Cathy Fagan could not believe it. She began to rock in her seat and cry. Her sobs grew louder, and the others soon wept with her. Justice Gruchey quickly sentenced MacNeil to the mandatory life term with no parole for twenty-five years on the first-degree conviction, and asked the jury to consider an appropriate parole eligibility on the second-degree conviction. Juries are not required to make such a recommendation, but judges must give them that opportunity. The jurors retired to consider the issue, and Freeman MacNeil was just being escorted out of the courtroom when a flashfire of emotion and pain burst through the courtroom. MacNeil went pale as he was hustled away, and Justice Gruchey also left quickly. But the prosecutors and defence lawyers remained to witness what they later called a very painful expression of grief.
Sixteen
Cathy Fagan ignited the explosive build-up of tension in Courtroom Three, crying out to her brothers as Freeman MacNeil was being led from the room: “Go get him! Paul, David, go get him!” Her knees buckled as she tried to push her brothers towards the wall of security officers protecting MacNeil. Paul and David Fagan had no intention of moving in that direction; instead, they turned to help Cathy. But their anger burst through the surface as deputies roughly escorted Cathy from the courtroom. “Get your hands off her, you hear me? Don’t you hurt her!” they shouted. They rushed towards the back of the room as the rear doors flew open, and the sheriff’s deputies and a hysterical Cathy Fagan stumbled into the anteroom beside the courtroom. The noise attracted the attention of the camera crews outside, who began recording as Cathy struggled with the guards, screaming that she didn’t want to be filmed. Her brothers tried to chase the journalists away, even pushing a guard in their direction, but that only made for more drama, and the scrum of camera operators and photographers moved in closer.
Back in the courtroom, Joey Burroughs screamed at Kevin Coady, who remained in his seat with his back to Burroughs, a hollow feeling in his heart as he listened. “You fuckin’ scumbag, you don’t have a heart!” howled the enraged young man. “He fuckin’ murders people! Coady, you’ll fry in fuckin’ hell!” An angry and tearful Julia Burroughs sat on the bench she had occupied for weeks. She turned sideways and pulled her knees up, hugging them and crying, “We had no protection!” Meanwhile, her mother-in-law marched to the front of the room and began to berate Freeman MacNeil’s mother: “I hope you don’t get one minute of sleep, lady. We don’t get a night of sleep after what they done to our kids.” Edith MacNeil made no response, just kept her head down and stared at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap. Her mind filled with the jury foreman’s words: “Guilty … guilty … guilty … guilty.” Her son, guilty of the most serious offences in the Canadian criminal justice system. Any hope she might have had that Kevin Coady could somehow persuade the jury to go easy on Freeman had evaporated. Edith MacNeil seemed lost in a world of her own, oblivious to the turmoil going on around her. Mrs. MacNeil’s friends would later say that she had changed completely—that anguish had aged her. Once a lively, friendly woman, she had become quiet and sullen, and at times, during the trial, she looked almost like a frightened deer, frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car.
Theresa Fagan, who had remained silent for a year and a half, could not believe what was happening around her. She had done what the lawyers wanted; she had kept quiet, and her kids had stayed away from the reporters. But now, all she could think was that the verdict meant Jimmy’s death wasn’t as important as the others. “Jimmy never hurt a person!” she shouted to no-one in particular. “He never said a cross word to anyone!” I watched, listened, and wrote as much as I could in the pandemonium. Those relatives who weren’t yelling were crying and comforting one another, or just sitting there, looking pale and confused. It wasn’t supposed to end like this, I thought. Two veteran newspaper reporters stood near me, and I could see they had tears in their eyes; no-one was immune to the raw emotion being displayed around us.
Neil Burroughs’s brother Joey vents his frustration with the tight security system for Freeman MacNeil’s trial in Halifax. [Print from ATV video tape.]
As the crowd began to move out to the foyer, ATV cameraman Stuart McDougal and I followed. Outside, I grabbed a microphone and tried to record the emotions of those leaving; Stuart, his energy heightened by all the emotion, was right with me. “Joey, what can you say?” It was a stupid question, but I knew that Joey Burroughs had a lot to express and wanted the chance to speak out. Other camera crews rushed over as Joey, still running on emotion and adrenaline, began to shout into the microphone and condemn what he saw as a justice system that protected the guilty and made criminals out of victims. “Look at this! I never seen nothing fuckin’ like it. A fuckin’ travesty of justice! This isn’t gonna end here, you hear me?” Everyone heard, but no-one responded. His shouts were loud enough to be heard in the courtroom, and security officers came out to restore order in the hall. Joey stepped away from the cameras and hollered at the men, aiming his hurt and anger at them: “Come on boys, right fuckin’ now! You’ll earn your fuckin’ pay today, ya bastards! This fuckin’ justice system sucks!” The guards kept their distance and let him blow off steam; they weren’t looking for a physical confrontation.
I raced over to Neil Burroughs, Sr., who was standing silently near the front, staring out a window. “Neil, some strong emotions in there. What caused it?” Again, a simple question was enough to get him started; like his son, Burroughs complained about the system that he felt had mistreated his family. “We weren’t going to hurt anyone,” he said. “We’re not like that animal in there. We don’t go around killing people. There was no need of any of that!” Burroughs shook his fist as blood raced to his face, his rage continuing to build. In the weeks ahead, Neil’s father, like many of the other relatives, would begin to grieve the loss all over again, a painful but ultimately healing process that would release his anger. But right now, only outrage, and a sense of violation, existed. I moved on to Olive Warren. She tried to talk, but couldn’t; instead, she reached out, squeezed my arm, and said, “I’m sorry.” Stuart and I approached Germaine MacNeil, who was weeping. “I don’t know what to say. I just want to go home. I want to go home to Arlene.”
As the people in the hallway began to settle down, the jury returned with its recommendation on the second-degree sentencing. They asked the judge to apply the maximum—no parole eligibility for twenty-five years—then quickly left the court through the side door. The judge would make a ruling on their recommendation in a few weeks. Stuart and I went to the media room, on the opposite side of the courtroom, where Kevin Coady was waiting for us; the defence attorney had agreed to talk to us in the relative security of the small room. Coady looked a bit dazed as he spoke, saying he understood the outpouring of emotion in the courtroom. He also confirmed my interpretation of the verdict—that the jury concluded Neil Burroughs had been struck by his client while Donna Warren was still being confined, that MacNeil had taken part in the confinement, and that the confinement ended when Donna was killed. That was why MacNeil was found guilty of first-degree murder in Burroughs’s death and second-degree murder in the case of Jimmy Fagan. I asked him if it would be possible to speak with Mrs. MacNeil, but Coady simply shook his head; she had already been taken out the side door and away from the commotion.
I knew some of Neil’s and Jimmy’s brothers were planning to go to the underground parking garage to wait for the prison van, so I headed there to talk to them. The Burroughs brothers had decided to leave, and the Fagan brothers, who had declined to comment for eighteen months, said they still didn’t want to say anything. Stuart put his camera down, and I just stood there talking with the Fagans for a while. After a few minutes of venting their anger privately, they decided it would be all right for them to speak on camera after all. The five young men stood in a row, expressing their pain and anger. “That was no robbery gone bad. They were executed.” “We wanted to put this behind us, but I guess we never will now. It’s just not over, not like this.�
�� “We wanted to see it through for Jimmy. But now, well, it’s just not right.” “That scumbag rat Freeman MacNeil gets all the protection in the world.” “I don’t know what that jury was thinking. It should have been first-degree murder.”
I thanked them, and we raced back to the station. Forty minutes until the 1:00 p.m. news, and I had to try to package all that emotion into a reasonable report. As the van backed out, I turned to look at the strange scene behind us—five powerfully built young men, staring blankly at each other or down at their feet. They had lost their brother, they had seen their sister completely out of control, they had watched their mother cry, and they too had cried—but they still felt empty and powerless. There was absolutely nothing they could do to help their mother or sister; there was absolutely nothing they could do to avenge their lost brother. Slowly they made their way towards their cars and left the court building, a place that, to them, could never offer justice. Their story was a powerful one, and it needed to be told, but I knew it would take more than the two-and-a-half minutes I would be allotted on the evening news.
In the weeks between the verdicts and the sentencing on the second-degree conviction, I was given the opportunity to tell that story, and more. The network agreed that the emotional trials and the grisly murders warranted a deeper examination. A thirty-minute news special would be built around the case, and I was asked to write and produce it, so back I went to Cape Breton to meet with the parents of the victims.
Gary Mansfield and I walked with Olive Warren through the graveyard where Donna was buried. We looked at the ornate headstone bearing the graduation picture of the pretty young woman, as Olive spoke, saying that the murder had changed her life forever. “I’m not the same person,” she said. “Nothing is the same. I have hate in my heart now, and that’s something I never thought I’d have.” Then she described her daily visits to the graveyard. “I come here and I sit and talk to her. I told her how the trials were going and what was happening in court. When I get up to leave, I can hear her asking me, ‘Why are you leaving me alone?’ It breaks my heart every time I walk away from here.” During the outburst in Halifax, I had been too busy and too pressured by time to react to what was happening, but that morning, looking at Donna’s grave, there was time to reflect. My eyes filled, and tears ran down my face. Gary was concentrating on Olive Warren, and I was relieved that my emotion was going unnoticed. The story would show her grief; my tears had no place in it.
Olive Warren and the author share a quiet moment near Donna Warren’s grave, which her mother visits every day. [Print from ATV video tape.]
Later, Theresa and Al Fagan were kind enough to open their home to me, and we spent some time looking at photographs of a young, smiling Jimmy and the big, happy family—before it was ripped apart by a murder. They cried as they recalled their happiest, most fun-loving child, who now lay in a grave they visited frequently. “Jimmy was a great one at special occasions,” Al said. “Oh, they’re all good, but Jimmy had something special about him when it came to gifts. He always managed to find something for you that you knew you needed as soon as you opened it. You might not have known before, but once he gave it to you, well, you just knew. He was great like that.
“Even if I was having a club meeting,” Theresa Fagan offered, “if Jimmy was home, he’d come and sit on that chair and talk to them all. He wouldn’t stay long, now, but he’d say a little something to everyone. He just loved people.”
Al Fagan was still angry. There was no way that what happened in Sydney River was a robbery gone bad, he said; it was an execution, carried out by people who wanted to know what it was like to kill, to shoot people in the head.
In the evening, Gary and I visited the hospital where Arlene MacNeil was still fighting to gain more control over her body. Her parents beamed as they predicted that she would walk again, someday. Arlene was already able to crawl, and she was growing stronger every day. The MacNeils also described the renovations being done at their house, which was being modified to meet Arlene’s special needs. Soon she would be home to stay. Germaine cried as she described her daughter’s old dreams for the future, and wondered aloud what that future might hold now. And Arlene? She captured my heart once again, showing a spark of delightful humour that only slightly embarrassed her mother. When I asked what she would do when she finally got home, Arlene looked at her mom, grinned, and said: “Get drunk!” She reached out and grabbed my hand, as she had done months earlier. Her grip was stronger now, and she seemed to understand more of what was happening around her. As the interview ended and I thanked her, Arlene squeezed my hand.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too, sweetheart. I love you.”
Carmel and Neil Burroughs decided not to participate in the news special; they felt they had been through enough. I told them I understood, and promised Carmel I would try to convey her feelings as best I could. Julia Burroughs, too, preferred not to discuss her loss in public.
In the process of preparing the special, I was able to obtain the RCMP video tapes of the crime scene, the re-enactment of events provided by Freeman MacNeil, and the lie-detector test taken by Darren Muise. I wanted Gary to edit those tapes, so I had them with me in Sydney. Gary copied the tapes and edited the crime-scene video to remove all traces of the bodies—a very painful experience for him. The last time he had seen Donna Warren was when she served him at the Sydney River McDonald’s. He remembered her smile and her friendly manner. Now he looked at the monitor and saw her lying on her back, a trail of blood streaming from her head, her eye blackened by gunpowder.
Arlene MacNeil with her parents, Germaine and Howard MacNeil, in the rehabilitation unit of the Sydney Mines hospital. [Print from ATV video tape.]
The news special was ready as the date for Freeman MacNeil’s last court appearance approached. The November 12 hearing was only a formality: MacNeil had already been sentenced to the maximum term allowable under Canadian law, and nothing done at the hearing could change that; any other sentences would run concurrently. A number of the victims’ relatives didn’t even bother to attend this final hearing—they had no more rage to express—and those who did come were in an altogether different mood than before. Even when they were taken aside and asked to give a personal undertaking to remain calm in the court, they agreed without showing a trace of rancour. At the end of the hearing, Justice Gruchey made it clear to the families that he did not feel the death of Jimmy Fagan was any less significant than that of Neil Burroughs or Donna Warren. Then, he imposed the term the jury had recommended—life in prison with no parole eligibility for twenty-five years. It was only the second time in Canada that a second-degree conviction had brought the maximum; this was a major victory in the esoteric world of legal precedent, but it meant very little to the people affected by the crime that brought the sentence. And it meant nothing to the young man who faced the extraordinary second-degree sentence. He could not seek parole for twenty-five years in any case.
Two days later, the ATV special aired, and among those who watched it closely were the prisoners at the maximum-security federal prison in Renous, New Brunswick—now home to Freeman MacNeil, Darren Muise, and Derek Wood. At the conclusion of the program, part of which showed how the three men had implicated each other in the crime, a chorus of jeers rang down “the range”—the row of cells where the killers were being held.
“Don’t fuckin’ worry about twenty-five years, hamburglers, you’re not gonna live that long!”
“Ya fuckin’ rats!”
“Squealers—we’ll hear ya fuckin’ squeal!”
An unwritten code had been broken, and inmates were promising revenge. The threats prompted prison authorities to continue to segregate the three men for their own protection. This decision angered some of the relatives of the victims, who said the killers were getting special treatment; their hopes had been that prison justice might do what civil justice had not—avenge their loss. Joey Burroughs was not a violent person, b
ut he said he hoped the prison terms would be very hard on Wood, Muise, and MacNeil, who instead were being put into private rooms, like students in a university dormitory. But others, like Al Fagan, said it was time to forget the three young men who had caused so much pain. “We can’t go on worrying about what happens to them in that jail,” Fagan told me. “They’re gone, and that’s all that matters. We have to get on with our lives.”
At the start of the Derek Wood trial, many of the victims’ relatives expected to feel some sense of relief when the final trial was over. That never happened. Instead, they were left with a jaded view of the criminal justice system. Olive Warren and Carmel Burroughs responded to the disillusionment by directing their energy towards changing the system they had come to despise. The two women began circulating petitions in Cape Breton, calling on Parliament to reintroduce capital punishment, or, as an alternative, introduce consecutive jail terms for cases of multiple murder. As they pointed out to people who looked at the petition, in Canada every murder after the first one is a freebie. As word of the petition spread, a juror from the MacNeil trial called me, asking how to get a copy and saying that another juror also wanted to sign.
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