Rage

by Jerry Langton

  After a break for the holidays, court resumed on January 4, 2006. The first witness called was Robert Gerard of the Center of Forensic Sciences. The Center, operated by Ontario’s Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, is a central facility for forensics and is used for both criminal and civil cases. He testified that the mustard found on the floor, the bats, and Johnathon’s pants matched the stains found on Kevin’s pants and Pierre’s pants and left shoe. He also said it was the same mustard found on Tim’s shoes, T-shirt and pants.

  With most of the physical forensics out of the way, the prosecution started to paint pictures of the personalities of the people involved. The first was a girl—we’ll call her Katie—who claimed to have been Kevin’s girlfriend. She was nice-looking enough, but not as well turned out as Ashley and her friends. She wore tight jeans, a turtleneck and hoop earrings, which she could not stop fiddling with.

  Goody asked her if she was nervous. Katie giggled and said she was. He asked her how long she had known Kevin. “We started going out in Grade 8,” she told him.

  He asked her if she considered herself Kevin’s girlfriend at the time. She replied that she did. The girl then described their relationship by saying “we hung out a lot.” She testified that she had been to 90 Dawes on many occasions and that she knew Ralston, Joanne and Johnathon well. While she was there, Kevin usually played video games—he had a remarkable collection not just of games, but of systems, she said—but she didn’t play very often because he was so much better at them than she was.

  Goody asked her if she knew Tim and Pierre. She said that she had met them both on separate occasions. He asked her if they seemed to get along well with Kevin. She said they did.

  Goody then asked if Kevin seemed close to his family. She said he didn’t. “He didn’t talk to them much about his personal life,” she answered. When he spoke to her about his family, it was always to complain.

  Goody asked why she felt a need to break it off with Kevin. She told him that Kevin had sent her and some other students threatening notes—hers said “Die, bitch”—after the two of them had an argument about her involvement with another boy. A teacher phoned the police and the girl was interviewed about the matter. She didn’t know of any aftermath.

  When Goody was finished with her, Kevin’s lawyer, Robert Nuttall, asked her: “Do you recall that Kevin had expressed some suicidal thoughts about killing himself?”

  “I didn’t know about that,” she answered.

  “Were you aware that he had been hospitalized at a psychiatric hospital for about a week?” he asked.

  She shook her head and said she wasn’t.

  The next witness was Ralston, who was questioned about his relationship with the boys. He said that he and another family member had moved in with Joanne and the boys in January 1997. Johnathon was not quite six and Kevin was 10. Ralston and Joanne were married that summer.

  He told the court how his relationship with Johnathon was fine, but that Kevin had become increasingly problematic. He described for the court how the older boy refused to do his share of the household chores and would not accept any criticism. Kevin rarely spoke, and when he did it was usually just to complain. Ralston then related an anecdote that fairly summed up the closeness he had developed with Johnathon and the gulf that had emerged between him and Kevin.

  About a month before the murder, Ralston had visited a doctor to have a benign cyst removed from the back of his neck. He was at home recuperating when Johnathon arrived. The boy noticed that his stepfather was bleeding from the site of the operation and asked if he was okay. Ralston explained about the procedure and assured the boy he was fine and just wanted to relax. Johnathon promptly got him a towel for his neck and then made him dinner. When Kevin arrived home, he wordlessly ate what remained of Johnathon’s cooking, then went up to his room. Ralston told him to do the dishes, Kevin refused.

  Things had gotten so bad between them that they barely spoke to one another. Ralston described how he had even attended counseling and eventually handed over his share of Kevin’s discipline and punishment to Joanne. “I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he said.

  But it was that night when Kevin wouldn’t do the dishes after Johnathon had been so kind that enraged Ralston enough to break the deal he had made to leave discipline to Joanne, and punish Kevin. He banned the boy from using the family computer. “I told him he was grounded from the computer,” he testified. “Because he loved the computer the most.”

  Goody asked him if there was anything else odd about Kevin at the time. Ralston told the court that Kevin had complained about being beaten up at school, although he showed no evidence of any assaults and was much bigger than any of his classmates. Still, Ralston took him seriously and suggested that they contact the police. He testified that Kevin told him that if they got the police involved that Kevin would be murdered. Ralston let the subject drop.

  Then Ralston was asked to describe the day of the killing. He testified that Kevin was very angry at him. The original ban from the family computer had been extended because Ralston had caught Kevin using it when he wasn’t supposed to be.

  He then described how Kevin had kept him waiting outside the back door, despite the cold, and how they’d had a small argument about the smoke and wine glasses in the house.

  After a night’s recess, Ralston took the stand again. He described in harrowing detail the attack Kevin and Pierre visited upon him after Tim fled. In a loud voice and with animated actions, he told how Kevin first stabbed at him, then wrestled him to the ground. He talked about how Pierre had swatted him in the head with a baseball bat several times. He described how he kept struggling for his family’s sake. “I almost gave up,” he told the court he recalled thinking at the time, “Jesus Christ! This is the way I’m going to die?”

  Ralston then told the court about his escape, how he slipped out of his jeans and flagged down a bicyclist before heading to a friendly neighbor’s house for safety. He also testified that he found out about Johnathon’s death later that night while recuperating in a hospital bed.

  Although Ralston’s story was exciting, plausible and fit in with what the police and other witnesses had to say, he struck many in the courtroom the wrong way. Three different observers have since told me that there was something about him that seemed less than credible. “He seemed so adamant, so angry [and] like he had practiced his story too many times,” one told me. “And he seemed to get mixed up easily on facts and figures, particularly time.”

  Perhaps surmising that Ralston’s testimony could be the prosecution’s weakest link, Kevin’s lawyer, Robert Nuttall, cross-examined him intensely. Quickly, he revealed that Ralston had a long history of drug- and assault-related arrests and had sought treatment for narcotics abuse. Nuttall then tried to paint the interior of 90 Dawes as a threatening place of anxiety and stress with Ralston, not Kevin, as the primary reason why. He asked Ralston if Joanne had been hospitalized for slitting her wrists after an argument with him. Ralston admitted that she had.

  He also admitted that he would occasionally use his slippers to discipline Kevin when he was younger, but he drew the line at Kevin’s claim that Ralston had hit him with a plastic baseball bat, leaving a nasty bruise.

  Then Nuttall asked Ralston if he had ever punched Kevin in the head at a birthday party, as the boy had claimed. Ralston denied it. Kevin said that he had told a teacher about the incident, which prompted a visit from the Children’s Aid Society.

  “Do you remember back when Kevin was 10 years old that the Children’s Aid Society came to have a little chat with you about a suggestion that Kevin had made to a teacher that you had struck him?” Nuttall asked.

  “I don’t remember that part,” Ralston said. He also denied Kevin’s claim that he beat him up for reporting the incident to his teacher. But he did agree that Kevin’s problems and his own problems with Kevin were the reason they attended family counseling. He admitted that in one of these sessions, Kevin
told him: “Once or twice when I disciplined him it felt like abuse, and I said to him, ‘If that’s what you feel, I’m very sorry.’ ”

  “Do you recall Kevin being angry at his mother for her failure to protect him from you?” Nuttall asked.

  Ralston said he didn’t.

  Nuttall pressed on: “Did you also call him names, names like ‘stupid fuckhead’? ”

  Ralston denied that and also Nuttall’s assertion that he and Joanne neglected Kevin while showing unlimited and unconditional love and affection for his little brother.

  Finally, Nuttall asked Ralston if Kevin had any reason to try to stab him that day. Ralston said he didn’t.

  Ralston also faced Dennis Lenzin, Pierre’s lawyer, that afternoon. Lenzin suggested that Pierre hit Ralston with the bat because he was trying to break up a fight between them. Ralston had, after all, admitted to scuffling with Kevin. Perhaps Pierre was just trying to save his friend Kevin, who had said he was calling out “help me” during the fracas. Ralston denied it.

  Lenzin then wondered aloud how a man who had been attacked with an aluminum baseball bat had gotten off so lightly. He then suggested that the boy had hit him four or five times. Ralston said that he was hit at least that many times in his head alone.

  Lenzin sneered and asked him why then did he only have “a bump on the head and a sore thumb?”

  Ralston seemed flustered and then weakly added: “There was also a scratch on the chest.”

  If Lenzin had tried to minimize and potentially discredit the injuries reported by Ralston, he wouldn’t dare with the next witness. Dr. Michael Pollanen is Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist and a well-respected member of the scientific community. He has been asked to work on cases as wide-ranging as a UN inquest looking for evidence of systemic government-sponsored torture in East Timor, and the alleged murder of Ireland’s soccer coach, Bob Woolmer, in Jamaica. No scientist is infallible, but Pollanen’s expert opinion is as authoritative as any in the country.

  He told the court he’d received Johnathon’s body at about 11 o’clock on the morning of November 26, 2003. It was wrapped in a sheet inside an official body bag.

  He described Johnathon’s body as being that of a normal, well-nourished prepubescent Caucasian boy. He was about 4-feet, 10-inches tall and the doctor estimated him to be a shade less than 100 pounds in life. He had short sandy brown hair, brown eyes and a few freckles. He was still dressed in a T-shirt, football jersey, sweatshirt, boxer shorts, blue jeans and black socks. He was not wearing shoes.

  Pollanen’s initial examination discovered 71 “sharp-force injuries”—a catch-all term covering any type of assault with a bladed weapon, including stabbing, hacking and slashing. The body showed a number of bruises, some from the everyday life of a 12-year-old boy, others from the attack. The face was so badly traumatized that the doctor said he had a hard time making out his facial features.

  As he described the 71 wounds, Joanne first began to sob and then had to be taken from the courtroom. The three accused, however, betrayed no emotion other than boredom.

  Pollanen went on. He said that 55 of the wounds were to the head. He described them all as “perimortem”—so close to the time of death it’s hard to determine if they were inflicted just before or just after. Some of them were surface wounds. One, beneath the left eye, scraped the flesh off the cheek, exposing the bone. Many of them, he said, had scratched Johnathon’s skull and some of them had actually pierced the bone, going all the way into his brain.

  Goody asked him if he could tell how much force was required to make such a wound. Rather than describe it in terms of pounds per square inch or other statistics, Pollanen deadpanned: “Sufficient force to perforate the skull.”

  But as bad as they were, Pollanen said that the 55 head wounds were almost certainly not what killed the little boy. Instead, it was the three profound wounds to his throat that proved lethal. One of them sliced through the muscles of his neck to completely severe his larynx, rendering him unable to make a noise. The thrust was powerful enough to make an indentation on the bones in the back of his neck. With his windpipe severed, Johnathon could no longer breathe through his mouth or nose. He could get air through the open wound, but with it came a great deal of blood.

  Johnathon’s lungs were rapidly filling up with blood, but that’s not what Pollanen testified killed him. The doctor said he could immediately tell from the color of Johnathon’s body that he died from catastrophic blood loss. He testified: “At the time of death he had a very small amount of circulating blood in his body.”

  He also noted eight “sharp-force” wounds on Johnathon’s fingers. He noted that they were what are often called “defensive wounds,” indicating that he probably instinctively tried to use his hands to defend himself from the onslaught. Pollanen also noted “perimortem” bruises on Johnathon’s arms, back and chest, which would be consistent with him being restrained during the attack. There were also abrasions and lacerations on his thighs, which were inflicted postmortem. Pollanen said they could have been the result of his body being dragged over broken glass.

  In the cross-examination, Tim’s lawyer, McCaskill, presented Pollanen with a hypothetical re-creation of events. He surmised that Johnathon received superficial injuries after someone knocked him down the basement stairs. Then the right side of his head could have been held against a wall while he was attacked with a bladed weapon in “a rapid and continuous fashion,” explaining why 42 of the 55 head wounds were on the left side of his head.

  Pollanen agreed that the scenario was plausible.

  Then McCaskill asked him if one of the three potential bladed weapons found in the house—in particular the green-handled knife, as opposed to the black-handled knife and the meat cleaver—could have been used to inflict all 71 wounds.

  Pollanen said that it very well could have, but his opinion was that the murder weapon was more likely the black-handled knife, which the police found on the stack of plastic chairs near the bottom of the basement steps.

  Then McCaskill asked Pollanen his opinion of the blood spatters at the bottom of the stairs. The expert witness testified that when Johnathon’s voice box was slashed, the blade also severed the carotid artery—the major blood vessel that brings blood from the heart to the brain—and that the markings on the wall and floor were consistent with such an injury.

  Lenzin, Pierre’s lawyer, asked what Johnathon would have experienced after his throat was cut in such a manner. Pollanen said that his body would have gone into shock. Lenzin asked him to explain what that meant. Pollanen testified that a person in that type of shock “can expect to feel cold, dazed, confused and ultimately unconscious.”

  The next important witness was a bit of a surprise. Goody’s partner Anna Tenhouse called Christopher Dicks, a guard at a youth court in Scarborough where some preliminary hearings for the boys were being conducted. He had overheard a conversation between the boys that he and Tenhouse thought was significant.

  By that point of the trial, the boys had shown very distinct but consistent attitudes. Kevin showed little interest in the trial, often daydreaming or staring off into space. Tim would often doodle on his notepad, glare at Ashley and her friends, and generally goof off while the trial was on, and then joke around with Kevin during recesses. Pierre, on the other hand, paid very close attention to the proceedings, became emotional at some of the more grisly moments and demonstrated many different signs of nervousness, from shaking his leg to biting his nails. He tended not to join in Kevin and Tim’s jokes and conversations.

  Dicks testified that at the preliminary hearing in Scarborough on April 8, 2005 Pierre showed symptoms of a panic attack. “He couldn’t stop biting his nails,” he said. “His hands were holding his head; his knees were shaking.” It got so bad the judge was compelled to call a recess.

  Dicks testified that as he and another guard were escorting the boys from the courtroom, he heard Kevin say: “What’s wrong with you? I have never seen you have
two panic attacks in two days before.” He described Kevin’s tone as one of “disbelief.”

  Dicks then told the court that he heard Pierre snap back at Kevin: “Yes you have. I was there when it happened and I don’t want to relive it again.”

  Goody called another expert witness from the Ontario Centre for Forensic Sciences, DNA scientist Cecilia Hageman. She had tested blood samples from Johnathon’s body as well as the stains on Kevin’s red T-shirt and black sweatpants and Pierre’s jeans. She testified that the chances that the blood on the clothes came from anyone other than Johnathon were about “one in 820 billion.”

  She also testified that Johnathon’s DNA was found in blood stains on the green-handled knife, both baseball bats and on the basement wall near the basement stairs, the stack of chairs beside them, on the first-floor washroom sink and on the stove in the kitchen.

  Hageman also said blood stains matching Ralston’s DNA were also found on both Kevin and Pierre’s clothes.

  She was followed by Robert Wood, chief of forensic dentistry for the Ontario Coroner’s Office, who testified that he reconstructed a model of Johnathon’s head to give him a better idea of where his wounds were and how they were most likely inflicted. His findings indicated that the meat cleaver was at least one of the weapons used in the attack on Johnathon. Many—at least 30—of the wounds about his head and neck showed consistencies with the cleaver, which had a distinctive notch in the blade.

  Then came the star witness, again. Ashley looked very pretty in her business-like blazer and skirt ensemble. Although she maintained an air of decorum and gravity, she managed to dazzle the entire courtroom with her one shy smile. Ashley was so instantly likable that one observer at the trial later told me that Tim did himself no favor by glaring at her and repeatedly writing “bitch” on his legal pad big enough for both the judge and jury to see.