Murder at McDonald's (8 page)

The corporal's search had taken him to the doorway leading away from the kitchen and into the public area of the restaurant. He moved quickly, remaining quiet as he carefully searched the area. With the public area clear, there was only one more place to check. Kevin Cleary had taken his kids to this restaurant many times and knew that the only enclosed areas in the public portion of the building were the two washrooms at the back corner. He moved to the door of the first washroom and swore to himself as he realized that the door opened towards him. Pulling it open, he moved away from the line of fire, quickly stepped inside, and kicked open the door to the stall. It was empty. Cleary hoped the other washroom would be vacant as well; surely if there were anyone inside, they would have heard him kicking open that stall door. And he was right. Secure in the knowledge that the upstairs was clear, the officer rushed back to the entrance to get an ambulance attendant inside. The attendant confirmed the officer's first impression—Neil Burroughs and Donna Warren were beyond help—so the two returned to Jimmy Fagan. The second ambulance had arrived, and Cleary sent that attendant down to the basement to have a look at Arlene MacNeil, still being guarded by Henry Jantzen. The taxi drivers joined in the effort, and moments later Arlene and Jimmy were on the way to hospital.

The safe in the office where Donna Warren died. A stack of two-dollar bills was left behind in the till, and change was scattered on the tile floor. [RCMP crime scene photo.]

Cleary pressed the transmit button on his radio. Nothing happened; it was dead. He moved quickly back to the door where another officer, Constable Dave Trickett, was now standing guard at the entrance. Seeing the problem the corporal was having, Trickett handed Cleary his portable radio. Cleary turned his attention to securing the scene and helping Henry Jantzen in the basement, where those responsible could still be hiding—or, God forbid, more victims were yet to be found. He needed more backup, and he had to deal with the strong possibility that those responsible had escaped. Before Cleary could call Stan Jesty and arrange to bring in every available officer, he heard someone else on the radio. It was Corporal John Trickett, asking Jesty what the situation was. Cleary quickly interrupted, not knowing that he and Trickett were forcing Jesty to cut short his conversation with Derek Wood: “Three-zero-six, come into McDonald's right away.” Cleary wanted to use Storm to search the basement, so that officers would not be put at risk.

Other traffic on the radio kept Trickett from hearing Cleary's call. Jesty cleared the channel. “Go ahead, Kevin, give him a call again.”

The crew training room at McDonald's, where Henry Jantzen waited, sweating, for backup from fellow officers. [RCMP crime scene photo.]

“Three-zero-six, do you copy? Come in as soon as you can. We want you to check out the inside. We got several down, and we need you to check inside and, ah, Stan, call other PDs.” Cleary wanted roadblocks set up in the area, and the RCMP did not have enough officers for the job. Jesty called municipal police in-Sydney, Glace Bay, Dominion, North Sydney, Sydney Mines, Louisbourg, New Waterford, and Eskasoni. Every available law-enforcement officer in the area would help in any way possible. Cleary instructed Jesty to call RCMP in Port Hawkesbury, about 150 kilometres away; he wanted a roadblock at the Canso Causeway, the man-made link that joins Cape Breton Island to mainland Nova Scotia. Cleary was going to take advantage of geography. No flights were leaving Cape Breton at that hour, and he would make sure that no-one responsible for the carnage in McDonald's would simply drive off the island into the night.

As Cleary made those arrangements, Corporal John Trickett arrived with Storm. Officers already at the scene were happy to see the big German shepherd; in the years since Storm had been posted to the Sydney subdivision, he had helped nearly all of them out of tough situations, his mighty bark prompting more than one criminal to call out from a building that he was prepared to surrender. Storm knew he was about to go to work, and was leaping back and forth in the back of the big four-wheel-drive truck as Trickett came to a stop in the parking lot. As the big truck shook under the dog's weight, the other officers thought about why Storm was there—that he was trained to take a bullet to protect any of them. A sickening feeling settled into their stomachs as they realized he might have to do just that in the moments ahead. But none of them said anything about it.

Corporal Trickett went over to Kevin Cleary and got a quick rundown on the situation. Henry Jantzen had already reported finding locked offices, and he had come across an open room where he saw a door held open by some kind of bag; he had backed away from the room but was keeping it in his sights. Jantzen enjoyed working out on the target range, and now he wondered if all that practice would prove useful. He knew he could empty, reload, and empty his gun again into a target in a matter of seconds, and drew some comfort from that knowledge as he watched the open door.

Comfort was just what the young constable needed. Sweat matted the burly officer's flyaway hair and rolled down his back, staining his uniform shirt. It seemed an eternity had passed since he pushed open that basement door to find Arlene MacNeil lying on the floor, inhaling her own blood. Every sound in the eerie atmosphere of the restaurant basement was amplified; compressors from the pop fountain and freezers clicked and hummed unexpectedly, heightening his anxiety. After Arlene was whisked away by the ambulance attendants, Jantzen moved gingerly through the basement, all too aware that a culprit, or culprits, could be in one of those rooms he passed. His pulse quickened as he tried the doors; they were all locked. But there were more doors ahead and, ready to react to any sound, he crept ahead, his gun held out in front of him. He hoped he would not have to test the skill he knew he had.

Outside, Corporal Trickett was expressing doubts that Storm could work inside the restaurant. The dog would become so agitated by the presence of the two bodies that Trickett felt he would not be able to accurately read Storm's reactions. Cleary decided he would use the officers on the scene to search the basement, and asked Trickett to use Storm to track the two people that cabby Daniel MacVicar had seen run off.

Trickett knew he would have to keep his eyes on Storm, so he wanted another officer with a shotgun to back him up; the dog could very quickly lead him into a deadly situation, if those responsible for shooting all these people were still hidden in one of the fields nearby. Kevin Cleary assigned an officer to cover Trickett, but Constable Dave Trickett stepped forward. “If anyone's gotta watch out for him, it's gonna be me.” The other officers understood. The shotgun was handed to the younger brother as both Tricketts, donning bulletproof vests, set out to find the killers. The taxi driver had told police that he thought he saw two people running alongside the building, in the direction of Kings Road, so the officers led Storm across the road and down towards the Sydney River Shopping Plaza. It was the same route Derek Wood had taken after he left his kitbag in the door and went to meet his accomplices at the coffee shop.

“You remember when we used to walk along the shore back home with our pellet guns? Never thought we'd be doin' this.” Dave Trickett was trying to relieve the intense strain he and his elder brother felt as they moved along, not knowing what was ahead of them. The older Trickett picked up the theme. “Yeah, well, as long as you don't decide it's time to get back at me for stealin' your pellet gun all those times you weren't around.”

“Don't you worry. I'm watchin' your back, brother.”

The brothers had grown up near Conception Bay, Newfoundland, where John had decided he wanted to be a Mountie after seeing officers in RCMP shore-patrol boats. The younger Trickett had followed his brother's lead a few years later.

After finishing his conversation with Stan Jesty, Derek Wood was baffled. He didn't know what he should have expected when he called the police, but he didn't think he would be told to go home; he thought they would want to come and get him—to protect him as the lone survivor of a major crime. Instead, the officer on the phone had been in a hurry to get rid of him. Derek called his cousin Mike and asked him to come get him, but Mike Campbell was half-asleep, and Wood was not sure he understood what he'd been asked to do. Then he called Freeman MacNeil's house, but MacNeil's mother said he was not home. Where had MacNeil and Muise gone? Wood became frightened and confused, and found himself beginning to cry. He had to leave the store and go somewhere to clear his head.

Now that Wood had managed to break out of his image as an awkward loner and step into the role of a big-time criminal, he was not sure what to do. He figured he'd covered his tracks with the police, a clever move that made up for forgetting the kitbag in the door in the first place. (Of course, using his own bag to hold open the door, when there were any number of items readily available in the basement, showed how small-time Wood really was.) Wood decided he would walk to Freeman MacNeil's house—more than six kilometres away. Maybe he would find MacNeil and Muise parked somewhere along the way.

MacNeil and Muise
were
parked, at the side of Beaton Road, not far from MacNeil's house. They had decided to take the duffel bag containing their clothes and hide it in the woods, where they also disposed of the spent shell-casings. As they jumped back into the car and drove the short distance to the house, they did not notice several unused hollow-point bullets rolling around on the floor in the back of the car. Edith MacNeil heard them come in, and she got out of bed to find out what was going on. Freeman, who had a remarkable ability to create believable explanations for his actions, told his mother he'd driven out to the house to get an inhaler his girlfriend had left there. Edith knew that Michelle Sharp suffered from asthma, and Freeman added credence to his alibi by phoning Michelle to tell her he'd found her puffer. Then he told his mother he'd be staying at Michelle's for the night, and he and Darren left, taking some of their loot with them and leaving the rest in a dresser drawer in Freeman's bedroom. In all they had $2,017.27—tens of thousands less than they had expected to get.

Four

After leaving the MacNeil house, the two drove to a secluded brook, a few kilometres away. Grantmire Brook runs through a large culvert underneath Beachmont Road. The point where the road meets the brook is a deep valley, perfect for getting rid of evidence without being seen from any residence in the area—or from the road, empty of traffic at one-thirty in the morning. In the darkness of the secluded road, MacNeil and Muise emptied the car of everything they could think of that was connected to the crime. A tin cash box was thrown into the woods. More than a dozen tiny red change purses containing McDonald's gift certificates were tossed into the fast-running brook. Also discarded was a sheaf of papers Derek Wood had grabbed from the safe—everything from a petty-cash expense sheet, to a paycheque being held for a vacationing employee. Muise then tried to rinse blood from the blade of the larger of the two knives he carried, and MacNeil threw both weapons into the brook, one at a time, on either side of the road. Muise also threw his deck shoes in the brook. The two had chosen a great location to get rid of these items; the fast-running brook quickly carried them out of sight into the dark, wooded areas of the Coxheath hills.

There was more evidence to dispose of, but the branches hanging over the brook made throwing clothing in there a bit too risky. MacNeil and Muise decided to drive towards North Sydney, taking Keltic Drive, which runs along the inner harbour, to a one-lane bridge. They got out there with some clothing they had not put in the duffel bag they'd left in the woods near MacNeil's house, threw the clothing into the tidal waters of the Sydney harbour, and headed back to Sydney. But first they had to get back up on the bypass. Staying on Keltic Drive would be too dangerous; that cab driver must have phoned police, and Keltic would take them back to Kings Road, only a block from McDonald's. Driving past the restaurant on the bypass did not concern them; Muise, glancing over, noticed an ATV News truck parked at the side of the highway behind the restaurant—just where he, MacNeil, and Wood had run out of the field a short time before. The ATV truck had arrived at the scene at 2:15 a.m., only moments before the killers casually drove past. In it were cameraman Bruce Hennessey and I. We had no idea how close we were to the killers; we were too preoccupied with what was happening around us, and, of course, we wouldn't have known who they were.