Rage (22 page)

After the jury left, Watt heard from one more witness. Sarah (not her real name) is the mother of Sean, Johnathon’s best friend. She knew Johnathon very well and noticed that he was acting a bit stranger than usual about ten days before he was killed. When she asked what was wrong, he said he was worried about his mother. “He said, ‘She’s been having a really hard time with my brother,’” Sarah told the court.

She knew that Kevin had been doing very poorly in school, so she told Johnathon that being a teenager is tough and that he’d grow out of the phase he was in. She assured Johnathon that his big brother loved him.

“No, he hates me,” Johnathon told her. “He thinks he’s the devil . . . he wants to kill me.’”

She assumed that Kevin and he had had a fight and it had gotten a bit rough for the younger, much smaller brother. She did her best to convince him that his brother didn’t want to harm him.

His response shocked her. Johnathon looked at her, she testified, and said: “You don’t know my brother, he’s evil.”

Reporter Joseph Brean was not disappointed by the trial. He’d never covered a murder case before, and this one was a classic. It had young love, sibling rivalry, the Internet and vampires. In various ways, it pitted rich against poor, black against white and children against their parents. It featured a star witness so attractive and composed that she looked like she’d just walked off a movie set, who took it upon herself to try to save the day after three brutish, self-interested young thugs bragged about plans to kill an entire family and to take out their violent frustrations on the public at large. If ever there was a case where a young reporter could make a name for himself, this was it.

As an added bonus, Brean was huddling with some of the best in the business. He was covering the case for the
National Post,
and that put him in a group with Vivian Song from
The Toronto Sun
, Peter Small from
The Toronto Star
and Christie Blatchford from
The Globe & Mail
. Brean did his best to learn from them all and was particularly impressed with Blatchford, whose work he had read for years and always appreciated. That they were all friendly and helpful to a young reporter like him was a pleasant surprise.

But not everyone was as gracious. Many people involved with the case made it obvious they considered Brean the last reporter in line when they were giving out information. Not only was he young—in his late twenties—but his inexperience with the court process and the people involved sometimes showed.

And he worked for the
Post
. Although the
Post
is an influential paper, especially when it comes to business, there are some people in Toronto who consider it something like the foreign press, even though it’s based in suburban Toronto. The
Post
is new to the scene, having been founded in 1998, and drew much ire from the Toronto establishment in its infancy because much-reviled media baron Conrad Black said he started it as a conservative voice to counter what he saw as the liberal bias of the
Star
and the
Globe
. Even the
Sun
was insulted, as they considered the
Post
’s job description already filled by their sometimes outrageous tabloid.

To do the job well, Brean realized he would have to work harder and to be more innovative than the others. One of the first things he did was get to know Ashley. She was clearly the key to understanding the case. Without her, it was nothing more than three pointless thugs sitting around a house until one went crazy and shredded his little brother. Ashley, the beautiful rich girl mixed up with them, was what made the case interesting. She added drama, intrigue and sex appeal. And he wasn’t the only one who thought so. After Ashley’s testimony, Blatchford wrote that she had “impeccable instincts, an unwavering sense of what is right and the courage to act,” and, in her column, called Ashley “a force for goodness.”

Brean saw his break one day when he was standing behind Ashley in line at the court’s coffee shop. She was fumbling for change, so he told the cashier he’d pay for her Coke along with his coffee. Ashley accepted, turned to thank Brean and flashed him a warm, welcoming smile.

After that initial meeting, Brean made an effort to talk with Ashley every day. They became friends of a sort and Brean did his best to keep the conversation light. He scored some points with her when he nicknamed her “Jackpot,” a reference to a remark by Tim’s lawyer, David McCaskill, who said that Tim had “hit the jackpot” when a girl so obviously superior to him agreed to go out with him. They talked about some of the things they had in common—Brean had grown up in the same area as Ashley and had even taken the same city bus to school, although about a decade earlier. He would bring up Tim and she would sigh and complain about him, often pointing out which parts of his testimony she claimed were “bullshit.”

The pair became so close that some parties close to the trial began to jokingly accuse Brean of “coming on” to the girl, and the other reporters even started calling her his “little girlfriend.” It didn’t bother him. Now his youth was working for him, rather than against him. His good looks didn’t hurt, either. And he was finding out things from her that nobody else could.

When her testimony was finished, Ashley came by to say good-bye to Brean. She told him that she was going to Quebec on a ski vacation and that she wouldn’t come back until after the verdict. He wished her well and promised to keep her up to date on the case.

After she left, something about her stuck with Brean. In an attempt to prove that she was into the same vampire fantasies as Tim and that she actually would have been impressed by his plan to murder and his offer of human blood, McCaskill had asked her why her e-mail address was [email protected]. It seemed less like the kind of name a sweet, innocent girl like she seemed to be on the stand would pick and more like the kind of name preferred by someone like Tim. Since all of the testimony up until that point had indicated that Kevin, and Kevin alone, killed Johnathon, the only real tie Tim and Pierre had to the murder was the telephone call. If he could prove that Ashley was the kind of girl who could be wooed by promises of mass murder and offers of human blood to drink, maybe he could convince the jury that the call really was just a coincidence. That Tim and Pierre were nothing but big talkers, unaware that their friend Kevin was actually taking everything they said quite seriously.

But it became something of a non-event at the time. Ashley told the court the e-mail address was inspired by the name of a local band she liked. It didn’t mean anything to her and the court appeared to accept it as just another example of Ashley finding herself in the middle of a place and time in which silly young men like to use the concept of pretend violence to show how cool they are.

But Brean couldn’t stop thinking about it. He remembered talking with Ashley about Tim’s testimony that he drank her blood after she cut herself and that she said that it totally grossed her out. She was pretty vehement about it. So why would a girl dead set against drinking blood call herself “biteforblood” on the Internet? Brean knew that e-mail addresses are a key part of a teenager’s identity and that they often go to agonizing lengths to pick the perfect one. Surely someone as intelligent and well read as Ashley could come up with something more creative (and more accurate) than “biteforblood.” They must have been one hell of a band.

Brean decided to Google the name to find out what was so special about these guys. Every band has a website or at least a MySpace page these days, he figured. To his surprise, no such band existed, but what he found was far more fascinating.

An account on
VampireFreaks.com
under the name “Biteforblood,” which gave [email protected] as its owner’s e-mail contact address came up on his searches repeatedly. He looked at the user profile and the physical self-description confirmed it was Ashley’s account. He looked down to see her likes. Among them, he spotted: Blood, pain, hating people, darkness, thunder, fire, drugs, cemeteries, knives and guys with sexy longish black hair and green eyes. At the bottom of her profile, she listed
sanguinarius.com
, a now-defunct website dedicated to the drinking of human blood, as one of her favorite sites. On her profile page at
Xanga.com
, another social networking site popular with teenagers, she wrote: “I like to wear a lot of black and like a lot of dark. Blood is good . . . both flowing and . . . Yum.”

She had a blog on VampireFreaks and another on Xanga. Brean realized he had to read them. All 15,000 words of them.

He found that they were not focused on blood and gore. She didn’t write like a typical Goth kid, using big words with little care about their meaning and overcomplicated syntax. Actually, he found, she had some genuine writing talent. For the most part, they were the typical writings of an advantaged—maybe a bit spoiled—teenager. She wrote about her friends, her job at Lick’s Homeburgers, school and boyfriends. She complained about her mother, her workload at school, how perfidious boyfriends could be and her disdain for her psychiatrist visits. She also wrote about how “hot” certain guys were. In all her writing, she showed an impressive ego, a sometimes charming sense of humor and a desire to play with language.

Brean read it all and noticed significant edits and a bit of a change in language after July 22, 2004. Her blog that day began, “Well my mom reads this, hey mom, thanks for reading this. Her excuse is it’s public, so are the bathrooms in the park, but you don’t use them.”

There was only one, oblique reference to Johnathon’s murder. Many people who use social networking sites fill in long questionnaires in an effort to give their readers a little better insight into their personality. In one rather exhaustive one, Ashley answers the question “When have you cried the most?” by writing: “It’s a three way tie between when I thought Will was dead, when we broke up and the whole . . . November thing.” On the same quiz, she claimed to have “hundreds” of scars and that she lied “constantly, though I’m bad at it.”

And, to Brean’s surprise, she wrote about the trial. She even mentioned him once, calling him a “really hott reporter” and musing that he was “hitting on” her.

Most of what she wrote about the trial consisted of complaints about how much time it was taking out of her life, how much school she was missing, how slow the process was and the numerous delays (including one because a “stupid jurer” got sick).

But a couple of things stood out for Brean. The first was her vehement desire for her parents not to show up in court during her testimony. She wrote:

Brean remembered that her parents had not been present when she testified. It wasn’t too surprising, actually. Despite her complaining about her mother’s intrusions, Ashley rarely had any trouble getting her way at home. One figure key in the case described her parents as a “couple of old hippies,” and said “she could do no wrong in their eyes” and that she was “the tail that wagged that dog.” Other sources also indicated that if Ashley wanted something badly enough, neither parent would put up much of a fight.

While doing a good job on the stand was understandably important to Ashley, it was mystifying as to how her parents would jeopardize that. And why did she refer to it as “performing?”

The blog continued: “. . . if I screw up and those fuck holes get off with a day less than they deserve I’ll blame myself and never forgive myself.”

It was clear she wanted to see Tim, Kevin and Pierre suffer, but unclear as to whether it was for murdering Johnathon or for dragging her into it.

When she finally gave her testimony, she was relieved that it went well, but clearly annoyed with the cross-examination style of Tim’s lawyer, David McCaskill, who she called “Bigasskill.” She wrote:

But everyone who watched her in court—other than Tim—had nothing but praise for her performance. She thought that was funny:

And, just before she left for her Quebec ski trip, Ashley left a couple of interesting comments, revealing her attitude toward Tim, who she (illegally) mentioned by name. In the first, she accuses Tim of perjury:

And in her final trial-related post, she wrote:

And later in the same posting, she seems confident Tim will be found guilty and end up in prison. She wrote: “I’m done, it’s shower time. Bwahaha, but I don’t have to be afraid to drop the soap, unlike tim, sucka.”

Brean could hardly believe what he’d found. After those initial successes, he “Googled the hell out of her.” He searched not just her name and onscreen nickname, but the names and nicknames of her friends and some of her frequently used phrases like “bwahaha” and “anysnitch.” When he was satisfied that he could find no more information on his laptop, he went to the
Post
and used a bigger, more capable computer.

Overloaded with this sensitive information, he didn’t know what to do. Even though it was his first murder trial, he was aware that it was considered bad form to publish anything the jury hadn’t already seen. He was sure he’d be found in contempt. But he couldn’t leave it alone and he wrote his article anyway. When he was finished, he ran it by his boss, Steve Murray, who told him to run with it. Brean did, changing the names and nicknames just enough to ensure Ashley’s identity wouldn’t be uncovered.