Rampage (5 page)

“Get out, get out,” he snarled, firing and hitting Maryse. Pivoting, he began spraying bullets at the students seated in the front row. Two women made a dash for the front doorway, but the Ruger roared, fatally wounding them. Those who chose to escape through the back exit were more successful. Lépine stalked down the aisle, firing at students hidden among the desks. One of the four he hit would eventually succumb to her injuries. Pacing up and down the aisle as if engaged in a tedious argument with himself, Lépine then clambered on top of a desk and exchanged his empty magazine for a full one. His mind clearly disintegrating, he fired wildly: nowhere; everywhere. In the silence that followed, he heard Maryse Leclair murmuring for help from the platform. Climbing onto the dais, he drew his six-inch hunting knife and plunged it three times into her chest. Then, placing the dripping blade, two boxes of ammo, and his cap onto the instructor’s desk; he sat on the platform and wrapped his windbreaker around the barrel of the Ruger.

“Ah, shit,” he muttered. Seconds later, he blasted the remaining bullet in the magazine through his own skull, bringing the Polytechnique massacre to its conclusion.

Control Data

A month and a half after losing his job at the hospital, Marc Lépine turned twenty-three. Living off unemployment insurance, he managed to obtain good grades during his fifteen weeks at CEGEP Montmorency, including an 84 in Mass Communications, 81 in Advanced Algebra, and 75 in Ethics of Politics. After purchasing a computer with his savings from the hospital, he spent most of the winter cooped up in his apartment playing on it. On February 29, 1988, he applied to study Computer Programming at Control Data, a private post-secondary school in downtown Montreal. Earning a 90 grade on his admissions exam, he began attending classes on March 11. The fifteen-month program cost $9,000, two-thirds of which he took care of with a student loan, covering the rest with monthly payments of $200. While his work at other institutions had ranged from “good but unremarkable” to “terrible,” at Control Data he truly shone. The school’s director, Jean Cloutier, recalls “an isolated hard worker. Very much above average.… His marks throughout were probably in the top fifteen percent.”
[14]

Outwardly, things seemed to be looking up for Lépine. Having reconnected with his old buddy Érik Cossette from Pierrefonds High School, in June the two moved into a second floor apartment at 2175 Bordeaux. Érik, shorter and fairer than Lépine, was studying theatre at the University of Quebec at Montreal, while Marc entered a chemistry course at CEGEP du Vieux Montreal. Strangely, during Lépine’s last meeting with his former building superintendent Luc Ripoel, he made no mention of his academic pursuits, only of leaving to join the armed forces.

Lépine’s new apartment was a striking departure from his previous residences. Located in Montreal’s downtown east side, the red brick duplex lay within walking distance of some of Canada’s most exciting nightlife. He decided to forego this opportunity to have fun, continuing to live as a hermit. Nadia’s ex-boyfriend Jacques recalled his futile attempts to help Lépine break out of his shell:

One evening, to help him out, I took him to a bar on St. Denis Street and bought him a rum and Coke. That was his favourite drink, although he wasn’t really much of a drinker. I hoped it would help him relax a bit because he was so nervous he was starting to sweat. He had no idea how to talk to the girls I introduced him to and ended up going home early. When Nadia and I went out with friends, we would often ask him to join us, but he usually said no.
[15]

At 2175 Bordeaux, Lépine ended up with the smaller of the two rooms, spending the last two and a half years of his life sleeping on a sofa bed in an eight-by-ten-foot box. The only window in the room overlooked a network of telephone wires obscuring the alley below. Monique, who had moved into a condominium three blocks away, had helped her son paint the walls turquoise. As a finishing touch, he added two prints, one depicting an epic battle scene.

The following month, Lépine arrived at his Class of ’82 Pierrefonds High School reunion, looking uncharacteristically suave in a black button-up shirt and dress pants. One of his few friends, Jean Belanger, was absent from the gathering, having accidentally crushed his leg with a garage door. Jean’s ex-girlfriend Gina Cousineau, however, was happy to see him. “He looked like he always looked, that big smile,” Gina recalled in an interview with the
Ottawa Sun
. “He always had that smile on his face, even if things weren’t going so well.” Lépine spent most of the evening drinking Coca-Cola and clinging to Gina and her fiancé. Though he was halfway through his studies at Control Data, he did not speak of it, saying only that he was attending university in the fall. When Gina inquired about his love life, Lépine said something about a girlfriend who had recently dumped him. He also claimed to have been fired from the hospital by a woman during his three-month probationary period because of one simple error. His replacement was another female employee, a point upon which he seemed particularly angry. The day after the reunion, Lépine called his injured friend Jean and informed him that he was considering a career in the military.

Chemistry at CEGEP du Vieux Montreal commenced in February 1989. From 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Lépine attended Control Data, devoting two nights a week to his new course. He became lab partners with Sylvie Drouin: a shy twenty-eight-year-old Laval University arts graduate. Like him, she was taking the class as a prerequisite for applying to engineering school. Initially, Sylvie found Lépine attractive, but was quickly turned off by the “fascist” side of his personality. During the first few weeks he criticized her constantly, called her “Fräulein,” and ordered her to wash and fetch things for him. When Sylvie threatened to change lab partners if he didn’t stop, Lépine responded with a silent scowl. For the rest of the term, he was notably more considerate. Paradoxically, the little führer was constantly bungling experiments, dismissing his absent-minded failings with his signature “Ah, shit.” “He was good at the theory, but at practical things he was no good,” Sylvie would later explain. “He was so nervous, he would make mistakes. His mind would wander. He would put too many drops in the solution, that kind of thing.”
[16]
Despite his disorganized headspace, Lépine’s raw intelligence managed to earn him an A+ in the course.

Sylvie Drouin’s relationship with Lépine was remarkable in that she was one of the few women he allowed into his personal life. When she learned that he was a wizard with computers, Sylvie asked if he would mind helping her with homework for a night course she was taking on the subject. Lépine was eager to assist, and on her first visit to 2175 Bordeaux, she thoroughly enjoyed watching him demonstrate 3-D modelling techniques and colouring on his computer. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that his intentions were not to teach her, but to wow her with his outstanding computer prowess.
“He needed to feel important to other people,” Sylvie perceived. “He didn’t teach me. He just wanted to solve the problems himself and hand them to me.” In her opinion, the controlling and patronizing approach Lépine took to teaching and teamwork would have adversely affected his love life:

I think in his mind, the girl has to worship everything he does, that everything he does is right. Like in those first few labs.… If you follow him and his ways, things are fine. If you don’t, there is nothing. He gets very cold and withdrawn.… I like the different kind, not whackos, but different. But to be with a guy like that, you would have to give your whole life to him, just follow him.
[17]

Lépine’s patriarchal views were not confined to his private life. Laboratory assistant Andre Tremblay recalls the twenty-two-year-old bringing a tabloid newspaper into class featuring a story about a female police officer who had rescued an elderly man from a house fire. Lépine had launched into an irrational polemic about how women were not physically fit to work in law enforcement, mentioning that there were only six employed on the Montreal police force. Incredulous, Andre asked where he had obtained such information, to which Lépine replied, “To date, I have only found the names of six of them in newspaper stories.…”
[18]
For a man of supposedly high intelligence, Lépine had seemingly missed two salient points: 1) the article intrinsically disproved his notions about female police competence; and 2) counting names featured in newspapers was hardly a logical way to collect statistics regarding gender representation in the Montreal police. If he were counting the male officers chronicled in the media, for instance, he would undoubtedly arrive at a smaller number than those employed by the force. At this juncture, one can only wonder: was the cheese beginning to slide off Lépine’s cracker?

With only two months left in his education at Control Data, on March 31 Lépine followed the same academic pattern he had his whole life: he quit. Jean Cloutier remembers his astonishment: “With his background in electronics, plus his high standings in programming, he was well on his way to becoming a computer genius.”
[19]
Two weeks later, Lépine stopped by Control Data to return some books, dismissing questions about his sudden lack of attendance with a few vague sentences about pursuing another career. Although he continued to attend chemistry class, pretending to Sylvie Dourin that he was still taking courses at Control Data, she began to perceive him becoming withdrawn. Andre Tremblay noticed that Lépine’s eyes were red, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well. In an attempt to coax him out of his shell, Sylvie invited Lépine to a Thursday-night party at a downtown bar, but he refused, saying, “No, I don’t drink and I never go in that kind of place.” He once asked if she would like to hang out after their weekly computer lessons, but all he wanted to do was watch violent movies on videotape — not exactly her cup of tea. The last time Sylvie ever saw him in person was a week and a half after their chemistry class had ended:

I had come away from there with a very strange feeling like I would never see him again, that I didn’t want to see him again and I didn’t. I told him I might call in the summer but I never did.… [He was] very strange, in a very hurried state, like someone with something very important on his mind. It was as though he had something to do that no one else could know about.…
[20]

Ultimately, Sylvie was accepted into the University of Quebec’s engineering program in the nearby city of Trois-Rivières. For his part, Lépine claimed he would be attending École Polytechnique for engineering in the autumn.

Of all the people who knew Marc Lépine in the year leading up to the massacre, Érik Cossette probably had the closest view, once describing his roommate as “emotionally repressed.” He recalls witnessing Lépine flying into a rage after dropping a chicken on the floor. On another occasion, Lépine burnt some meat and punched a hole in the wall. Aside from these incidences, Cossette maintains that there was nothing particularly nefarious about his friend’s behaviour. The sexist remarks he made were “no more disturbing than what one hears from many men,” and Cossette chalked his fondness for gun magazines down to “an interest like any other.”
[21]
In fact, according to Cossette, Lépine had a number of good qualities: his insatiable intellectual curiosity for history, science, politics, and technology; his childlike fondness for cartoons; and his willingness to help out a friend. “Doing favours was his way of expressing his affection for people.”

As the summer of 1989 came to a close, Érik left 2175 Bordeaux Street to backpack in South America, and was replaced by Lépine’s younger cousin Michel Thiery. On August 29, Lépine procured a firearms acquisition certificate application from the Sûreté du Quebec. He bumped into Isabelle Lahaie while exiting the SQ’s Montreal headquarters, and explained he was trying to obtain a gun for hunting. The application was filled out and in police hands, along with the customary $10 charge, by Labour Day, but due to the demand before hunting season, it wasn’t until mid-October that permit number AA2092373 bearing the name “Marc Lépine” appeared in his mailbox. Soon after, the gangly young man began appearing at Checkmate Sports on St. Hubert, inquiring about firearms. On the afternoon of November 21, Lépine finally purchased a semi- automatic Sturm Ruger Mini-14 with a banana clip capable of holding thirty bullets. Including the carrying case and five boxes of Remington .223 bullets — one hundred in total — his bill came to $765.03.

“Ah, shit.” Lépine blushed. He had purchased the cheapest ammo available and was still short on cash. Leaving a $100 deposit, he hurried to the bank and returned in thirty minutes with the balance.

Aside from his daytrips to the sporting goods store, Lépine lived the life of a recluse throughout the fall, routinely ordering grocery deliveries from the store across the street. Monique remembers that he brought her an early birthday present, and though he was uncomfortable with physical affection, told her, “You can kiss me.” Neighbours recall his chilling laughter in the middle of the night, cascading down from his bedroom window into the alleyway below.

Autopsy

By the time the zipper was closed on Marc Lépine’s body bag, fourteen innocent women lay dead, with another ten women and four men suffering injuries. The tragedy at École Polytechnique was followed by three official days of mourning in the province of Quebec. At Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica, a joint funeral was held for the nine victims of Roman Catholic faith, along with an official recognition of the massacre. The bodies of the slain were displayed in pearl caskets in a chapel below the University of Montreal tower, where tens of thousands of grieving Canadians lined up in the winter cold to pay their respects. Across the country, public and private vigils were held for the deceased. The fallen were Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Marie Klueznick, Maryse Laganiere, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, and Annie Turcotte. The only people in attendance for Lépine’s funeral at a Boucherville crematorium were his mother, his sister Nadia, her boyfriend, and a few members of Monique’s church.