Rage (16 page)

He recalls that they told him his proposal was unfeasible because, as they pompously told him, “we don’t believe in the badness of people.” That’s it, book shut, program dead.

“The irony is that Canada could have had this all set up and they could have been leaders in the world,” he said, now that many of his ideas are being adopted worldwide. “But they dropped the ball completely.”

A little more than a year in custody didn’t seem to have hurt the boys at all. A supervised diet and mandatory exercise helped Kevin lose some of his excess poundage, slimming him from obese to merely overweight. The same regimen had the opposite effect on Pierre, who was no longer painfully skinny and had filled out considerably. Tim had grown his hair long and arrived in court with a ponytail.

The victim, all three accused and many of the witnesses were all under 18, which prevented the media from naming any of the people involved. Instead, they began to refer to trial as the “Jonathan” case, using the more conventional spelling of the victim’s first name. In news reports at the time, Kevin was usually called “the victim’s brother,” while Tim and Pierre were called his “friends.” Once the facts of the trial began to emerge, though, the media unfailingly referred to Tim as “Vampire Boy.”

It was December 2, 2005, and the trial had been going on for about two weeks. Up until that day, there were hearings to determine if plea bargains could be made (they couldn’t), jury selection, what kind of trial the boys would have and where it would be held. Since most of what had happened up to that point had been procedural, the boys had become bored by their long court appearances, often listening to lawyers talk for hours about things they didn’t understand or didn’t really care about. While occasional items would appear to pique their interest, Kevin and Tim spent much of their time daydreaming, doodling and joking around with each other. Pierre, on the other hand, consistently remained quiet and focused. His mother and father showed up every day, and the entire family appeared to be following each word of the case as intently as any of the lawyers and the judge.

But that afternoon, Tim was paying extra attention. Ashley—looking pretty and likeable in a blazer and skirt suit—was on the witness stand. A year away from her had given him a different perspective on the girl he once proclaimed his undying love for. As she spoke, he sneered at her and wrote her name surrounded by the word “bitch” on the yellow legal pad he was supplied with. He hated her for ratting on him, for taping their phone call and for sending his e-mail to the cops.

Crown Attorney Hank Goody is a small, energetic man who is always perfectly coiffed. He has an extra sense for details and a flair for the dramatic—he seems tailor-made to lead the prosecution in a high-profile murder case. He had already warmed the jury up by reminding them that Johnathon had been “stabbed, cut and chopped 71 times.”

He told them about the tape and how it had been made by a team of frightened and concerned girls, including Ashley. Goody addressed the jury directly and told them: “By their own words which you will hear spoken in their own voices, you will know that the three young persons before you now were responsible for Johnathan’s death.”

Then he pushed play on the tape recorder. The recording begins with the electronic purr of a phone ringing from the caller’s side. There’s some murmuring. Then Kevin answers. Goody played the entire tape Ashley had made without stopping. The courtroom fell silent. The jury was aghast. Even Kevin stopped goofing around and paid attention.

To some it seemed like nothing less than the kind of courtroom confession you see in movies or on TV. All three boys say quite plainly that they intend to kill that day, and two of them identify the planned victims, with Kevin specifically mentioning the murdered boy. Pierre only obliquely talks about his part in the plan, laconically answering “since today,” after Ashley asks him “Since when do you kill people?”

The tape appeared to say that the boys had promised her five murders and delivered on one.

Goody wisely waited for the effects of the tape to sink in on the jury before questioning Ashley again. He established that she had made the tape after she had received a similarly distressing call earlier in the day. He asked her why she taped the second call, which seemed to him an odd thing for someone her age to do. She replied: “To make sure this wasn’t a total lie or joke.”

On the following day, Goody then questioned Heather, at whose house the tape was made. She told the court about how the girls had hatched the plan in drama class and repeated Ashley’s belief that they needed hard evidence of what the boys were planning before they would be taken seriously. “We didn’t want to worry anyone unless we had evidence,” she said. “We didn’t want to blow this out of proportion in case it was a practical joke.” She seemed a bit embarrassed when Goody asked her if she had ever taped phone calls before and admitted she had, but just for fun.

Then Goody brought Heather’s mom to the stand. She testified that the girls seemed extremely agitated when they arrived at her house and ran upstairs that day. Heather gave her instructions that they were not to be disturbed because something “very serious” was going on and that she couldn’t tell her what it was until they had it all figured out. “Frankly,” the mother told court, “I thought one of them was pregnant.”

When the call ended, the court heard, the girls “freaked out.” Heather dashed down the stairs, explained the situation to her mother and played her the tape. Her mom immediately called 911.

Police officers Paul Wildeboer and Glenn Gray corroborated all of the day’s testimony.

The next day, two of Johnathon’s friends were called to the stand. Dressed in a black Nike hoodie and jeans, 11-year-old Jeffrey was questioned by the judge, David Watt, as to his understanding of the legal system and the importance of his testimony. He passed the judge’s approval.

Jeffrey described Johnathon’s life in glowing terms. He spoke about how the two of them played and talked and shared interests, about how they did “almost everything together.” Then Jeffrey detailed the last time he saw Johnathon. It was the afterschool snowball fight on the day Johnathon was murdered. After a short detention when school was finished, he told the court, Jeffrey ran outside. There he saw Johnathon with Jamal (a younger boy he would later escort home) and another boy about their age. Goody asked him if he went straight home, as he lived just across the street from the school. “No,” the boy said excitedly. “We had a snowball fight.” His enthusiasm drew a laugh from the audience when he described Johnathon as being hard to hit because he was “moving around like something out of
The Matrix
.”

Jeffrey then testified that his mother called him in to punish him for coming home when he wasn’t supposed to earlier in the day. Jeffrey had a short debate with his mother in which he asked if he could go to Johnathon’s house. She said no. Jeffrey complained a little but accepted his fate. Johnathon told him he was going to take Jamal home and go to the cyber café.

Later, Sean, Johnathon’s older friend, painted a similarly idyllic picture of the boy’s life. He talked about how they played basketball and other sports together and how they had been friends for as long as either could remember. Sean told a story about how Johnathon’s mother had taken them to the annual Santa Claus Parade about a week before he died.

He then recounted the events of November 25, 2003 as he saw them. Johnathon’s class got out late, so Sean played basketball with other friends. Later, he still couldn’t find Johnathon, so he went home. Sean called his best friend’s house, but he got Kevin, whose voice he recognized, who told him Johnathon wasn’t home. Bored, Sean went to the cyber café himself, hoping his friend would show up. Eventually, he did. But Johnathon was out of money and Sean had just spent the last of his, he testified.

“What did he do then?” Goody asked him.

“He left,” Sean replied.

“Did he come back?”

“No.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

Sean paused and then said: “No.”

Goody asked him what he did after Johnathon left. Sean told the court that he played the rest of his game and at a time he estimated to be 5:20, he left for home. He pointed out that he could see Johnathon’s house from the corner as he passed Dawes on the way home.

“Did you see anything there that night?” Goody asked him.

“Yeah,” Sean replied. “There were lots of police cars.”

The next witness to speak was the neighbor whose house Ralston ran to after the attack. He testified that Ralston was pantless, bleeding profusely from the head and screaming that Kevin (who the man knew) had “tried to stab him with a knife and his friend hit him on the head with a baseball bat.”

The witness then told the court that he was a friend of Ralston’s and saw the Champagnie family frequently. He noted that in the summer he would often invite the whole family—except for Kevin—over for barbecues. When asked why he didn’t invite Kevin, the witness said that he didn’t like Kevin and Kevin didn’t like him.

Indicating that he had a plan, Goody asked the witness what color his skin was. The witness was black. Ralston is black. Kevin, Joanne and almost everybody else involved with the case are white. Johnathon was also white.

But if Goody hoped to convince the jury that part of Kevin’s problems with Ralston were because of racism, the judge was having none of it. He told Goody to stop asking questions based on race, saying that he had “no idea” how it was relevant to the case.

The police officer who responded to the neighbor’s call, Constable Stephan Charron, testified that he took Ralston’s report, which included the initial attack by Kevin and the subsequent assault by Pierre. He also noted that Ralston had told him about the condition of the house and the presence of, and hasty exit by, Tim.

On the following day, the court heard testimony from the ETF officers who arrived at 90 Dawes and then eventually at Tim’s apartment. Constable James Hung, the team’s leader, described how he and his team “cleared” the house, using a battering ram to enter the building, shouting warnings before making any moves and using a mirror on a stick to see if anyone was in a room before entering. He told how the officers cleared the first floor room by room, moved first upstairs and then down to the basement. Hung described how he and his officers were unable to avoid stepping in the vast pool of blood at the bottom of the basement stairs and then had to trudge through the broken beer bottles. Goody then asked Hung if he knew what he’d find down there. “On going down, there was a bit of urgency,” he said. “We didn’t know what was in the basement—we couldn’t avoid it.”

Constable David Leck, an eight-year veteran of the ETF, was the first one down to the basement. He described following the blood trail over the broken glass to the crawlspace. It was slightly open, and Leck could see that there was a person inside. “It was a body; I alerted the team,” he testified. “I called out to the body. There was no response.”

Paramedic Ron Bogle testified that the police directed him to the crawlspace and he saw a child’s body in full fetal position. “I could see blood all over the body,” he said. Immediately, Bogle checked for vital signs: “I couldn’t find anything.” Aware that he could not help the child in the crawlspace or the basement, he wrapped him up in what paramedics call a “drag sheet”—a specially designed blanket with handles intended for the safe and quick transport of severely wounded patients.