Death's Shadow (8 page)

The Lost Boy

The first of the two trials was scheduled to begin in the spring of 2005, but Carl fired his lawyers, delayed the process further. The Jackie McLean trial started, finally, in January 2006, before a jury and Superior Court Justice Jane Milanetti. Carl continued to cause trouble during the trial. He threatened courtroom guards, refused to enter court several times. Six Hamilton police officers were added for extra security.

“The position of the Crown,” assistant Crown attorney John Nixon told the jury, “is that this murder was committed during the course of a sexual assault, and that, by definition, is first-degree murder.”

The Crown argued that Carl had struck Jackie in the head six times with the steel pipe, and then had had sex with her when she was dead or dying. Carl’s defence lawyer, Michael Puskas, called Barry Lane to the stand as an alternative suspect. But the forensic evidence that the Crown argued linked Carl to the sexual assault in the loft of the apartment proved critical for the jury. In the end, after a six-week trial, it took the jury just 10 hours to render its verdict: Guilty. First-degree murder. Carl was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility of parole for 25 years. He stood in court after the verdict was announced.

“I have no remorse for something I didn’t do,” he said. “I thought justice should be done. So the woman is dead. Now, basically, I’m dead, too.”

He was led from the prisoner’s box. On his way out, he turned to a detective in the crowd. “Dave Place,” Carl said, “you’re a goof.”

It was, reflected Place, a curious remark from someone as violent and foul-mouthed as Carl. In Carl’s odd way, it might have been something of a show of respect. But then, Place did not spend time trying to psychoanalyze the man. Carl had done wrong and left evidence. Place followed it. It felt good to hear the conviction.

But as it happened, the case was not yet closed on the Jackie McLean homicide.

Just over a year later, on May 17, 2007, assistant Crown attorney Ed Slater rose for his opening remarks in the Clark/Del Sordo trial. Carl was defended by Russell Silverstein, a Toronto lawyer who had represented Hamilton serial poisoner Sukhwinder Dhillon in two high-profile homicide trials. Silverstein had lost both, but had mounted strong defences in each.

Slater began by telling the jury the story of Charlisa’s son, Eugene, the “lost boy,” who Constable Randy Carter had helped the day after Father’s Day in 2000. He then described Carter’s discovery of the crime scene. Slater spoke of the murders, the baseball bat, Shane Mosher’s meeting with Carl Hall, and the confession. Don Forgan sat in court. The room was dead quiet yet electric with emotion. Forgan thought Slater’s address was the most powerful opening he had ever heard. The detective studied the jurors, saw a couple of them wipe tears away. Evidence had not even been presented yet, but Slater had them already.

“The case that you are about to hear,” Slater said, “has everything to do with what Randy Carter found when he took that boy home.”

Carl listened in the prisoner’s box. What was it that stirred inside him? Did the talk of the little lost boy, the one that Carl had seen the night of the murders, get to him? The boy was the one Carl had spoken of with regret, the one victim who gave him pause. Later, Carl would wonder about his motivation for what he did next. Was it a crisis of conscience? He didn’t think that was it. In the past he had wondered if he had been born without one. No, he was more than ready to try to beat the rap. It was more a calculation of the odds.

His lawyer confirmed for him that the Crown would lead with evidence of his palm print on the bat. Not good. Maybe, Carl thought, he could run with the story that he had held the bat another time, prior to the murders, when visiting the former tenant, Paul. Or, he could say the cops had fabricated the evidence. Carl recalled having wiped it down after the murders. How could they get a print from it? But then, part of him just wanted to get it over with. He killed them and he wanted it to end.

That first day of the trial, after Slater’s opening address, court took a recess. Behind closed doors Carl wept. That same day he decided to enter a guilty plea. There would be no trial. A week later he was sentenced to two counts of second-degree murder. He would serve three concurrent life sentences. And Charlisa’s and Pat’s families were spared going through a public trial, where the evidence from the crime scene would be shown in court for all to see.

The confession also meant that Shane Mosher would not have to take the stand, which was fine by him. Shane continued to live in the Hamilton area, and got a new, solid job. One of the detectives had called Shane a hero for his role in the investigation, and his wife, Shannon, was proud of him. Shane had taken the stand once in court, at the preliminary hearing into the double murder. He was frightened, having to walk past Carl to take the stand. It was the first time they had seen each other since the rehab centre. He testified in court to the confession Carl had made, and he felt Carl’s eyes on him the whole time, but no words were spoken. Later, he worried that if he did not testify effectively, the whole case would blow up and Carl would be a free man to come after his family.

With Carl locked away, he and Shannon could breathe again, and he felt no urge to use drugs. He thought often of the road he had travelled. In the depths of his addiction, he had called out to God, wondered why it was happening. In retrospect he felt he knew. Only by going through that ordeal was he taken to Carl, and put in a position to hear the confession and contact police. In fact it seemed to Shane that his whole life had, in a sense, been a prelude to that horrible summer: growing up out east, which gave him a connection with Carl when they met; and all the curious twists in the road along the way. It was like it had all been meant to be from the start.

At sentencing, Carl came face to face one more time with the boy. Eugene had recently turned 10. He was offered the opportunity to present a victim-impact statement in court. He wanted to do it. Dressed in a suit and tie, the blond-haired boy rose from his seat and took the stand. With Carl sitting close by in the prisoner’s box, Eugene looked out at all the people in the courtroom, and began.

“Hello, your honour,” he said.

Eugene thanked the Crown, and Don Forgan and Mike Thomas. The detectives sat together in court; the entire room pulsed with emotion; some in the audience quietly sobbed as the boy spoke. Forgan felt so proud of him, of how brave he was to be up there.

Eugene could see that his uncle, Charlisa’s brother, Greg, was choked up. It was the first time he had ever seen Greg cry, and that made him feel emotional. But Eugene was determined to hold it in. He felt very mad at Carl Hall. But he was not going to let Carl Hall see him cry.

“Thank you for letting me talk today,” he continued. “I have been waiting a long time for this day. On June 18th, 2000, I was three years old. I had a great room, lots of toys, a bike and a goldfish, and a mom that loved me a lot. When I woke up that morning everything changed. I saw lots of blood. I was scared and I will never forget. I know how life was, I know — shoot, now I live with my grandma and uncle. I still get scared when it is night time. And now I call my grandma my mom.”

The boy in the suit stepped down from the stand, without a single tear in his dark eyes — Charlisa’s eyes — and walked past the killer. And then, out of the courtroom, when it was all over, behind closed doors, Eugene cried, a lot.

A cold hard wind blowing off Lake Ontario meets the razor wire and guard towers of 175-year-old Kingston Penitentiary in eastern Ontario. The place has a medieval feel to it; visitors enter through a hulking front door into a lobby that is dark and cramped.

No friends or family come to visit Carl Hall. His uncle came and saw him back when he was in the bucket, in Barton jail in Hamilton. But not here. He is not in touch much with his family. He doesn’t blame his upbringing for the way he turned out. He wrote his parents a letter soon after he was jailed for the murders. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. He was the one who did it, period.

Talking to a writer, Carl now reconsiders the letter. “Is it my dad’s fault? I guess that’s up for debate. I can’t say, ‘Oh, poor me.’ Won’t use that as a scapegoat. On the East Coast, you grow up hard; that’s just the way it is.”

There is a trailer at the pen where inmates with good behaviour can enjoy conjugal visits. Carl misbehaves in jail, gets in fights. He tells inmates he’s a nice guy, and if he’s in the wrong, he’ll apologize. But if he’s right, and you cross him, he’ll kill you. In any case no one comes to see Carl for a conjugal visit, either. He does look forward to just hanging in the trailer alone, though; looks forward to making himself some food, watching DVDs in peace.

He has never stopped denying murdering Jackie McLean. In prison Carl has continued to point the finger at Barry Lane, who also spent time with Jackie on the last night of her life. Carl says that the sex he had with Jackie was consensual, and that he left her that night “alive and kicking.” The notion that he would have sex with a woman who was dead or nearly dead is crazy, he says. Certainly, that reputation would not help in prison. In the inmate culture, rapists and child molesters are not treated well. He blames police for falsely portraying him as a serial killer.

“Anyone can be a killer. Doesn’t mean I’m a serial nutbar or something like that?” He tells the writer that he hopes he is “humanized” in a story being written about him. “I’m just a working dude, a normal guy who got into a bad scene.... The drugs made me a man that I’m not, brought out the worst in me.”

As for murdering Charlisa and Pat, he never mentions them by name. He says not a day goes by he doesn’t regret what happened. “I would give away my life for them if it would bring them back.”

Why did he do it?

He claims that it was just a break and enter. He wasn’t hitting the place to get revenge on anyone. Just broke in because he could see that the balcony door on King Street East to the apartment was open. He saw a guy sleeping on the bed, lights on in the room; he grabbed the guy’s pants on the floor to get his wallet, and the guy grabbed his hand, fought back. So Carl hit him with the bat, again and again; and the woman, she was in the bed too, started screaming. So he killed her, too.

“The guy put his hand on me; I was terrified; I fought for my life. He was a lot bigger than me. And the rage ... I just kept going.”

His story seems off. Pat’s body was found face down on the mattress, as though he had never moved from a resting position. Charlisa’s body, on her knees, suggested that she had been standing up, had come in from the hallway. It seems more likely that Carl killed Pat in cold blood, an attack from behind from which Pat had no chance to defend himself.

Carl does not sound angry at Shane Mosher for talking to police. He confessed to Shane to get it off his chest, and it felt good. He figured he had fudged enough of the details, but realized he had talked too much. Never thought Shane would tell. Regrets it now. Never should have told him.

He is not religious, but sometimes he says a prayer, asks God to forgive him his sins. Carl hints at other dark things he’s done in his past, “a whole other incident” that has not been made public. He could say some things that could really screw him, he says.

As he approaches 40, the pale skin, red hair, and pudgy cast to his face and frequent smirk make him look younger. Physically, he is far from what he calls the “hate machine” he was building in jail prior to his convictions, when he worked out like a demon. The muscles have softened; he is overweight. All he does now is watch TV, read.

All of this is a woman’s fault, Carl claims. He had a girlfriend, a long-distance relationship with a Hamilton girl named Shellee. For four years, while he was in jail awaiting trial, they dated, talked about getting married. On his fingers, Carl has the tattoo “SH” for Shellee Hall. But she broke up with him. Just as well, he figures; he wants to get back in a groove, get back in shape.

He reads mystery fiction, Stephen King, Grisham. He is a big fan of
Dexter
, the darkly twisted TV show about a vigilante forensic investigator who is a serial killer — but of bad guys. Does Dexter remind Carl of his experiences?

“Yeah, a bit. Although I never killed anyone who deserved it. That’s the problem.”

Early in 2012 his appeal of the Jackie McLean conviction was upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal. The court ruled that the presiding judge in the first trial had made errors in her charge to the jury, for example, failing to “direct the jury’s attention to some of the important evidence that was capable of supporting (the defence’s) claim that Barry Lane was the killer.” The original judge, the Court of Appeal ruling said, should have directed the jury to consider “his presence and strange behaviour soon after the deceased’s body was found; … the fact he was not wearing a shirt after the murder; [and the fact that] his bloody footprints were found in the apartment leading away from a pool of the deceased’s blood.”

A new trial was ordered and began in the spring of 2012 in Hamilton. Carl would be tried before a judge only, no jury.

His lawyer was again Russell Silverstein, the same lawyer who had represented him in the Clark/Del Sordo trial.

Life has been difficult for Sue Ross since Char’s murder.
Ron Albertson, Hamilton Spectator.

Members of Jackie’s family followed the case in court. So too did Sue Ross, Charlisa’s mother. During the trial Carl often stared at Sue, for long moments. He knew who she was, had seen her in court many times. There was no expression on his face. He just stared. She had no idea what was going through his head. She just stared back at him.

The Crown argued that blood spatter evidence suggested Carl Hall had had sex with Jackie McLean after she had been bludgeoned with the steel pipe. Russell Silverstein offered a competing theory: the victim had had consensual sex with Carl, and then put her stained underwear back on, only to be murdered later on by the real killer — who the lawyer suggested was Barry Lane.

Silverstein also said that, given the pooling of blood on the apartment floor from the beating, if Carl had been the killer, one would expect there to have been blood on his shoes or other clothing — but there was none. The only person who had blood on his shoes was Lane.

In Canadian criminal law, the standard for convicting an accused of first-degree murder is that the court must be convinced of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” On June 23, 2012, after a two-week case, Ontario Superior Court Justice J.R. Henderson announced he was acquitting Carl Hall of Jackie’s murder. He said the weakness with the Crown’s case was that Carl’s fingerprints were not found on the murder weapon, and no blood was found on his clothing.

The
Hamilton Spectator
reported that the moment the judge announced his verdict one of Jackie’s daughters ran from the courtroom. And as Carl was about to be led away by police officers, Cindy McLean, Jackie’s older sister, called him an asshole. Carl, in turn, looked over his shoulder and smirked at the family.

There was a police officer in the courtroom who watched it all unfold with a sense of disbelief. As the evidence had been presented for a second time, Detective Dave Place at first felt confident. He had a cautious nature when it came to trials, but in this case he couldn’t help it. The semen and blood spatter evidence seemed to him overwhelming; clearly, the jury in the first trial had felt that way.

He had watched Russell Silverstein raise issues with the Crown’s evidence, and to Place, the case for Carl Hall seemed weak at best. The lack of blood spatter on Carl’s clothing, he felt, was a non-issue. Carl had said in a police interview that he had removed his pants prior to having sex with Jackie — so obviously his pants would have no blood spatter on them.

But toward the end of the trial, when Place heard that Silverstein had submitted a 57-page submission to the judge detailing closing arguments, he started to wonder if Carl had a shot at getting off.

As the judge presented his acquittal decision, Dave Place felt numb. He knew they had gathered strong evidence. His heart ached for Jackie’s family. He understood and respected the Canadian judicial process. But he left the courtroom that day still firm in his belief that Carl Hall had gotten away with Jackie McLean’s murder.

Russell Silverstein said the acquittal gave his client “a fighting chance” at being released from prison one day.

But even with his name cleared of the McLean homicide, the shadow of his admitted double murder in the Clark/Del Sordo case would always remain, and Carl was well aware of what that meant.

“I’m never getting out,” he said in prison. “Maybe when I’m 70. But I won’t live that long.… I just don’t care.”

If Canada had the death penalty, would he deserve it?

“I guess I do deserve it. And I’m growing less scared of dying, because life doesn’t have much to offer.”

“More coffee?” The elderly customer nods yes at her question but does not smile. The server, in her red uniform, hair up, tops up his mug, steam wafting, and returns to the kitchen. The woman waiting tables used to teach ballet. But now she works in the Zellers restaurant, in Hamilton’s hard-bitten east end, where today the smoke from industrial stacks is frozen against a leaden sky. In the kitchen she chats with other, much younger servers. They are good girls. She has told them about her daughter, Charlisa.

The girls adore Sue Ross, her openness, her sense of humour. She is a brave and resilient woman, but they can always tell when she’s feeling down. She is like a mom to them. Sue likes that. The girls remind her of Char. But at the same time it also makes her wary. She does not want to get too close. That’s one reason she hesitated returning to teaching ballet; she was not ready to open her heart again. She does have her moments, though. Her co-workers at Zellers convinced her to get together for a backyard summer party. They had more than a few drinks, a lot of smiles — it was nice.

Hamilton police officer Randy Carter reunites with Eugene ten years after he had helped the lost toddler.
Ron Albertson, Hamilton Spectator.

After the trial, Sue continued living in the tiny old house in the east end with her son. Greg, who is in his mid-twenties, and little Eugene. Sue’s first husband, Charlisa’s father, Al Clark, died a couple of years ago. Sue and her second husband, Bruce, split up not long after the murder. She had obsessively watched crime shows on TV in the time leading up to the trial, but when it was over, she could no longer watch any of it, turning instead to lighter fare, comedies. She does not look for silver linings, but at least she did ultimately find out that her belief that Char had been pregnant at the time of her murder proved not to be true. The autopsy showed that had not been the case. Pictures of Char continue to adorn her home, as do cows — Char collected cow-themed ornaments, mugs, and so friends of Sue keep giving them to her as gifts.

As for Eugene, he no longer has a biological mother, and has no desire to get to know his biological father. Greg, Charlisa’s brother, is his uncle, but he is more like a big brother. Greg did his best after losing Char to help make Eugene’s upbringing as positive as he could, give him some solid, traditional memories that he could reflect back upon when he got older; of Christmases and birthdays and trips.

Greg often thinks about his sister. He will never forget the time he babysat for Char at her apartment a few weeks before she died. When she got home from her night out, she gave him a big hug. She hadn’t done that in a long time. He’s careful not to let himself linger too long in sorrow. Char would not want that. But memories like that still get to him.