Rage

I’m at the fortress-like Toronto Police Central Station at Bay and College when Detective Sergeant Terry Wark greets me and takes me upstairs. He was the lead investigator on the Johnathon Madden murder case, and looks every bit the part. Except for the modern-cut suit, Wark looks like he just walked out of a Clint Eastwood movie from the 1970s. He’s a homicide cop from central casting with an inscrutable face seemingly made of granite.

Upstairs, he introduces me to Detective Sergeant Glenn Gray, another big player in this drama. Gray has a much more jovial look about him, but still doesn’t look like someone you’d want to piss off. I’m a pretty big guy, but Wark towers over me. Gray is taller than him.

Wark apologizes that the Toronto homicide headquarters doesn’t look like they do on TV. I point out that I was thinking exactly the opposite.

They take me to a nicely appointed conference room and make a little small talk. Gray jokes about how often his name is misspelled in the media and recalls some of the worst ones, including the time he was called “Gray Glenn” by a local paper. I ask them a few questions about the case and I can tell that they are relieved that I know what I’m talking about.

Wark brings up a point about the tape. The tape is a key element in the case. A group of girls secretly tape-recorded some boys telling them they were going to murder a family. When they called the police, it set the wheels in motion for the eventual arrest of the boys. Not surprisingly, it was a valuable piece of evidence that both prosecution and defense tried to use for themselves. I admitted that I had not heard the tape, but had only read transcripts.

Wark then played it. Much has been written about how chilling the tape is to hear, and it truly is. The boys casually talk about murder as though it is no big deal. And the girl, taping them without their knowledge, appears to egg them on. One boy boasts about the plan, as though murder is something he does for fun. Another talks about it ambitiously, as though it will be his one great achievement and the solution to all his problems. The third treats it as a mere matter of fact, an annoyance he simply has to put up with.

So I have to thank Wark and Gray, not just for letting me hear the tape, but for giving me hours of their time and speaking frankly and accurately about every element of the case and trials. They set me straight on more than a few things I thought I knew, and I’m always grateful for that.

And if there’s anyone who should be thanked for the existence of this book, it’s Joseph Brean. It was Brean who uncovered the mountains of online evidence the police and lawyers missed. It was he who risked a contempt of court charge and potential humiliation by writing about it. And it was he who caused the first trial to end in a mistrial, forcing a second one with a more accurate picture, not just of the evidence, but of the people involved. When I approached him to help me with this book, he went well beyond the bounds of professional courtesy and provided me with an extensive amount of data and background. Very few true-crime books have heroes in them; but you’re it for this one, Joe. It’s not often a journalist can change the course of history just by reporting the facts, but he did. And on his first murder trial, too.

I also have to thank all the other police officers, emergency workers and journalists—particularly Peter Small—who helped out. And my thanks also go to the parents, friends, neighbors and other people who selflessly gave their time to help give me a clearer look at this complicated drama.

And of course, I must thank Joanne Champagnie, Johnathon’s mother, for her cooperation.

As usual, I thank the team at Wiley Canada for backing this book. And Leta Potter, just because she doesn’t want to be mentioned.

And this book, like most things I do, never would have happened if not for the help, patience and encouragement provided by my wife and two sons.

It all began innocently enough. Two young high schoolers—a 14-year-old girl and a boy who’d just turned 15—were on a first date at Toronto’s Kew Beach in the autumn of 2003. They walked along the boardwalk, talking in the moonlight and listening to the lapping of the waves. It was the most romantic thing Tim Ferriman could think of on his very limited budget.

And it was also something of a re-creation of their first meeting. A week or so earlier, the two of them first saw each other when two groups of kids met up on the same boardwalk.

The two groups went to different high schools and came from somewhat different worlds. But they mixed and mingled, talking about this and that and laughing frequently.

Tim was shy, even among the kids from his own school. But something about him somehow caught the attention of the most attractive girl there. They started talking and, much to his surprise, she agreed to go out with him.

The date ended on one of those huge concrete blocks that jut out into Lake Ontario, that give visitors a chance to watch the waves and maybe throw a few stones into the water. They talked and talked until it got dark. At the end of the date, he got what he was after—she promised to see him again.

They made a strange pair. Ashley (not her real name) was pretty, verging on beautiful. Tim could tell a couple of things about her from what she wore: She had money and she was into a few things many of the other kids weren’t. Ashley was not decked out in full Goth regalia, but there were subtle clues—her makeup, her jewelry—that indicated an interest in the occult. Tall and physically advanced for her age, she was often mistaken for a much older girl. She had thick dark hair, almond-shaped eyes and a long, almost regal, nose. In addition to her physical traits, Ashley was smart, personable and had a healthy sense of humor. A talented drama student at the prestigious Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, she was also an accomplished amateur photographer. She lived in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city, was well traveled and was surrounded by a well-to-do family dedicated to her cultural enrichment and her protection.

But because she was so very attractive at such a young age, she spent much of her time fending off the advances of prospective suitors. Her parents would not allow her to date at such a young age, but she decided it was time and defied them. She’d actually been dating regularly for about a year, switching from boy to boy without feeling much attachment to any of them.

Her choice of Tim was surprising, almost perplexing. He was not a particularly good-looking boy. He had the kind of face you could see a million times a day and never look twice at. He had small eyes, thin lips and a round, almost childish face. But he wasn’t cute like a child, just plain. One girl I spoke with who remembered him from high school wondered aloud what Ashley saw in him, saying rather coldly: “No face, no body, no reason.” Ashley’s friends unanimously derided him as a loser.

Nor did Ashley (by her own admission) find him particularly intelligent, witty, well spoken or charismatic. He tended to wear the same clothes—almost always black—all the time and had few, if any, real friends. He lived above a second-rate sandwich shop with his dad in a run-down area of town. His mom had left when he was two years old after she decided that she’d rather feed her drug habit than her child. His dad’s only source of income was a series of monthly disability checks from the government, and Tim had no identifiable income at all.

Part of what may have attracted her were the visual cues he displayed that indicated he wasn’t just another jock, stoner or boy next door. Like Ashley, Tim didn’t dress up in what has become the instantly identifiable Goth uniform. He was, instead, more subtle—although probably without realizing it. Tim showed his interest in things Goth with his jacket, his choice of T-shirts and his modest jewelry.

Tim was headed for a life on a downhill treadmill at a tough middle school until a guidance counselor intervened on his behalf and suggested he apply to one of the city’s better high schools.

Although neither his marks nor his personality indicated that he deserved a better school, he was accepted by one and given an opportunity to escape the trajectory he’d been on.

But while he was accepted
by
the school, he wasn’t entirely accepted
at
the school. A chronic truant with poor marks, frequently in trouble, Tim was also very unpopular at his new school. Most of his classmates I spoke with considered him something of a weirdo. None of his peers could name a single close friend of his at his new school.

Without an established social circle, Tim relied heavily on his old friends from middle school. But that all changed when he started seeing Ashley. She became his whole world. He saw nobody else, he spoke with nobody else and he thought about nobody else.

She wasn’t as sold on their relationship as he was. They saw each other after school and in the evenings and kept in touch via e-mail and MSN Messenger—a popular real-time chatting application—every night for about a week or so. But while she was his only MSN contact, she had many. In fact, she maintained her enviable standing in all of her existing social circles. That included speaking with and flirting with other boys (which, of course, enraged Tim) and she spent a lot of time at home socializing through e-mail and on a number of different social networking websites. Tim—more cunning than intelligent—could sense that he was losing what little grip he had on her.

He was right. On one of their walk-around-the-neighborhood dates, she tried to gently break it off with him. She wasn’t successful. After she broke the news to him, he panicked. He began crying and screaming about how much he loved her. Then he started breaking things—street signs, lawn ornaments—and smashing his fist into a wall. Unsure of what to do, she partially retracted her comments. She didn’t exactly give him a vote of confidence, but she did somewhat ambiguously take back the dumping.

Although Tim did his best to deny the fact Ashley wasn’t actually interested in him anymore, he knew she was on the verge of actually leaving him, so he decided to bring out what he thought was his only trump card. While their backgrounds were disparate, they had a few things in common—one thing in particular. Both of them had an interest in what he called “the dark side.” Tim and Ashley talked for hours, fascinating each other with intense discussions about death-metal and Goth music, horror movies and the occult. Sensing that this was his quickest way back to her heart, he tried to appeal to her own dark side—something he later maintained had worked for him with girls in the past.

As their relationship waned, he convinced her to cut class one afternoon and took her to a coffee shop not far from her school. That’s when he broke his big news to her—he told her he was a vampire. He could tell she was interested, but not really all that impressed. He told her that he liked to cut himself and drink his own blood. When she still didn’t react enough, he added “before sex.”

When that didn’t get the reaction he wanted either, he looked around to see if anyone else was listening and began to tell her that he also drank other people’s blood. He told her that he hid in the trees of the Don Valley—a ravine near where they both lived—ambushed unsuspecting joggers, killed them and drank their blood. It was a desperate ploy, and she seemed to recognize it as such.

A few days later, on Friday, November 21, 2003, Ashley called Tim at home to tell him it was over. Again, she tried to break it to him easy, to spare his feelings. She knew he was really into her and correctly surmised he was a very fragile person. But she knew she had to end their relationship to get on with her own life. She didn’t want to be saddled with this guy any longer. He was just too immature and way too needy for her.

When Ashley dropped the bomb, he totally freaked out. Tim made a loud, strange noise, then burst into tears. Weeping, he told her that he loved her; he loved her more than anything. “How can you do this?” he asked. He was screaming and babbling, which made her even more sure her decision was an astute one. He said a lot of things, much of which she didn’t understand because he was so frantic. So in an effort to calm him down, she let slip: “Forget it, never mind.”

Tim was deluded enough to interpret the brush-off as a reprieve, so he called her again on Monday morning. After a great deal of pleading, she said she would allow him to visit her at her home the next day. She said she wasn’t feeling well and was planning on calling in to school sick in the morning. But when he got in touch with her via MSN Messenger that morning, she told him he couldn’t come over because her family had workmen in, renovating the house and she would get in trouble if her parents found out he had come around.

Distraught, Tim cut class anyway. He did little but feel sorry for himself until noon, when he decided to call an old friend from his old school.

Betrayed and humiliated by the gorgeous girl at the rich kids’ school, Tim turned to her exact opposite. Widely regarded as the most bad-ass kid at Tim’s old middle school, Kevin Madden was the antithesis of all things Rosedale Heights.

At a little more than six feet tall and about 250 pounds, 16-year-old Kevin dwarfed almost all of his classmates and teachers. While Tim was astoundingly plain, Kevin was just plain ugly. He had tiny, darting eyes sunk deep in his fleshy face with no discernible eyelids. His chin was severely undersized, making it look like his flabby neck ended at his lower lip. He had a thick, rubbery mouth and the kind of slow-working tongue that would make him sound stupid even if he wasn’t.

Severe discipline problems had led him to attend 10 different schools despite never having moved. Whenever he got into major trouble, he was usually punished by being kicked out of school. Since it’s against the law for someone his age not to attend school, he was always accepted by another, often less impressive school.

A classmate at the last of Kevin’s schools, admittedly frightened of him, said to me that Kevin told him he wound up in that school because he had beaten up the principal at his last school. While that claim is almost certainly not true, it was widely believed and helped establish Kevin’s reputation as a hardcore tough guy at his new school. And his size and quick temper gave him instant credibility.

Kevin was delighted to hear from his old friend. He told Tim that he and Pierre (not his real name) were cutting class and were “partying” at his house. Tim knew Kevin wasn’t allowed to have guests over at his house, but he also knew both of Kevin’s parents worked during the day, so he thought nothing of it. Tim accepted the invitation and hopped on the subway. He took up two seats.

Before long, Tim arrived at Kevin’s house at 90 Dawes Road in Toronto’s east end. Like much of the city, spiraling housing prices had led to a slow but steady gentrification of the area, but there were still pockets where the original working-class population was intact. Among the teenagers I talked to at the schools Tim, Kevin and Ashley went to, it had a reputation as a tough, racially mixed neighborhood.

Kevin shared the small, gray semidetached house with his 12-year-old brother Johnathon, his mother Joanne, his stepfather Ralston Champagnie and another family member who can’t be identified. It was a tight fit and tempers sometimes flared in this blended family.

Particularly, Kevin didn’t always get along well with Ralston. “They had all the typical father-son problems—you know, he was a teenager,” a neighbor who knew the family well told me. “It was worse because Ralston was a stepfather, [and] he tried to move in and put in all this hard discipline, and Kevin didn’t react well to that at all.”

Kevin and Johnathon’s biological father had split up with their mother on a memorable Christmas Eve about a decade earlier, and Ralston had moved in about four years after that. “And I don’t even know how well the two of them [Ralston and Joanne] got along—they didn’t always seem to,” the neighbor said. “I got the sense Kevin didn’t like the way he treated her . . . those boys were very protective of their mother.”

She wasn’t the only one I spoke with who questioned Ralston’s ability to keep his anger in check. A former co-worker of his warned me “not to mess around with him,” but declined to elaborate further. Despite his stepfather’s intimidating presence, Kevin had decided to defy him that day and cut class.

When Tim arrived at 90 Dawes sometime around 12:20, he found Kevin and Pierre upstairs in the dark cell of a bedroom that Kevin shared with Johnathon at the front of the house. They were smoking and playing a video game. Pierre noticed that they had taken the mattress off one of the beds and propped it up to block the room’s only window. Kevin explained that he blocked the window when he didn’t want his stepdad to see what he was doing. Ralston would occasionally drive past the house, Kevin said, to look through the front window and spy on him. They had also taken a television from another family member’s room and put it beside the one that was already there so they could play two games at once.

Tim had run into Pierre a few times before, but they weren’t exactly buddies. Pierre went to Rosedale Heights with Ashley, though they weren’t friends. They knew each other by sight and by name—pretty well everybody in the school knew who Ashley was—but they didn’t have much in common. Instead, Tim knew Pierre through Kevin. Pierre and Kevin had grown up in the same neighborhood and, although they had taken different academic paths, they remained pretty close. More than a few observers have characterized their relationship as one that featured Kevin as a fearsome and impulsive leader and Pierre as his submissive, admiring follower.

The boys had grown tired of the video game—
Deathtrap Dungeon
, a
Dungeons & Dragons
knockoff that one reviewer called a “typical hack and slash” game—and had moved downstairs to watch the big TV in the living room. Somehow, Kevin had gotten his hands on a hardcore porn DVD. He played
Eat My Pussy
, an oral sex-themed compilation film four hours long, but the boys soon lost interest.