‘I’m already a dead man,’ Jeremy Hall told the detective investigating Billy Mason’s murder

A sign states the obvious: the road, ridged with tire ruts from tractors and trucks, is not open to the public.

A wooden cross rises among the trees. There is a name – Billy – and 1978-2006. A dream catcher twists in the wind.

It resembles a roadside memorial, those tributes to victims of recklessness or fate whose lives are torn away violently without warning.

But most people would never travel a road like this, one that barely exists, south of Hamilton and east of Caledonia.

Perhaps William James (Billy) Mason never believed that knowing the people he knew, sudden death in a place like this was not an abstraction; that it was there on the edge of his vision.

You picture Billy Mason’s last sense of his world: a tunnel of lifeless trees on a cold and snowless winter day. No fork in the road, the path under him uneven yet his future linear and unavoidable.

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• Dec 31, 1969

• Dec 31, 1969

The buzz from the last joint he smoked minutes earlier is gone. Images from his life – friends, family, the little girl he had fathered but was too young to raise – dissolve to the stark clarity of the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun.

Had Jeremy William Hall always understood his world with a different sort of clarity? That his path had been forged a long time ago, a rage and capacity for crime and violence germinating inside?

He would not use his childhood as an excuse. That would be a cop-out, he thought. He would not have that – that f——-g stigma attached to him.

A shot fires, the echo lost in the wind. Billy Mason falls in a forest where no one can hear, dead corn stalks crunch under the body.

Here the road ended for Mason and, in a different way, Jeremy Hall, and those around them who lived by a code of the street; who wore pictures of panthers and dragons on their skin like armour protecting broken psyches, who cast tough shadows, but who had always existed like moths fluttering near an open flame.

• • •

Q: Tell us what happened.

A: We all exited the vehicle and then Jeremy shot Billy.

Q: Where did he shoot him?

A: The torso area … Then I said let’s go. And Jeremy goes, ‘I got to make sure he’s dead.’

Q: Were there any other shots fired?

A: Yeah there was. I started panicking and he fired another shot and said, ‘Do you want to be next?’

Court transcript, June 23, 2006

• • •

“I admit it, I can be a bad guy. I’m not the guy you want on your bad side. But I’m a f——-g good guy, too man. I’m the guy who will go to the ends of the earth for you.”

— Jeremy Hall

• • •

Mike Maloney drove down the Mountain and arrived at Central Station downtown.

The homicide detective was told there was a guy in basement lock-up: Jeremy Hall.

Maloney knew about Hall, most Hamilton cops did. Assaults, weapons offences, thefts, car chases. Career criminal; 33 years old, 5-foot-7, 220 pounds. Aliases: Scott Penny, Gerry William LeBlanc. Identifying tattoos: three skulls at base of neck, dragon on forearm, graveyard on lower back, two shotguns and “Remorseless” on abdominals.

Maloney had been a cop in Hamilton more than 30 years. He was waiting for one of his cases to come to trial – the killing of Art Rozendal, a family man stomped to death by gangbangers in a bar on Upper James.

The file today was the case of Billy Mason. The 27-year-old had been missing more than three months, since late February 2006. His mother had last spoken with him on the phone Feb. 22.

East-end detectives investigated it as a missing-person case but it had been upgraded to a homicide.

Police knew crack cocaine users had been hanging in Mason’s apartment on Main Street East.

Some of the crackheads swore that Billy was alive. They had seen him around town. And out west. And up north.

Maloney had recently reinterviewed one of these sources; a woman likely the last person to see Mason alive. She used crack and worked in the sex trade.

She told police she was with Mason when he was taken from his apartment on Feb. 24 by two men. She had said he addressed one of the men as “Jeremy.” She had not heard the name of the other man.

Maloney interviewed an old friend of Mason’s. He asked if Billy had known anyone named Jeremy.

“Who do you mean – Jeremy Hall?” the man replied. “If Billy’s hanging around him, that’s not good.”

When Maloney interviewed the female eyewitness she was serving time in jail. She did not like seeing her name in his homicide case notebook. She seemed agitated.

The detective pulled a photo of Hall to show her. He knew that in her earlier interview, with a different police officer, she had drawn a picture of “Jeremy” with facial hair, receding hairline, and stocky physique, and that when shown a photo lineup she had pointed to No. 3: Jeremy Hall.

But now, with Maloney, she changed her story. She looked at the photo he showed her of Hall. He asked: is this the Jeremy that took Billy Mason away? That’s not the guy, she said. Definitely not him.

But Hall remained on Maloney’s to-do list, along with at least one other Jeremy in Hamilton he planned to interview.

As luck would have it, here was Jeremy Hall in lock-up, having been finally arrested on an outstanding warrant for dangerous driving that had been issued six months earlier, in December 2005.

Maloney wasn’t aware of the background behind that charge.

Back then police wanted to speak to Hall about an incident in October, when shots were fired at his house in the east end. When police tried to pull him over he sped away. Running was his pattern. He never came quietly. Cops thought he was unhinged.

Years earlier, when he was 20, he appeared in court in handcuffs, and jumped out of the accused box and raced down the stairs and out the building. Police chased him on foot before taking him to the ground along Walnut Street. Hall was so spent he couldn’t stand on his own.

Maloney escorted him to an interview room on the second floor where a video camera was cued up.

“Have a seat Jeremy,” the detective said. “It sounds like the boys have been looking for you for a couple of months.”

“Yeah,” Hall said. “That’s an understatement.”

“I imagine you’re tired of looking over your shoulder for them.”

“Well, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?”

Typical of his generation who worked in the police service, Maloney had joined right after graduating high school. He had worked a variety of posts including the emergency response unit in the 1980s, where he did his share of busting through doors. He transferred out of ERU when it seemed every situation he entered involved guns, including a close shave with a round from a .357 Magnum.

He looked into Hall’s dark eyes. He had interviewed his share of men with a history of violence. Hall could affect a glowering stare when required, and it created an aura, Maloney thought, that suggested a potential for destruction of anything he believed needed destroying, and that included the detective himself.

Still, when he looked at someone like Jeremy Hall he also could see a bit of himself. But just a bit.

Mike Maloney’s father had been a steelworker. So had Hall’s, although unlike Maloney, Hall had never known his father well.

Maloney didn’t go in much for psychoanalysis, but he believed that in some ways his humble upbringing might not have been all that different from a guy like Hall, but with at least one important difference: Maloney had always felt loved, even if his dad gave him the belt.

Before Maloney could ask about the Billy Mason case, Hall asked his own question.

“What’s going on with my house?”

“Your house?”

“Being shot up on Martha Street,” Hall said. “You guys sent the forensics boys down there to pull some bullets out of the walls.”

It happened on Oct. 21, 2005. Police were called to Martha Street, near Oriole Crescent. Someone heard gunshots in the area. A police officer found no signs of a shooting. Two weeks later, a neighbour spotted small holes in the window at 85 Martha St. – the house where Hall had been living with his common-law wife, Carol Anne, and their young kids.

When police returned they found six bullet holes; two rounds were pulled from a bedroom wall. No one lived in the house anymore.

Maloney knew with a guy like Hall, in the criminal subculture in which he lived, an attack would not have come out of the blue. Had to be payback.

“Do you have a price on your head?” Maloney asked. “Did you take something from someone that you shouldn’t have?”

“Oh yeah, f — k yeah.”

Billy Mason was presumed murdered; Jeremy Hall’s house had been riddled with bullets. Were the two events connected?

“I’m here with you because we’re investigating Billy Mason’s disappearance,” Maloney said.

“Billy Mason – I just saw him on the news yesterday.”

“We think he’s dead.”

“He probably is.”

Maloney suggested that Hall had known Mason since they were teenagers.

That’s true, Hall said, adding that his girlfriend, Carol Anne, had once dated a friend of Mason’s.

“I just knew him, we never hung around together,” Hall said. “He didn’t like me too much. I beat up his friends. The guy who used to be Carol Anne’s boyfriend, I got in-between them and I guess that didn’t go over too well with a bunch of people.”

Maloney asked if Mason had set up any scores – robberies – for Hall.

“Not that I can remember. Like I said, me and him weren’t close.”

The word on the street was someone had taken Mason at gunpoint from his apartment, Maloney said, and that someone present addressed one of the abductors as Jeremy.

“That’s convenient,” Hall said.

“Everybody jumps to your name.”

“Yeah. I don’t know what the f—k you want me to say.”

“Well, I’m just running it by you. Bottom line: did you have anything to do with Billy, at all?”

“No.”

Hall changed the subject back to the shoot-up of his house.

“The stupid motherf——-s let me live. That’s all I know. But whether you guys do something about it or I do something about it, it’s not going unchallenged.”

“You’ll try and get out of this town or you stay and take your lumps?”

“Well I’m already out. Just not far enough. I’m already a dead man. They’re gonna kill me. The best I can hope is that my kids will be OK.”

Maloney returned to Mason.

“Does his disappearance have anything to do with him setting up a bad score for you?”

“No …Why would you think that he set up a bad score?”

“Because someone is saying that there was a problem, when he was taken away by ‘Jeremy’ – that it was about you setting up a bad score.”

“Well you gotta follow the leads, right?”

Maloney asked if Hall would take a lie detector test.

“I’m not doing nothing for you guys, man.”

Hall told the detective it was the Hells Angels who were out to get him. Maloney offered to have a police officer meet with Hall about protecting his family.

“I got my own problems,” Maloney said. “Mine are murders. And right now it’s Billy Mason’s.”

“If he’s dead.”

“Well I think he’s dead.”

“Chances are he probably is … Maybe he got lucky.”

Hall said the only thing he knew about the Mason case was what he had seen on the TV news.

“His mom is crying on TV and shit,” Hall said. “She seems pretty distraught.”

“She is,” Maloney said. “He’s got a little seven year old daughter, too.”

“We all have kids, man.”

• • •

Are bad men born or made?

Jeremy Hall said the answer to the question – “Did you forge your own path, or were you nurtured into it?” – is: it’s complicated.

That the apple often does not fall far from the tree is both cliché and sociological truism.

Hall himself does not blame his upbringing, but he is not the best person to evaluate the role his roots played.

Every story starts somewhere; his begins in east Hamilton, the ground under him fractured.

Hall’s colleagues in Hamilton’s underworld shared similar backgrounds. In that sense he was simply one of them. But in other fundamental ways he was different.

A child of a broken family, poverty and violence, Hall follows a road through some combination of free will, hard wiring and environment.

The story ends badly for him and those he touches.

Jeremy Hall was born in Hamilton a week before Christmas 1973, when the city endured a harsh cold snap.

His mother was 16-year-old Cathy LeBlanc. His father, William Hall, was 18.

“Keep clapping your hands. Don’t stop.”

That was the instruction that his mother gave him as a young boy when they walked through a store. He didn’t understand why. She called him “light finger Louie.” He stole stuff. He saw a G.I. Joe action figure on the shelf. He wanted it and tried to take it. She made him clap his hands to keep from grabbing.

His mother was a high-school dropout. She received social assistance and used the food bank. The family moved around a lot but Jeremy never travelled beyond Hamilton’s borders. She kept their house reasonably tidy.

He had seizures when he was little. They frightened his mother, she didn’t know what to do, she sent him off to live with her parents for long stretches.

He hung with a crew of kids; none of them had the latest clothes or new toys. They saw other guys with stuff like that — new bikes, toy action figures and trucks, and started taking it from stores when they had the chance.

Eventually his mother told him to let her know where he was stashing his stuff so she wouldn’t take the police there by mistake some day.

• • •

“Organized crime and gangs have long been linked to what is known as strain theory. In brief, it is the idea that poverty and exposure to images of wealth in a market society crosscut to allow offenders to see crime as an occupation, legitimizing crime as a means to an end.”

— Mike Arntfield, Western University criminologist

“My whole life I’m primarily a thief, my criminal record focused around property offences. I did a lot of stealing to get money for myself and my family. I’ve done a lot of crimes that I’m actually guilty of, there’s an abundance of them … Sure I’m guilty of a lot of it, probably more than half. But there’s a lot out there that I’m not guilty of, it just got stuck to me because of who I associated with, who I got caught with.”

— Jeremy Hall

• • •

In elementary school Hall was a loner with few friends. Mostly he hung with his sister Jennifer. She was his only sibling and best friend.

At school he stuck to himself but was picked on and beat up. He could not understand why.

His mother told him: You are not a punching bag — hit back. And he did. Striking back became part of his life, just like stealing.

It only deepened his rage when police repeatedly took him down as he got older. He runs away, cop catches him, roughs him up and Hall gets charged with resisting arrest. In Hall’s mind that’s how it went, again and again. They were just kids; why did he have to pay for every mistake he made, but the cops didn’t?

They were out to get him, hung him with a reputation as a nasty and devious criminal. He knew he was doing bad things, but they didn’t know what was inside him.

He had no friends at school, but when he started spending most of his time on the streets he connected with a group of guys. One night they were out late, hanging on Barton Street East — Jeremy, Dodie, Mike, Johnny Bro. A small kid named Dwayne rode up on his skateboard.

Dwayne Utman had run away from home. His mother had a drug problem. Hall, who was five years older, asked to see the new kid’s skateboard and then told him he wasn’t giving it back. But then he did. Utman, who had little in his life, now had friends who became like family.

Their crimes started small; one day Johnny Bro’s girlfriend stole her mom’s purse, a bunch of them took a car to Canadian Tire, bought spray paint, talked big about refinishing the vehicle, heading south to California.

Never happened though. They never left east Hamilton, their world geographically confined as was their sense of the possible. Crime is what they did, something exciting but also a job of a sort.

Eventually they were breaking into homes and stores. When Utman got older, ripping motorcycles became his specialty, just as pickup trucks would become Hall’s forte. The two of them were close, but years later, Utman would break their bond, and the code, and ultimately face off against Hall in a courtroom with tears in his eyes.

Jeremy Hall’s mother did not want his father around anymore; he left home. His father worked in a steel mill but quit after he had a heart operation. At one point he managed a Tim Hortons and got Jeremy’s sister a job there. Jeremy asked him for a job, too. His dad refused. Jeremy figured it was because he was worried he’d rip the place off. Like he would do that to his own father?

After his father left home a family member beat him repeatedly, worse than anyone would in his life. He spent a lot of time with his grandparents on his mom’s side. He loved them.

His mother got a new boyfriend, a large man who had done time.

• • •

“My mom got an ex-pen-timer boyfriend. He used to pound the f——-g s—t out of me. I started running away because I didn’t like him putting his grimy meat hooks on me. My mother never did anything and I think it was in part because she was scared of him. He was a big dude, know what I mean? I’m a 12, 11-year-old kid and he’s punching me in the face. Like what the f—k man?”

— Jeremy Hall

“Studies upon studies have confirmed that victims of abuse – physical, verbal or both – are at disproportionately higher risk of becoming abusers … in concert with this, they also typically have absent biological fathers, overbearing mothers, and live in transitional neighbourhoods. It is not surprising that Hall has such clear, verbatim recollections of his mother’s admonitions and life ‘lessons’ as he serves to neutralize — self-rationalize or mitigate – his offending.”

— Mike Arntfield

“I refer to guys like Hall as victims of the abused puppy syndrome. Puppy is all excited when their master arrives home but the first thing he does is kick the puppy around when he gets home. Hurt and confused, the puppy hides. The next day, he’s all excited again and the same thing happens. What kind of puppy do you think he’ll grow up to be? One mean vicious dog. Guys like Hall are weaned on violence.”

— Mike Csoke, Hamilton police officer who conducted surveillance on a teenage Jeremy Hall

• • •

Hall quit high school, his time was dominated by a cycle of crime and arrests.

Police kept an eye on him. One day they set up surveillance inside a building on Cannon Street East and watched him walking down the street carrying a stolen TV that was almost as big as he was.

In his mid-teens he was regularly in and out of court: breaking and entering, escaping custody, theft, assault, assault with a weapon.

When he was 18, in February 1992, on a Thursday morning at 2 a.m., he hung out with his buddy Ian, who had busted out of jail.

They were hopped up on black beauties — amphetamines. They looked for a truck to steal, having recently learned how to swipe pickup trucks using little more than a screwdriver. They sold the vehicles to the Red Devils motorcycle gang for $500 apiece. The Chevy 454SS pickup was popular, everyone wanted one with the monster 454 engine.

That morning they hit the lot at Queenston Chev-Olds in east Hamilton at the Queenston traffic circle. They jumped the truck and eased it off the lot.

A cop nearby spotted a rather conspicuous scene: a new Chevy with no plates exiting the lot with its lights off. He wheeled around and followed.

“Drive two blocks, turn the corner, go two more blocks and then we jump and run,” Hall said.

“Why?” said Ian. “I’m not dumping the truck, why would I dump the truck?”

“Because there’s a cop behind us.”

Ian matted it, the chase was on. The truck raced west on Main Street, hitting 110 km/h, crossed the Delta and continued west on King Street. Ian lost control, the truck jumped the curb at McDonald’s, hit a street sign, plowed through railway ties bordering a rock garden, rolled and crashed into the front porch of a house that backed onto the parking lot.

The truck was mangled. The two teenagers were listed in serious condition at first but Hall was upgraded to good condition; he had been brazen enough to steal a truck straight off the lot, and cautious enough to wear a seatbelt.

Later that year he was convicted for assaulting a peace officer, theft over $1,000, and assault.

He often got caught for his crimes. He also gave the police the slip, always covering his tracks, watching his back.

• • •

Tip-off leads police team to wrong man

Hamilton Spectator, Oct. 23, 1993

Members of the police’s Emergency Response Team surrounded a house at the corner of Hess and Hunter Streets believing that a man wanted on assault and weapons charges was holed up inside.

But when the man emerged from the home after speaking with police negotiators by telephone he turned out to be an unarmed babysitter watching over a one-month-old baby.

Inspector John Bronson said police were told that a man wanted in connection with an incident involving a shotgun that occurred at the same address in the early hours of Friday morning, was in the house.

That man, 20-year-old Jeremy Hall of Hamilton, is wanted on three separate charges stemming from an incident in which a woman was allegedly assaulted and had a pump shotgun pointed at her.

• • •

Hamilton Spectator, July 16, 1994

A suspect wanted in the robbery of an electronics store in early June is the subject of a Hamilton-Wentworth police request for public help.

On Tuesday, June 7, at 5 p.m., four men wearing masks entered Sun TV at 267 Kenilworth Ave. N. and tied up and assaulted the store owner. One of the men was armed with a knife. The four suspects escaped with electronic equipment.

Jeremy William Hall, 20, is wanted for robbery with violence, being masked with intent, bail revocation on two counts of break, enter and theft, possession over $1,000, four counts of failing to comply with release conditions, and one count of failing to appear in court. He’s white, 5-foot-9, 177 pounds, with short brown hair and brown eyes. He’s known to frequent Hamilton’s east end.

• • •

He was not beyond forming a close friendship beyond the guys he ran with on the street. One of these was with a young woman he confided in; he cried when he told her about his childhood. They got tattoos together, he told the tattoo artist she was his sister. One of the tattoos Hall got paid tribute to his grandparents.

The woman knew he scared people. Guys walked the other way when they saw Jeremy Hall on the street. She saw reactions first hand: a group of them sitting around, and Jeremy — that dark glare, the deep, sandpaper voice — suggests something crazy, they look at him wide-eyed. She felt like he tried to live up to his reputation.

He drank, smoked weed. Their whole crowd did. He wasn’t an addict, not like friends of his like Dwayne Utman, who did hash, some crack — he was too scared of heroin to get into it but tried it a couple of times, got hooked on morphine.

One of Hall’s lawyers told court at one hearing that his client had a heroin addiction and wanted to get treatment for it; many years later Hall denied that, said he had never done heroin. Drugs were a source for business — stealing, dealing — but he wasn’t big as a user, sending his brain into oblivion. It was more like he wanted to keep his wits about him, be on guard against those out to get him.

The girl he befriended didn’t like it when he stole stuff, it seemed like he was getting in trouble all the time. But she hung out with him for a reason; she had a place for the man she felt was inside and didn’t believe that the scary stuff was all of him.

For all his tough talk and rebel image, it was like he needed her, he was clingy. She was a safe person. She bought him a birthday cake. He said he couldn’t remember the last time someone had done that for him.

He dropped by her place all the time to see her, and that was fine, but when biker guys started coming by where she lived with her child, looking for Hall, it freaked her out.

She hadn’t had the easiest life growing up, either. In her teens she had a child; the father did time in jail. But she always felt like her family stuck by her, that she had a moral foundation to fall back on. Jeremy Hall? She knew he never had one. She figured that was the reason he could switch from good to bad so quickly.

• • •

“At one point he was a good person, had a good heart. Something snapped in him...He was a nice person to me. He had a place in my heart.”

— A female friend of Hall’s

“When you say that Hall was able to express love, and that he was disorganized in his offending, it strikes me as sociopathic, like most career criminals. Psychopaths continuously seek new sensations as a matter of self-gratification and power attainment. People frequently mix and match these two terms when they are in fact very specific categorizations. Generally speaking, a sociopath is someone who suffers from antisocial personality disorder. They are reckless, deceitful, lack impulse control, cannot maintain meaningful or lasting relationships, and usually suffer from another simultaneous personality disorder. Sociopaths can have an ethical code, but it is usually rooted in a moral calculus that approximates a code of the street.”

— Mike Arntfield

• • •

In January 1997, a month after he turned 25, Hall ripped a Chrysler Intrepid, which was a prime target for thieves because they were easy to steal. Police chased him. He ran – he always ran. He struck a cruiser and continued through a red light at Wentworth Street, hit a taxi and then a hydro pole. He took off from the car with two others and they were all arrested. He was sentenced to six months.

At sentencing the judge gave Hall a brief speech he often used with offenders, a mix of chiding and reprimand.

It was as though the judge believed words might help alter the young man’s future, take him off the road he had been travelling all his life. He already had more than two dozen convictions on his record.

“Mr. Hall … your record seems to indicate that you are not too successful as a criminal,” he said from the bench. “Perhaps it’s time you did something else for a living. Perhaps it’s time you grew up.”

Jeremy Hall had grown up a long time ago. The worst was yet to come.

All of the detail and dialogue in Remorseless is culled from sources including hundreds of pages of court transcripts, as well as interviews with those personally familiar with Hall, lawyers who defended and prosecuted him, a criminologist, and Hamilton police officers. In addition, Jeremy Hall answered a series of written questions submitted by Jon Wells through Hall’s lawyer.