Death's Shadow (10 page)

Staff Sergeant Steve Hrab addressed reporters on Thursday, February 10. It was a big day.

“To put together a case, there are two ingredients,” he said. “There are witnesses, and there are forensic pieces of evidence. In combining those two, we do our best to identify an individual, and turn him from a suspect into a person that we believe we have the necessary legal requirements, namely the grounds to arrest and successfully prosecute.

“We were able to do that yesterday.”

Little over a month had passed since Audrey Gleave had been killed. Hrab, case manager of the investigation, was announcing an arrest. Detectives Paul Johnson and Angela Abrams had also been working on the case. Earlier that day Hamilton Police officers had arrested David Scott at a laundromat in Brantford. He was charged with first-degree murder, meaning the murder was planned and/or involved a sexual assault.

He had been targeted as a person of interest early in the investigation. Described as a 50-year-old homeless man who squatted in a barn near the victim’s home, Scott had been charged for breaching probation by carrying a hunting knife in Brantford on December 29 — the day before the body was found with extensive stab wounds. Hrab said witnesses had seen him in the area of Audrey’s home.

During the proceedings dealing with the breached probation matter, a Brantford judge opined in court that he believed David Scott was not violent, but that he could be intimidating because he frequently yelled in public places. The
Brantford Expositor
reported that he had been previously convicted for assault and cruelty to animals, and that he was schizophrenic. The day after his release from the Brantford jail on the previous offence, Hamilton police packed him off to Barton Street jail.

Meanwhile, investigators waited for evidence collected at the murder scene, Audrey’s house, and the barn to be tested at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. Police would not describe the nature of the forensics, however. Fingerprints? DNA? A footwear impression at the scene or on the victim? They wouldn’t say.

There was a question as to whether Scott fitted the killer’s profile. When homicide detectives search for a killer, they sometimes request a profile be developed by the Ontario Provincial Police Behavioural Sciences Section. Steve Hrab had taken courses in criminal profiling, the science of studying behaviour to paint a portrait of the perpetrator, which can assist in identifying a suspect. He placed stock in its use as an investigative tool.

Perhaps a profile seemed unnecessary in this case, since David Scott appeared to be a slam-dunk suspect: previous arrests; known in Brantford for unpredictable behaviour; seen carrying a large knife; and spotted near the victim’s home. But a behavioural profile of the killer in the Gleave case likely would have suggested the perpetrator was a younger male, in his twenties or early thirties, and someone who had known Audrey, or known of her, which was not the case with David Scott.

“[The killer] has knowledge that an elderly female lives there by herself,” said Mark Safarik, a retired FBI profiler with expertise in violent crime against the elderly. Safarik said those who kill the elderly “are not opportunistic offenders. They are not breaking into a place and stumbling upon the victim. He knows she’s there, know she’s by herself, and he goes there with intent to sexually assault and murder her. This is different than prior research suggesting women were opportunistic victims of non-violent offenders who become violent at the scene.”

These are angry young men with pent-up rage toward women; they likely live with a female authority figure, he said. They are socially incompetent and feel that they have little control in their lives; they are typically undereducated, have substance abuse problems, and are unemployed or in a menial job. “For these guys, there is not a lot of planning, and they don’t stay at the scene long. They leave evidence, don’t clean up. They don’t think that far ahead.”

Another identifying sign is that they typically use far more violence than necessary to kill. Overkill is indicative of their anger. This had been the case on Indian Trail. They attack elderly women because they are easy targets — a child does not present as ready a victim because he is seen as having guardianship, whereas an elderly woman on her own has none. These killers also tend to live relatively close to their victim.

“But a homeless guy in his forties or fifties?” Safarik asked rhetorically when considering the Gleave case. “Hmm.… My advice is look young and look close.”

Steve Hrab neared the end of his news conference in which he had announced that police had the evidence to send David Scott to prison for life. Then he added: “I would hope that if the public has any information about Mr. Scott, please call us.”

Someone from the public did call. Her name was Debbie and she lived in Brantford. She was David Scott’s sister.

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” she said.

“Don’t let aging get you down. It’s too hard to get back up!”

“I’ve still got ‘it’ but nobody wants to see it!”

“Ever notice the ones who tell you to calm down are the ones who got you mad in the first place?”

Audrey Gleave emailed these
Crabby Road
comics to a friend at four o’clock one morning. Her affection for Maxine, the cantankerous protagonist in the comic, perhaps reflected the ups and downs over the course of her life. No doubt Audrey, a deep thinker, had often wondered how things might have gone differently. She had married the wrong man — three times. She had had a career as a high-school science teacher, but could well have become a renowned nuclear physicist. Through middle age she was in good shape physically, played tennis and golfed, but in the final years of her life, her health was not the best. She smoked and lamented putting on weight in the winter. She often wore stretchy pants that she was always hitching up; a pack of cigarettes could usually be seen bulging in the back pocket.

When she taught at Hill Park, Barton and Westdale secondary schools, Audrey was known for her quirky sense of humour. She kept a picture of Albert Einstein in class and called him “my boyfriend.” She handed out pens to students inscribed with phrases such as “physics is phun,” “black holes are out of sight,” and “cryogenics is cool.” In the school yearbook, she was quoted in a caption under her picture: “Broaden your horizons and keep smiling, stupid.”

Some called her “Mama Gleave,” likely in an endearing way, although it also probably reflected her old-school discipline. One student remembered getting chewed out by her in the hall for holding hands with her boyfriend, which was against the rules. Audrey told her former brother-in-law, David Gleave, about the time an argument with a female student got out of hand at Barton. The girl told Audrey she was going to kill her and was suspended for the outburst.

In her leisure time, Audrey played golf at Brantford Golf & Country Club, and she also became a competitive bridge player. Her name appeared in the
Spectator
’s Hamilton Bridge Club results. Other players knew she was kind, and highly intelligent, if quirky. She told them how she had once built her own TV set, about how she would often stay up very late into the night working on her computer, and sleep away much of the day.

Audrey retired from teaching in 1997 at the age of 60. She started meeting with a group of former colleagues every Wednesday for coffee, first at the Williams coffee shop across from McMaster University, and later at the one on the waterfront. She visited the local Lynden library at least once a week, but most of her time was spent alone in the house on Indian Trail with her dogs, Togi and Schatze (a short form of
Schatzen
, which was German for “treasure,” she said.) She had an invisible fence installed; the dogs wore collars with transmitters that kept them inside the boundaries.

She had always owned German shepherds — for protection and because she liked the breed. She had had two of her earlier dogs, Taggi and Alix, buried in Plot 106 in the Ancaster Pet Cemetery, run by Dudley Collins, her long-time veterinarian and friend. On the stone she had engraved: “My Best Friends.” She often visited the plot and told friends that, when she died, she wanted her ashes buried next to her dogs.

Living alone out on Indian Trail, she would occasionally have coffee and chat with a neighbour — but always outside her house, on a bench, hardly ever inside. David Gleave said she didn’t think the house was neat enough to invite guests in. And, in fact, friends who had made it inside said her house was always cluttered.

Into her late sixties and early seventies, she stopped playing competitive bridge. Her bridge mates wondered if she preferred playing alone on her computer, given her odd sleeping hours. It might have been that bridge perhaps no longer fitted with other enthusiasms, which included Sudoku, sketching, handwriting analysis, and watching her big-screen TVs. Her favourite show was
The Big Bang Theory
, a sitcom with characters that included genius physicists/geeks who interact with a waitress and aspiring actress. In 2007, Hollywood came to Indian Trail to film scenes for a B movie called
Cyborg Soldier
. Audrey delighted in having her picture taken with the movie co-star, Tiffani Thiessen, known to pop-culture junkies for playing teenage roles in the TV shows
Saved by the Bell
and
Beverly Hills 90210
.

Despite the fact that she lived alone, and had a generous teacher’s pension and no children to support, Audrey always seemed to stay home, never took vacations. She eventually bought air-conditioning for the house but hated turning it on. Sometimes she lined her windows with tin foil to block the sun’s rays and conserve power. Still, she allowed herself some indulgences: a riding lawn mower, the flat-screen TVs, and a new, wall-mounted convection oven, one she likely never had the chance to use.

And then there was the car. Neighbours thought she had a thing for sports cars. When she was first teaching and still married to Allan, she drove their Rover, a British model that Allan took up north with him when he left. But she had never owned anything like her pride and joy: a new white Camaro with a black stripe, the latest model of the iconic muscle car that had first gone into production in the spring of 2009.

Low-key, reclusive Audrey delighted in taking the dogs — “my puppies,” she called them — for a drive, revving up the big engine and turning heads. She once drove a friend through a quiet neighbourhood in Brantford. An elderly woman on the sidewalk looked on in disgust as the Camaro rumbled past. Audrey loved it.

She had few friends. There were some, though. Lynne Vanstone was a long-time friend. She golfed in Brantford with Audrey for years; they often had coffee; and Audrey spent some time with Lynne’s family. In 2007 Audrey decided it was time to write her will and made Lynne the executor.

But the one who perhaps spent the most time with Audrey was Phil Kinsman. Phil was polite and radiated an earnest, eager-to-please vibe. Phil had met Audrey four years earlier, in 2006, when he was 18 and in his first year at McMaster. He used to work at Windmill Power Equipment in Dundas. Audrey frequented the place and let it be known she needed someone to help her around her property. Phil needed the extra money, and her place was near: back then, before he got married, he lived with his parents in Brantford, just a five-minute drive away from Audrey’s. So Phil gave it a shot. Things worked out well, and Phil continued to do odd jobs for Audrey. They became friends, and when Phil got married in June 2010, to a petite, attractive woman named Alex, whom he had met at church, he convinced Audrey to attend the wedding.

Phil Kinsman insisted that Audrey come to his wedding.
Hamilton Spectator/Facebook.

At first Phil had found it tough dropping by Audrey’s because she talked … a lot. The smallest job would take him several hours because she wanted to chat, educate him on all manner of things, including the intricacies of the invasive garlic mustard plant. But Audrey grew on him. He came to enjoy her quirks, looked forward to the routine of helping with a small job and chatting. The two of them shared a passion for science, although they didn’t talk a lot about it. Phil had entered graduate studies in electrical and biomedical engineering at McMaster, and was working toward his doctorate. He had received a scholarship and been named valedictorian of his engineering class. He had two papers published: one was called “Dynamic binary translation to a reconfigurable target for on-the-fly acceleration,” which involved applications for diagnostic imaging in medicine. He gave a bound copy of the paper to Audrey as a gift. She was delighted with the gesture and invited him over to talk about his work.

He received regular emails from Audrey, often at odd hours, at least 2,000 over the course of a few years — Maxine comics, educational articles and videos, corny jokes. She emailed Phil photos she had taken of him working in her yard, as well as cooking articles for him to pass along to Alex, who was a pastry chef at a French restaurant in Dundas. If Phil was out for dinner at a fancy place, she encouraged him to take photos of his food and email her the pictures. She loved gourmet foods and “creative plating,” even though she didn’t allow herself enough time to embrace the hobby. Instead, her idea of a perfect meal at home was a chicken pot pie from Costco.

There were even some adventures the two shared. Phil enjoyed telling the story of the time he fixed Audrey’s mailbox. In the fall of 2010, vandals had busted up her old one at the end of the laneway. She was livid. She bought a new mailbox, and when she discovered that a part was missing, she recruited Phil to drive with her to the hardware store. Audrey found the spare part on a shelf and stuffed it inside her big parka. She had Phil run interference, make sure no one was watching, and they scurried out the door. All this, even though she could have simply asked for the part at the counter.

Although Phil felt that he and Audrey had become close friends, however, not once in all the times he was in the house did she ever serve him coffee or watch TV with him. They would always chat on the same couch, just outside the kitchen. She would either shut Togi and Schatze in a large kennel crate she kept in the house, or urge them to be nice to Phil. When he visited, Phil would push the number code on the keypad outside the automatic garage door, meet her in the garage, and then chat with her, either inside or out. That was the routine.

On December 22, 2010, Audrey met with her retired teacher colleagues at Williams for their regular Wednesday coffee chat. Around that same time she loaded Togi and Schatze in the Camaro and visited veterinarian Dudley Collins in Ancaster to pick up vitamins for the shepherds. She let the dogs run on his property as usual and gave him a hug when she left, as she often did.

That Christmas she had felt under the weather. On Monday morning, December 27, Audrey emailed Phil and declared she would make her Wednesday coffee meeting come hell or high water. Lynne Vanstone brought her soup. Later that day, at about 6:00 p.m., she emailed a friend, Linda. She forwarded Linda the same music video she had sent Phil that morning.

Just after 2:00 a.m., Wednesday, December 29, a big, male chocolate Labrador living on a property across the road from Audrey’s barked wildly, although that was not entirely unusual for the dog. Later that morning Audrey did not make her regular coffee gathering.

Just after midnight on Thursday, December 30, fog hung in the darkness over the snow-covered ground. Then it turned to freezing fog, which, as Audrey would have known better than most, occurs when water droplets supercool and freeze on contact with a surface.

Later that morning it rained. Phil Kinsman spoke to a writer from the
Hamilton Spectator
, relating his experience of what happened to him that morning. He had hesitated to talk about it with friends and classmates. Everyone wanted to share a theory about the mystery, ask him what he knew. It bothered him. He wanted to talk about Audrey’s life, not her death.

“Obviously, I want to see justice served, but I don’t need that to happen to have closure; I don’t need to have a theory,” he said. He agreed to meet the writer — at Williams, he suggested — the same coffee shop near McMaster that Audrey had frequented.

On the morning of December 30, Phil said, he drove with his wife, Alex, from their apartment in west Hamilton to Quatrefoil, the restaurant where she worked. After dropping her off, he headed to Audrey’s. He turned his silver 2002 Hyundai Accent off Indian Trail into the driveway, past the small pond on the right and larger one on the left, and parked on the far side as he always did. He was bringing her a piece of her favourite cake. It was about 11:00 a.m. He did not go to Audrey’s front door. He always entered through the garage. He carried the cake from his car to the twin automatic garage doors outside. He punched in the code on the keypad. The door rose. The Camaro was parked in its usual spot, both its doors closed.

That’s when he saw her, he said, on the garage floor, lying on her back. Had Audrey slipped and fallen on some ice, he wondered? Up close, he saw that that was not the case.

She was wearing her winter coat. Her comfortable stretch pants were ripped. He went outside, put the cake back in the car, and called 911 on his cell. The person on the other end asked him to confirm that she was dead. He said he returned to the garage, knelt down, and felt her pulse. Then he went outside, sat on the bumper of his car, and waited.

Police spoke of the brutality of the murder, that it had been a stabbing. She had also been beaten. From what Phil saw, or remembered, it was not a gruesome scene. But it all kind of blurred over in his mind’s eye. He did have flashbacks in the months to come. It messed him up. Audrey’s dark eyes had been wide open, as though she was looking at him. The eyes stayed with him for a long time.