Murder at McDonald's (9 page)

MacNeil drove to Muise's home, on Patnic Avenue, just outside Sydney. Muise realized he didn't have his keys, so he asked MacNeil to take him to the Sanitary Dairy, a twenty-four-hour convenience store on George Street in Sydney. Muise wanted to try his luck at the Mega Double poker machines; he loved the game but usually didn't have enough money to play. But tonight he could pop quarters into the machines and kill a few hours. He'd head home later, when his father would be awake for work. Less than two hours after cutting an innocent man's throat, Darren Muise was feeding a video-gambling machine with money taken in the commission of that grisly act.

MacNeil left the store and drove to his girlfriend's place. Michelle Sharp lived with her mother and stepfather in a trailer on East Broadway in Whitney Pier, not far from Derek Wood's former home. Michelle's mother, who was on the couch watching TV, noticed nothing unusual about Freeman as he said goodnight and headed to bed. As he drifted off to sleep, the big-time criminal was unaware that he had left a critical piece of evidence in the back of the car. The tiny silver handgun had been thrust down behind the seat cushion in the confusion of the getaway.

While MacNeil and Muise were carefully discarding evidence and police were beginning their search for clues at McDonald's, Derek Wood continued looking for his accomplices. Wood walved from Kings Road up Keltic Drive to Coxheath Road, passing Riverview Rural High School, where he and Muise had both dropped out and where MacNeil had graduated. From there he climbed Mountain Road, descending to the intersection with Beaton Road. There was no sign of the Impala; maybe MacNeil and Muise had not gone to MacNeil's after all. It had taken Wood an hour to cover the distance to Beaton Road, and now he decided to walk back. The night was raw, with temperatures running below the freezing mark, but Wood was too preoccupied to feel the cold. He still did not know what to do; he still felt uncertain about what had happened in the restaurant. He knew he had shot Arlene, Donna, and Neil, but he had heard other shots after Darren took the gun from him while he rifled the safe. He tried to replay the whole crime in his mind, in slow motion, but the pieces weren't fitting. Where had Donna and Arlene come from? What were they doing in the basement? He couldn't understand it. Had they been in the manager's office downstairs? Why was Arlene even there? Her shift had ended with the inventory, hadn't it? And what should he do now? As Wood continued to sort through the events, and his options, he found himself back at Kings Convenience, but now the store was locked. That made no sense, either. That store was always open, and there were two clerks inside; he could see them. Wood pounded on the window—he wanted to call his cousin Mike again—and one of the clerks came over but would not open the door.

By the time Wood was walking down Mountain Road, police had already visited all the twenty-four-hour businesses in the area and told employees not to allow anyone inside until they were informed that the situation was safe. Then they blocked off a section of Kings Road, from the Sydney bypass, back about a kilometre and a half towards Sydney, to the intersection of Kings Road and Kenwood Drive. There were several all-night or late-night establishments in that corridor, and police were afraid a cornered suspect could turn one of them into another blood bath.

The roadblocks created an eerie effect in the area, and the yellow glow of street lights added to the ghost-town atmosphere. The area was well lit, but nothing was moving; it was as though all the people had disappeared—except for John and Dave Trickett, who, with Storm, were still trying to find out where the culprits had gone.

After failing to pick up a trail in the area of the Sydney River Shopping Plaza, the officers returned to McDonald's. At Kings Road, an excited motorist stopped and told them he had seen someone running up behind Jasper's restaurant, one of the few all-night businesses that had not yet been ordered closed. The motorist, who had driven down from a side street inside the cordoned-off area, gladly agreed to allow Storm to jump in the back of his small white truck while he drove the officers to the restaurant. What they found was a group of teenagers in the middle of a drinking party; what they lost was precious time. John Trickett knew very well that every second away from a fresh trail was a second in which it could be contaminated. Dave Trickett ordered the kids to leave, and the brothers returned to McDonald's.

Kevin Cleary had finally managed to secure the crime scene, and officers were being detailed to take footwear from the taxi drivers and ambulance attendants who had tramped all over the floors. Footprints were now a crucial concern: Henry Jantzen had discovered a trail of prints, leading from the door where he'd found the kitbag, to the inside of the building. The leaves and dirt in the small porch between the outer and inner steel doors had covered two sets of footprints, only to be pulled off by the tacky, freshly waxed tile floor in the crew training room. For some reason, Muise's deck shoes did not pick up grit or leave prints.

Cleary knew the footprints were a start, but he also knew a crime scene could hold a variety of more-telling clues, some as minute as a hair or fibre. This was a large scene, and one that had to be examined carefully by experts trained in evidence collection. The first to enter was the medical examiner, Dr. Murdock Smith, who officially pronounced Donna Warren and Neil Burroughs dead at the scene. The bodies would later become evidence to be handled by a pathologist, but first, Corporal James Leadbetter of the Sydney Identification section had to catalogue the crime scene.

An “Ident” officer approaches a crime scene the way a storyteller does, and Leadbetter knew that eventually he would have to tell all the stories revealed by this scene to a judge and jury. The first step towards preparing a scene in a murder investigation is a walk-through with the chief investigating officer: the two carefully examine—without touching—everything at the scene, and detailed notes are taken. Then the Ident officer takes an extensive series of photos that will give jurors a complete picture of the crime.

After finishing his photography, Corporal Leadbetter went out to his station wagon and opened a case containing a video camera. He wanted the horror of this crime scene brought home to any judge, prosecutor, defence lawyer, or juror to become involved in the case; he wanted each of them to see the senseless brutality that had so deeply moved him and the other officers present. Leadbetter began by sweeping the camera slowly over the bloodstained floor where James Fagan had fallen. He walked the camera over to the body of Neil Burroughs, slowly zooming in to capture the grisly nature of the wounds he had suffered. Then he turned the camera towards Donna Warren, whose body had been pulled from the tiny office by ambulance attendants hoping to revive her. They had left her on the floor, her skirt spread neatly down past her knees, her legs together, almost as though she had been laid out by a mortician. Downstairs, Leadbetter filled his viewfinder with the coloured sticks, now clustered in a pool of blood where Arlene MacNeil had fallen.

The kitchen at McDonald's hours after the crime. The bloodstained paper towels were used by cabbies trying to help Jimmy Fagan; the marks on the door are fingerprinting dust. [RCMP crime scene photo.]

While Corporal Leadbetter captured the disturbing images inside the restaurant, other cameras were causing problems for investigators outside. Upon returning to the restaurant, John and Dave Trickett began a new search with Storm; the dog quickly picked up a trail at the back of the building, leading to the field behind the building and towards the highway, then veering to the left and back to a garage at the corner of the parking lot. What the officers found there was not a suspect hidden in the bushes, but a television cameraman and a newspaper photographer, who had walked down from the highway to get closer shots of the action behind the restaurant. The brothers guided the big dog away and moved farther into the field. Suddenly they froze; night had turned to day. The sight of the dog master searching the field, protected by an officer carrying a shotgun, was too much for veteran CBC cameraman Frank King to resist. King flipped on the bright light on top of his camera, illuminated the field, and began recording; the photographer, Ray Fahey of the
Cape Breton Post,
was busy taking his own shots. Within seconds, the Trickett brothers recovered from their shock and ordered King away from the crime scene—but it made for a powerful image. Within hours, the tape was picked up by CNN and broadcast around the world as reports of the multiple murder at the Sydney River McDonald's filtered out. In Newfoundland, the mother of John and Dave Trickett was among the thousands in Atlantic Canada riveted by reports of the hideous crime. She was left speechless when she turned on the television, only to see her sons wearing bulletproof vests and searching the woods in the darkness.

By the time the camera had captured the search behind the restaurant, Kevin Cleary was already being distracted by the media. His early transmissions on open radio to Stan Jesty, which made it clear there were several victims, were monitored in the local newsrooms in Sydney. Initial reports filled by a radio reporter had been fed to the international wire services, and a sergeant arriving on the scene informed Cleary that the detachment had already received calls from news organizations as far away as California. Reports of an unknown number of people gunned down inside a McDonald's restaurant made for the kind of news that travels fast. Cleary had more pressing things to do and could not afford the time to deal with reporters, but he knew that in a few hours, Cape Breton residents would awaken wanting to know what had happened to their community overnight. A controlled flow of information could prevent panic and might even help the investigation. He called media liaison officer Dave Roper.

Constable Roper was asleep at home when his phone rang at about 3:00 a.m. His crime-prevention and media-information duties meant that calls in the middle of the night were no longer supposed to be a part of his routine, so he and his wife were startled by the ringing. When he hung up, Roper was more than a little confused; he pulled himself out of bed and told his wife there had been a shooting at McDonald's, with several people involved, and he was needed at the scene. Roper dressed quickly and got in his car. As he drove towards Sydney River, Dave Roper began to wonder whether this was some kind of prank; or worse, whether someone was trying to get him out of the house in the middle of the night for some nefarious purpose. But his doubts evaporated as he approached Sydney River; the flashing lights up ahead were all he needed to see. It was a Louisbourg police car, guarding a roadblock that had been set up in the area where Highway 4 runs beneath the Sydney bypass and merges with Kings Road, near McDonald's.

When Roper arrived at the scene, Kevin Cleary was assigning duties to the large group of men and women who had been called out to work on the McDonald's case. Roper stood by while Corporal Brian Stoyek was asked to visit the late-night businesses and interview the workers—find out what the people behind those now-locked doors had seen. Other officers were sent to the address Derek Wood had given them, to find the potential witness. Still others secured the building and property, placing yellow plastic ribbons—
POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS
—around the perimeter. Because his forays with Storm were coming up empty, Corporal Trickett was sent back to the detachment for a briefing. His brother would not be so lucky: Dave Trickett was one of the officers who would be informing the families of Donna Warren and Neil Burroughs that their loved ones would not be coming home. Positive identification of the slain McDonald's employees had been provided by a badly shaken Garfield Lewis; it was an experience the restaurant owner would never forget.

Finally Dave Roper had a chance to talk with Cleary. He wanted to walk through the crime scene, but Cleary said no; enough people had already been inside, and so far no real evidence, except the footprints, had been uncovered. Cleary wanted the scene protected from further contamination. Roper was adamant; he knew the Cape Breton rumour mill would run wild, and he would be the one asked to quell the panic it would undoubtedly spawn. He knew he would not be allowed to tell reporters exactly what he saw inside, but he had to be ready to face questions from reporters who'd had calls claiming the killings were ritualistic slayings, or proposing some other wild theory. If he hesitated or did not comment because he did not know, Roper knew full well that reporters would run with a phrase like “RCMP have not ruled out—,” filling in the blank with the latest rumour. If he saw what was inside, he would be able to respond without telling reporters too much about what had happened. He finally convinced Cleary and was taken inside the restaurant.

For the few reporters who'd been called out that night—myself included—the rumour mill was already providing more information than we could ever responsibly use, but there was also relatively reliable information coming out. A curious motorist, who had stopped on the Sydney bypass when he saw police lights down at McDonald's, walked down to the building and almost entered the rear door before he was noticed by an officer and sent away. The motorist described the scene for me but did not want to appear on camera. Instead, cameraman Bruce Hennessey recorded the interview without lights—all that viewers would see was a silhouetted image of the motorist as he talked about seeing blood all over the restaurant, and at least one body. In fact, what the “eyewitness” had seen was a small patch of blood in the doorway where Jimmy Fagan had fallen. The stain seemed much larger because a taxi driver had slipped in the blood while running to help an ambulance attendant, causing the blood to spatter on the wall. Still, his description was more accurate than he knew: just out of his sight, inside the kitchen, many litres of blood had been spilled on the floor.