing the test, she wrote: “Don’t know how I did, but filled in all the answers LOL. I have a hangnail on my thumb and it hurts.” She wrote to Kyro that after classes she was going back to the apartment to tidy things up with Sherri, rearrange some stuff: “I have some bad news, wish I could tell you in person. When I came home this weekend my parents decided it would be best if I got out of Hamilton. I have people watching me like fucking crazy.... Baby I want you to know that I’m not abandoning you, I would never do that. If it was that easy I wouldn’t be so sad. This is going to be just as hard for you as it is for me, but you have to still try and be good in there. When you get mad please don’t do something stupid....”
She was having a tough time, she told Kyro — trouble sleeping, lying awake every night, thinking about stuff. During the day it all made her want to cry: “Please try not to think of bad things and try to be happy. And if not, then just don’t do what you know what I don’t want you doing while you’re in there.… I almost didn’t want to tell you all this because I was scared how you’d react. But whatever you think, just please don’t think that I won’t be there for you, because I always will be ...”
On Wednesday, February 2, forensic detective Annette Huys visited Waterloo police. There she compared a fingerprint she’d lifted from one of the drinking glasses at O’Grady’s to prints Waterloo had on file for Cory McLeod. They matched.
The next day Maloney and Jackson also visited Waterloo police. They showed video stills from the No Frills store on Upper James recorded January 14 — the day of the killing — to a police officer and a Kitchener social worker who were both familiar with McLeod. The officer confirmed one of the males on the video was McLeod. The social worker said he was “110 percent sure that it is Cory McLeod.”
The detectives left the station. At 4:45 p.m. they visited Sherri Foreman’s home in Kitchener. Her mother was there. They said nothing about Cory McLeod.
“We have a suspect named Kyro Sparks in custody for a murder in Hamilton,” Maloney said. “We believe he has been associating with your daughter and her friend.”
They asked where Sherri had been around the time of the homicide. Her mother said she was unsure if her daughter had been at home in Kitchener on January 14 or 15. She’d never heard of Sparks before, but said Sherri had had a friend to the house the summer before named Cory. Just after 5:00 p.m., the detectives visited Katrina’s house and spoke to her mother. She said she had never heard of Kyro Sparks, and didn’t know where Katrina had been the weekend of January 14-16.
“Your daughter and Sherri Foreman visited Kyro in jail,” Maloney said. “I think your daughter and Sherri are not telling us the whole truth.”
Maloney knew they needed a crack at searching the girls’ apartment in Hamilton; they needed to look for evidence that Sparks, McLeod, and the third guy had been there the night Art was killed. But they still had no legal grounds for obtaining a search warrant. They had proof the girls visited and exchanged letters with Sparks and McLeod in jail. It wasn’t enough to get a warrant. If Katrina permanently vacated the apartment, however, that was a different matter.
On Monday, February 7, Maloney called Katrina’s parents. They told him their daughter was moving back home. This was their chance.
“We have to get up there,” Maloney told Jackson. “Time it when they are moving; maybe we can get consent to search.”
Wednesday morning Jackson and Det. Kevin Stanley dropped by the apartment on Upper James Street to see if Katrina was still there. The landlord said she had moved out the day before. Her dad had helped her. The father had been quite apologetic that she was breaking her lease.
The detectives asked the landlord if he would mind if they looked around the apartment? Jackson and Stanley entered apartment number 2. There was a shopping bag left on the floor. A No Frills bag. Nothing in it. The rest of the place was empty.
“They took some garbage bags out back,” the landlord said.
Out behind the building, they saw four green garbage bags. They loaded them in the backseat of their unmarked white cruiser and headed to Central Station. The detectives had been on the job too long, seen too much, sorted through too much garbage, to be overly enthused by the discovery. Stanley worked vice and drugs for six years — seizing garbage bags was standard procedure.
Real investigative work is not like CSI on TV — every search does not blow a case open. If you’re lucky, you might get one eureka moment like that in your career, where X really does mark the spot. Jackson and Stanley had already had theirs about five months earlier, investigating a stabbing homicide. One day Jackson suggested they check the roofs of buildings near where a witness had last seen the killer downtown. They climbed a ladder atop the first roof. Bingo: there was a bag containing a pair of jeans. Blood all over them. Victim’s blood on the outside, killer’s DNA inside. Case closed.
At 11:30 a.m. Maloney answered his phone in the office. It was Jackson calling from the car. “We found four garbage bags out back of the girls’ apartment,” Jackson said.
Maloney was unimpressed. More garbage. Great, he mused. Was the garbage even hers? It was possible, Jackson replied.
Maloney met the detectives in the basement garage at Central. Maloney and Stanley slipped on rubber gloves, opened the bags. One of the first items in the bag was an empty Timberlands shoe box. Interesting.
Police matched the tread on this shoe to an imprint on Art’s back.
Hamilton Police Service.
Kyro Sparks wore Timberlands. There was another pair of shoes, called Lugz. Phone bills, cable bills.
After opening the second bag Stanley noticed a pair of Nike running shoes, tanned colour. He held one shoe. Turned it over. Unbelievable. The tread. In his mind’s eye, he saw the drawing in his homicide case book. The circular pattern. The marks on Art Rozendal’s back the forensic pathologist showed him in the morgue. A killer’s shoes.
“These are the shoes!” he shouted. “These are the shoes, no doubt about it — these are the ones.” He put down the shoe, grabbed his notebook, turned to the page where he had illustrated the markings, showed the others. “Look at this. Look at it.”
Maloney took charge. “Let’s hold it guys; let’s just pause here.”
They needed to preserve the integrity of the evidence, record what they had, by the numbers, step by step. Get forensics in there to take pictures and secure it.
Annette Huys took the call in the forensic identification department. It was Stanley on the line. He told her she might want to come to the garage and take a look at something. They had a present for her. And bring your camera. In the garage Huys saw the tread. She had seen the autopsy photos. X marks the spot.
The back hallway of O’Grady’s, where Art Rozendal was beaten to death.
Hamilton Police Service.
Huys noticed a tiny dark s
pot on the left shoe. Might be blood. She could not use a Hemastix strip to test it on the spot; the sample was too small, almost a misting. The chemical from the Hemastix might compromise it. Better to seal the shoes for testing at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. If it was blood, whose blood was it? Just as important, who wore the shoe? Could they find DNA inside it? Not if the person wore socks, reflected Huys.
The DNA test was critical. After Huys had packaged the shoes, Kevin Stanley hit the Queen Elizabeth Way and drove the evidence to the CFS. The next day Alexandra Welsh in the biology section of CFS sent a fax to Maloney. She had finished analysis on the O’Grady’s drinking glasses. The DNA profile developed from a swab of one of the glasses matched the DNA profile on record for Cory McLeod. As a convicted offender, McLeod’s profile had previously been registered on a national database.
Maloney met with case manager Peter Abi-Rashed, Greg Jackson, and assistant Crown attorney Joe Nadel to discuss where the case might be heading. One suspect — Sparks — in custody; another — McLeod — in the works. Witnesses had told the detectives about a third guy who was also in that back hallway in O’Grady’s where Art died, and who had held the back door open. His identity was still a mystery.
