Murder at McDonald's

by Jessome, Phonse;

  As the rear doors of the church opened, an honour guard of uniformed McDonald’s employees walked out. The young adults hugged and comforted one another as they cried. The funeral director positioned Donna’s co-workers on each side of the church steps as he prepared to lead the pallbearers past them to the waiting hearse. The camera recorded the emotional group and Donna’s casket as it was taken from the church. It was the first time I had seen Donna’s mother, and it was difficult to watch as Olive Warren hugged her mother and walked slowly out into the sun: the pain was evident in every movement of the two women. As George and I watched in North Sydney, another camera operator was doing the same thing outside the church in Dominion, where Neil Burroughs’s coffin was being followed by his grieving relatives.

  I had managed to find out that Donna Warren would be laid to rest in the large Lakeside Cemetery on Johnson Road, a little more than one kilometre from the McDonald’s in North Sydney. Donna had left her job at the Sydney River restaurant to work closer to home when the North Sydney location opened, but after a short time she returned to Sydney River. Like all McDonald’s restaurants in Cape Breton, the one in North Sydney was closed for the day of the funerals, and, as at all McDonald’s restaurants in Canada, the flags outside flew at half-mast. As the casket was placed in the hearse, I tapped George on the shoulder and asked him to break down the gear. If we hurried, we could reposition ourselves across from the restaurant and record the funeral procession as it passed—a very telling shot, and one I felt would open our report that evening.

  But the shot would never be recorded; someone had decided to spare the Warren family the pain of driving past McDonald’s, and the funeral procession followed another route. We headed back to Sydney to call on Dave Roper.

  As the turnout for the funerals suggested, the people of Cape Breton were having a tough time adjusting to what had happened in Sydney River. Employees of the three other McDonald’s restaurants in Cape Breton were particularly anxious, and executives with the fast-food chain took steps to address that problem. Peter Beresford, the vice president of McDonald’s of Canada, released a statement that the hearts and prayers of his company were with the victims’ families, employees of McDonald’s, and the community. Beresford called the killings a senseless, isolated incident: the company was aware of the impact such a tragedy could have in a small community, but its executives were also sensitive about McDonald’s image as a friendly family restaurant. Considering the size of the international restaurant chain, McDonald’s had been the target of relatively few violent crimes; but when one did occur, the popularity of the restaurants made the incident big news. Perhaps the most notorious of these crimes occurred in San Ysidro, California, in July 1984, when a gunman opened fire inside a McDonald’s restaurant, killing twenty-one people and injuring thirteen others before killing himself. McDonald’s acted quickly, razing the building within days. Also in 1984, six people in a McDonald’s in Detroit were shot to death by a youth who returned to the restaurant with a gun, after an argument there. In 1990 a gunman took his own life in a Hamilton McDonald’s, after taking thirteen hostages. A little over a week before the Sydney River killings, three McDonald’s outlets in the Far East were rocked by bombs.

  While these incidents were isolated tragedies, as Beresford had said, McDonald’s International had learned the importance of helping its staff through the emotional trauma associated with violent crime. McDonald’s sent its head of security to Cape Breton to coordinate efforts aimed at assisting police and helping employees deal with the loss. Two psychologists set up a trauma clinic in the Cambridge Suites Hotel and offered counselling to all McDonald’s employees and to relatives of the victims. Many teenagers and young adults arrived at the hotel to consult them. The young employees of the Sydney River restaurant were struggling to cope with the particularly powerful, horrific images of what had happened in a place they knew so well, and they wanted someone to explain where and how their co-workers had died. The workers had heard the rumours of ritualistic slayings, of execution-style murders, of torture. Many feared the day they would return to work. No arrests had been made; what if the killers came back? To address that concern, McDonald’s initiated new security measures in Sydney River, and psychologists assured the workers that it was extremely unlikely the killers would return. The issue of the rumours, and the images of torture and a blood-soaked restaurant, were tougher to dispel. The company and the psychologists agreed it would be in the best interest of the employees to get the restaurant back to business as soon as police were finished with the part of their investigation involving the crime scene itself. This happened within days, and with Dave Roper’s assistance, company representatives took employees through the building, hoping that by showing workers where the deaths had occurred and answering as many of their questions as possible, the young workers’ anxieties would be eased.

  The day the slain McDonald’s employees were being buried, Freeman MacNeil was driving through Sydney with an old friend when he saw Darren Muise and Derek Wood walking along the road in the Hardwood Hill area. MacNeil pulled over and offered them a lift. The four drove quietly down George Street to Pockets, where Muise and Wood got out and said goodbye. It was the first time the three men had been together after the crime, but nothing said during the short drive suggested they had any involvement. While Wood and Muise played pool, MacNeil and his friend went shopping. They headed to Car Audio Plus, on Welton Street, where MacNeil had made the down payment on a pair of speakers for his car on Saturday. He was ready to settle up—the balance owing was just under eleven dollars—paying, once again, with five-dollar bills (and a loonie). Then he noticed a good deal on an amplifier, so he made another down payment, handing the clerk two more five-dollar bills.

  MacNeil left the stereo store, but he wanted that amplifier, so he told his friend he would go borrow the money from his mother. The two chatted as they headed to Beaton Road, where the friend waited in the car while Freeman went inside. Back at the store, he handed the clerk ten more five-dollar bills and left with his amplifier. Since the night of the murders, Freeman MacNeil had purchased two sets of speakers and two amplifiers, and used thirty-nine five-dollar bills in the process. And his shopping spree would continue later.

  While other McDonald’s employees dealt with their grief by talking with counsellors, Derek Wood was finding a different way to cope with his. Wood had experimented once or twice with mild recreational drugs, but in the week after the murders he found getting high a great way to get away from the pressures he was feeling. On Tuesday, May 12, Wood got together again briefly with Darren Muise and Freeman MacNeil—this time they were alone in MacNeil’s car and could talk. MacNeil and Muise assured Wood that everything was back in place and that the other evidence had been disposed of. Wood had contacted MacNeil over the weekend and told him about the gun; after three days of driving around with the weapon still in the car, MacNeil finally went out to retrieve it from behind the back seat. He washed the gun and returned it to the box in Michelle’s stepfather’s dresser. MacNeil and Muise felt secure; Wood did not.

  After they had talked for a while, MacNeil threw a bag of money to Muise, who asked what it was and was told it was his share. Wood was not given any money, and he didn’t ask for any. The robbery had been his idea, but now he didn’t want the money, nor was he surprised that it had not been offered to him. He figured MacNeil and Muise were upset about the knapsack he had left behind. In the group, Wood was the weaker personality, neither prone to the grandiose schemes and claims of Darren Muise, nor as self-assured as Freeman MacNeil, whose size, age, and access to a car put him a little ahead of the others.

  Surprisingly, the three did not talk much about the crime. The money was handed out, Wood was assured the evidence had been taken care of while he was in custody, and that was that. MacNeil left, and Wood and Muise headed to a secluded pond to smoke hashish and relax. Muise had tried the drug two years before and now used it occasionally. Whether it was due t
o the paranoia brought on by the drug, or because of the barrage of news reports on the extensive RCMP investigation, Darren Muise decided it would be a good idea to hide his take. The plastic grocery-store bag MacNeil had given him contained a wad of two-dollar bills. Muise grabbed some, leaving more than sixty of the crumpled bills in the bag, which he sealed tightly. Wood offered to help hide the money: he crawled out on a fallen tree trunk jutting out of the pond, reached into the water, and forced the bag down to the muddy bottom. Then he crawled back to shore and dried himself off.

  A couple of hours later, someone else would be trying to stay dry beside a body of water in another part of Industrial Cape Breton—a person who would give police the break they’d been waiting for. As the late spring temperatures continued to climb, sports fishermen had started their annual migration to snow-swollen brooks and streams in search of trout. Mike, like many recreational fisherman, had his favourite haunts, and after work on May 12, he tried out one of them. The Grantmire Brook was as a good a place as any, he figured, as he parked by the road and made his way down to the fast-running brook. As he walked along the edge of the water, the high-school teacher noticed a grey metal container about the size of a tackle box. He went over to have a look. Mike realized very quickly that he was not looking at a discarded tackle box. The metal container was a cash box, and when he looked inside, the fisherman saw a faded yellow sticker bearing the slogan “Have A McHappy Day” and showing the familiar image of Ronald McDonald. Mike headed for a telephone and called the RCMP.

  By midweek, John Trickett and Storm had begun retracing their own steps in the area around the Sydney River McDonald’s. He and another dog master, Truro-based RCMP Corporal Kim Baldwin, had been conducting pattern searches of the wooded areas and fields in Sydney River since May 7; Baldwin had been called in because the case was too demanding for one team. If investigators did not yet have any assignments for the teams elsewhere, Trickett and Baldwin were content to continue to scour that area in case they found something that would lead to those responsible for the crime. But the dog masters were beginning to worry about their canine partners. Hours of searching without any results were not good for the dogs, who were motivated by the rewards they received from the trainers after finding something.

  For several days, the dog teams had been the most visible part of the RCMP investigations, as TV cameras captured their searches and news reports replayed those images for the viewing public. All the attention gave Trickett and Baldwin a high profile in the community. Each morning before heading out with the dogs, officers would stop at a busy Tim Hortons in the day’s search area, and several times, customers ahead of them in line insisted that the Mounties move to the front. People might be in a hurry to get to their own jobs, but they did not want to delay the men working on the McDonald’s murders. Other officers were having similar experiences as they went about the business of interviewing people and checking on leads phoned into the detachment. Every day, there were reminders that the residents of Industrial Cape Breton supported their efforts; even Mounties working on unrelated cases were told that the people were behind them. And all the encouragement spurred their determination to win this one.

  At the Sydney detachment office, news of a McDonald’s cash box found lying near a secluded brook sent renewed energy through the investigators. They knew that a grey metal cash box was missing from the safe at the Sydney River restaurant. Henry Jantzen, who had been named exhibit man for the case, was sent to Grantmire Brook; it was his responsibility to collect evidence and be prepared to explain in court how he had obtained each item. John Trickett and Storm were also sent along: if there was one item connected to the crime, there could be more. Unfortunately, it was getting dark by the time they arrived, so Trickett took Storm in the woods for a quick look around, then decided he should wait for daylight before conducting a full search. An RCMP officer was placed on guard for the night to protect the search area.

  Back at the detachment, Kevin Cleary and other investigators were wondering about the location where the new evidence had been uncovered. A map confirmed that Grantmire Brook was near the end of Mountain Road, and police knew Wood had walked up that road after the killings; but could he have carried evidence that far and then returned? The investigators also knew that Freeman MacNeil lived on Beaton Road, which wasn’t far from the end of Mountain and the brook. Suddenly, checking out the details of MacNeil’s statement to Glen Lambe and Phil Eagan became a priority. Maybe MacNeil was telling the truth, but police generally don’t believe in coincidence. They knew MacNeil had driven Derek Wood to work that night and that Wood had tried to phone him after the shootings, neglecting to mention that phone call to police. Now evidence had been uncovered near MacNeil’s home. Adrenaline flowed freely again; the investigators felt very positive about the discovery at the brook and hopeful about the next day’s search. Someone was also going to have to talk with Darren Muise, whose name was connected to Freeman MacNeil’s on the flow chart in the investigator’s office. Muise would either confirm the belief of Glen Lambe and Phil Eagan that MacNeil was not involved, or he would add weight to the growing belief among other investigators that Freeman MacNeil warranted a much closer look. Kevin Cleary sat back in his chair and stared at his flow chart. For the first time, he connected the names Wood, MacNeil, and Muise in his mind. The names would become inseparable in a matter of days.

  As Kevin Cleary sat reflecting over his flow chart, the names MacNeil and Muise were being offered to another member of the investigative team. The daily television appearances had made Dave Roper the most-recognized member of the Sydney RCMP. Public perception might have been that Roper was at the centre of the investigation, but in reality his duties were confined to keeping the public informed. He was not conducting interviews or following the leads other investigators were. Still, Roper knew what the others were working on and he attended the daily briefings with Sylvan Arsenault.

  Roper had been stationed in the Ingonish area of Cape Breton before coming to Sydney, and Freeman MacNeil’s friend Greg Lawrence was then living near Ingonish. Lawrence recognized Roper on TV and remembered the officer as a friendly guy who was easy to talk to. He decided to give him a call. Lawrence told the officer who took the call that he wanted to talk with Dave Roper. No, he wouldn’t give his name, and he would talk only with Roper about the information he had—information about the McDonald’s case. When he was told Roper had gone home for the evening, Lawrence left a number where the officer could phone him in the next few minutes. There was some confusion at the detachment: Dave Roper had been receiving a constant flow of phone calls at home from residents who simply wanted to encourage him to keep up the good work. The volume of calls had forced Roper to change his home phone number the day before, and officers now scrambled to find out who had the new number. When he was contacted, Roper decided not to call this mysterious source from home; he was concerned about his wife and children. He drove to Sheldon’s Kwik Way, a convenience store less than a kilometre from his home. There was a pay phone in the lot about thirty metres from the store, and Roper could talk without being overhead. Roper did not recognize the voice on the other end of the line, but the man said he knew Roper. He also claimed he knew who had committed the McDonald’s murders. Greg Lawrence gave Roper the names of Freeman MacNeil and Darren Muise, and claimed he had heard them planning the robbery. Roper knew that the names were being circulated at the office and wondered if his caller was someone connected to MacNeil and Muise; maybe he wanted to find out how much police knew, or maybe he was trying to lead police in the wrong direction. Lawrence could tell from the officer’s tone that Roper did not believe him, so he ended the conversation, refusing to give his name. Lawrence was angry, and a little disappointed in Dave Roper—maybe insisting on talking to him might have been a mistake. He would call back another time, and when he did, he wouldn’t demand to talk to Roper. No, next time he would speak to someone who would believe him.

  Wednesday, May 13, w
as another warm, sunny spring day, and the sun was indeed shining on the RCMP and their investigation. Soon after officers arrived at the Grantmire Brook, they uncovered more evidence. Along both sides of the brook, branches from fallen trees reached down into the water, creating natural nets for debris floating along the surface. Digging through the debris, officers found some clumps of paper and several red plastic McDonald’s change pouches. Back at the detachment, investigators decided they would scrape the bottom of the brook if that’s what it took to find every scrap of evidence at that site. Most of all, they wanted the gun. They had to recover the weapon; it was a nagging worry they had been dealing with since the morning of May 7. Kevin Cleary and Sylvan Arsenault knew that whoever was responsible for the murders might still have the gun, and might be willing to use it again. They needed to find that gun because it was evidence in their case, but, more importantly, because they wanted to get the thing off the street.

  The RCMP diving team was sent to Beachmont Road; their daily dives into Sydney harbour had turned up nothing, and now they would have the chance to search an area known to contain evidence. The Grantmire Brook is not deep enough for divers to submerge themselves completely, but in places there are pools too deep to be examined by someone walking along the sides of the brook, or even down the middle. Two divers donned masks, snorkels, and wet suits, then settled themselves face down in the brook, reaching out to the sides to grab rocks or other protruding objects that would stop them from being pulled along too quickly by the rushing water. They inched their way along the brook, examining the deep holes and paying close attention to the fallen trees and their branches. As the divers found anything they considered worthy of a closer look, they would stand and take the item or items to another member of the team who was slowly walking along beside the brook with a kitbag. The bag bore a remarkable resemblance to the one used to take the clothing and other items away from McDonald’s almost a week before—Freeman MacNeil had hidden it in the woods near his home and later burned it, along with the clothing he and Darren Muise had worn.