Under the Bridge (42 page)

T
HE PRETTY BLONDE WOMAN
surprised the boys of View Royal. In the courtroom, she wore the black gown, but she seemed so friendly and cheerful, and they were surprised when she'd turn on them suddenly, though they should not have been surprised, for she was their adversary.

Catherine Murray, a Crown prosecutor, had once been Don Morrison's protégé. Her life amid criminals could not have been foreseen. She was from the comfortable neighborhood of West Van, she'd grown up with trips to Hawaii, she had been head cheerleader for four years, received a new car at sixteen. Before she went to law school, she spent her vacation in California. She entered law school with a tan and a cheerful demeanor and fellow law students dubbed her “California Cathy.”

First as a criminal defense lawyer and now as a major crimes prosecutor, Catherine Murray maintained her sunny, hopeful manner despite her constant dealings with horrible acts of violence.

While the attorney general debated whether it was worth the time
and great expense to retry Kelly Ellard, Catherine faced some of the more troubled youth of View Royal.

“I did a bunch of Crips cases,” Catherine recalls. Many of Warren's high school friends had grown up and now, as young adults, still held onto their adolescent fantasy. Only the gang was real now, no longer “wannabes.”

They would often engage in sudden and vicious attacks on respectable strangers waiting for taxis on the wrong street on the wrong night. They also managed to gain access to the occasional firearm as well as crystal meth and cocaine. The police, in response, formed a special gang unit, and, after months of surveillance, arrested at least fifteen young boys, for crimes ranging from possession of stolen property to aggravated assault. It was Catherine Murray who won convictions, mainly because she was able to convince the often reluctant and frightened girlfriends to testify against their boyfriends. “She's just really good with kids,” her superiors observed. Unlike Ruth Picha or Derrill Prevett, or even Don Morrison, she did not prefer the vagaries of DNA and legal precedents. She was said to be: a “people person.”

Her string of Crip convictions culminated with a boy with the unlikely name of Harry Hiscock. The twenty-one-year-old ringleader and avowed lifelong thug was charged with beating a young man into a comatose state, a young man who had been carrying flowers for his girlfriend on the wrong street at the wrong time. Despite being represented by Kelly's skilled lawyer, Adrian Brooks, Harry Hiscock was found guilty by a jury. The police were pleased by his eight-year sentence as he was “a major leader of the group, somebody that the younger people looked up to. Now, with him out of circulation, a lot of the other Crips, with too much heat, have simply moved on.”

With both police and her superiors impressed by her dealings with the Crips, it was perhaps not surprising that Catherine Murray was asked if she would like to handle the second trial of Kelly Ellard. “I'd be very interested!” she told her bosses, and she agreed to junior alongside Stan Lowe.

After the debacle of the last trial, everyone in the Crown office, from the deputy chief to the paralegal, thought the only way Ellard would be convicted was if Warren Glowatski testified. He was the only eyewitness. Word was that he was in good shape, “doing really well,” “a pretty good guy.” Yet no one knew how he could be convinced to testify. He
owed no favors to the Crown. (“They never believed what I said the first time around, so why should I say it again?”) And would he want to even meet with Stan Lowe, the one who brought in Syreeta, brought her to tears? The one who thrust Reena's clothes in his face and sent him away to live in a place with no girls or swans.

Several months before Christmas, Catherine went to visit Warren at the minimum security prison where he now resided. The prison was on lush green grounds, and inmates were free to wander on the field of grass with picnic tables and a view of a Benedictine monastery.

When Warren walked into the room, Catherine was surprised and not surprised, for as a defense lawyer, she'd learned that supposed criminals could be likable and polite. But Warren was unlike many of the accused Crips, who were brutish and surly. “He was cute,” she noted. “He looked like he could be my son.”

She was surprised by all the progress he'd made. He'd been editing a documentary video and working as a volunteer for a restorative justice program. The prosecutor and the convicted murderer hit it off. (“We just got along right away,” they both would later say.) Warren asked her if she was thirty-five, and she laughed. “You're my new best friend,” she said. They talked for a long time about a lot of things besides Kelly Ellard. He couldn't bear to tell her he wasn't going to testify against Kelly—not just because he didn't want to cooperate with Stan Lowe but because he didn't want the trauma. He didn't want to die from a shiv in his back; he didn't want to talk about that night again and again and once more.

He was hoping she'd come back and visit him, so he told her he'd think about it.

“I promise you one thing,” she said. “I'll never bullshit you.”

He hadn't asked for any kind of deal, although his parole date was looming. He didn't even have a lawyer. (“I've had my share of those guys. They never did anything for me.”) It seemed to him that he was doing so well after so much struggle to emerge from whatever nightmare he'd been in. To get up on the stand and talk about the night under the bridge and over the bridge would put him back seven years, traumatize him all over again, open him up to all kinds of slings and jabs, the least of which would come from inside. They would come from all the forces of the world—the media, the defense lawyers, those
with a kind of influence he'd never known. He'd known only the opposite in that brief moment when the cop in Estevan had said, “Glowatski. Oh, another one of them.” Now he knew where he stood, despite all his studies and change. “Society pretty much sees me as a scumbag.”

Marissa wrote him sometimes. “I really hope you testify,” she said. “Otherwise Kelly is just going to get away with it again.”

He did not write to Syreeta anymore. Gregory, her stepdad, had said they'd appreciate it if he stopped calling. Syreeta was trying to get on with her life, that's what he'd heard.

Catherine came to visit him a few more times, and she never put any pressure on him. They just talked about his life before this all happened and where he saw himself going, and he told her some theories he had about why kids like Harry and Carter were still acting like fools.

By December, just before Christmas, and once again against his dad's advice, he'd decided to testify as a witness for the Crown. “You think you'll come back before that?” he asked Catherine Murray.

She said, sure she would.
I promise you I'll never bullshit you.

T
HE SECOND TRIAL
of Kelly Ellard began on June 14, 2004, and it was a reunion of sorts, a strange camaraderie inevitably forming between the Virk family, Kelly's family, and the media, who had spent so many hours together, years before, in this very modern gleaming courthouse. Stan Lowe was not on the case. (“I got a triple murder. I had to handle that.”), so Catherine Murray would be lead, and she chose as co-counsel a young woman named Jeni Gillings. Jeni, with the intelligent beauty of a French actress, was “so organized.” Catherine could not believe the boxes and boxes and files and transcripts involved in the Virk case. Jeni as well had a scathing sense of humor and shrewd instincts. Without Jeni, she wouldn't have convicted all those Crips. “She's the brains behind the operation,” Catherine would often say.

Kelly sat blithely in the prisoner's box, with her hair newly cut in trim bangs, no longer black, but a pale brown with auburn highlights. In the prisoner's box, she would write copious notes, and she would hand these
to her fourth lawyer, a woman named Michelle. Michelle was both partner and girlfriend of Kelly's main lawyer, Robert Claus. Robert Claus, like Adrian Brooks before him, was well respected and known for victory.

•   •   •

The trial was a remake of sorts, a production with the same actors as the original, all only more noticeably older now.

Dusty, looking vaguely as if she'd wandered in from a Gauguin painting, seemed the most transformed. Softer, prettier, her voice now seemed to suit her at last, and as often as she could, she interspersed her testimony with mentions of her daughter, the fact that she was a single mother, and in school.

“Let's talk about what kind of teenager you were,” Catherine said to her warmly.

“I dropped out of school in grade 8,” Dusty said, comfortable, for she'd talked with Catherine so many times. They'd just had a smoke together, and even her older sister Destiny thought Catherine was “pretty awesome.”

Dusty said, “I lived in Edmonton, Windsor, Maple Ridge, Thunder Bay, Vancouver. I didn't want to follow the rules. I was put in Seven Oaks. It's a house where they put kids who didn't want to follow the rules.”

“What was the secret bond with Warren?” Catherine asked her.

“We all have one,” Dusty said softly. “We all did it together. We were all involved. That's not going to change.”

“Did you kill Reena Virk?”

“No,” Dusty said, and she began to cry, and the jury looked at her with sympathy, for when talking of her life to Catherine, she seemed likable, even redeemed.

•   •   •

“This lawyer,” Reena's dad said of Kelly's representative, “is it just me or is he very irritating?”

Bob Claus was a very tall man with a constant scowl. Throughout the proceedings, he would often call for a mistrial. His first one was in regard to his client's lack of medication.

“Your Honor, my client has been unable to get her anti-anxiety medicine and she cannot contribute to these proceedings in any meaningful
way if she is suffering from anxiety, and I am going to have to request a mistrial at this time.”

He would often produce an exhibit known as “the dark photos.” He would show these to every witness in an effort to establish that you can't see anything on the bridge in View Royal during the darkness of evening. “You'll agree with me that it is impossible to make out who is on the bridge in photo 14?”

“Yes,” the kids would say, half-bewildered, half-amused. While showing the “dark photos,” Bob Claus did not refer to the presence of a full moon in the sky on that certain dark evening.

The judge, Selwyn Romilly, originally from Trinidad, sat through the days with a wry look. Occasionally, he seemed near laughter or lecture, but he kept his expression both amiable and stern. On the lunch breaks, he changed into shorts and sneakers and jogged for many miles.

If the young witnesses were more remorseful and polite, less sullen and defensive, it was perhaps because over time, they had come to understand the horror of what had truly happened. Most often they would cry when describing how Reena was kicked and punched, and most often they would not try to minimize their own role.

They were savvier as well, so used to the process of interrogation by now.

Billy politely told the court of how he “just bumped into Kelly on the Old Island Highway.” Her pants were “soaking wet” and she said, “I just killed someone. I held her head under water. What should I do?”

“Did you not say before that Kelly might have said, ‘Her head was put under water'?” Bob Claus asked, hopefully.

“I said that last time,” Billy said, “because the lawyers tricked me.”

This seemed to startle Bob Claus, and he flipped through his notes for a few seconds. “Did you not say before that you thought Kelly was just making a joke? That it was all a big joke?”

“Yes, I said that,” Billy agreed. “Because,” and here he shot a disgusted look at Kelly, “you just don't think someone you know is capable of doing something so terrible. I just didn't believe it. I didn't think somebody could do that to another person.”

“No further questions,” Bob Claus said, his voice heavy with temporary defeat.

•   •   •

“Tell us what you were like in 1997,” Catherine said to her star witness.

“I was trying to find my place in the world,” Warren said. “I was basically very directionless. I was living two lives. One was with my girlfriend where I didn't have any emotional turmoil, and then, in the other, I was trying to be a tough guy. I hung around with the Crips, they accepted me, and just feeling accepted was good enough for me.”

“How did you feel about violence?” Catherine asked him.

“It got my blood flowing.”

In her box, Kelly began to fidget about.

“I want to take you to that night—November 14th.”

“Some kind of rocket went across the sky. I think it was a shooting star,” he said before describing the fight under the bridge—all the girls hitting Reena, the way he'd kicked her too.