Death's Shadow (3 page)

“I’m Going to Be Okay”

It had been a sad year for Ruth Del Sordo. She had lost her mother, Lily, in February. Ruth’s husband had tried to tell her all the right things, that Lily had lived a good and long life, 84 years. But Ruth had been very close with her mother, could not believe she was gone. Lily had family who were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War, but her parents made it to England, where she was born. The family moved to Canada after the war, and ended up in Hamilton, where Lily raised a family on her own after her husband left her. Ruth grew up on the Beach Strip, went to Van Wagners Beach School on the lake, the building that would one day be reborn as Barangas restaurant. She married an Italian-Canadian named Flavio Del Sordo in 1973.

Their first child, Pasquale, was born a year later, on September 20, 1974. Ruth and Flavio had four other kids: Anthony, Flavio Jr., Cindy, and Joey. Flavio started a construction company; all the boys worked for him.

Pasquale especially loved the work, had a passion for woodworking since he picked up a toy hammer as a toddler. In his teens he won awards for woodworking and carpentry projects. As the first-born, he occupied a special place in the family, but especially in Ruth’s world. He had had epilepsy as a boy, but with treatment his symptoms had vanished before he hit his teens. Still, Ruth had never stopped worrying about Pasquale, even into his twenties. They continued to be very close. He shared everything with her, and was always driving her places, taking her shopping. Ruth always got a steady dose of the music he cranked in the house or car. He used to always give her a big hug, and say, “Me and you against the world, eh, Mom?”

Pasquale “Pat” Del Sordo.
Hamilton Spectator.

She was fiercely protective of him; one of his girlfriends once broke up with him because he paid so much attention to his mother. When he was in his early twenties, Pasquale and a girlfriend had a child, a girl. They did not stay together, though. Still, Ruth glowed with pride when, in the early days, she saw him bathe and diaper the baby.

By the summer of 2000, nearing his 26th birthday, Pasquale, who now went by the name his friends had given him, Pat, worked for his dad framing houses and still lived upstairs in the family home in Stoney Creek. He loved to go out at night, though. He loved his food and music; fixing up his blue Jeep and riding around blasting classic Kiss; heading out at night with six or seven of his fingers adorned with gold rings; taking centre stage on the dance floor at clubs, all 5 foot 11, 240 pounds of him. Others gravitated toward him, his big laugh and brassy presence.

His dad warned him not to stay out too late. Pat often had to work early in the morning, and most of all he needed to be careful out there. But Pat seemed to trust everyone. “Don’t worry, I’m going to be okay,” he said, and gave Flavio a hug and playfully pinched his cheek.

Even when he had a late night, Pat always returned home to sleep in his own bed. That continued during the summer of 2000, when he was seeing Charlisa Clark. Saturday afternoon, June 17, he hung with Charlisa and her son, Eugene, and then, later that night, he was out with his friends Moe and Luca in Burlington at a carnival on the lakeshore. They stopped at a club called Billy Bob’s, but the lineup was too big, so they decided to pack it in. Pat was dropped off at the Del Sordo home just after midnight.

His family had plans for Sunday, Father’s Day: everyone was going to the Mandarin for a big dinner, as was the custom. Soon after midnight, Charlisa called him on his cell. He left the house, took his dad’s white Del Sordo Construction van and drove the 15 minutes to visit Charlisa at her apartment on King Street East; parked in a lot right across the street.

Ruth woke up at 9:00 a.m. on Sunday. Pat had not come home. She was worried, and called his cell repeatedly. No answer, just his voice mail. At 4:45 p.m. Ruth and Flavio drove downtown to pick up their youngest, Joey, from where he was getting off a shift working at Tim Hortons. On the way, driving along King East, they noticed the white van in a parking lot. They did not know that Charlisa lived across the street. Flavio phoned his son Anthony; told him to bring the extra set of keys. Flavio opened the back door of the van, which was unlocked. Anthony left his father, and Flavio drove the van home by himself.

It was 7:00 p.m. and no one had heard from Pat yet. The family decided to go back to the spot on King Street where the van had been parked. Flavio, Anthony and his fiancée, Joey, and Pat’s friends Luca and Moe went down. The area near 781 King Street East now buzzed with police; yellow crime-scene tape was up. Did it have anything to do with Pat? Officers asked them to come to Central Station, where detectives began interviewing Pat’s family and friends. Did anyone have any reason to harm Pat? Had he had any trouble with friends or girlfriends? Any drug use? No, the family replied, everyone loved Pat; he didn’t take drugs and was hard on people who did, even if they just smoked cigarettes.

Flavio phoned Ruth, who was still at home. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “The police are saying there are two people found dead in an apartment on King Street, but are not saying who it is.”

Ruth dropped the phone, fearing the worst.

“Please!” she yelled, “Don’t take my Pasquale! Take me! God, take me!”

All that night, still uncertain if her son was alive, Ruth prayed, asked God for a miracle, even as she sensed the truth. Flavio suggested maybe Pat had been in a fight, was attacked, had fled town?

No
, Ruth thought,
he would have come home, no matter what
. Her Pasquale always came home. She kept thinking back to the night before, the last time he had been in the house. Ruth had heard Pat leave to go see Charlisa. She had wanted to stop him. But Flavio had recently given her a hard time about being so protective of their son. “Don’t phone him all the time; he’s a man,” he had said.

When Ruth asked Pat about the argument she had had with Flavio, however, he said, “Don’t ever stop bugging me, Ma; it just shows you love me.”

That night, when he had just left for Charlisa’s, Ruth had had a mind to call him on his cell: “It’s too late, Pasqua, tomorrow’s Father’s Day — come on back; we’ll have some coffee, talk a bit.” Ruth knew if she had called that he would have come back. No question about it. How many times had he cancelled dates in the past if she needed him? Many times. But no, she had not called him. Why? Why hadn’t she just called him once more, kept him home where he belonged?

Just after 5:00 p.m. Monday, Don Forgan and Dave Place pulled in in front of the Del Sordo home, the house the family had renovated. Pat himself had helped screw down every new floor. Just 15 hours earlier, Dave Place had stood in Sue Ross’s kitchen to pass along the news of Charlisa’s death. And now he was doing it again. Place dreaded such notifications, personally bearing the worst news in a family’s life, a dark moment of the soul they would never forget.

The detectives were invited inside. They told the Del Sordos one of the victims in the apartment on King Street East was Pat. Some sat in silence. Pat’s brother Anthony punched a pane of glass in the china cabinet, slicing a tendon in his hand. The family wrapped it and rushed him to hospital. Ruth just sat there, absorbing the news, her heart shattered.
My boy is gone
, she thought.
My music man
.
My Pasquale
.

Pat’s cell phone was recovered from the apartment. Detectives monitored it, waiting to see if anyone called in the days that followed. There was one person who dialed the number several times. It was Ruth. She yearned to hear his voice on the recording, the one that said without fail, “Hello, this is The Pasqua — if you got something hot or interesting to say, just leave a message after the beep. Ciao.”

Ruth focused her energy on the investigation, her sorrow competing with puzzlement and anger. Her boy was gentle, full of fun. Who could want to harm him? Moreover, she could not fathom it — he was a large man, with big arms and shoulders, muscled from weight lifting and building houses; a gentle giant but so strong he could kill a man with a punch. Who could possibly have done this to him, she wondered? Surely not just one man.

Cold Blooded

After it had all gone down, Carl crashed at a friend’s apartment. In the morning he rose, stood on the balcony high in the sky, thought about what he had done, what he had seen and heard.
Jump?
Should he?
The thought crossed his mind, and not for the first time. Except Carl had issues with suicide. Not that he considered himself religious, but, still, he wondered:
What if it was true that you burned in hell for it?
On the other hand, what if, when you die, everything was just black?
That would be good; he would choose suicide if that were the case.

Mostly, he wondered if he had cleaned up enough back at the apartment. So much blood. After it was over, he had hopped off the low-rise balcony of the apartment on King East to escape. But then he had returned, scaled the wall again, through the open balcony door, and wiped down everything: walls, light switches. What had he touched? Anything that would stick? He hopped off the balcony again, threw one of his shoes in a dumpster, another in a second dumpster. Then he returned to the apartment a final time, remembering he had handled a wallet in there. Grabbed the wallet, a set of car keys, left; threw it all down a sewer.

The next day he visited his girlfriend, Elaine, who lived down at Melvin and Parkdale in the east end, six kilometres away from where it had happened on King Street. They had a stormy relationship; his violent temper and drug habit did not help. She once called police to complain that Carl had stolen her VCR.

Carl Hall climbed the outside wall of the apartment before killing Charlisa and Pat.
Ron Albertson, Hamilton Spectator.

Carl turned on her TV and asked her what channel the Hamilton news was on. That was odd, she thought. He never watched the news. He saw a journalist on the screen, reporting from the scene outside the apartment on King East. The journalist was talking about a double homicide.

Elaine looked at Carl. “What? Did you have something to do with that?” Elaine asked.

“No.”

In the past, when they were high, they had talked about what violence each might be capable of doing.

“I believe in God,” Elaine had said. “I couldn’t kill anyone.”

Carl sat there, with his red hair, bloodless white skin, pale blue-grey eyes that seemed to possess a crazed light, an unhinged quality. As a teenager growing up back east, in the Maritimes, Carl had once dreamed of killing someone. Woke up thinking it had actually happened. No, it wouldn’t bother him, killing, he told Elaine. “Because I don’t have a conscience.”

He left Elaine’s place and headed again for the apartment on King Street East. The Hamilton Police command van was there; there were uniform and plain clothes cops, news reporters.

Why did he return to the scene? To see what they might have on him? That’s what he told one person. Or was there another reason? Why would he risk showing his face there, outside the place where he had killed two people in cold blood, uncertain if anyone had spotted him? For that matter, why did he drop hints to Elaine about what he had done? Maybe his behaviour was explained by something very dark that beat inside him.

He moved closer to the yellow police crime scene tape, his thoughts spinning.

“Hey, stay back,” ordered a cop in uniform.

“Okay.”

One day, down the road, Carl would reflect about having taken two lives. He had done something that most people didn’t get to do.
Didn’t get to do?
An odd statement to make
, he thought. He knew that.

A couple of weeks before the double murder, a man fought through tears for the right words, as a north wind off the Bay of Fundy whipped his face, along with a hard rain. Shane Mosher was 32, thin, with a boyish face and short dark hair. He lived in Brantford, Ontario, 30 minutes west of Hamilton, but had travelled to his boyhood home of Middleton, a small town in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, to see his mom, Barb. She was dying of colon cancer and time was running out. It was tearing him apart.

Mom was an angel of a woman, had always been there for him. When he was a boy growing up in the valley, however, Shane’s relationship with his father had been more complicated. He wanted to emulate his dad, or some of him, anyway. He didn’t want his day job, that was for sure. Dad worked at a funeral home next door to their house. He was an embalmer. Shane always stayed away from the basement of the place; it freaked him out. But there were other things about his dad that Shane admired. His dad had been a great athlete, a local legend; he had played for Canada’s national baseball team, the one that toured Cuba and met Fidel Castro in 1964. Shane kept a scrapbook of the pictures. Dad was a good looking guy; women loved him; guys wanted to be like him. But Shane came to believe that his dad struggled to deal with life, with not living up to the shadow of his own father, and not making it big-time in sports.

Visiting his mom for what he knew would be the last time, Shane was nervous. His mind was racing. What should he say? He came to the front door of her house, where she was receiving palliative care. Shane had come down with a sore throat and earache, which he had mentioned to his stepfather. The stepfather wouldn’t let him in the door because of his symptoms. Shane pleaded with him; it was the last time he would see her.
Please
. The stepfather said no. Instead he set Barb up in a room at the front of the house, by a window. Shane had had to stand outside in the wind and rain, talk to her through a screen, both of them crying. She died on June 13 at 52 years old.

That summer, back home in Brantford, Shane continued his life with Shannon, his wife, and their one-year-old girl, Riley. On the outside he was still good ol’ Shane from the valley: likable, clean-cut, big smile. But inside everything was a struggle; he could not shake the sadness. He talked to a doctor about it. Was he losing it, going crazy? Shane reflected on his own history a lot — such an unusual life, he reflected: how he grew up back east; how he had taken it on the chin more than a few times but kept on surviving.

He had always yearned for a solid family life, but his parents had broken up when he was young. Sports had filled the void: he was a ranked tennis player and a standout baseball player; led his team to the Eastern Canadian championships after making a game-winning catch over the outfield fence. Strong hockey player, too. But it seemed to Shane that whenever he looked up into the stands, his dad was never there; he was hanging with his buddies having beers instead.

There were some tough times. There was the time when Shane was 16, when he had caught a ride hitchhiking. The driver was a sexual predator; had tried to make a move on him. As the car slowed around a bend, Shane opened the door, jumped out, and got away. And then, at 21, he was in a bad car accident. Shane’s best friend, Dave, who was driving, died when their pickup truck crashed through a guardrail and plunged 100 feet down a hill. Shane didn’t have his seatbelt on, had been sleeping, but somehow emerged with just a cut.

When he met Shannon, she was coming off a bad marriage. Shane was attracted immediately to the popular, blonde — she was a pretty woman with a big personality. Shane felt like he had won the lottery when they started dating. After marrying they had Riley.

That was a few years ago, though; now, back in Brantford, after his mom died, he was drinking some, smoking pot a bit, which he had done on occasion in his valley days, when he’d have a joint and a beer with the guys after hockey. But it wasn’t enough, not anymore. He could not clear his head, shake his depression, and could not bring himself to talk to Shannon about it. He was acting outside his own skin now. Shane Mosher was about to plunge into another world, put everything at risk, and head down a road where he would find himself face to face with a killer and a fateful decision.