Murder at McDonald's

by Jessome, Phonse;

  The officers wrote out this statement but let MacNeil know they felt he knew more. Then he began connecting Muise and Wood to other crimes; they’d been involved in break-and-enters before, he said. As the questioning continued, MacNeil began to wonder just what it would take to get him released. He painted a grimmer and grimmer picture of his colleagues. One time they borrowed his car to go buy a submarine sandwich—Darren even borrowed money to buy the food—and when they returned, two hours later, they had filled his car with gas. He wondered how they suddenly came into money that night. At the conclusion of this statement, the officers left the interview room and MacNeil relaxed, certain that he would be able to leave soon.

  This information certainly gave police reason to pick up and question Darren Muise, Derek Wood, and Mike Campbell. But MacNeil hadn’t offered an account of the discussions with Greg Lawrence, and something just didn’t feel right. Phil Scharf decided he would have another chat with the young man, and while the new statement was being faxed to Kevin Cleary and Sylvan Arsenault, Scharf took over the questioning of MacNeil.

  The new statement, coupled with the one from Greg Lawrence, gave police enough reason to prepare for arrests, and extra officers were brought in from other RCMP detachments. It would not be a repeat of the high-profile ERT raids in Glace Bay a week earlier, but the Mounties would take no chances; the gun was still out there somewhere. Pat Murphy had been listening to the wiretaps and learned Wood was planning a night of club-hopping to celebrate his nineteenth birthday. Afternoon briefings were held, take-downs were planned, and officers were assigned to conduct interrogations once the suspects were in custody. Dave Trickett would get another chance with Darren Muise, and his partner would be Corporal Brian Stoyek, the man who had questioned Wood on the morning of the murders. Jim Wilson and Karl Mahoney were assigned to interview Wood. They were fresh faces: Cleary didn’t want Wood to think he was dealing with officers he felt he had already bested. And unfortunately, officers were also assigned to arrest and question an innocent man—Mike Campbell. Rod Gillis and Wayne MacDonald were instructed to push for more from Freeman MacNeil; questioning him further was critically important. So far police had enough time to hold the suspects on conspiracy to commit robbery, but not enough to tie them to the crime itself. They needed more.

  It had become a habit for me to touch base with Dave Roper every morning at eight and every afternoon about three, just to see if anything new had developed. When I called that afternoon, Roper’s voice sounded excited, but he was guarded about the reason for his exuberance. Roper almost always said the investigation was going well, but this time he said things were going very well. I said I wanted to head out to the detachment to get an on-camera interview with him saying just that, and told him I had heard there was an unusual amount of activity at the detachment. Roper confirmed that there were several new officers in the building, but asked me not to take a camera up there right away and said he would call back in a few minutes to explain. I asked George Reeves to get the gear ready; we might have something more compelling than the community-concern item we had prepared for that evening’s broadcast.

  Roper did call back, saying he had switched to a telephone that was not being recorded, as most of the lines at the detachment were. This was an arrangement we had made a few times in the past week, when the officer wanted to ask a favour and knew he might have to trade information for it. I pushed for confirmation that arrests were pending, but he could not give it, and asked that I make no reference to the reinforcements arriving at the detachment—something that our camera would reveal simply by panning across the packed parking lot. His tone of concern told me that police were about to make a move, and I knew reporting it could sound an alarm for the suspects. There was no way I’d do that, but I wanted something in return for assuring Roper that I would stay away from his back door. The best he could do was to say that if I didn’t have anything important to do that evening, it might be worthwhile to hang around the station for a few hours; he would call me there with something new to report. I hung up the phone and asked George if he could cancel his plans for the night. He grumbled a little, reminding me—as he had several times in the past week—that he did have a life outside the workplace; maybe I should consider getting one myself, he remarked, heading into the equipment room to sort through the gear. I knew he was joking, and that like everyone else, he was looking forward to seeing this case resolved, but it reminded me to call home. I was going to be late again.

  By the time plans for the arrests were readied, it was too late in the evening to make the move before Muise, Wood, and Campbell left their homes. Officers debated whether to make the arrests in public places and risk a violent confrontation, or wait until the suspects had returned home. While those issues were being worked out, Phil Scharf persuaded Freeman MacNeil to give yet another statement. Once again, he insisted that he had held back information earlier in the day because he was afraid that his mother and girlfriend were in danger. Scharf told him that if he was not completely truthful, Wood and Muise would remain at large, and his loved ones might indeed be put at risk. Then, Gillis and MacDonald took over again.

  This time, MacNeil’s statement was much more specific, and MacNeil hoped the details would convince police he was finally telling all, and should be allowed to go home. The new statement would run eleven pages in length; Gillis and MacDonald wanted every bit of information MacNeil was willing to give. “Freeman, you spoke to the other police officer, Phil Scharf. Do you wish to say anything further at this time?”

  MacNeil was relaxed and his tone was casual as he began his newest tale. The officers had no inkling of the bombshell he was about to unleash. “Yep. Darren Muise didn’t have anything with him … when I picked him up, but he got me to stop along the bypass and he picked up a steel can. I don’t know what the contents were. I assume it was the contents from McDonald’s. I asked Darren where Derek was; he said he went to call the police. He said that they robbed McDonald’s, and when Derek got inside, that he went nuts and started shooting everybody.”

  That was it. Just before 5:00 p.m. on May 15, police heard for the first time who had pulled the trigger. It was a shock to the officers who had dealt with Derek Wood. They suspected him of being involved, all right, but was he really capable of that kind of cold-blooded murder? Was Derek Wood the gunman, and did he still have the gun? MacDonald and Gillis continued to question MacNeil, while Phil Scharf contacted Sydney to report that they had a statement implicating Muise and Wood in more than the planning of the robbery.

  MacNeil gave police some truth and some fantasy as he continued to deliver the goods on his former partners in crime. “He got me to stop at the brook, and that’s where he dumped it all. I don’t know what was in the can; he just took it down to the water with him. He asked me if I wanted some money—he had about a hundred dollars on him. He said they got a lot of money but everything went wrong. He said the other guy got all the money, and I said, ‘Who, Derek?’ and he said no. I told him, ‘Never mind, I don’t want to know.’ I don’t know who the other guy is, but he said Mike dropped him off in town and I think that’s who the other guy is. That’s it.”

  MacNeil was not only willing to hand over his partners, but also more than willing to implicate an innocent man. He would say anything to get out of that interrogation room. But the longer MacNeil stayed, the more police learned about his real involvement. Part of the investigation involved finding and talking to the friends of those believed to be connected to the crime, and an interview with a friend of MacNeil’s had yielded the interesting information that MacNeil had been shooting a handgun at a beach about a week before the murders. MacNeil had an explanation for this: Wood had left a small pistol in his car, and when MacNeil was at the beach with two friends, he discovered that it was loaded, so he decided to shoot at some ice floes. He said Wood took the gun back shortly afterward.

  Police also wanted an explanation that would ease their concerns about the Greg Lawren
ce statement. “Did you yourself talk about doing this robbery with Darren or Derek?”

  “I think I might have.”

  “Explain.”

  “They asked me a couple of times if I’d drive them out there, and I told them no.”

  “When?”

  “About a week before and then the night of the shootings.” This fit Greg Lawrence’s time frame, but hardly implicated MacNeil in the way Lawrence had. Gillis and MacDonald continued the interview, and with each question, MacNeil handed them more and more; he was burying his friends.

  “Do you know who did the shooting?”

  “Darren said Derek did it, but I think Darren did it—or it could have been the third guy, because I don’t know him at all.”

  “Why do you think Darren?”

  “I don’t think Derek would hurt anybody, and Darren was so calm and strange, and Darren keeps calling me, and I saw Derek, and Derek is a mess.”

  The officers asked MacNeil if he knew how it all happened, and he outlined what he claimed Darren told him, including the locations of some of the shootings. His description was accurate enough to convince police he had inside information, but contained enough errors to be seen as second-hand. He was telling what he knew but, after all, he hadn’t been there at the time. The police also wanted to know if he had any theory on why they tried to kill everyone. “I don’t know, Derek told them that nobody was there and Darren probably had the gun and freaked out because he was probably stoned,” MacNeil said. Muise smoked hash a lot and must have been high that night, because he acted so calm after the murders.

  Then, he dropped another bombshell: “Darren also said he finally got to slit somebody’s throat. I don’t know whose, but that’s what he said.” The RCMP had not revealed that a knife had been found at the brook, but now MacNeil had Muise claiming to use a knife during the robbery, and he had already placed Muise in the area where the knife had been recovered.

  MacNeil again offered to tell the officers about the criminal histories of Muise and Wood. “I know they used to break into houses, but I don’t think recently. Derek said when he was fifteen or sixteen, he used to break into houses and stuff, but he got away from it. I think that Darren got him back into it. I say this because it’s Darren I would see broke one day and then have money the next, and he always had money to play pool.”

  “Did they ask you to go on any other robberies or thefts besides the McDonald’s restaurant?”

  “They used to get me to pick them up downtown and drive them home, but not to any breaks that I am aware of. I feel that probably there were times when they used me as a taxi service after they had done something without me knowing it.” MacNeil was getting right into the role of innocent friend of the guilty—any part he played in past robberies was that of an unwilling patsy.

  MacNeil signed his new statement, and agreed to take the officers along the route he’d driven that night and show them where he said he had picked up Muise and where Muise had disposed of evidence. Gillis and MacDonald decided to video-tape the trip. The three men stood in front of the North Sydney detachment as another officer recorded the start of their journey. Before they headed to Sydney, Constable MacDonald read Freeman his rights once more and asked if he wished to speak with a lawyer. MacNeil said no, and the three officers took their willing witness on a drive to Sydney. The camera began to record the re-enactment just outside Tim Hortons on Charlotte Street, where MacNeil claimed to have found Darren Muise that night. As the police car rounded the corner by the coffee shop, MacNeil began to recite the information he had already given police, but now he was pointing to locations and indicating where each comment was made.

  As the car drove past Tim Hortons, I was just on my way out with a large coffee; it would probably be a long night, and I wanted to start the caffeine flow early. That brown Ford Taurus rounding the corner was probably an unmarked police car, but I didn’t see the video camera being used by the officer in the back seat, and I had no idea that the car also carried one of the three men responsible for the crime. The car turned up towards the RCMP detachment, and it occurred to me that the four men inside were going to take part in whatever Dave Roper had hinted would be happening that night. It was a few minutes after 8:00 p.m. Time to go back to the station and try Roper again. At some point, I could also strike up another conversation with the observation officer posted in the ATV parking lot. If an arrest was going to happen tonight, the observation team would have to be near the suspect so police would know where to pick him up.

  As Freeman MacNeil guided police along the route he had taken with Darren Muise after the killings, Muise was back at the pool hall, worrying about the lie-detector test and the disturbing promise made by Dave Trickett. He wondered when that officer Trickett spoke of would come to his door. Derek Wood and some friends of his were also at Pockets, and a local youth counsellor, Barry Moore, was watching the group. He had been keeping an eye on Muise all week and felt something wasn’t right. Moore had played the poker machines with Muise at Sanitary Dairy on the night of the murders, and since then he had begun to wonder where his young friend had been before he arrived at the store. And Muise was also spending more money than he normally did.

  Moore watched Muise laugh and joke with the group on the other side of the room. As the group broke up, Muise huddled and whispered with Derek Wood. Moore knew Wood was the McDonald’s employee who had survived the attack, but he had no idea how much the two had to talk about. Muise was worrying about the polygraph—Freeman was taking one, and Wood figured police would soon want him to do the same. When Wood got up and left, Moore confronted his friend, who looked pale and nervous: “Darren, are you involved in that McDonald’s robbery?” Moore didn’t think his friend was a killer, but he could tell something was wrong. As a counsellor and a friend, he felt Muise might want to confide in him, but Muise had no time for caring friends.

  “No.” Muise left the pool hall and headed home.

  Derek Wood had not gone home, but to the nearby Irish Club, a small bar where he was going to celebrate his birthday with his cousin Mike Campbell and a couple of friends. As he walked towards the club, Wood had a feeling this would be the night. He knew Darren was finally feeling the pressure he himself had felt ever since that day with the police. But he wasn’t going to let his premonition stand in the way of his birthday party. At the Irish Club, Wood and his buddies had a great time, drinking and joking; a friend even gave the karaoke machine a try. The club wasn’t considered the best spot in town to find young women, but the guys figured they’d have a few beers there and then go down to Daniel’s Beverage Room or Smooth Herman’s and make a late night of it.

  As they sat inside the club drinking, Freeman MacNeil was only a block away. He had finished showing Gillis and MacDonald the route, and now the three of them were parked in front of the Sanitary Dairy, where MacNeil had left Muise on the night of the murders. The officers figured they would be able to take MacNeil home, but first they wanted to stop at the Sydney detachment to see what role they would play in the arrests about to take place. At the detachment, they were told not to allow Freeman MacNeil to go home; Kevin Cleary was not satisfied with MacNeil’s statement. MacNeil must have played a more active role: Greg Lawrence was certain that he had acted as the ringleader, and that didn’t fit with his contention that he was aware of the crime but did not even want it discussed in his presence. No, Gillis and Mac-Donald had to push a little harder. MacNeil had changed his story twice already that day; he might do it again.

  Freeman MacNeil points towards Grantmire Brook as he shows Constables Wayne MacDonald, centre, and Rod Gillis where evidence had been disposed of.

  The two officers returned to the car and apologized to MacNeil; no point in letting him they think they were responsible for keeping him in custody. The officers wanted to maintain a friendly rapport with MacNeil. But MacNeil was furious. He had given the police enough to hang Muise and Wood, but they still would not let him go. He sat silentl
y in the car as they drove back to North Sydney. This time he was not going to cooperate; he wanted to go home. When he was taken back to the interrogation room and told about his Charter rights, MacNeil said he would exercise one. He wanted a lawyer. The police helped MacNeil contact Legal Aid lawyer Art Mollon, the man who had advised Derek Wood a week earlier. On the phone, Mollon told his new client that he was not to talk with police, no matter what they asked. “Just be quiet and wait until I get there,” he said.

  On the night of May 15, Freeman MacNeil became the first of the three killers to be placed in custody, at the North Sydney RCMP detachment.

  “I already talked to them. I just want to go home.”

  “Well, don’t say anything else until I arrive; it will take me about a half-hour. Just sit tight.” MacNeil returned to the interview room, where he told the officers he would not make any comment until his lawyer arrived. Wayne MacDonald then placed Freeman MacNeil under arrest and told him he was being charged with being involved after the murders. MacNeil was taken to a holding cell and locked up. He could wait for his lawyer there.

  While MacNeil waited for his legal counsel, I was out in the ATV parking lot, chatting with the lone Mountie. It was about 10 p.m., and police were getting ready to bring in the others, but if this officer knew that arrests were coming, he wouldn’t admit it. We talked about how the crime had changed people in Sydney, and the officer told a story that had him convinced not enough people were getting the message. Earlier in the day, he was at a local store to purchase cigarettes when he was asked to wait while the clerk cleared out the cash register. He couldn’t believe it: the money was right in front of him, yet the clerk seemed completely unconcerned about the prospect of being robbed. She had no idea the man at the counter was carrying a gun. The radio in his car interrupted our conversation; the observer team was using a frequency that our newsroom scanner could not detect. Much of what was said was in code, but I did recognize the places named at the end of the transmission. The officer said he had to leave, and I rushed back into the station newsroom.