Journey into Darkness (10 page)

In my mind, there’s a double tragedy to Alison’s death. Not only was this young life so full of love and promise brutally snuffed out and her killer unpunished, but it was a death that could have been avoided. Had Alison’s parents or some other authority figure accompanied her to her meeting with the self-proclaimed photographer, I don’t believe anything would have happened. He probably would have taken his pictures, which he would have used not to sell to a magazine but to fantasize over on his own, and then would have been on his way. It’s upsetting to think about this degenerate masturbating over pictures of children and happily musing about how close he was able to get to them, but this young girl would be none the wiser and still alive. I believe he was frankly shocked when she showed up alone and therefore felt she was independent and grown-up and that he could go further than ever before.

As parents, we may not always be able to prevent all of the horrible things that I’ve seen happen to kids. But we can prevent some of them if we just try to understand the nature of the threat and the range of personality types and motivations of the threateners. It’s critical that we try. I hate to say that we have to be less trusting of people, I hate to have to give my own kids that message, but we do have to accept the realities of our time. We don’t have to become crazy with fear that there’s a monster lurking behind every tree because there isn’t. The number of child abductions is statistically low and most of them are carried out by noncustodial parents. We don’t have to become crazy, but we do have to become cautious and observant.

About forty miles away from the site where Alison Parrott’s body was found, a different personality type—a true monster—was responsible for the death of Kristen French and, as it turned out, at least two others.

By all accounts, Kristen Dawn French, of St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls and the border with New York, was an exceptional young lady. Beautiful, with long, shiny black hair, she was adored by her family, friends, and teachers at Holy Cross Secondary School where she was an honors
student. She’d been skating since she was a little girl and now, in addition to everything else, was an accomplished precision skater. Friends say she was always smiling, always able to help them over their own problems, a genuinely happy person in love with her first boyfriend.

Shortly before 3:00
P.M.
, on a rainy Thursday, April 16, 1992, the day before Good Friday, less than a month before her sixteenth birthday, Kristie French disappeared on her way home from school. Doug and Donna French knew their daughter well enough to know she was always on time or else would call with a legitimate explanation why she wasn’t. They even briefly entertained the possibility that she might have been kept after school as punishment, but this would have been so out of character for Kristie that they dismissed it. When she wasn’t home by 5:30, Donna called the Niagara Regional Police and reported Kristie missing.

At least there was something to go on. Five separate witnesses reported seeing something related to Kristen’s disappearance. A schoolmate noticed her walking from school in her uniform of green plaid skirt, tights, V-neck sweater with a white shirt, and oxblood-colored Bass loafers as he approached the corner of Linwell Road in his van around 2:50. Another reported seeing a cream-colored Chevy Camaro with rust on the back and primer paint on the side pull over in front of Grace Lutheran Church about two minutes later. Three minutes after that, two men in the car were speaking with Kristen. The car window was down and the driver appeared to be around twenty-four to thirty years of age, with brown hair. A third witness, on her way to pick up her daughter downtown, thought she saw a girl struggling with a passenger in the car, who was trying to shove her into the maroon-colored back seat, but figured it was probably a boy and girl fooling around or having a minor argument. The fourth and fifth witnesses were drivers who nearly collided with the speeding Camaro just after it pulled out of the church parking lot around 3:00. Others believed they had seen a similar car in the area around Holy Cross and next door to Lakeport High School in the days preceding the abduction. This led police to speculate that Kristen or other students might have been stalked and that the abduction was planned rather than spontaneous.

As the investigation intensified, police psychologists used hypnosis to help potential witnesses evoke memories of that afternoon. More than one described having seen an elderly couple walking by the church as the abduction was in progress and pointing in shock at the car and Kristen. If these people did, in fact, exist, they never came forward.

All of this information is important. However, too many times I’ve seen information considered that really has nothing to do with the case. If it is irrelevant or out-and-out wrong, it can derail an investigation. Therefore, I always recommend concentrating on the overall crime analysis rather than on any one possible clue.

In the parking lot, crime scene technicians identified tire tracks and found a worn, folded map of Canada and a small lock of hair that appeared to be Kristen’s. On Good Friday, as Kristen’s close friend and fellow skater Michelle Tousignant drove with her mother along Unwell Road as part of a general community search, she noticed an oxblood right loafer like Kristen had worn. She picked it up and brought it to two Niagara detectives who were conducting a houseto-house canvass along the route Kristen ordinarily took home from school. Donna French identified the shoe, which had an arch support inside, as belonging to her daughter.

A massive search and investigation were undertaken. The students at Holy Cross kept a hopeful but agonized vigil for their friend. They tied green ribbons around trees and poles as symbols of hope and remembrance. And Doug French appealed publicly for the safe return of his beloved daughter as his wife went through unremitting torment at the thought of what Kristie must be going through. Nearly every night she was tortured by dreams of Kristie crying out, but no matter what she did, she was never able to find her.

There was another terrifying prospect associated with Kristen French’s disappearance and that was the possibility of a serial killer operating in this relatively peaceful and secure area of Canada. The previous June 14, at 7:00
P.M.
, Leslie Erin Mahaffy—like Kristen French, a month shy of her sixteenth birthday—left her home in Burlington, just across the western rim of Lake Ontario from St. Catharines. The area is known as the Golden Horseshoe.

The pretty ninth-grader at Burlington High School was
going to the Smith Funeral Home for the wake of Chris Evans, a school friend who had died in an automobile accident with three other teens. Leslie promised her mother, Debbie, a teacher in nearby Halton, that she’d be home by her 11:00
P.M.
curfew.

The curfews were indicative of some of the problems and conflicts that had come up between mother and daughter. Leslie had always been a bright, spunky, independent girl, but as she had approached her fifteenth birthday, the traditional teenage emotionalism and rebelliousness seemed to well up within her. She took to staying out well beyond her parents’ curfews, sometimes all night. She was once caught shoplifting. The problem may have been compounded by the fact that her father, Robert, known as Dan, often had to be away from home on his job as a government oceanographer.

That night after the wake, Leslie and several friends convened in a clearing in the woods popular with local teens to have a few beers and console each other on their loss. By the time Leslie walked back to her house, accompanied by a male friend who wanted to see her home safely, it was almost 2:00
A.M.
and the house was dark. She told him her parents would just yell at her when they saw her, so he might as well leave before she went in. He said good night and that he’d be back for her in the morning to take her to the funeral.

But when Leslie tried all the doors, she found them locked. Her mother had decided to teach her a lesson this time by locking her out of the house. She would have to ring the doorbell and wake up her mom. She wouldn’t be able to postpone the confrontation and resulting discipline.

Instead, Leslie walked over to Upper Middle Road and called her friend Amanda Carpino to see if she could stay there overnight. But Amanda was afraid to ask her mother, Jacqueline, knowing the trouble Leslie had been in with her own mom before and Mrs. Mahaffy’s complaints to Mrs. Carpino. Coincidentally, Amanda’s younger sister was sleeping over at another girlfriend’s house but called home to say she was sick. Around 2:30, Jacqueline Carpino got dressed and went out to get her. Knowing of the phone call to
Amanda, she drove down Upper Middle Road to see if she could spot Leslie and take her home.

By this time, however, Leslie had apparently gone home, resigned to facing the music with her own mother.

But she never went inside, and when Debbie Mahaffy woke up that morning, Leslie wasn’t there. She’d done this kind of thing before, crashing at friends’ houses, so Debbie wasn’t overly concerned until Leslie didn’t turn up at Chris Evans’s funeral. That was totally out of keeping. Leslie would have made sure to be there. At 4:30 and panic-stricken, Debbie Mahaffy called the Halton police and reported her daughter missing. In the next several days, Leslie’s family and friends put up more than five hundred missing person posters throughout Burlington and the Halton area, hoping for any lead or word on her.

On June 29, 1991, two weeks to the day after she was reported missing, Leslie’s dismembered body was discovered encased in several blocks of concrete in the shallow waters of nearby Lake Gibson. Autopsy reports indicated a brutal sexual attack.

Every parent I’ve ever encountered whose child has become the victim of a violent crime goes through a harrowing and punishing personal inquisition, agonizing over whether he or she could have done anything to prevent what happened. Debbie Mahaffy was no exception. As soon as Leslie disappeared she was plagued by thoughts that if she hadn’t locked her out that night, her daughter would still be with her.

Before Leslie’s parents even had the opportunity to bury their daughter, another local girl, Nina DeVilliers, was discovered murdered. There was no clear-cut connection but two violent deaths of young girls in the same area seemed like more than coincidence. The previous November, Terri Anderson, another fifteen-year-old who was a good student and cheerleader at Lakeport High School, next to Holy Cross, had disappeared around 2:00
A.M.
from her home on Linwell Road after returning from a party where she reportedly took LSD for the first time.

These, then, were the fears as days dragged on into weeks and Kristen French had still not been heard from. Police put out an all-points bulletin for the cream-colored Camaro.
Before the investigation had taken its course, billboards throughout Ottawa would picture the type of car police were looking for together with a toll-free number to call and as each cream-colored Camaro or similar-looking car was noticed, an officer would question the driver and place a sticker on the windshield to register it.

But on the morning of Thursday, April 30, 1992, two weeks to the day since Kristen disappeared, a forty-nineyear-old scrap metal dealer named Roger Boyer was horrified to come upon a naked body amidst the underbrush by the side of a road while foraging for abandoned farm equipment to salvage. The corpse was folded into the fetal position, as if asleep. The black hair was cut short like a boy’s, but from what he could see of the shape of the body and the small size of the hands and feet, Boyer thought it was probably a woman or girl.

As it happened, the site was only separated by a narrow greenbelt from Halton Hills Memorial Gardens in Burlington, the cemetery where Leslie Mahaffy was buried.

Police responded immediately to Boyer’s call and cordoned off the area. It wasn’t long, however, until the media got wind of the discovery. Speculation as to its significance was rampant and pointed. It was left to Halton Detective Leonard Shaw to confirm everyone’s worst fears. As the result of a childhood accident, Kristen was missing the tip of the little finger of her left hand. As soon as Shaw lifted the corpse’s left hand, he saw an identical disfigurement.

The medical examiner’s report compounded the horror. The cause of death was ligature asphyxiation. Like Leslie Mahaffy, she had been beaten and sexually attacked. And the well-preserved state of the body suggested that Kristen had been alive until a few days ago, maybe even less than twenty-four hours ago, held captive for at least a week and a half by whoever did this to her.

More than four thousand mourners showed up for Kristen’s funeral on May 4 at St. Alfred’s Church in St. Catharines. So great was the outpouring of public sympathy that the massive church was filled to overflowing. More than a thousand people had to listen to the service from outside. She was buried in the family plot in Pleasantview Cemetery alongside her grandparents. It soon became clear that
virtually everyone associated with Kristen’s case, from the detectives to the crime scene technicians to the medical examiners, was affected by it in ways these seasoned professionals had seldom been before.

Fear gripped the entire Golden Horseshoe area. The discovery of Kristen French’s body led directly to the formation of Operation Green Ribbon, which became one of the largest manhunts in the history of Canadian law enforcement. Named for the campaign of hope launched by her classmates, the multiagency task force was under the direction of veteran Niagara Police Inspector Vince Bevan. The cases became known throughout Canada simply as “the Schoolgirl Murders.”

On May 21, Terri Anderson’s body was discovered floating in Port Dalhousie harbor on Lake Ontario. Evidence was inconclusive as to cause of death. Police eventually ruled her death accidental, relating to her drug ingestion.

Speculation linking the Anderson, Mahaffy, DeVilliers, and French deaths was rife in the media, even though the police tried to underplay it. Inspector Bevan was a dedicated and serious-minded investigator with little time or patience for the press. This was indicative of the larger problem with publicity and the public that the task force was facing. The Halton force had a long history of going public with information in the hope that someone might come forward with useful tips. The Niagara department, on the other hand, seldom willingly released anything, which tended to encourage the media to launch their own independent investigations of important cases.