Rage (6 page)

As Sherk was taking Pierre down, Detective Sergeants John Rossano and Chris Haynes arrived from another direction after recognizing Kevin, who was on a different side of the same corner as Pierre. Rossano leapt from his car to arrest the big boy. And he too was surprised at how calm the murder suspect was. Kevin was not only giving no resistance, but he was showing no emotion. Rossano asked him: “Do you understand what this is about?” Kevin nodded and replied: “Yeah, the death of my brother.” Both arrests were recorded at 2:35 p.m., November 26.

Despite—or maybe because of—the seriousness of the situation, the cops at intake couldn’t help but feel a mordant amusement when they saw what the boys were wearing. Kevin had on a bright red T-shirt with the Nike slogan “Just Do It,” and Pierre was wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of a man up to his neck in the Nile River just in front of the pyramids, with the words “Deep In Denial” printed beneath him.

Later that day, homicide Detective Sergeant Terry Wark and his partner Jerry Ball were brought in to interrogate Kevin. Before he turned the tape recorder on, Wark told Kevin that he and Ball were both fathers and that they were trying very hard to understand why he’d done what he had. Kevin offered no response. Wark informed him that he could talk to a lawyer before he answered any questions. He also repeated the charges against him. Kevin said he understood. They began the interview when Wark turned on the tape.

That response surprised Wark, but he surmised that Kevin was trying to play Canada’s
Youth Criminal Justice Act
(formerly named, and still better known as, the
Young Offenders Act
) to his advantage. Under the controversial and much-criticized legislation, Wark anticipated that Kevin was aware that he would face a much lighter sentence if tried as a youth than he would as an adult and that he would probably not be tried as an adult unless the charge was first-degree murder.

At that point, Kevin asked if could call a lawyer. Wark agreed and turned off the tape. Then Kevin returned to the interrogation room and Wark turned the tape back on.

At this point, Kevin began to cry.

Kevin regained his composure.

About a week after Johnathon’s death, Ashley received an alarming e-mail. She was very surprised to see that it was from Tim. The subject line was—as was usual for Tim—typed in all caps and with little regard for spelling or grammar, it read: IM IN JAIL.

Tim was being held at the Syl Apps Youth and Secure Treatment Centre. Kevin and Pierre were at other facilities. The Syl Apps Centre is in Oakville, Ontario, about an hour’s drive southwest of 90 Dawes. Named after the late star forward for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Olympic pole-vaulter who later became a Conservative Member of Parliament, the Syl Apps is a detention, custody and treatment facility for mentally ill youth.

Normally it is an efficiently run facility that has little interaction with the neighborhood around it, and it has been the source of few news-making incidents. But on December 1, 2003, Tim was left unsupervised on an Internet-equipped computer long enough to log onto his MSN e-mail account and compose a message for Ashley. The message was time-stamped at around midnight, but my sources tell me that the kids at Syl Apps frequently change times and dates on the computers there just for fun, and it was most likely sent in the early afternoon. At least, that’s when Ashley received it.

“This is the story,” was his opener, and he went on to claim that none of what happened was his fault. He explained to her that when he arrived at Kevin’s, he and Pierre were already talking about killing Kevin’s family. Since they were laughing and having a good time, he was sure they were joking and so he went along with the joke. As he understood it, Kevin was planning to run away from home that day because of problems with his stepfather, and all the talk of killing his family was just his fantasizing out loud.

But as Kevin began to get more destructive in the house, Tim claimed he became more and more frightened of him—frightened even for his own life. He became even more scared when Johnathon came home. According to the note, Kevin and Pierre were determined to beat Johnathon up, but Tim intervened, suggesting that they merely threaten the boy instead.

But after Kevin threw his little brother down the stairs, Tim wrote, he was so scared he couldn’t even move. And when Kevin told Tim to go get him a butcher knife from the kitchen, he said he complied without thinking.

Tim then made it clear that it was Kevin alone, and not him, who hacked Johnathon to death. Tim closed his message with a rather beseeching: “Please, I wouldn’t do that you have to believe me.”

It was a far cry from the young man who was almost blasé while bragging about murdering strangers and drinking their blood.

As soon as she finished reading the message, Ashley called detective Glenn Gray.

Dahlia (not her real name) is meeting with me to tell me about Tim. She wouldn’t come to meet me alone. Something about seeing a much older man she met over the Internet spooks her, so she arrives at the coffee shop with a phalanx of four friends. After introductions—I give her a copy of
Fallen Angel
, my first book, to establish a little credibility—we sit at a booth in the back and the rest of her crew sits at a table about ten feet away. I’d rather they were farther away because if she knows they can hear her, it may prejudice her answers, but they won’t budge.

From first impressions, she doesn’t appear to have much in common with Ashley. She’s short and small-featured and looks much younger than her 18 years. She’s more cute than pretty and does not project a great deal of self-confidence. She has an appearance of vulnerability Ashley doesn’t share. Dahlia’s hair is not quite shoulder length and blonde. It’s an unnatural color that suits neither her eyes nor her complexion.

She tells me it’s not what she looked like when she dated Tim. Back then, it was dyed black (her long-abandoned natural color is, she says, “mouse brown” and she absolutely hates it). And back then she wore white foundation with heavy black mascara and eyeliner, rather than the subtle, girl-next-door look she goes with now.

When I ask her about Tim, she says she wants to make it very clear she was never really into him. “Well, not exactly ‘dated’ dated,” she corrects herself. “We went a few places and talked—it’s not like we were boyfriend and girlfriend.” In fact, that’s why they broke up. I ask for details.

“It’s a long story,” she tells me. “I wore black, he wore black, so people naturally thought we should be together.” According to Dahlia, when Tim came to her high school, nobody knew him, but her friends noticed him right away and were excited that there was a guy in school who looked and acted so much like her. Before long, they were pressuring her to get to know him; one friend of hers actually called them “a match made in hell.”

So Dahlia did her best to get noticed by Tim and, before long, he built up enough courage to talk to her and eventually to ask her out. They didn’t do much. He never seemed to have any money; so most of their dates consisted of just walking and talking. They spoke even more often electronically. Besides hanging around at school, they also communicated through e-mail and by MSN Instant Messenger at night.

She tells me that it wouldn’t have bothered her that they didn’t go anywhere—she likes talking—but he didn’t really have anything to talk about. He was boring. He was always around, always talking, but never seemed to have anything to say. Once they discussed what their favorite bands were, there wasn’t all that much left to talk about. And it bothered her that she called her his girlfriend. “I mean,” she tells me. “All we did was walk around together.”

And it bothered her that he was so immature. He would frequently affect accents or talk in the voices of his favorite cartoon characters. It was annoying, but not as annoying as the smug grin he had on his face whenever he said or did something he thought was funny. “Which was constantly,” she said.

She was thinking about breaking it off with him when he made her mind up for her. On one of their nighttime walks, he stopped, turned to face her, held both of her hands and told her he loved her. That’s when she knew she was done with him. She told him so. He started yelling and screaming and even punched a wall. He cried. She relented and told him she’d see him the next day, but that she wasn’t really interested in being his girlfriend.

The next time they got together, Tim got her alone and told her that he’d been acting funny because he had a secret, a secret he could tell only her.

It was, she tells me in the coffee shop, a difficult moment for her. Although she was annoyed at Tim and not at all interested in dating him anymore, she certainly didn’t dislike him and if he had a real problem, she didn’t want to abandon him. A few things ran through her mind. She knew he wasn’t gay. It could be drugs—maybe someone was out to get him for money he owed. She stopped walking, eager to listen, perhaps to help.

Tim turned around to face her, grabbed both her hands as he did earlier when he told her he loved her, looked her straight in the eyes and told her that he was a vampire and that he drank human blood.

At the coffee shop, she gives me a look that clearly says, “Can you believe it?”

I nod, roll my eyes and ask her what she did next.

Shocked that he would say something so ridiculous, so stupid, she jerked her hands back and told him she never wanted to see him again. And then she walked away. At home, she blocked his instant messages and refused to open his e-mails.

“I should’ve slapped him,” she tells me. “He had me worried for a minute there.”

I ask her what happened after that.

“Well,” she says, “he eventually kind of got the message and stopped bothering me.” After a while she started saying “hi” to him again (after she heard he was seeing someone else) when they saw each other in school, but that was about it.

I ask her why the vampire thing bothered her so much; was it just that she expected something else? “Well, mostly,” she tells me. “But I also felt like I was being played.” She confesses that she was, at the time, a Goth. Goths, she explains, are kids who dress up in black and lots of makeup and try to look spooky. They listen to darkly themed music and tend to like things related to horror movies and other scary things like bats, spiders and ravens. But because she was a Goth, she believes Tim assumed that she was interested in vampires and drinking blood for real.

“That stuff ’s disgusting,” she says. “Just because I wore all black doesn’t mean I want to kill people and drink their blood.”

It’s actually a lot of fun, she assures me, to be a Goth, to look different than everyone else. She was a Goth, she says, simply because she likes dressing up and because she thought the music was cool.

“So why aren’t you a Goth anymore?” I ask.

“Because there are so many jerks out there who take it too seriously,” she says. “Tim’s not the only one, you meet them on the Net all the time—they all think they’re real live vampires—it’s just not fun anymore.”

“Are vampires real?”

I was putting my seven-year-old son to bed when he asked that. He must have heard me talking about the book.

“No, vampires are an old legend from a faraway place a long time ago,” I told him. He looked at me as though he expected more, so I oblige. “People like to make up scary stories like that because it gets them all excited and then, when they realize everything’s okay and there’s nothing to be scared about, it makes them feel all better.” He decided my explanation sounded plausible enough and went off to sleep.

I wasn’t exactly telling the truth. While it’s true that the original legend—that of the dead awakening, hungering for the blood of the living to keep them from a permanent grave—is nothing more than a twisted fairy tale that parents used hundreds of years ago to terrify their children into obedience, there actually are vampires out there.

To be more precise, there are people—lots of them—who call themselves vampires. And some of them actually do drink blood. They show up every once in a while on
Jerry Springer-
style shows. Tim must have thought they were kind of cool, because he repeatedly told people he was one of them.

It’s a bizarre take on history, actually. People grow up with the idea that vampires are cool, erotic and dangerous. And for various reasons—psychologists note a lack of guidance from parents, a contextual skew caused by an early exposure to media intended for adults, and a lack of social structure—some teens acquire an indistinct or totally misdirected opinion about what’s real and what isn’t. They become vampires, at least in the sense that they drink blood and say they are vampires, because they want very badly to
be
vampires.

This doesn’t surprise the experts. Lynn Schofield Clark—psychologist and author of
From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media and the Supernatural
—makes the following points about teens in our culture:

That Tim Ferriman told people he was a vampire may surprise some, but it’s not actually that uncommon. In fact, there are many thousands of people his age all over the world who dress up like vampires, and a few who drink blood.