Under the Bridge (27 page)

•   •   •

Newspapers and television news were banned suddenly. This censorship increased the interest in the arrival of the new girls, and it took only hours for rumors to move through the hallways and classrooms.

“When I found out what they'd done, I just said ‘Holy Shit!' It exhausted everybody's brains,” Floyd, the guard, recalls.

The kids in juvie found it “weird” when seven girls came in together, and soon began their own investigation into the crime since the newspapers were missing and the guards were unusually tense and silent. In
juvie, days are divided into blocks and in those blocks of time the residents attend arts and crafts class or woodwork or gym. But at 1:30 and 3:15 and 5:30, they're granted free time, and in these moments of free time, several girls discussed their findings.

“Warren started the fight,” a girl named Sidra said. “That's what I heard.”

“No, Warren told Craig that he didn't do anything,” insisted Annie.

“I heard this!” a red-haired girl with a Chinese tattoo on her breast declared: “The girl who died was Warren's girlfriend and she screwed around on him and Warren got pissed off. So, he got Kelly mad at the girl and then there was a fight and the other girls took off because they were scared.”

“Why would they take off?” Sidra asked.

“I don't know. They all beat the girl up and they were scared they were going to get charged. They're standing there, like, ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do?' And Kelly goes, ‘Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.' And then Warren and Kelly followed her. They went over the bridge after her and they burned her with a cigarette and they drowned her. They kept it secret for a week. This all happened last Friday.”

“No, I asked Dusty. I go, ‘What are you all in for?' And she goes, ‘We beat the shit out a girl and then she died.' Just like that. Exactly like that! She's all proud of it.”

Arianna, a girl with black roots and a sly smile, a girl who'd lived on the streets near Chinatown since she was twelve, was thoroughly disgusted by the revelation. “I was high as a kite when I did my assault,” she sneered. “These girls were stone-cold sober. But I like Laila,” Arianna said. “She's cool. I talked to her in arts and crafts, and she said she doesn't even know those girls. She just met them that night. She said she tried to stop the fight.”

Lily spoke up now, “I heard Kelly ask the girl with the braids, Eve, she asks her, ‘Why'd you rat me out? My lawyer told me you gave a statement against me.' And Eve goes, ‘I'm not going down for murder.
You
did it, not me.'”

“Yeah, Kelly's got a lot of attitude. I wouldn't be acting like that if I was going down for murder,” Arianna said, and all the others nodded.

“She's sick,” Lily said. “They're all sick. They killed a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“Yeah, at least I can change the things I did,” Arianna said.

Lily, too, contemplated redemption and the consequences of murder. “I can go back and apologize to the people I've hurt, but once you
kill
somebody, that's it. You can never change that. Kelly thinks she's getting out of here too. She told me, ‘I've got a good lawyer. I'm getting out any day now.'”

The girls laughed and wondered how long Kelly would last if she found herself cornered by eight others. How long would she last if she was the cornered one?

“The blonde Josephine is a little princess. She looks like she should be doing ballet.”

“What was the name of the girl they killed?” Annie asked softly.

“Elly something,” Lily said. “That's what I heard. I think her name was Elly McBride.”

•   •   •

Though they were forbidden to do so, Kelly and Josephine found a way to whisper.

“Did you give a statement?” Kelly asked. The stud in her nose had been taken away.

“Fuck, no. Of course, not.”

“Well, don't give a statement against me, and I won't give one on you.”

“Of course not, Kel,” Josephine said, truthfully. “I would never do that to you.”

The girls hugged and held one another, and then Floyd, the guard with a brush cut and a wrestler's physique, came and brought Kelly back to her cell.

“Tell these girls in here to stop messing with me,” Kelly ordered, as if he was her personal bodyguard. “Tell them I know karate.”

He held back a laugh and opened the door with a key attached to the chain on his hip. “Take a good look at the company you're in,” he said to her, without sarcasm or irony.

J
OHN
B
OND KNEW THE MAN
who showed up at the station that Saturday evening. They'd both been volunteer firemen together for the View Royal Fire Department. Doug was a good man, Sergeant John Bond thought, still married to a nurse, and on the weekends he'd take tourists on fishing trips around the bays of the island. The fireman had brought in his son.

The son seemed slightly hesitant. The young boy held his skateboard to his chest, as if it was a shield that could ward off dangers about to come his way.

The fireman's son was seventeen. When he was at Shoreline, he was one of the “cool” boys, who seemed effortlessly possessed of a certain and elusive charisma. Colin Jones thought the fireman's son was “hilarious … he has an awesome sense of humor,” while even Warren would later admit, “I've got a lot of respect for that guy.”

Billy, the fireman's son, was now a senior at Spectrum School and thus had heard no rumors of the murder. He nonetheless arrived at the Saanich station soon after his father saw the commotion near the Gorge. Bond would later speak of Billy's information as “the nugget.”

“You get all these false leads, and all these kids giving you what I'd kindly call carefully calibrated versions of the truth, and then you get a kid like Billy who's just totally forthcoming, and it's an interview, not an interrogation.”

Billy's crewcut was bleached blonde, in the style later favored by Eminem. Dimples appeared in his cheek when he smiled, which, until this moment, had been quite often and constant. Like Syreeta, he was about to step away from the innocence of his youth in View Royal, all because of what occurred on the evening of the Russian satellite.

Billy had not seen the satellite fall. He'd been at his friend Craig Smiths, watching a movie with his girlfriend, Annika. The movie was called
The Relic,
and later, he would remember how silly they'd all been,
so goofy, just watching the monster in the horror movie and screaming and laughing.

At eleven o'clock, Billy and Annika left because Annika had a curfew of 11:30, and Billy planned to walk to his place, get his dad's black truck, and drive her home. Only something very unusual occurred as he crossed the Old Island Highway. He saw Kelly Ellard—he'd known her “for most of my life.” He was friends and classmates with her older brother; he knew her stepsister; she lived down the street from him and he'd been to her house a few times. He felt neither friendly nor hostile toward her; he felt largely indifferent. She was just a little sister, another girl from the neighborhood.

And then that night, after watching the horror movie, he'd bumped into her and it was a little weird because her pants were wet up to the knees. It got even stranger, even creepier, even the strangest thing that had happened to Billy in his young and carefree life.

Kelly had walked up to him, seeming “stressed out,” and had asked him for a cigarette. She then told him that she had just held a girl's head under water in the Gorge waterway.

“What should I do?” Kelly had asked him. “What should I do?”

When he heard this, Billy thought she must be kidding around. “I just thought it was a complete joke,” he would later admit.

Bond asked him if he had told anybody about the conversation with Kelly.

Billy said yes, he had told his father when he got home that night. His father had also thought the story of Kelly drowning a girl in the Gorge couldn't be true. It was only on this Saturday when he'd seen the divers in the Gorge and heard from other firemen that a young girl's body had been discovered that he realized his son had important evidence.

“My dad,” Billy would later say, “made me go to the police.”

“Well, we appreciate you coming forward,” John Bond said. “That's pretty significant information.”

Billy nodded, and he pressed his skateboard back to his chest.

•   •   •

Erna Anderson greeted John Bond at the door of her apartment. She was a talkative woman, a cashier at Thrifty Foods supermarket “Well, I thought the coat was my friend's grandson's,” she said, chatting nervously.
“And then at work today, my co-worker, well, he took the training test to be a police officer, and he told me on the news he'd heard about a girl found in the Gorge, and I told him, ‘Well, jeez, I found a coat down there last Saturday,' and he says, ‘Erna, you got to call the police.' Her apartment smelled like carnations and apple pie. John Bond smiled, and she kept chatting to him as she offered him some coffee. “And when I got the coat, it was covered in blood.”

Hearing this, he asked to see the coat, which she had retrieved from her friend. He touched the cloth. The coat was large and ordinary, just a black and white Adidas jacket with a few cigarette burns in the sleeve.

“The blood was there, and there,” Erna said, pointing at the clean cloth. “And I thought, well, whoever stole this from Robby must have got in some fight.” She shook her head.

He saw no blood on the coat, and looked at her quizzically.

“Oh,” she said, blushing. “I washed the coat.”

She was still chatting away, for it was nice to have a visitor, especially someone like John Bond whom you just wanted to talk to for as long as possible. “You noticed the blood more on the white part,” she said, pointing at the stripe on the sleeve. “I put it in my car after we took it from the jogger and it was soaking wet and—”

“Can I take a look at your car?”

“Sure,” she said, and she led the detective outside, where her car was parked under the awning of a cherry blossom tree. The detective cut out part of the carpet on her car floor, leaving a dark and rough hole. He told her they would need to send the carpet to the lab. Even at this early stage, John Bond knew if there were to be convictions in this strange case, the detectives better hurry up and find some real and tangible evidence.

O
N
M
ONDAY
morning, the public spectacle began.

In Youth Court, all eight teenagers appeared and were formally charged before a judge. The atmosphere of the courtroom was charged and frenetic, for the hearing was attended by a large number of journalists, from countries as far away as Sweden and Japan. Never before had so many journalists crowded into a courtroom in the small and lovely town.

Teenagers too arrived at the courthouse, a square box of a building located near the tearooms and tartan shops of downtown Victoria. Teenagers sat on the steps, not far from the sheriffs', but farther from the plaque engraved with the blessings of Queen Elizabeth, for courts in Canada are still under the monarch's domain. Across the street, satellite trucks were parked in the lot of the Cherry Bank Hotel, and beside the sign announcing barbecue ribs—“all you can eat—10.99”—cameramen wielding telephoto lenses smoked American cigarettes and paced, furious that they were not allowed into the courthouse.

“I feel kind of quivery,” a girl named Millie Modeste, a Shoreline student,
confessed to a reporter, unaware that her words would appear in
The New York Times.
“I'm really surprised,” Millie Modeste said. “I go to school with them and they don't seem like those kind of people.”

From the back row, surrounded by the cadre of media, Dusty's sister showed no concern for protocol. She screamed out to her young sister, who stood teary-eyed and startled beside her more regal and proud former cohort Josephine. “I love you!” Dahlia screamed to her little sister.

After his appearance in the courtroom, prosecutor Don Morrison went outside the courthouse and held an impromptu conference. Don Morrison, a seasoned prosecutor with silver hair and a quick smile, was known for being neither timid nor bland, and yet he was momentarily startled by the large crowd surrounding him. It was another kind of swarming, one far less dangerous then the swarming of Reena Virk, but a swarming nonetheless. The journalists shoved each other, pressed forward, elbowed away photographers, raised their microphones into his face.

“A young woman was brutally murdered,” he announced. “It appears that a group of women assaulted the girl. The assault ended. There was a second assault. This ended in death.”