Rage (19 page)

Then McCaskill asked Pollanen his opinion of the blood spatters at the bottom of the stairs. The expert witness testified that when Johnathon’s voice box was slashed, the blade also severed the carotid artery—the major blood vessel that brings blood from the heart to the brain—and that the markings on the wall and floor were consistent with such an injury.

Lenzin, Pierre’s lawyer, asked what Johnathon would have experienced after his throat was cut in such a manner. Pollanen said that his body would have gone into shock. Lenzin asked him to explain what that meant. Pollanen testified that a person in that type of shock “can expect to feel cold, dazed, confused and ultimately unconscious.”

The next important witness was a bit of a surprise. Goody’s partner Anna Tenhouse called Christopher Dicks, a guard at a youth court in Scarborough where some preliminary hearings for the boys were being conducted. He had overheard a conversation between the boys that he and Tenhouse thought was significant.

By that point of the trial, the boys had shown very distinct but consistent attitudes. Kevin showed little interest in the trial, often daydreaming or staring off into space. Tim would often doodle on his notepad, glare at Ashley and her friends, and generally goof off while the trial was on, and then joke around with Kevin during recesses. Pierre, on the other hand, paid very close attention to the proceedings, became emotional at some of the more grisly moments and demonstrated many different signs of nervousness, from shaking his leg to biting his nails. He tended not to join in Kevin and Tim’s jokes and conversations.

Dicks testified that at the preliminary hearing in Scarborough on April 8, 2005 Pierre showed symptoms of a panic attack. “He couldn’t stop biting his nails,” he said. “His hands were holding his head; his knees were shaking.” It got so bad the judge was compelled to call a recess.

Dicks testified that as he and another guard were escorting the boys from the courtroom, he heard Kevin say: “What’s wrong with you? I have never seen you have two panic attacks in two days before.” He described Kevin’s tone as one of “disbelief.”

Dicks then told the court that he heard Pierre snap back at Kevin: “Yes you have. I was there when it happened and I don’t want to relive it again.”

Goody called another expert witness from the Ontario Centre for Forensic Sciences, DNA scientist Cecilia Hageman. She had tested blood samples from Johnathon’s body as well as the stains on Kevin’s red T-shirt and black sweatpants and Pierre’s jeans. She testified that the chances that the blood on the clothes came from anyone other than Johnathon were about “one in 820 billion.”

She also testified that Johnathon’s DNA was found in blood stains on the green-handled knife, both baseball bats and on the basement wall near the basement stairs, the stack of chairs beside them, on the first-floor washroom sink and on the stove in the kitchen.

Hageman also said blood stains matching Ralston’s DNA were also found on both Kevin and Pierre’s clothes.

She was followed by Robert Wood, chief of forensic dentistry for the Ontario Coroner’s Office, who testified that he reconstructed a model of Johnathon’s head to give him a better idea of where his wounds were and how they were most likely inflicted. His findings indicated that the meat cleaver was at least one of the weapons used in the attack on Johnathon. Many—at least 30—of the wounds about his head and neck showed consistencies with the cleaver, which had a distinctive notch in the blade.

Then came the star witness, again. Ashley looked very pretty in her business-like blazer and skirt ensemble. Although she maintained an air of decorum and gravity, she managed to dazzle the entire courtroom with her one shy smile. Ashley was so instantly likable that one observer at the trial later told me that Tim did himself no favor by glaring at her and repeatedly writing “bitch” on his legal pad big enough for both the judge and jury to see.

Goody began his questioning by asking her about the first phone call she received from Kevin’s house on the day of Johnathon’s death. He wanted to know what was so frightening about it that it made her call back and tape the second call.

Ashley said she was “disturbed” by the call. Goody pressed her as to why, he asked her to take him and the court through the call. Ashley testified that she was home in bed because she had called in sick that day. She had been trying to end her three-week romance with Tim, but he just couldn’t seem to accept it. When he called, he was crude and a little bit abusive: he was clearly showing off. Ashley said that she heard the voices of two other boys. Goody then asked her what Tim said that offended her. Tim asked Ashley if her mom (whom he’d never met) was “hot,” if her older brother had ever been raped and if she knew that “people shit their pants when they died.”

After that last recollection, Joanne started crying.

Ashley continued her testimony. She said that she heard the beep of call waiting, excused herself from Tim and answered the other call. It was her dad, calling to check up on her because she had taken the day off school, telling her parents she was sick. She assured him she was okay, then went back to Tim. As she reconnected, Ashley overheard him tell someone else that he was “not going to be home tonight or ever.”

She asked him what he was talking about. Tim told her that she could find out what was up by watching the news “that night or tomorrow morning.”

When she asked him what he meant by that, she testified that he screamed: “It doesn’t concern you, bitch!”

She told the court that his abuse made her want to hang up, but she didn’t because she heard Tim ask his friends if he could tell her about what they had planned. Goody pressed her on. “And they responded, ‘As long as she doesn’t tell,’ ” she told him.

Intrigued, Ashley stayed on the line. Tim unveiled his plan. At that point, Tim spoke of a plot to kill Kevin’s family. Further, he told Ashley of a long-range plan. She testified: “He told me they were going to steal all the parents’ credit cards and buy bombs and ammunition and suicide bomb either malls or highways.”

Goody asked her why she didn’t go to her parents or the police. Ashley told him that she didn’t think the police or her parents would take her very seriously. Goody asked why not. She replied: “I didn’t have any evidence.”

Cross-examining so jury-friendly a witness as Ashley could be hazardous for the defense lawyers. If they appeared to be too rough on her, it could easily turn the jury against them. But up until this point, the case had appeared open and shut. The overwhelming weight of evidence supported the theory that the boys, led by Kevin, brutally murdered Johnathon and attempted to kill Ralston. Hell, the jury had already heard them—all three of them—on tape telling Ashley that they were planning to do as much.

The defense team’s only hope, it would seem, would be to discredit Ashley’s testimony. To make it appear as though Tim, at least, and also perhaps Pierre, were trying to impress her with fabricated stories of murder and mayhem, not knowing that some of it would actually happen. Kevin was clearly a lost cause—let him try an insanity defense—but Tim and Pierre had a chance to be portrayed as puffed-up young men eager to impress a pretty young girl with tales of what they took to be manliness. It wouldn’t take much to convince the jury that Tim and Pierre were stupid and deluded; the real challenge would be to get them to believe that Ashley could be impressed—even turned on—by their nihilistic claims. If they could prove that Tim and Pierre were only pretending to be murderers because they thought it would make her like them better, they had a chance of painting the two younger boys as blameless—if not entirely innocent—stooges.

McCaskill, Tim’s lawyer, dove in and asked her if she believed Tim’s claims that he was a vampire. “I didn’t take seriously that he was killing people in the Don Valley,” she answered.

He asked if it was true that Tim had drunk her blood. Ashley sighed. She told the court that she and Tim were messing around at her house—her parents weren’t home—and they were throwing some fruit, she recalled they were pomegranates, at each other. One of his throws went wild and she tried to catch it with a plate. The plate shattered, and one of the pieces made a small slice in her forearm. Before she knew it, Tim was at her arm, licking up the blood. She told the court that she found it disgusting. Blood was his thing, not hers. As if to put an exclamation point on the statement that buried Nuttall’s argument, Ashley told the court that Tim’s interest in blood and violence was what made her want to dump him in the first place. That stuff was just too weird for her.

McCaskill then asked what the entire courtroom was wondering—what did a beautiful girl with all the advantages in life ever see in a loser like Tim? “He was nice to me most of the time,” she answered. Ashley then said that she only liked Tim for “about four or five days.”

“And after that?” McCaskill asked.

“I didn’t like him anymore and I had wanted to get out of the relationship,” she answered. “My friends didn’t like him—I didn’t like him.”

Again he brought up the fact that Tim told her that he drank blood. Ashley deftly told him that she didn’t take that seriously, that she didn’t take much of what Tim said or did seriously. That he was the kind of boy who spoke in the voices of his favorite cartoon characters. McCaskill asked what that was about. “Fourteen-year-old boys tend to talk like that,” she said with a sigh. Some members of the jury laughed.

He asked her to describe their relationship. “He thought he was in love with me,” she said. McCaskill asked her if she was in love with him. She looked at him as if he was crazy and then said she wasn’t. In fact, she said, she “found him silly” and “told him pretty much blatantly that I didn’t want to see him anymore.”

McCaskill then asked her why she didn’t end the relationship earlier then. She told him that she couldn’t. When she tried, she testified, Tim got angry and started breaking things. She tried to let him know subtly, to give him hints that she wasn’t interested in him, but he was, she maintained, “too dense” to pick them up.