Murder at McDonald's

by Jessome, Phonse;

  For Derek Wood, the fifth day of his murder trial marked the end of his teenage years. Wood’s lawyers brought a birthday cake to the courthouse so their client could celebrate his twentieth birthday over lunch. It was a birthday he also shared with his father, a quiet, dark-haired man in his forties, who had been sitting in the hall outside the courtroom since the beginning of the trial. The short, shy-looking George Wood had asked to be near his son during the trial, but the defence team said no. Apparently, Derek didn’t want his father to hear the testimony against him. For the first couple of days, Mr. Wood’s presence had pretty much gone unnoticed by the victims’ relatives and the reporters; however, it wasn’t long before we discovered the identity of the gentleman in the grey leather jacket, who was always leaning forward on a bench and staring at the floor. The sheriff’s deputies told us who he was when we asked if he was a witness, and they also identified the woman who joined him one day—Derek’s stepmother. The couple sat quietly, listening to the conversation swirling around them—all about what a frightening monster their son was supposed to be. George Wood knew all too well about the pain and outrage being felt in the community, especially in the area around the Sydney River McDonald’s; he worked in a grocery store less than a block away, and was constantly reminded of the terrible crime. The pain George Wood felt was as obvious in his posture and his sad eyes as it was in the expressions of the victims’ parents. He too had lost a child.

  Emotions ran high again on the afternoon of Derek Wood’s birthday, as Kevin Cleary took the stand, using a pointer and an architectural model of McDonald’s to describe the scene he found on the morning of May 7, 1992. The $15,000 scale model had been built for the three trials to help witnesses with their testimony, but its presence didn’t make Cleary’s job easier on him emotionally. Cleary wanted to provide the jury with a clear picture of what had happened, but as he talked of finding the bodies inside, he could hear the relatives of the victims crying in the gallery. Each sniffle or quiet moan sent a chill down the officer’s spine, but he forced himself to continue, aware that the families wanted justice and certain he could only help them by being as detailed as possible in his testimony, regardless of the effect.

  By the fifth day of the trial, I had worked out my routine for this trial and the two that would follow. Early each morning, camera operator Gary Mansfield and I arrived at the courthouse to get a new shot of the suspect arriving. At the noon break, we rushed back to the station to do a live report on the 1:00 p.m. news. Then, back to court, where I would try to persuade one of the Crown or defence attorneys to make a comment on the morning session. I needed a fresh on-camera comment each day, and the victims’ relatives were still rejecting requests for interviews. At 4:30 p.m., it was back to the station again, to pull together a two-minute report on the day’s testimony, including the reactions of the spectators. The schedule kept us running and, unfortunately, prevented me from getting as close to the relatives of the victims or of Derek Wood as I would have liked. It seemed that every time there was a break, I was running for a phone or racing towards the truck to get back to the station.

  Still, I was getting in some brief chats with Olive Warren, a very friendly woman who happened to know Gary; the cameraman grew up with Donna in the industrial suburbs of Sydney. Olive had wispy fine hair, glasses, and an expression that varied from a bright smile to deep sorrow, depending on the day and the testimony. She always wore a bright purple jacket with a faded ribbon pinned to the lapel—a tribute to Arlene MacNeil. The committee raising money for Arlene’s rehabilitation had given out the ribbons months before, and Olive continued to wear hers; she told me she would only remove it when Arlene was well enough to come home. Each morning as we arrived, Olive would come over and ask Gary if he had managed to get a good shot of Wood being led from the prison van. He couldn’t appear before the camera too often, as far as she was concerned.

  While Olive would not yet agree to give me an interview, she did talk privately about her concerns and fears—and began to include me in a morning ritual of hers. Every day, before the doors opened, Olive would make the rounds of all the victims’ families, handing out peppermints from an apparently endless supply she kept in her purse. The mints were also offered to security officers, and now Gary and I were on her treat list. When I realized that Olive was also giving candies to the prosecutors each morning, I began to tease her. She had often told me that she’d welcome the chance to get Derek Wood alone and teach him a lesson about what he had done, so one time I told her I knew what she was really up to: “I know what you’re doing,” I said. “When the final day of this trial comes around, you’re going to slip everyone a knockout pill instead of a candy.” Olive smiled conspiratorially. “Don’t tell on me,” she said, “and I’ll keep you awake.”

  After my morning visit with Olive, I would try to chat up the other relatives. Al and Theresa Fagan were very friendly, and apologized for their reluctance to agree to an interview; they did not want to be rude, but they had been advised not to talk to the media. The morning also offered a few minutes to ask Ken Haley about his plans for the day—the witnesses he intended to call, and the insights he hoped to reveal through their testimony. To my sorrow, I learned that Haley had more than the trial on his mind as he arrived each day. He was spending his evenings at the home of his father, a well-respected and hard-working community volunteer who was fighting a losing battle with cancer.

  On the sixth day of the trial, the jury heard from Corporal Lead-better, who provided one of only two pieces of physical evidence linking Wood to the crime—the first being the kitbag found propping open the basement door. Leadbetter said the footprints from that door into the restaurant matched impressions made by the sneakers Wood wore that night. It was a tiny chink in the armour Derek Wood had worn since the trial began—the well-dressed, clean-cut young man, chatting quietly with his lawyers or with the guards beside him. It was difficult to believe that he was responsible for the horrific crime being re-created in gory detail for the jury. Whenever he entered or left the courtroom, he kept his head down and his face expressionless; even the jurors who watched the evening news saw only a subdued-looking, quiet young person. But when the jury was out for a break, and Wood was talking with his lawyers, he showed a little more emotion, even laughing at times. This irked Gary Mansfield, who took a great deal of pride in his work and was becoming more and more frustrated with the ever-present image of Wood with his head bowed in apparent sorrow. He wanted people to see Wood’s face clearly—to see his eyes.

  “As soon as I put the camera down, he comes to life,” Gary told me one day. “Maybe if you stand in front of me, and I shoot over your shoulder, he won’t notice.” We both laughed at the suggestion. More than six feet tall, Gary packed about 225 pounds of solid muscle developed over many long hours in the gym. At five-nine and 145 pounds, I was hardly the one to block Gary Mansfield from anyone’s view—especially when he had a TV camera on one shoulder and a large video-recorder on the other. “Fine,” said Gary, “but I’ll get the shot even if I have to find a full-grown reporter somewhere else.” Mansfield did get his shot that day, while Wood was talking with his lawyers during a break. He didn’t get anyone to block for him, though; he simply adjusted his camera for available light, quickly moved into the doorway, and aimed the lens into the courtroom. He managed to catch a few seconds of the smile on Derek Wood’s face before Wood saw the camera, at which point his face went blank and his head lowered. It was another chink in the armour; Derek Wood wanted to be seen as a quiet and serious young man, and his efforts had been thwarted.

  A hint of a smile compromises the serious look Derek Wood assumed for most of his trial. One of his lawyers, Allan Nicholson, is behind him. [Print from ATV video tape.]

  On May 18 and 19, the jury also saw a very different Derek Wood, as they watched the video tape of his interrogation. This was a defiant Wood, arguing with and scoffing at Constables Wilson and Mahoney as they tried to persuade him to confess
. They could also see a clear change in the young man’s demeanour when he did confess—from an angry teen with an attitude, to someone clearly enjoying his conversations with police. The big-screen confession was the most telling evidence in the case, and Art Mollon and Allan Nicholson promptly set out to discredit it. In cross-examining the officers who had interrogated Wood, they showed that many details of the crime had first been revealed by the police, not Wood. For their part, the officers insisted they were trying to convince Wood that they knew what had happened, and that it was in his best interest to cooperate. But the defence team argued that the details police provided, coupled with Wood’s obvious concern for the incarcerated Mike Campbell, could have prompted him to invent a confession that would help his friend. In his effort to create reasonable doubt—did Wood commit the crime or did he just repeat what police had described to him?—Allan Nicholson spent hours questioning Jim Wilson. The big, friendly constable shifted uncomfortably in the witness chair as he lived through every police officer’s nightmare—a defence attorney who will not let you off the stand. The heat and humidity in the crowded courtroom added to Wilson’s obvious discomfort; still, he handled the questions well, insisting he was certain that Derek Wood confessed because he was guilty. The cross-examination also gave Wilson a chance to say in public how he really felt about Wood. He may have been the one befriending the suspect in the interrogation room, but that didn’t mean he was a member of the Derek Wood fan club. When Nicholson suggested that Wood responded to officers’ appeals to his conscience by admitting to more than the minor role he played, Wilson flatly rejected this image of a guilt-ridden teenager. “I don’t feel he has a conscience,” the officer said. “When he finished his statement, he says he’s sorry. That’s about the only conscience he has.”

  Wilson spent the better part of two days on the witness stand, and near the end of his cross-examination, Neil Burroughs’s sister Francine began crying quietly in the courtroom. I asked her later if she was upset because she felt the jury now believed Wood was innocent. But her concern was for Jim Wilson. “I just feel so bad for him,” she said. “It’s not fair for them to treat him like that. I just wanted to run up to the stand and give him a big hug.”

  The Crown rested its case after calling the police witnesses, and Art Mollon took over. Like many defence lawyers, Mollon doesn’t give an opening statement, preferring to save his arguments for the summation. He began by calling four people to testify on behalf of Derek Wood. These witnesses came to Mollon’s attention about halfway through the trial, when he received a phone call from a young woman who had been at Kings Convenience with her boyfriend on the morning of the murders. She remembered Derek Wood running into the store, and after hearing reports from the trial indicating that the time he arrived at the store was at issue, she felt compelled to call.

  In early testimony, the convenience-store clerk who dialled the police for Wood just after the shootings insisted that he called the RCMP, and not the ambulance company, as the defence suggested. It made a big difference. If the first call was made to the RCMP, then Wood arrived at the store at 1:20 a.m., the time the RCMP logged the call. But if the clerk dialled the ambulance first, then Wood could have been at the store as much as fifteen minutes earlier, a point that was crucial to Nicholson’s and Mollon’s case. And Mollon’s witness was sure that Wood had arrived before 1:15; her boyfriend agreed, as did his mother and sister, who remembered exactly what time the couple returned from Kings to tell them about the young man who reported a shooting.

  The fifth defence witness, Russell Deveaux, was a guard at Cape Breton County Correctional Centre who had befriended Derek Wood during his preliminary hearing in October 1992 and had listened to Wood talk about the case several times since. But when Deveaux was called to the stand, Ken Haley objected; he wanted to discuss the admissibility of the guard’s evidence. The judge had a chance to hear Deveaux’s testimony while the jurors were out of the room. According to the guard, Wood talked in hypothetical terms about being in the restaurant—what if I were there but didn’t shoot anyone?—and indicated that he saw Arlene MacNeil shot and tried to help Donna Warren but was prevented from doing so. He felt he could have saved Donna, and Jimmy Fagan, but instead he ran away. The statements came in bits and pieces, not as one cohesive explanation, Deveaux said, adding that he encouraged Wood to talk when he appeared to be upset during the trial.

  The guard also tried to persuade Wood to testify, which, he said, Wood told him his lawyers were also trying to do. Someday, Wood told Deveaux, he would make sure the victims’ families heard the whole story. But he did not feel he could testify while they were in the courtroom. The guard also insisted that Wood told him not to testify about their conversations, but Ken Haley argued that Wood was using Deveaux to get a new version of his story before the jury without having to undergo cross-examination to do it. And despite defence arguments that the Crown had been allowed to call a guard to testify about incriminating remarks by Wood made while he was in custody, Justice Tiddman ruled that Deveaux’s testimony would not be allowed. The jury would not hear what the guard had to say.

  Art Mollon then turned in his chair and asked his client a question; he replied, “No.” Mollon never did reveal what the question was, but he had made it clear to reporters throughout the trial that Derek Wood could make his lawyer’s job a lot easier by testifying on his own behalf. Whatever he had asked Mollon rested the case for the defence after Wood’s reply. On the morning of May 27, the thirteenth day of the Wood trial, Art Mollon was ready to deliver his summation to the jury. “While this is one of the most brutal and senseless crimes in Nova Scotia, or even Canada, we must determine what the facts are,” he said. “I believe the evidence indicates he did not do it.

  “Let’s look at the times,” he continued. “They are critical.” And Mollon slowly outlined for the jury why the timing of key events after the crime made it impossible for his client to have been at McDonald’s when the murders occurred. “We have documented times,” he said. “The RCMP received the call from City Wide Taxi at 1:09—that was the first call to police. At 1:20, Derek Wood phoned police.” Facing the jury, a portable podium beside him to hold his notes, Mollon spoke with compassion as he outlined the tough role jurors must play. The only evidence of the anxiety the lawyer was feeling was his voice; it was a little louder and a little higher than it had been for the rest of the trial. Then his expression turned to deep concern. That call, he said—Wood’s call to police had to be the young man’s second attempt to notify authorities about the crimes. And the first call had to be to the ambulance company. Wood had told police the morning of the crime that he thought his first call had been to an ambulance company, and the ambulance dispatcher had told the jury he received two back-to-back calls reporting the crime at about 1:08, one from the taxi dispatcher and the other from an unidentified male calling from Kings. Mollon asked the jurors, who were from the Sydney area and knew the distances involved, if his client could have been at McDonald’s at 1:05—when the taxi arrived with Jimmy Fagan—and still have been able to run to Kings to make a phone call at 1:08. “Derek was at Kings when Jimmy Fagan was shot,” Mollon said. “He was a terrified young man who was involved in a plan to rob his employer. When the horror started, he ran for help.”

  Derek Wood’s second statement to Constable Brian Stoyek on May 7 was credible, Mollon argued; the young man was in the restaurant when the first shot was fired, but he ran back out the door and headed for Kings. As for the confession, Mollon told the jury his client wanted to protect Mike Campbell, and felt he was to blame because he helped plan the robbery and let MacNeil and Muise into the restaurant. Mollon emphasized that Wood did not take any money: “Who was in control of the money? Freeman. Wood did not want any.”

  As he took his seat after almost ninety minutes, Art Mollon realized that his job was done—all he could do now was wait for the jurors to do theirs. While his arguments were strong, the jury still had to hear from Ken Hal
ey, who had spent a long night preparing his address to the jury, working at his kitchen table and pausing every once in a while to think about his father. How proud he had been, only weeks before, when his son was appointed regional Crown prosecutor for Cape Breton, and how happy he would be if Haley won this very important case. The prosecutor began simply by asking the jury to consider all the evidence. Derek Wood acknowledged his true involvement in the crime, he said, reminding the court of the way Wood chose to confess. Haley asked the jury to consider the videotaped interrogation when they assessed Wood’s character: was this the portrait of a terrified teenager or a cold-blood killer? Rather than admit to everything, in an attempt to satisfy police and help Mike Campbell, Wood picked up the list of charges and specified the ones for which he claimed guilt. As for the timing of Wood’s calls from Kings, Haley wondered just how accurately people keep track of time; wasn’t it common for people to differ by ten or fifteen minutes? Slowly building his argument, Haley questioned Wood’s actions after the crime. Why didn’t he tell police he was walking to Freeman MacNeil’s house? Because he knew MacNeil was involved? And if he was so terrified that he took off after hearing shots, why didn’t he tell police about the maniacs who went crazy with the gun? As Haley continued to summarize the evidence, the victims’ relatives began to relax. Mollon’s summation had them worried, but now they could feel the tide changing in their favour; “their lawyer,” as they later referred to Haley, was doing a good job.

  In front of the jury box, Haley paced slowly, emphasizing that what happened at McDonald’s was no accident. “They talked about shooting the employees if they had trouble inside.… They planned the robbery, and when things went bad they fell back on what they had talked about. Our ally is force, our ally silence. No one can tell. Eliminate witnesses.” Then, for the final time, he took the jury through the crime scene, describing in detail what had happened, what Derek Wood had done. Once again, Neil Burroughs’s sisters wept to hear the heartbreaking account of their brother’s violent death.