“Your co-accused is pretty hot,” a fellow inmate told him, as the footage of Kelly’s stroll in her red top was played, and replayed, and played once more.
Though he’d taken a million courses in anger management (“It’s best, when one is angry, to try and discuss your anger. Tell the other person about it. Have a discussion. ‘I’m feeling very hurt by what you just said.’”) Warren couldn’t help but feel something stronger than anger as he watched Kelly walk with her family out to her car, on her way back to her home, back to View Royal.
He had been incarcerated since November 14, 1997. His only time outdoors had been when he was getting into the sheriffs van or working in the garden of the walled and gated grounds. Everywhere I go, it will be there. I’ll never get away from it. He’d somehow managed to turn the institution into a makeshift academy. “I never did any homework until I got to prison,” he would later recall. He studied with a criminology professor who often came to discuss the justice system with the men inside. He hung out with another young inmate who was studying empire (as in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), and this young guy gave him a few books to read, one being The Art of War. Not that Ferndale was pleasant, for it most surely was a prison above all. But sometimes he thought he never would have learned all he was learning if he’d stayed in View Royal. “I probably would have just been some two-bit drug dealer.”
When he heard of Kelly’s new chance, he went to his room so he would not have to find himself in a possible confrontation. He expressed his thoughts in a letter:
I am doing all right, I guess, as good as can be expected. I really have not done much thinking while I am here about where I will go if I get parole. I’m hoping to go for work release to Chilliwack. They are starting a program there, and I would be working with elderly men who have been in prison for twenty to thirty years. I would like to go to Simon Fraser University, and earn a B.A., but in what, I still do not know.
I have been pretty lonely since my arrival to this place, but I have gotten used to that feeling. It goes with the territory. It is not a big thing for me anymore. Sometimes life can be just another boring, sluggish, aging day for me. I don’t want to grow old.
As for Kelly’s shit dragging on endlessly, well, she is playing the system, and the system is falling for it, ultimately hurting and re-victimizing the Virk family.
I personally don’t agree with all of the system’s antics, as well as Kelly’s. I don’t want to comment because it is not my place. I would probably be discredited anyway.
Keep in contact a little more often if you can.
P.S. Lots of care and respect,
Sincerely,
Warren P. Glowatski
• • •
Kelly was pretty sure that lady took her cell phone.
Her mom had given her the cell phone because she was living in Vancouver now. Big deal. She was still under all these rules, and stupid rules they were. Rules were easy to break, especially if your boyfriend was a member of the Triad, a hard-core Asian gang, and you’d been inside Wilingdon Detention Center since you were just sixteen. Killer Kelly, what a stupid name. That lady took her cell phone. Danica was just wasted. She’d been throwing back Buds since two in the afternoon. Danica was pretty pregnant, so that was going to be one messed-up baby. That lady stole her phone! The halfway house was run by the Elizabeth Fry Society. She was supposed to learn “life skills.”
“Danica, call that lady over here. She stole my fucking phone!”
Danica screamed, “Hey lady!”
Danica’s hair was black, little pixie bangs, and she wasn’t even at the Elizabeth Fry Society. Kelly met her one day on the street, and Danica was just hanging about, the way she and Nevada and Josephine used to hang about Marton Place hoping to get some weed or attention from Colin Jones. She and Danica would just wander over to this park and drink some beer and hope a cute guy would walk by, even though Kelly already had a boyfriend in the Triad. Do you know what that is? The Asian mob! Don’t fuck with me. Nobody better even try.
Her bail conditions said she shouldn’t be drinking beer in a public park at 2:30 in the afternoon. Life skills. She didn’t even know what that shit was all about. Her mom gave her the phone just in case she ever got lonely or needed to talk or had some kind of emergency.
The lady came over.
“What’s your name?” Danica asked.
“June.”
“June, sit down and have a beer.”
June sat down. She was fifty-eight.
“Hey, lady. Where’s the cell phone?”
“I don’t know—”
“Listen, lady!” Kelly screamed. “I’ve done some weird shit.”
“She stole the phone!” Danica screamed, and she hauled off and began to hit June in the face. When the cops found June, her lips were bleeding and there was a bruise on her face.
“These two girls,” June said, and she described them, though she had no idea one of the girls was the notorious Killer Kelly.
Kelly denied taking part in the assault and she denied drinking beer. “They’re just trying to get her back in jail,” her mother mused.
The Crown filed a motion for Kelly’s bail on the murder charge to be revoked, and thus Kelly found herself before Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm of the Supreme Court, the same judge who had relaxed her bail conditions two months before, releasing her from house arrest so she could look for a job.
How many courtrooms had she been in? How many judges had she stood before? She might have counted as she waited for the judge to announce his decision. Her fingers moved through her hair, black with red streaks, and she clenched her palms and did not turn to look at her mother. She was dressed as so many girls dressed, in cargo pants and a loose sweatshirt. Judge Dohm revoked her bail and ordered Kelly back into custody. She would have to stay in jail now for at least four months, until her second murder trial in June. After that trial, she would face an assault trial for the incident in the park. Another trial, another courtroom.
For now, she was back on television and on the front pages of newspapers. Many were surprised to discover that she’d been out of jail for months, no longer under house arrest. In View Royal, people would shake their heads and say their banker or their Realtor had told them they’d heard Kelly was a vicious child who decapitated her Barbie dolls. A friend of a cousin of a friend said they’d heard that when Kelly went to her mothers wedding to George Pakos, the soccer star, she signed the guest book “Jeffrey Dahmer.”
Kelly’s mother bristled when she heard such tales. “It’s all false,” she said. Asked what Kelly was really like as a child, she said, “Kelly rode horses. She was a Brownie. She wasn’t an abused child. We’re honest, hard-working parents. And Kelly was just like every child. She had curfews. She came home on time. She never defied us.
“Before all this happened, she was just a regular girl.”
California Cathy
THE PRETTY BLONDE WOMAN surprised the boys of View Royal. In the courtroom, she wore the black gown, but she seemed so friendly and cheerful, and they were surprised when she’d turn on them suddenly, though they should not have been surprised, for she was their adversary.
Catherine Murray, a Crown prosecutor, had once been Don Morrison’s protégé. Her life amid criminals could not have been foreseen. She was from the comfortable neighborhood of West Van, she’d grown up with trips to Hawaii, she had been head cheerleader for four years, received a new car at sixteen. Before she went to law school, she spent her vacation in California. She entered law school with a tan and a cheerful demeanor and fellow law students dubbed her “California Cathy.”
First as a criminal defense lawyer and now as a major crimes prosecutor, Catherine Murray maintained her sunny, hopeful manner despite her constant dealings with horrible acts of violence.
While the attorney general debated whether it was worth the time and great expense to retry Kelly Ellard, Catherine faced some of the more troubled youth of View Ro
yal.
“I did a bunch of Crips cases,” Catherine recalls. Many of Warren’s high school friends had grown up and now, as young adults, still held onto their adolescent fantasy. Only the gang was real now, no longer “wannabes.”
They would often engage in sudden and vicious attacks on respectable strangers waiting for taxis on the wrong street on the wrong night. They also managed to gain access to the occasional firearm as well as crystal meth and cocaine. The police, in response, formed a special gang unit, and, after months of surveillance, arrested at least fifteen young boys, for crimes ranging from possession of stolen property to aggravated assault. It was Catherine Murray who won convictions, mainly because she was able to convince the often reluctant and frightened girlfriends to testify against their boyfriends. “She’s just really good with kids,” her superiors observed. Unlike Ruth Picha or Derrill Prevett, or even Don Morrison, she did not prefer the vagaries of DNA and legal precedents. She was said to be: a “people person.”
Her string of Crip convictions culminated with a boy with the unlikely name of Harry Hiscock. The twenty-one-year-old ringleader and avowed lifelong thug was charged with beating a young man into a comatose state, a young man who had been carrying flowers for his girlfriend on the wrong street at the wrong time. Despite being represented by Kelly’s skilled lawyer, Adrian Brooks, Harry Hiscock was found guilty by a jury. The police were pleased by his eight-year sentence as he was “a major leader of the group, somebody that the younger people looked up to. Now, with him out of circulation, a lot of the other Crips, with too much heat, have simply moved on.”
With both police and her superiors impressed by her dealings with the Crips, it was perhaps not surprising that Catherine Murray was asked if she would like to handle the second trial of Kelly Ellard. “I’d be very interested!” she told her bosses, and she agreed to junior alongside Stan Lowe.
After the debacle of the last trial, everyone in the Crown office, from the deputy chief to the paralegal, thought the only way Ellard would be convicted was if Warren Glowatski testified. He was the only eyewitness. Word was that he was in good shape, “doing really well,” “a pretty good guy.” Yet no one knew how he could be convinced to testify. He owed no favors to the Crown. (“They never believed what I said the first time around, so why should I say it again?”) And would he want to even meet with Stan Lowe, the one who brought in Syreeta, brought her to tears? The one who thrust Reena’s clothes in his face and sent him away to live in a place with no girls or swans.
Several months before Christmas, Catherine went to visit Warren at the minimum security prison where he now resided. The prison was on lush green grounds, and inmates were free to wander on the field of grass with picnic tables and a view of a Benedictine monastery.
When Warren walked into the room, Catherine was surprised and not surprised, for as a defense lawyer, she’d learned that supposed criminals could be likable and polite. But Warren was unlike many of the accused Crips, who were brutish and surly. “He was cute,” she noted. “He looked like he could be my son.”
She was surprised by all the progress he’d made. He’d been editing a documentary video and working as a volunteer for a restorative justice program. The prosecutor and the convicted murderer hit it off. (“We just got along right away,” they both would later say.) Warren asked her if she was thirty-five, and she laughed. “You’re my new best friend,” she said. They talked for a long time about a lot of things besides Kelly Ellard. He couldn’t bear to tell her he wasn’t going to testify against Kelly—not just because he didn’t want to cooperate with Stan Lowe but because he didn’t want the trauma. He didn’t want to die from a shiv in his back; he didn’t want to talk about that night again and again and once more.
He was hoping she’d come back and visit him, so he told her he’d think about it.
“I promise you one thing,” she said. “I’ll never bullshit you.”
He hadn’t asked for any kind of deal, although his parole date was looming. He didn’t even have a lawyer. (“I’ve had my share of those guys. They never did anything for me.”) It seemed to him that he was doing so well after so much struggle to emerge from whatever nightmare he’d been in. To get up on the stand and talk about the night under the bridge and over the bridge would put him back seven years, traumatize him all over again, open him up to all kinds of slings and jabs, the least of which would come from inside. They would come from all the forces of the world—the media, the defense lawyers, those with a kind of influence he’d never known. He’d known only the opposite in that brief moment when the cop in Estevan had said, “Glowatski. Oh, another one of them.” Now he knew where he stood, despite all his studies and change. “Society pretty much sees me as a scumbag.”
Marissa wrote him sometimes. “I really hope you testify,” she said. “Otherwise Kelly is just going to get away with it again.”
He did not write to Syreeta anymore. Gregory, her stepdad, had said they’d appreciate it if he stopped calling. Syreeta was trying to get on with her life, that’s what he’d heard.
Catherine came to visit him a few more times, and she never put any pressure on him. They just talked about his life before this all happened and where he saw himself going, and he told her some theories he had about why kids like Harry and Carter were still acting like fools.
By December, just before Christmas, and once again against his dad’s advice, he’d decided to testify as a witness for the Crown. “You think you’ll come back before that?” he asked Catherine Murray.
She said, sure she would. I promise you I’ll never bullshit you.
A Reunion, of Sorts
THE SECOND TRIAL of Kelly Ellard began on June 14, 2004, and it was a reunion of sorts, a strange camaraderie inevitably forming between the Virk family, Kelly’s family, and the media, who had spent so many hours together, years before, in this very modern gleaming courthouse. Stan Lowe was not on the case. (“I got a triple murder. I had to handle that.”), so Catherine Murray would be lead, and she chose as co-counsel a young woman named Jeni Gillings. Jeni, with the intelligent beauty of a French actress, was “so organized.” Catherine could not believe the boxes and boxes and files and transcripts involved in the Virk case. Jeni as well had a scathing sense of humor and shrewd instincts. Without Jeni, she wouldn’t have convicted all those Crips. “She’s the brains behind the operation,” Catherine would often say.
Kelly sat blithely in the prisoner’s box, with her hair newly cut in trim bangs, no longer black, but a pale brown with auburn highlights. In the prisoner’s box, she would write copious notes, and she would hand these to her fourth lawyer, a woman named Michelle. Michelle was both partner and girlfriend of Kelly’s main lawyer, Robert Claus. Robert Claus, like Adrian Brooks before him, was well respected and known for victory.
• • •
The trial was a remake of sorts, a production with the same actors as the original, all only more noticeably older now.
Dusty, looking vaguely as if she’d wandered in from a Gauguin painting, seemed the most transformed. Softer, prettier, her voice now seemed to suit her at last, and as often as she could, she interspersed her testimony with mentions of her daughter, the fact that she was a single mother, and in school.
“Let’s talk about what kind of teenager you were,” Catherine said to her warmly.
“I dropped out of school in grade 8,” Dusty said, comfortable, for she’d talked with Catherine so many times. They’d just had a smoke together, and even her older sister Destiny thought Catherine was “pretty awesome.”
Dusty said, “I lived in Edmonton, Windsor, Maple Ridge, Thunder Bay, Vancouver. I didn’t want to follow the rules. I was put in Seven Oaks. It’s a house where they put kids who didn’t want to follow the rules.”
“What was the secret bond with Warren?” Catherine asked her.
“We all have one,” Dusty said softly. “We all did it together. We were all involved. That’s not going to change.”
“Did you kill Reena Virk?”
“No,” Dusty said, and she began to cry, and the jury looked at her with sympathy, for when talking of her life to Catherine, she seemed likable, even redeemed.
• • •
“This lawyer,” Reena’s dad said of Kelly’s representative, “is it just me or is he very irritating?”
Bob Claus was a very tall man with a constant scowl. Throughout the proceedings, he would often call for a mistrial. His first one was in regard to his client’s lack of medication.
“Your Honor, my client has been unable to get her anti-anxiety medicine and she cannot contribute to these proceedings in any meaningful way if she is suffering from anxiety, and I am going to have to request a mistrial at this time.”
He would often produce an exhibit known as “the dark photos.” He would show these to every witness in an effort to establish that you can’t see anything on the bridge in View Royal during the darkness of evening. “You’ll agree with me that it is impossible to make out who is on the bridge in photo 14?”
“Yes,” the kids would say, half-bewildered, half-amused. While showing the “dark photos,” Bob Claus did not refer to the presence of a full moon in the sky on that certain dark evening.
The judge, Selwyn Romilly, originally from Trinidad, sat through the days with a wry look. Occasionally, he seemed near laughter or lecture, but he kept his expression both amiable and stern. On the lunch breaks, he changed into shorts and sneakers and jogged for many miles.
If the young witnesses were more remorseful and polite, less sullen and defensive, it was perhaps because over time, they had come to understand the horror of what had truly happened. Most often they would cry when describing how Reena was kicked and punched, and most often they would not try to minimize their own role.
They were savvier as well, so used to the process of interrogation by now.
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