Murder at McDonald's (3 page)

Donna Warren's Memorial High School graduation photograph shows the purposeful gaze of the lawyer Donna dreamed of becoming. [Print from ATV video tape.]

Downstairs, in the restaurant's basement, Arlene MacNeil was looking for something to do. The attractive twenty-year-old had already punched out on the time clock and changed out of her uniform, but she wouldn't be leaving until Donna was ready. Arlene's last task had been to conduct a stock inventory of the food supplies used on the evening shift and to co-sign the balance sheet for Donna. The inventory had taken less time than usual, because Derek Wood had stayed behind to help her. Wood, a slight young man with dirty-blond hair—still a teenager, really, from the looks of him—was the new cash-counter worker. Arlene hadn't worked with him very often, but she was favourably impressed—it was nice of him to stay after his shift and help her. Even when she was finished, he didn't seem to be in a hurry to leave, Arlene noticed. He had been out in the main restaurant smoking with one of the other cash workers earlier, when she went downstairs. Employees were not allowed to do that, but Donna was a pretty easy manager to work for, and as long as they cleaned the ashtray, she wouldn't complain. Arlene figured the two of them were waiting for a lift.

Well, if the new guy could put in some extra time helping her, she'd return the favour by doing some work for the morning crew. There was going to be a child's birthday party in the restaurant the following morning, so Arlene decided to help get a few things ready while she waited for Donna. As she sorted out the party favours, a gentle smile illuminated her fine-boned face, framed by long, dark curls.

In downtown Sydney, meanwhile, Daniel MacVicar sat behind the wheel of his City Wide taxi. He'd been driving a cab in Sydney for three years now, and liked the freedom the job offered. The tall, thin cabby looked a bit like a teenager whose body had grown too fast and whose co-ordination had not quite made the adjustment. Things were different behind the wheel of a cab, though. His height wasn't an issue, and fares rarely expected much more from him than a quick ride and occasional advice on where to enjoy an evening out.

MacVicar was waiting to hear the 1:00 a.m. news on the car radio as he parked outside the spot he usually recommended to visitors—Smooth Herman's Cabaret. The cabaret licence allowed Smooth Herman's to remain open until three in the morning, making it Sydney's late-night hot spot of choice. In two hours the big spenders would pour out, looking for a drive home; until then MacVicar and the other drivers parked nearby would wait for a radio call or for someone to decide to go home before last call. Maybe he'd get an out-of-town fare and make a few extra bucks on an otherwise slow night. MacVicar was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and thinking about going for a coffee when the rear door of the cab opened and someone jumped in.

“Hi. Can you take me out to McDonald's in Sydney River?”

“Yeah, sure.” MacVicar recognized the fare as a McDonald's employee he'd picked up once or twice before.

“Sure is cold out there,” Jimmy Fagan offered.

“Typical Cape Breton spring. I hear it's going to warm up by August, though,” MacVicar said, pulling the car out of the parking lot for the short drive to Sydney River. There wasn't much traffic early on a Thursday morning, and the car made good time. As they drove, the two men chatted about sports. Jimmy liked to talk about hockey—not that he followed the game as fanatically as many people did, but he knew enough to get others talking on the subject, and that was fine by him.

Back at McDonald's, Donna Warren was finishing the receipts and preparing the morning cash drawers. She put everything in the safe and locked it. As she stepped out of the office, she looked around the kitchen for Arlene. Walking around the large propane grills, she found Neil working near the sinks.

“Neil, did you see where Arlene went?”

“She went downstairs after she punched out, and I didn't see her come up since.”

Donna Warren's friend and co-worker at McDonald's, Arlene MacNeil, also graduated from Memorial High School in Sydney Mines. [Print from ATV video tape.]

“Thanks. Oh, look—you missed a spot.” Neil turned to look at the sink he was cleaning before he realized Donna was only kidding. She laughed and punched her own code on the time clock before going downstairs to find her friend.

Arlene was counting long, colourful wooden sticks that would later have Ronald McDonald balloons tied to the tops. The balloons weren't inflated yet, but Arlene was getting enough sticks out for the kids who would attend the party in a few hours. She looked up as Donna walked into the room.

“All done?” she asked.

“Yeah, what are you doing?”

“Just getting a few things ready for the party tomorrow.”

“Well, now, aren't you the dedicated employee.” Donna glanced at her watch. “The morning crew can handle that. Let's get going.”

“O.K. Let me put these sticks out in the crew room so everyone will remember to get them ready before the kids come.”

The two friends were in a small office at the rear of the basement, behind the larger room used by the owner, Garfield Lewis. Along the wide hallway outside was a row of green filing cabinets, and a washer and dryer, for employees who did not like to take their uniforms home for cleaning. It was difficult to talk in the area because of the mechanical hum from the huge compressor used to mix syrup and water and pump it to the pop fountain in the restaurant above. Cardboard boxes containing heavy bags of syrup were spread out in front of the machine, plastic hoses reaching from each box to carry the coloured fluids into the mixing unit. The whole setup looked like some weird organism from a cheap sci-fi movie. Towards the front of the basement were the crew locker and change rooms, washrooms, a break room, and a large storage area. Beside the storage room was an office used by Lewis's wife, Shirley, who ran her own business from the restaurant; and at the very front of the building was a large room where new employees were welcomed into the McDonald's “family” and received their initial training. Lewis, who owned two other McDonald's restaurants in the Sydney area, liked to consider his employees part of an extended family. About forty full- and part-time workers depended on the Sydney River restaurant for employment; many had been with the company for years, some for more than a decade. Their loyalty was more a comment on the economic conditions in Cape Breton than a testament to what a wonderful place McDonald's was to work.

“In May 1992, unemployment levels on Cape Breton Island were in the midst of a steady climb that would see them approach 30 per cent. The island, once a prosperous industrial centre, had long before begun a steady decline that would see it become one of Canada's most-depressed economic regions. Don Cameron, premier of Nova Scotia in 1992, referred to the island as “a have-not region in a have-not province.” The slide into joblessness and economic uncertainty had not been a quiet evolution. Successive federal and provincial governments had championed economic renewal initiatives aimed at leading Cape Breton away from its historic dependence on failed or failing resource-based industries. None of the programs had succeeded in doing much more than create a minor bump in the steady downward slide. For many Cape Bretoners, life had become a never-ending cycle of short-term work ending in unemployment insurance coverage. Just when their unemployment premiums came close to being exhausted, yet another program would surface, offering yet another temporary job. For many caught in the cycle, planning for the future was as futile as trying to predict it.

An unfortunate side effect of all the political grandstanding on the latest quick fix to the island's economic woes was a general acceptance that the government was responsible for turning things around—not an attitude conducive to the entrepreneurial spirit that local business leaders upheld as the real solution to the economic free-fall. Cape Breton business owners had watched in frustration as millions of tax dollars were thrown at imported solutions. Investors with grand schemes for employing hundreds of Cape Bretoners were given grants, loans, and incentives to build factories on the island, only to leave as soon as the government largesse dried up. The people of North Sydney still have bitter memories of the Ontario-based promoter who introduced Cape Breton Chemicals to their community. Hundreds attended a meeting announcing the creation of the plant, listened to promises of hundreds of jobs, and eagerly awaited the opening of the new factory. But government aid was not enough to keep the plastic food-wrap business going; not long after it opened, Cape Breton Chemicals joined the list of failed ventures. Industrial Cape Breton was hard hit by all these plant closings; there were enough oversized vacant buildings in and around the area to make a Hollywood producer in search of sound-stage space jump for joy.

Industrial Cape Breton is a group of small municipalities scattered along the shores of Sydney harbour; Sydney, the only city, is on the south side of the harbour, at its inner limits. On the opposite shore, the towns of North Sydney and Sydney Mines mark the harbour entrance. Many of the buildings left abandoned in the economic fallout are located in an industrial park between these two small communities. On the south side of the harbour entrance stands the mining town of New Waterford, and two smaller, more-rural communities—New Victoria and South Bar—extend along the harbour between New Waterford and Sydney. Out beyond New Waterford, around the coast to the south, lies the mining town of Glace Bay, and farther down the side of Cape Breton is the historic town of Louisbourg, with its famous reconstructed eighteenth-century fortress.

Towards the end of the 1980s, governments began to pay lip service at least to claims from Cape Breton–based investors that
their
ideas and businesses should be the basis for economic renewal. It did, after all, make more sense to bet on an investor who lived in the community and planned to stay there, than one who was parachuted in from southern Ontario, where he would quickly return when things went wrong. The problem was, politicians liked announcing multimillion-dollar initiatives that would employ hundreds; the media wouldn't listen to a government announcement of assistance to a company already operating—especially if the company only planned to hire two or three more people. Supporting small business might improve the economy in the long term, but it didn't generate votes. One of the local investors who did make it in Industrial Cape Breton is Lou Whalen of Glace Bay; he received government support for his plan to make pre-formed cultured-marble bathroom fixtures and counter-tops. His company, Marble-Waye, remains a successful business; it doesn't employ the hundreds of people promised jobs by some of the Ontario investors, but the jobs it created are still there.

The painful and often failed efforts to revive the island's slowly dying economy did have some positive effects on the people living there: the adversity drew them even more closely together. In Cape Breton the people and communities are closely knit, and Cape Bretoners have never been too busy to lend a helping hand when it is needed. There was also a renewed strength and pride born from continued hardship. Cape Bretoners have always been fiercely proud people, first because of the tough times they faced, working in coal mines or eking out a living from the sea, and later because of the struggle to find alternatives as the old jobs disappeared. For a whole generation growing up in Cape Breton, the future meant leaving home for more-prosperous regions, while those who did not want to leave took what jobs they could get. In a difficult economic environment, a fast-food chain offered a steady, reliable income—not a lot of money, but better than jumping from one government grant to another in the hope that a permanent job would materialize before you ran out of luck and unemployment insurance.

The employees working overnight at McDonald's in Sydney River had a variety of reasons for being there. For Arlene MacNeil, McDonald's was a place to earn enough money to go to university, where she hoped to get a degree, maybe in business administration. Donna Warren's job would eventually pay the tuition for law school in Halifax. Jimmy Fagan felt the restaurant was his best chance to keep working year-round in an area where many people couldn't even secure seasonal work. As for Neil Burroughs, he was probably going to be at the restaurant the longest. The twenty-nine-year-old relied on McDonald's to help support his wife and child. The pay at McDonald's didn't provide many luxuries for Neil, his wife, Julia, and their son, Justin; but his pay, combined with Julia's income from a hairdressing job, kept the family going. And they were living where they wanted to—at home, close to their parents, siblings, and friends.

Derek Wood, the new McDonald's employee, had also been raised in the economic disparity of Cape Breton, but he did not have the same kinds of long-term plans or goals. Wood spent the early years of his childhood in the Whitney Pier area of Sydney. His parents' marriage broke up, and his mother later moved to British Columbia, but Wood led a pretty normal childhood nevertheless. Derek's dad worked in the meat department at the Sobeys supermarket in the Cape Breton Shopping Plaza, across Kings Road and down the hill from the Sydney River McDonald's, while Derek—like dozens of other kids—went to school and developed keen interests in computers, video games, and the latest in pop music.