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Authors: Jerry Langton

BOOK: Rage
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At court the next day, Feb. 15, 2005, Brean was surprised to see that the lawyers treated him no differently than they had the day before. Blatchford and Small, on the other hand, were shocked and impressed with his story and told him so. They particularly liked the inclusion of “Bigasskill,” even though McCaskill was far from overweight. The merriment it brought helped ease the boredom of another day waiting for the jury to come to a conclusion.
With nothing else to do, Brean and Blatchford decided to teach Small how to play gin rummy at about 5:15 that afternoon. They had just started the lesson on a courthouse hallway floor when McCaskill walked by. Thinking he might appreciate his new nickname, Blatchford handed him a copy of the
Post
, which had Brean’s story on the front page.
As he read, McCaskill’s mood changed from jovial to deadly serious. He looked at Brean, told him there would be some “legal issues” with the piece and headed upstairs to confer with Lenzin and Nuttall.
Alarmed and sure that he would be held in contempt, Brean excused himself from the other reporters and headed to the men’s room. He was just leaving a urinal when he was immediately surrounded by three big men in black robes. Lenzin—with his long red hair, the most fearsome-looking of the trio—asked him where he got the information he put in the piece. Brean told him the Internet. Lenzin rolled his eyes. It was clear he didn’t put a lot of faith in the information superhighway. Lenzin asked for his notes. Brean said that he could lay his hands on some, but most of them were on his computer. Trying to be helpful, he told Lenzin that he could get most of the information by Googleing Ashley.
To his surprise, they did. Although the lawyers managed to find Ashley’s VampireFreaks page and her Xanga blog, she had recently removed much of what she had written. Brean surmised that she had been warned by her host that her blog was attracting extra traffic from him and his editors. They looked at what was on the Net and his story again, and recommended he get himself a lawyer.
Brean returned to the press pack while calling the
Post
to see if they could get him a lawyer. As he hung up, relieved that they promised to take care of him, he could tell from the other reporters that he had transformed from reporter observing the case to part of the case itself.
He was talking with Blatchford and Small when the trio of defense lawyers passed by and went into the courtroom. Lenzin had Brean’s article in his hand. The entire press horde, including Brean, followed them in. To their amazement, they didn’t argue for contempt charges against Brean, but perjury against Ashley. They wanted the jury to stop deliberating. They wanted to call Ashley back to the stand. They even mulled over the idea of Brean taking the stand.
Watt asked for the article. He skimmed it and asked the collected defense lawyers how they could have missed such a thing. Lenzin said that he had done an Internet search on Ashley (using Yahoo, not Google) and had found nothing out of the ordinary. Watt asked how Brean had been able to, then. Lenzin replied that the blog was: “hidden within this technical thing called the Internet, and I don’t know how he could have found it.” Wrong answer.
Watt told the court he would read the article over the dinner break and address the matter at 8:30.
When Watt came back, he was fuming. Brean later wrote: “New evidence was not supposed to come out in the newspapers before it was presented to the court, especially not while the jury was deliberating.” Watt sighed and told the lawyers and press: “If this young woman did not commit perjury, she came close enough for government work to it. And I just don’t understand what else I can realistically do. I don’t see in this case how Humpty can be put back together again.”
When the jury came in, Brean said he could tell they knew something was wrong. Once they were seated, Watt thanked them for their great sacrifice over these last four months and told them that they could go home.
After countless hours of heart-wrenching testimony and over $1 million in public money spent, the Johnathon Madden murder trial had ended in a mistrial.
At least two reliable sources later told me that jurors told them that they were very close to finding all three boys guilty when the trial ended.
A new trial date was set for November 14, 2005—almost two years after Johnathon’s death.
CHAPTER 7
Starting Over
Ashley’s wasn’t the only blog Joseph Brean found when he started combing the Internet for information related to the case. While searching for information about Kevin, he came across a blog entry called “My Ex-Best Friend is a Murderer.” It read:
I get home today and my friend who had just gotten out of jail (No, I don’t hang out with a bad crowd, I’m a loner I hang out with no crowd :P.) pasted me a link from cp24, first thing I assumed was that it had something to do with My Ex-Best friend murdering his brother Johnathan. So i clicked the link and a few minutes later he supplied me with more links with extended stories on the court hearing, I mean there’s not much to say about it, I wasn’t there when he did it. I did know the guy for years though and we were good buds up until his girlfriend dumped him for me(woops) So I hope now he gets a life sentence cause I know if he gets free he’s going to come and kill me, seriously. I’m just going to post the links to the news stories; I don’t really feel like talking much on the subject, the guys dead to me.
He didn’t post anything illegal. Although he did try to identify Johnathon, he misspelled his name “Johnathan,” which is not far from the name “Jonathan” that the media had been using to describe the case.
But, on an Internet discussion forum, the same person, let’s call him Alex, posted the names of all three accused. Since they were all under 18, that was against the law, although the media was briefly allowed to publish the names of Kevin and Tim while they were at large overnight in and around Taylor Creek Park. But then they were identified as missing persons, not suspects in a murder case. Alex wrote:
I was asked by a member here to reveal the names, and I will because I hate that fucking Youth Protection bullshit. I would testify against Kevin Madden because some of you don’t understand how disgusting this is . . . im sorry, even if I had a lifetime friendship with him I would wish death upon him.
Alex didn’t go to the police or lawyers, he said, because he didn’t believe in the legal process. But he didn’t mind talking to the media. He did an anonymous interview with Citytv and, when Brean contacted him, he was more than happy to talk via e-mail. But he had one—somewhat hypocritical—condition, he didn’t want his name to appear in the paper. Brean agreed.
Alex told Brean that he’d known Kevin for about 10 years and had gone to his house many times, mostly to play video games. He said he had witnessed several fights between Kevin and Ralston, but chalked them up to youthful rebellion. He also spoke about Kevin’s disdain for Johnathon. “I know he was really annoyed by his little brother a lot,” he wrote. “But a lot of people can’t stand younger siblings, so that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary either.” Alex described Kevin’s life as being fraught with discord, hatred and violence, a situation he considered perfectly normal.
Brean asked why they were no longer friends. Alex boasted that Kevin’s girlfriend dumped him, so that she could date Alex instead. The girl in question was Katie, the one Kevin pleaded guilty to threatening with his “die, bitch” note. Alex said that he’d heard Kevin had been depressed ever since.
If they weren’t talking, Brean asked Alex how he knew that. They had a friend in common, Alex told him. If Brean really wanted to know about Kevin, he said, he should get in touch with his friend Gabriel. Kevin and he had become practically inseparable since Katie left him. Alex gave Brean Gabriel’s e-mail address.
Brean sent Gabriel an e-mail asking if he wanted to talk about Kevin. What he got back surprised him. Gabriel wrote back a long, rambling essay about how he taught Kevin the “truths of Nazism.” In it, Gabriel likened himself to Edward Norton’s handsome, charismatic and intelligent character from the film
American History X
, and he compared Kevin to the obese, mentally challenged character with a hair-trigger violent side played by Ethan Suplee in the same film. While he may have been a fan of the film to the point of fantasy, he had clearly missed its obviously anti-Nazi point.
And that wasn’t the only thing he seemed to have missed. Gabriel’s message was written in a style that, to be kind, would embarrass most fourth graders. Sprinkled with multi-syllable words he clearly didn’t know the meaning of, the message was couched in a bizarrely stilted, almost unfathomable perversion of English:
To speak the tale of Kevin would oblige me to state the significance of my life, and thus I shall attempt to do so. The essence of death entails inquirer, as the life remains excused, I question some time if the life ever existed. Kevin was folly to the vanity of knowledge and life. Kevin was bewildered and beguiled by the only structure and religion he had ever acquired, society. His life was a perpetual misery, caused by reconciliation of eternal vanity. Though I feel obliged to elucidate, as I shall . . .
Gabriel claimed to have known Kevin since they were very young children and to have noticed early on that he was different from the other children. “Essentially he could manipulate perception; he could induce accentuated states of comprehension, such as indulging in toy activities,” he wrote. “As most children would irrelevantly occupy their time playing with toys, Kevin would contrive intricate and unfathomably zany scenarios.” This apparently meant that while the other kids in class were having fun with toys, Kevin played by himself.
Gabriel did offer some tortuously worded insight on Kevin’s development and home life. He had very little respect for Kevin’s parents, writing:
Kevin was by nature afraid, thus hostile. This I assume derived from the neglect he endured as a child. Kevin’s father abandoned him on Christmas Eve, when Kevin was five. His mother hysterically lost, married an ex-convict. And thus the new stepfather assumed responsibility for Kevin and his brother. . . . Kevin would frequently tell me how his stepfather would favor Jonathon for mysterious purposes, and as yet beat Kevin as a youth.
Later, he added: “With the inconclusive beatings from his step father, and Kevin’s now obscured personality incited ridicule from school, and thus the anger grew.”
But while Gabriel was appalled at Kevin’s stories about Ralston that were perhaps fanciful, he considered Kevin’s torture of Johnathon to be par for the course:
Surely they had a violent relationship. I can vividly recollect Kevin venturing home from school in grade 6, only to encounter his brother passively watching television. Kevin then forcefully smashed his brother’s head against a solid wooden chair. Then grasped the heels of his brother and whorled him almost majestically in circles. Then to let go and watch his 90 lbs brother collide with the wall. Though it was peculiar, despite such unprovoked occurences of irrelevant violence, Kevin never spoke of his brother in any manner.
Then Gabriel began to portray himself as a teacher molding the unformed personality of his friend. Looking to channel his “cognitive hate,” Gabriel introduced Kevin to “National Socialism”—Nazism. Whether his teachings inspired it or not, Gabriel noted that Kevin espoused a racist philosophy:
With his father being black this further complicated family life. To which I now assume begun the most atrocious moments of Kevin’s life. Upon venturing to school after being beaten at home, he would frequently engage in fights with all students. Even when the vast forces of blacks encumbered me, Kevin would stand prominently and mutter racial provocative slurs.
Gabriel said that although Kevin claimed to be a Goth, “it was merely an instrument to shield his fear.” He went on to blame Kevin’s hatreds on the fire (which wiped out Kevin’s beloved collection of Tom Clancy books), Katie (who Gabriel incorrectly said had had him thrown in jail), his “stepfather a black ex convict” and society in general. These factors, along with his own guidance, he said, drove Kevin to Nazism.
In the six months or so after the fire, Kevin would visit Gabriel and listen to his lectures about “the beauties of death” and other ideas he had.
Then Gabriel’s e-mail addressed the murder:
Now as for Kevin’s two associates, Pierre and Tim. I was vaguely acquainted with them, they were more so substitutes for myself. I suppose Kevin felt I had progressed beyond ignorant hatred and devolved my own intellectual beliefs. Thus Kevin and I spoke on a time-to-time basis. satisfied with my prodigy Kevin, i revised my beliefs and continued to incline intellectually. Though I now realize it was to late for him. With his uncouth mother, his abusive step[father], his mentally challenged brother, Kevin could not endure. And so he rejected the system fucking him. He said no, i will not let life lie to me. I will not be encumbered by beliefs, motives and emotions I forbid. And with this contempt Kevin acted, and thus his brother he demised.
He closed with a recollection of the last time he had seen the boy he believed was his protégé. About two weeks before Johnathon’s death, Kevin called Gabriel and asked him to help him pick out a knife. They went downtown together and Gabriel recommended that Kevin buy a small Swiss Army-style knife, which was not connected with Johnathon’s death.
Aware that he had once again uncovered relevant evidence, Brean wrote a story about Kevin’s Nazi past for the
Post
. It didn’t run.
When Detective Sergeant Terry Wark, head of the murder investigation, found out about Gabriel, he interviewed him. He wasn’t impressed. Neither, apparently, was Hank Goody, head of the prosecution, because Gabriel never spoke in or was mentioned in court. I asked Wark, an intelligent man of few, impeccably chosen words, why not.
“Guy was a total wing nut,” he said.
David McCaskill quit as Tim’s lawyer. In fact, he left criminal law altogether and took a job with the Ontario Ministry of Labour. In his place, John Dennis filed a bid for bail on Tim’s behalf. David North, working with Dennis Lenzin on Pierre’s defense, also filed for his client.
At a hearing on July 8, 2005, the details of the crime and the involvement of Tim and Pierre were presented before Superior Court Judge Mary Lou Benotto, and Dennis could tell which way things were going. He withdrew Tim’s request. North held on until the end. Benotto denied Pierre bail.
The second trial began November 15, 2005, when a new judge, Justice David McCombs, told 230 prospective jurors not to be influenced by the fact that the first trial ended in a mistrial.
About three weeks later, the first witness took the stand. It was Ashley, and she was under a very different kind of scrutiny than the last time.
She told her story much as she had the first time, but without as much flair. Her parents were not present. Ashley admitted that she had gone out with Tim, but was trying to dump him.
Goody asked why she was trying to break off their relationship.
Ashley replied that Tim had told her that he killed people in the Don Valley and drank their blood.
Goody asked her how that made her feel.
She said she was “weirded out.”
She testified that Tim called her on November 25, 2003 from Kevin’s house and told her of a murder plot. She was so distraught that she asked her friends for help, ignoring her parents and the police. She and her friends then taped a second call in which Tim, Pierre and Kevin—to varying degrees—boasted that they would kill Kevin’s family. Her friends then called police, gave them the tape and she found out Johnathon was dead later that night.
Goody played the tape to a hushed jury.
But under cross-examination, John Dennis, Tim’s new lawyer, introduced Ashley’s online persona of Biteforblood. He asked her to confirm that it was the name of her profile at
VampireFreaks.com
and that she posted semi-nude photos of herself on the site and expressed an interest in “blood” and “pain.” She acknowledged that it was hers.
He asked her if she had posted “Blood is good . . . both flowing and . . . yum” on her profile at
Xanga.com
. She admitted that she had.

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