Crime Seen (17 page)

Dr. Peter Collins joining us was another police first in Canada. His Forensic Psychiatry Unit added a much-needed psychiatric and mental health perspective to our investigation support services. Medical science was a perfect alliance with all that we were offering behaviourally. Peter had not only worked with Ron MacKay and me on the murder of Kristen French, he had also assisted Ron in the development of ViCLAS. He had a solid resume with particular expertise in sexual deviance and violent crime from having already worked for years with the RCMP and police in Ottawa, Toronto and the Niagara Region.

Stalking behaviour is the hallmark of so many serial predators, with Bernardo being a notable example. Criminal harassment legislation had been in place since 1993, but it still needed to be taken more seriously by the police, judiciary and the public. Factors present in cases needed to be better understood as warning signs and indicators of potential future violence. Again a first in the country, the Threat Assessment Unit worked with victims, police and other agencies where future risk of harm could be prevented, mitigated or, if already existing, better managed. Ontario’s Correctional Services assigned one of their probation and parole officers to work directly with us. It was a particularly proud day when I got a call asking for the new unit to work with the Ontario Parole Board and provide training to help them better understand offenders’ past criminal behaviours and potential future dangerousness should they be released back into the community.

Geographic profiling had first come on my radar when Ron MacKay introduced me to Vancouver PD officer Kim Rossmo. Based on environmental criminology, mathematics and his investigative experience, Kim had developed a computerized geographic profiling system that predicted where a serial offender lived in relation to their crime scenes. In simple terms, once a series of crimes were determined to be committed by the same person, the location of each crime was input into the system, spatially analyzed, and a map produced highlighting the general location of where the offender was likely to reside. Like criminal profiling and ViCLAS, it helped identify and prioritize persons of interest living in the area identified for investigators to follow up on. Kim agreed to train one of my officers and geographic profiling was added to our repertoire.

Me, Roy Hazelwood, Ron MacKay, 1997

Sometimes I found team members in unexpected places. I’d gone back to my alma mater, University of Toronto, and took courses to complete their Crime and Deviance major. One of my psychology professors asked me to come back and speak to one of his other classes about my work as a criminal profiler and the new BSS. After that class I was approached by one of his students, Angela Eke, and we talked at length about her undergraduate research in offender profiling. We kept in touch over the years as she pursued her master’s thesis on the impact of stalking on victims and her PhD thesis on staging in homicide cases. I was always impressed with the rigor of her research and how it fit in with what BSS was doing, so I was happy to have Angela accept my invitation to work for me part-time while she completed her studies. I’d seen first-hand the advantages of the FBI’s research partnerships with academia and mental health professionals and wanted to establish that legitimacy here in Canada. A formal research unit was eventually established with Dr. Angela Eke heading it up.

After BSS had been up and running for a few years I received a card in the mail from a superior court judge before whom I’d appeared in a homicide trial. He said he had just read an article on the work being conducted in the BSS and complimented me and my staff. “I hope that your success and coordinated consolidation of services has continued,” he said. “As a trial judge, I am most appreciative of helpful, reliable input to a standard of excellence.”
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To know that our work was having an effect on the whole justice system was the ultimate compliment.

I’d been president of the ICIAF since 1997 and each year BSS hosted an international conference on violent crime cosponsored by the OPP, RCMP and ICIAF. Similar to the Quantico National Academy consultations, local police were encouraged not only to register for the conference but also to bring along their unsolved violent crime cases to be reviewed by attending ICIAF profilers. Lawyers, psychologists, psychiatrists and forensic experts who were either attending or speaking at the conference were often asked to sit in on the evening consultations. Rather than host the event in a large city, we instead spent the week at a tranquil rustic lodge on Lake Simcoe, south of Orillia. Any spare time after our classes or consultations was spent letting off steam playing basketball or baseball—pretty much always Canada against the US, with a few stray country ringers.

The conference always opened with a perspective of crime that many often didn’t get to hear—that of the victims and their families. When an investigation was completed most officers and civilians went back to dealing with the multitude of other cases they’d been assigned. They rarely interacted with victims or their families and I wanted to make sure those perspectives were not ignored. So the first session of each conference was a “survivor” story. The presentations demonstrated how victims and families moved on from their tragic circumstances to have positive achievements in their personal and professional lives. Many had gone on to become advocates and effect change in Canada’s criminal justice system.

Doug and Donna French spoke at the first conference we hosted. There was the tragic story of their daughter’s murder to tell, but they also wanted Kristen’s life to be known and remembered—her enjoyment of team sports like precision skating and rowing; her beloved dog, Sasha; her excitement about having her first boyfriend over to cook him dinner and wanting Dad, Mom and her brother out of the house before he arrived. They were all stories that Doug and Donna chose to remember Kristen by rather than dwelling on the evil done to take her away from them. They told the good stories that followed the tragedy, about the many wonderful people they met and their acts of kindness, great and small.

Doug French, Lesley Rice, Donna French, me

There was the young Holy Cross student who knocked on their front door when Kristen was still missing and asked if he could cut their lawn for them. Donna thanked him but told him that their lawn mower wasn’t working. He left but came back a short time later in a pickup truck with his father. They’d brought their own lawn mower over and the father and son cut the grass. Donna had them stay to have dinner with her and Doug before they returned home.

On another day, Donna was home alone when an elderly man knocked on the front door. It was shortly after Kristen had been found and the man wanted only to say how sorry he was and to shake Donna’s hand.

Several years after Kristen’s murder, a stranger came up to Doug when he was sitting in a Tim Hortons coffee shop with some friends having a coffee. The man asked him if he was Kristen French’s father and he said that he was. The man expressed his condolences and then gave him an envelope. Inside was a ten-dollar Tim Hortons gift card to buy Doug and his friends coffee next time.

In 2001 I was in Calgary visiting some family members and was introduced to the hockey player Sheldon Kennedy. My brief conversation with Sheldon ended with me inviting him to come to Ontario to open our upcoming conference. Sheldon wasn’t going to be telling a story similar to past guest speakers. At the time he was barely surviving—and that’s why I wanted him to come.

Sheldon was a Manitoba native who’d played in various hockey leagues for almost fifteen years. He’d been a member of three NHL teams over eight years and in 1996 was playing for the Calgary Flames when he made the gut-wrenching decision to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse by his junior league coach. For years Sheldon had felt that if he disclosed the abuse he would not be believed. However, he finally felt comfortable and confident enough to speak with an officer he met with Calgary Police Service. Another player came forward as well, but his name was never made public. The charges filed against the coach were a severe blow to the reputation of Canada’s beloved national sport.

At one time Sheldon was seen as a rising star in the NHL but off the ice he had been spiralling downward. From the age of sixteen he had been arrested every few years for some criminal behaviour related to alcohol or drug use, including marijuana, cocaine and crystal meth. Having sustained numerous physical injuries, his contract with the Calgary Flames was not renewed. He tried to make a hockey comeback but bounced between teams and leagues for a couple of more years before he finally hung up his skates in 1999.

I met Sheldon for breakfast on the morning of the first day of the conference and he was clearly still struggling with his addiction demons. His eyes were bloodshot, his face flushed, and he looked like he hadn’t slept at all the night before. A couple of cigarettes and coffees did little to settle his nerves. He was concerned that he hadn’t done a lot of public speaking and wouldn’t do a good job for me. Given his past brushes with the law, I supposed that appearing before a bunch of cops was only adding to his angst.

I told him, “Just tell your story and you’ll be fantastic.” And he was.

For the first hour, Sheldon paced back and forth at the front of the conference room, microphone in hand and head down. He rarely looked up from the floor. He started by telling of growing up in rural Manitoba and learning to play hockey on a frozen backyard pond. Despite his lack of polished presentation skills, he endeared himself to his audience within minutes.

Sheldon spoke of his passion for hockey and that he knew he was good at it. Each summer he looked forward to getting away from the family farm and attending hockey school. When he was fourteen, Sheldon met a coach, Graham James, at one of the schools. James was an ex-schoolteacher who was then a scout and considered influential in junior hockey league circles in the Prairies and across Canada. The coach changed Sheldon’s life in ways he could never have imagined.

Sheldon’s presentation was raw and filled with emotion. Halfway through the morning we took a break. He was the only speaker I ever recall receiving a spontaneous standing ovation at coffee break.

When we returned to the conference room, Sheldon continued with a story that was all too familiar to those of us who worked on these types of cases. If I checked off the list of characteristics and behaviours that FBI agent Ken Lanning taught me to look for years earlier during my training in Quantico, James had every one of them. The charismatic coach engaged in all the classic sexual-grooming behaviours of a predator. He “courted” Sheldon’s parents by praising their son’s hockey capabilities. His parents believed James could positively influence Sheldon’s future in the sport and were excited that he would take such an interest in their child. Sheldon confided in James that his father ruled his home with tough love tactics that matched his temper. Sheldon therefore relished the kind of caring attention James gave him. After hockey camp was over, James invited Sheldon to participate in a tournament in Winnipeg. Sheldon’s parents were thrilled that the coach had even invited their son to stay at his apartment. Sheldon’s world came crashing down the first night he stayed there.

In the months that followed, James’s seduction progressed from his initial sexual touching to multiple sexual assaults on Sheldon. All the while, James instilled in Sheldon that he was the key to his hockey future, and without him he would achieve nothing. Given the reputation of James in the Canadian minor hockey world, Sheldon believed him. He was trapped in a nightmare of compromise that he couldn’t wake up from.

Sheldon not only suffered from the sexual assaults but also from the resulting emotional upheaval that he had in common with so many victims who go through similar abuse. James isolated Sheldon from his family and friends. Sheldon hated himself, feeling guilty and ashamed for what he was prepared to endure to realize his dream of playing professional hockey. Over the next three years Sheldon turned to alcohol and drugs to help him cope and even contemplated suicide. At nineteen years of age Sheldon finally got away from James when he started to play for his first NHL team, the Detroit Red Wings.