In concluding his statement, Muise reiterated this point: “I am glad that people will know I wasn’t a shooter. In my mind I feel that I am not responsible for the shootings of these people. I couldn’t stop Derek or Freeman, I was in such shock at the time.” It was a bizarre comment. Muise was trying to lessen his own guilt by putting it off on the others. He did not understand how appalling it was that he had deliberately tried to cut the jugular vein of an innocent man—ostensibly to put him out of pain. That he saw such a horrible action as somehow better than what MacNeil and Wood had done just made it all the more shocking.
Muise cried several times while telling his story. He signed his confession at 10:24 p.m.
At the precise moment that Darren Muise was signing his confession, his name and picture were being broadcast around Atlantic Canada. Saturday May 16, had been a frustrating day for those of us covering the story. We knew the suspects were in custody, and we at ATV even knew who they were—by 8:00 p.m., I had verified through a police source that Mike Campbell was the fourth man, who had been questioned and released. But we still could not identify those in custody. Dave Roper was holding the media at bay, awaiting confirmation from Sylvan Arsenault, the investigation’s coordinator, that the identities of the accused men could be made public. Charges had to be laid, and Roper also needed to keep the victims’ relatives up to date.
Officers were sent out in the early evening, after Darren Muise made the statement admitting his involvement but claiming he had blacked out. The families were told that charges were being laid, and court appearances would follow shortly. As the evening continued, I pressed Roper to release their identities in time for our 10:00 p.m. newscast. The decision to lay charges had been made, but the officers sent out to talk with the victims’ families had not completed their task. Only a couple of officers had been assigned to explain matters to a great many relatives, who had a great many questions. The biggest question—and the one police laboured to explain—was why the men were only being charged with conspiracy to commit robbery. The decision was a legal one: the Mounties had to lay charges of some kind so that Muise, MacNeil, and Wood could be remanded in custody; but investigators wanted time to confer with the Crown after reviewing the statements, and then decide exactly what additional charges each suspect would face.
As newscast after newscast informed the public that the suspects had been arrested and that their identities would soon be revealed, media pressure on Roper grew more and more intense. Finally, he arranged a 10:00 p.m. news conference at the Cambridge Suites—he would release all the information then. It was close, but I knew that if we kept an open phone line to Halifax and sent the video tape of the suspects’ pictures ahead, we could still get the names and pictures on the show. Although it had been a relief to find out that Mike Campbell was not involved in the crime, I still felt the awful apprehension that came from knowing I would have to broadcast the identity of the son of a woman I’d known most of my life. Facing Gail Muise would be difficult, not because what I was doing was wrong, but because I knew it would hurt her.
Roper had not arrived at the hotel by 9:55 p.m., so I phoned the detachment from one of the basement pay phones. Roper said he would make the announcement in a matter of seconds, so I asked if he would stay on the line while I waited. He wanted to tell all the reporters at one time, but reluctantly agreed to release the information that way. I grabbed a second pay phone, dialled the newsroom in Halifax, and asked to be patched through to the anchor—but she was already on the air. The identities would be confirmed in a matter of moments, I told the director, and we could break into the newscast live. It seemed an eternity that I waited with a phone pressed to each ear, but finally, just after 10:20 p.m., Roper was told that the last of the victims’ families had been notified. He read a brief prepared statement into the first pay phone, and I placed the other receiver down to take notes.
“This information is a supplement to the news release given earlier this morning,” Roper said. “The three persons presently in custody are: Derek Anthony Wood of Sydney, date of birth 73-05-14; Darren Frederick Muise of Sydney, date of birth 73-09-18; Freeman Daniel MacNeil of Cape Breton County, date of birth 68-08-24. All three persons have been charged with conspiracy to commit robbery contrary to section 465.(1)(C) of the Criminal Code of Canada. All three have appeared before a justice of the peace and have been remanded in custody. This is the initial charge only; other charges will be laid to coincide with the suspects’ court appearance on May 21, 1992. That’s it. I’ll see you down there in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, Dave.” The identities I had were confirmed. I hung up the first pay phone and shouted into the second, as Dave Roper left the RCMP detachment and headed to the hotel to reread the release to the other reporters and camera operators. While he was getting into his car, the school yearbook photos of all three suspects were being displayed, one after the other, on regional television; and I was being heard from a hotel pay phone, as I gave a brief audio sketch of each young man and explained that friends, neighbours, and teachers were shocked to hear their names associated with this crime. With the broadcast complete, I headed upstairs in time to see Roper being interviewed by the other reporters. I went over and asked my own questions; the ATV cameraman, Gary Mansfield, was already recording the “scrum,” as we call that tangle of reporters and microphones around a person being interviewed after a major news break.
After the briefing, Roper and I walked outside. I was surprised to see him excited; his standard briefings were always given in a direct, unemotional tone, but now he was beaming with the pride of a job well done. But he became more sombre when he made reference to the reality of what had happened at McDonald’s in the early hours of May 7. Roper had read Derek Wood’s confession; he would not give any details, but told me the people of Sydney would be shocked when this case came to trial.
Gary and I loaded our vehicle and returned to the station to feed the taped RCMP briefing to the Halifax newsroom; it would be used on the late-night and Sunday newscasts. While Gary cued the tape, I sat back and enjoyed a coffee at my desk. The May 21 court date meant there would be a few days to relax after the late nights and early mornings of chasing the RCMP. I’d be able to do a community reaction item for Monday and then get away from the story for a couple of days. Sipping the coffee, I looked through the pictures of the accused men and stopped at the yearbook photo bearing the name Darren R. Muise. There were some humorous remarks from classmates, and one of those “Goals for the Future” type of entries—Muise wanted to be a social worker. How had this young man’s plans gone so far off track? He had been interested in a career helping others; how could he have turned into a killer? This was not someone whose childhood differed so dramatically from mine. We had grown up in the same general area, and our mothers had worked together. I looked at the picture and wondered how Gail Muise was feeling, now that word of her son’s involvement had been made public.
Suddenly, my stomach turned as the name Darren R. Muise seemed to jump off the page. I grabbed the RCMP release from the desk: Darren Frederick Muise. Oh, no. It’s the wrong Darren Muise, and we’ve just shown his picture on TV as a suspect in this case. I screamed, grabbing for the phone to call the teenagers who had identified the person in photo. They did not understand why I was upset; they had just watched my report, and they were absolutely positive that was the Darren Muise who had been arrested. Yes, they knew him and had talked with his friends. He was in jail, and they were sure he was the right Muise. It was some relief, but not enough; how could I have believed teenagers on such an important matter? I phoned Greg Boone, who had also confirmed the Muise I.D. through separate sources. He wasn’t sure about the middle name. Finally I contacted Roper, who said it was possible the “Frederick” was a mistake. He checked it out for me—yep, the name is Darren Richard Muise. I hung up the phone exhausted. In less than an hour I had gone from the agonized clock-watching of impending deadline, to the triumphant feeling of get
ting the identities and pictures in time for the newscast, to believing I’d made a career-ending mistake, to realizing that everything was all right. I sat back and stared at the oversized clock that dominated the rear wall of the newsroom. That large white face could be most intimidating as its hands marched along towards the next newscast—whether you were ready or not.
Gary walked back into the newsroom after feeding the tape from the control room. Reports assembled in the Sydney bureau of ATV are transmitted via a designated phone line to the ATV edit suites in Halifax, where they are recorded and rushed to the playback room before a newscast begins. Feeding tape this way is considerably cheaper than the satellite technology we used earlier in the week for our live reports from the RCMP news conference and the disturbance at the courthouse.
“Someday, that thing’s going to kill me,” I said, without looking away from the wall clock.
“That’s what’s going to kill you,” Gary said, pointing to the coffee.
“Everything in-house?”
“Yep.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
By midnight, Darren Muise, Derek Wood, and Freeman MacNeil were in custody at the Cape Breton County Correctional Centre, where they were locked in the special isolation wing to await their first court appearances on Thursday. Shortly after the suspects were safely behind bars, the members of the investigating team began heading home for some much-needed rest. For the first time in ten days, the pressure was off. They had the killers behind bars, and a search of the East Broadway trailer where MacNeil had stayed with his girlfriend had produced the gun. The weapon looked surprisingly harmless—a tiny chromed .22 with brown plastic handles. It didn’t even look like a real gun. A starter pistol, maybe, but not a weapon capable of delivering the fatal shots that had been fired in Sydney River.
Twelve
Back at the Sydney RCMP detachment, a few members of the investigative team were discussing the case and feeling pretty good about their success. But as they started looking through the confessions, the officers became quiet. They couldn’t believe the horror the victims had gone through, how detailed the descriptions were, how Muise and MacNeil had excused their brutal acts as being humane gestures designed to relieve Neil Burroughs from his suffering. Like many of the investigating officers, Pat Murphy was exhausted as he arrived home, but he could not sleep. Constable Murphy sat on the edge of his bed and kept thinking about taking Freeman MacNeil’s hand and holding it tightly as MacNeil confessed. He could see himself reaching out, consoling and forgiving a man who had clubbed an innocent man and shot another. Murphy felt very bad about befriending the killer; he knew it was part of the job, but in the loneliness of the moment he could not rationalize what he had done. Pat Murphy sat in bed in the dark and cried.
Murphy was not the only officer to react that way. Later in the week, two members of the team were discussing the confessions and wondering which version was closest to the truth, when one of the men began to cry, right there in the office. No one felt that was unusual; everyone understood that the team had worked under unyielding pressure, and now, with the pressure off, the strain was beginning to show. An RCMP psychologist was sent to Sydney to offer group sessions and private counselling to officers who wanted to express their feelings to a professional. During one group session, both junior and senior officers filled the room, listening to the counsellor and discussing what they felt inside. At the end of the session, there was not a dry eye in the room. For many, that cathartic release was enough—they had dealt with the anxiety, and the pain—but others took longer to get over the experience. More than a year later, Pat Murphy was returning from a vacation with his family and some friends when they stopped in the town of Antigonish to take the kids to McDonald’s. As the group approached the restaurant, Murphy stopped. He looked at his wife and said he had changed his mind and was going to an adjacent Tim Hortons. He’d meet her back in the car. A travelling companion was about to question him, but Murphy’s wife insisted they all go in and allow Pat to go have a coffee. She understood that her husband just didn’t want to be reminded of the case by going to McDonald’s, in Sydney River or elsewhere. Some members of the team took their families back to the Sydney River restaurant as soon as it reopened; others still avoid it. John Trickett remains haunted by the image of the bent knife-blade and the bloodied Neil Burroughs. A year after the case, he joined a snowmobile club, only to learn that meetings were in the basement of the restaurant—in the training room behind the black steel door used by the killers to get inside. When a friend who had joined the club with him phoned to ask if he was coming to the meeting, he declined, making excuses. He just couldn’t bring himself to go back in there.
For other officers, the effect of the experience has been entirely different. Kevin Cleary, for example, has developed a renewed respect for the little things in life. Always a deeply religious family man, Cleary now constantly finds himself reminded of the value of time with those he loves. Crawling around a deserted restaurant, finding one innocent victim after another, has made him truly appreciate what he had in life.
The community of Sydney was also shaken by the murders and the intense investigation that followed. The Monday after the arrests, I began to interview people, asking them how they felt now that the suspects were in custody and life was returning to normal. Many said that things would never return to normal, that what happened in Sydney River had entirely changed the community. It wasn’t so much the violence of the crime itself, although that certainly was being discussed. But what seemed to disturb people most was that three apparently average young men from the area had been involved in such a crime.
The increasing numbers of people filling the ranks of the unemployed in Cape Breton, and the grim economic forecasts for the future, had hardened some people; yet those same conditions had drawn others close together. It was difficult to understand the hows and whys of it. Reverend Mel Findlay, a local community activist who worked providing food and other essentials to those who could no longer support themselves, shed some light on the issue when he said the McDonald’s murders were a symptom of something gone very wrong in the community. In an interview, he pointed to the harsh economic realities facing Cape Breton, and said they naturally led to an increase in crime; people in need were sometimes forced to take what they could not get any other way. Findlay felt programs like the “Loaves and Fishes” soup kitchens and a newly opened shelter for the homeless could address part of the problem by providing help to the most desperate, but those programs could not deal with whatever drove people to such extreme violence. The McDonald’s murders did not mark the start or the end of a rash of violent crime in Cape Breton, he said; they just focused attention on what had been a steadily growing problem. Indeed, within weeks of the murders, there were two more killings in the area. In Sydney Mines, two brothers got into a fight after a card game and ended up outside, rolling around in the driveway and stabbing each other. One brother died, the other was hospitalized. Later, a young mother was brutally murdered in her apartment in Sydney. And in the months before the McDonald’s murders, there was the savage stabbing death of convenience-store clerk Lorraine Dupe in Sydney—a crime that many felt was connected to the McDonald’s case. That the two tragedies were unrelated only served as a nagging reminder that the end of the Sydney River investigation did not mean the problem would go away.
The escalation of violence had been gradual, but journalists could see its course just by the way we handled violent crimes over the years. When I first started working as a reporter at a Sydney radio station, more than ten years before the McDonald’s murders, a routine phone check with police that revealed a stabbing had occurred the night before would become a lead item in our newscast. We would want all the particulars from the police—whether anybody had been charged; where the stabbing had occurred; how police had been notified; what the victim’s condition was. By 1992, a question usually had to do with whether the victim was going to survive. If the
injury was not life-threatening, the story might not even get reported—unless, of course, it was an otherwise slow news day. Emergency-room workers at local hospitals had also observed a rise in violence, and were becoming more accustomed to seeing ambulances arrive late at night, carrying someone injured in a violent confrontation. The situation was still far from what hospital workers in large cities faced, but it was also far from the image of “downhome” Cape Breton.
Police noted that most of the violence was linked to alcohol abuse; however, social workers from the local addiction-treatment centre found that alcohol abuse was often linked to the desperate state of the economy. People were hiding from the circumstances in which they found themselves, and while alcoholism is certainly not limited to those who have fallen on hard times, neither is violence. The pressures of an uncertain economy were felt by the employed as well as the unemployed. There were very few people in Cape Breton who felt secure in their jobs. All in all, the explanations—the economy, its hardships, problems like alcoholism or drug abuse—had relevance, but were not answers to the overwhelming question: Why?
What is certain is that the arrests of Derek Wood, Darren Muise, and Freeman MacNeil shook the foundation that had always helped Cape Bretoners work through the tough times. People’s inner strength had always been a source of fierce pride; islanders had been through extreme hardship in the past and had always pulled closer together. The mining communities had proved they were stronger than the powerful mining companies during the bitter disputes over workers’ rights in the 1920s. They could “stand the gaf,” as the expression went—a rallying cry in times of apparently insurmountable difficulty. The term had its origin in a remark made by a mine owner when company stores were refusing to provide food to the miners and their families; the owner had commented that the people did not have the strength to “stand the gaf”—to endure in the face of hardship. But Cape Bretoners proved they had what it took; as long as they stuck together, they could conquer anything. And they won their rights. Working conditions in the mines would improve, as would the meagre salaries paid to men who worked from before dawn until after dark. The companies running the mines began to show more respect to the men who worked underground. The songs and stories of Cape Breton artists have always celebrated the dignity of people such as coal miners, who risked their lives underground to support their families; fishermen, who headed into unpredictable waters to do the same thing; and steelworkers, who stood proud in the extreme heat and dirt of an ageing plant to produce one the highest-quality steel rails in the world.
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