‘You’re not going anywhere’: Chapter 1 of To the Grave

April 1999

Gage Park, Hamilton, Ont.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

A woman spoke the words under an eternal blue sky, sun shining, the air bone dry, a spring day that otherwise might have offered a chance to contemplate renewal, rebirth, and the annual deliverance from winter’s grip.

It had been an unusual and jarring winter, the weather shifting between extremes. A warm December had caused flowers to bloom incongruously, snapdragons poked up their heads. A month later the cold erupted with a fury but did not last long. Tundra swans flew through the city in March, spring arrived early.

A dozen or so people gathered for the informal memorial service that April day in Gage Park, in the rugged and worn heart of the lower city.

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They had all known the victim, although most did not know her well. She had once lived just a few blocks away.

They stood near the children’s play area, holding hands, joining to speak the words to a prayer they all knew.

“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Kids played on the swings. Plainclothes Hamilton police officers stood at a respectful distance from the gathering.

In one sense, the nightmare was over. In another, it was just beginning.

The epilogue would be little better than the bloody and unspeakable end.

“Lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever.

“Amen.”

***

Easter weekend

Saturday, April 3, 1999

He grabbed another dish out of the cupboard.

Smash. And another. Smash.

The kitchen floor was littered with pieces of plates and bowls.

And now the furniture: baseball bat in his hands, slamming it into furniture, chair legs splintering, a mirror shattered.

This is what he had done at times over the years, his anger exploding in a red-black fury, raging.

Was he unravelling, “decompensating” as the psychologists put it, unable to keep his head when faced with acute stress?

There was the time he huddled alone, upstairs in his house behind the trap door in the attic, wedged in the crawl space among the roof insulation, hiding from his dark past, present and future.

He lived on a court called Burns Place, on the east Mountain in Hamilton.

That Saturday afternoon, after his anger had subsided, he lay on the couch in his living room, curled into a fetal position.

He had been playing an Alannah Myles song, over and over and over again:

I’m bad for you, I’ll hurt your pride/I’ll put a hole in your heart

Ten foot wide; I make you feel/Like you wanna die

The fury had dwelled inside him for a long time, but he had also shown control, had kept it together. Hadn’t he? His secrets had been not merely tucked away but burned forever. He made sure of that.

But now everything was coming apart at the seams, out of his comfort zone.

And yet, with everything he had done, everything he was feeling, all that tore at his insides, even as he was losing it, the stone cold would not leave him entirely.

The woman’s last breath had come right there, in his home, in the basement.

She had wanted to leave the house on Burns Place, get away from him.

Women, he said: “They keep f——-g leaving me.”

She told him she wanted to go.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he replied.

***

Rookie Hamilton police Constable Kathy Stewart pulled the cruiser into a variety store on Upper Wellington at Brucedale that same Saturday night, April 3.

She was working 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Easter weekend, after having switched shifts with a colleague.

She had just finished a sparse brown-bag lunch at the old Mountain police station, a building that had all the charm of an elementary school portable. A new station would soon be finished farther south off Rymal Road.

She felt a bit guilty about the junk food, but the bag of Doritos and bottled water would help address the growling in her stomach.

She lived with her husband common law, he was at home in Selkirk. Formal marriage wasn’t far off, she would change her name from her maiden Czemerynski, which would save her fellow officers the challenge of wrestling with the pronunciation.

It had been a grey day. Started off cool, then abruptly warmed, the sun showing itself in glimpses. By late afternoon the air was heavy and wet with a gathering storm.

Stewart had done a park-and-walk at the Mountain Plaza. Wrote some parking tickets. The holiday weekend was always ripe for people leaving their cars where they shouldn’t.

And now she pulled away from the convenience store. Before she could open the Doritos, a call came in on the mobile data terminal.

It was 5:44 p.m.

Back then the MDTs were narrow message display centres, the cruisers not yet equipped with laptop-size screens. She pulled over to read:

“Suspicious circumstances. 12 Burns Place.”

She scrolled down further. “Do not broadcast over air,” the text continued. She was instructed to check it out. “Advise if backup is required.”

Stewart typed a reply: “If the hairs on the back of my neck start tingling, I’ll call you.”

She turned the cruiser east onto Concession Street and headed to the call.

Today was just her fifth solo shift on the job.

Stewart had always wanted to be a police officer. She was a big fan of “Law & Order” on TV, and hungrily devoured mystery novels by writers like Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson.

She was an athletic teenager, played basketball. But when she first applied to the Hamilton Police Service she didn’t make the cut. Missed the mile-and-a-half distance run standard by about a minute.

Then she attended Brock University. She took a first year biology course, had to do some animal dissections. Ultimately she pursued law, got a law clerk qualification, ended up working in Toronto as a paralegal. After six years in Toronto, she was 30 years old and ready to chase the dream again, serve her home community.

She once again applied for Hamilton police, and trained hard for the run — the time standard is no longer used — and nailed it. She was hired on Sept. 1, 1998.

The long road to uniform was probably a good thing, she came to realize. Gaining life experience helps you deal with things you’ll see and do on the job that might shake a younger person.

Three months training at police college, and then a beat on the Mountain.

Nothing ever happens on the Mountain, that’s how cops joked about the beat; some domestics, nothing major.

She didn’t hit the flashers or speed en route to Burns Place. The call might amount to nothing. Dispatch had said a woman who called police would be waiting for her outside the house. There was no immediate emergency.

At 5:53 p.m., nine minutes after receiving the call, she pulled the cruiser into the driveway of the house. Rookie mistake. Always park down the road a bit, not right in the driveway. But this was a cul-de-sac, not much room to park on the street.

She got out of the car, and when she walked up saw two women standing by the driveway.

“Which one of you called?” Stewart asked.

“I did,” said the woman with blond hair.

The woman seemed quite nervous. Both of them did, they were standing very close together.

Stewart glanced at the house. The glass from the front storm door was broken, pieces of it on the porch. At the side of the house there was a box, maybe big enough to hold a small microwave. On top of it sat a tied, full green garbage bag.

The MDT call had mentioned the bag. The woman who called police were afraid to open it, afraid that what she had been told might actually be true.

Stewart slipped on a pair of latex gloves as the three of them walked to the side of the house.

“We feel like idiots,” said the blond woman.

“Why?”

“We’re a couple of girls, afraid to look in the bag, and then they send a female officer.”

“Well, I don’t want to look either, but I have to, it’s my job,” Stewart said. “Let’s take a look.”

Stewart grabbed the top of the bag and lifted it off the box. The bag had weight to it, maybe eight pounds. She set it down, untied the top knot, looked inside.

There were a few plastic containers inside, like margarine buckets. An empty Coke bottle.

Stewart looked deeper into the garbage bag. There was an empty white plastic tub. Sitting in the tub was a small bag, a bag that soil or peat moss would come in. She took the bag out. Opened it.

A sobering thought was running through her brain: if this is a crime scene and I mess it up, Abi-Rashed will kill me.

She had just finished one of his training sessions on crime scene management: Detective Sergeant Peter Abi-Rashed, Major Crime Unit. He had shown the class photos, examples of sloppy crime scenes, officers trampling over evidence.

“Now THIS is the worst crime scene!” he had bellowed to the trainees.

He didn’t name names, but you didn’t want to be the one Abi-Rashed was holding up as an example of how not to do things, even anonymously. Word will get around, you’ll be found out. Abi-Rashed struck fear in the hearts of new recruits. He came across as an old-school cop; booming voice, meticulous work habits, everything by the book. “Do not screw up,” he’d tell them. “We cannot afford you to screw up.”

Inside the soil bag was something wrapped in fabric, like a baby’s receiving blanket. Stewart peeled back the layer.

There was a plastic-wrapped bundle inside. And inside that was a clear bag. Something reddish inside.

Life experience; she knew basic biology from university.

Red on one side, white on the other. Follicles. Flesh.

“What is it?” asked the blond woman, who was shaking now. “Is it from a cat?”

The two women watching held each other tightly now.

“No,” Stewart replied.

The blond woman started to cry.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Constable Kathy Stewart called for backup.

***

“Abi-Rashed.”

The homicide detective took the call at his home on the west Mountain.

Saturday night; nice. Not a good sign, a call coming in from Central Station.

Peter Abi-Rashed only got phoned off duty when there was a suspected homicide. And when he did, it meant the next few days could be what detectives call “the marathon,” working around the clock in the critical early part of an investigation.

Might work 30, 34 hours straight off the mark, depending on the case. It’s part of the job. Murderers don’t honour a schedule.

But still. Long Easter weekend. Family time. Get some yard work done.

He was not pleased.

About to plunge again into the dirty work of homicide with his Major Crime Unit colleagues — “the merchants of misery” as he dubbed them — Abi-Rashed showered, shaved, and put on a suit.

He was one of the original four detectives when the unit was created in 1992 to focus on Hamilton homicide cases. Abi-Rashed hung a print in his office, a sketch of the original four: Abi-Rashed, Fred Mueller, Frank Harild, and Steve Hrab.

From the start Major Crime had an aura within the Hamilton Police Service. Part of it was the look: on the job the homicide detectives always wore suit and tie. When they showed up at a scene, some of the uniform officers would quip: “The big guns are here; the suits are here.”

Abi-Rashed always insisted on the dress protocol. There would be none of this talk about going business-casual. In Major Crime you deal in life and death, with victims’ families, and the perps. Wear a suit. Carries authority, seriousness. You are a professional. Dress like it.

Abi-Rashed walked from his house.

“See ya in a couple of days,” he cracked to his wife.

He was built like a retired football running back. Stocky, broad shoulders, thick hands. Befitting his look, he could come across blustery, cut to the chase, salty language. He even wrote his emails mostly in all-caps.

He could also be sensitive, thoughtful. Did lots of charity work. Rough around the edges, yet also meticulous, a neat freak, a military-style sense of order; in the kitchen at home, all the canned goods ordered smallest to largest, all of the labels facing the front. In his office, move a paper clip where it doesn’t belong, he will know. “And hunt you down.”

That Saturday night he headed along Fennell Avenue West, left onto Upper James and down the Mountain to the lower city. The call filled him in on basic details: body parts may have been found at a house on Burns Place. He knew little else, but Abi-Rashed’s mind was already going full bore.

It might have nothing to do with a homicide. You get a call about some tissue, organs, found in a bucket left out with some garbage. Well? Think about it. Easter? Certain cultures at Easter time? Think: sheep, lamb. They buy it at the butcher, put the remains out with the garbage.

Abi-Rashed wasn’t looking for more work. He already had plenty on his plate. Had been up to his neck with the Frost homicide. In February, 80-year-old Clyde Frost’s bludgeoned body was found in a Dodge Road Trek van in Regent Park in downtown Toronto. Hamilton’s first homicide of 1999.

And there was ongoing court preparation for the case of a man charged with murdering his girlfriend’s infant son. In that investigation, Abi-Rashed had gone for the hot button when he interrogated the accused, face to face, no cuffs or restraints in the interview room at Central Station.

He accused the suspect of being a pedophile, knew that would get him. The man charged at Abi-Rashed, who kept his hands down, tightened his jaw and braced for the blow. Hoped he’d punch him in the face on videotape. But the guy stopped just short. All Abi-Rashed got was a shot of some nasty breath.

He turned left off Victoria Avenue, along King William Street to Central Station. It was just after 7 p.m. He beeped himself up to the second floor and into the Major Crime department. A briefing was held for detectives called in to work the new case.

There was a buzz in the room, the word they were getting was that the remains found in the garbage bag were in fact human. Suspected homicide. Abi-Rashed was in charge.

He started making calls, handing out assignments to the others.

Is the victim male or female? Where is the rest of this individual? Is there more than one victim? Need to secure the site, now. Where is the crime scene — is it in fact the house? Canvass the neighbourhood and interview anyone who might have seen or heard anything. Interview the woman who called it in. Get the command van up there.

And gather any and all information on the owner of 12 Burns Place.

“I want to know everything about him. I want to know what he had for breakfast this morning.”

***

Up the Mountain on Burns Place, Constable Kathy Stewart waited nervously outside the house for backup to arrive.

Her first crime scene. Don’t blow it. She had not been wearing her police uniform cap when she had talked to the women and examined the garbage bag, so went back to the cruiser and put it on. Uniform protocol.

Another cruiser pulled up. Stewart expected a veteran to be sent to a scene where body parts had been discovered. Instead, out stepped a uniform male colleague who had been on the job maybe a year.

“You?” Stewart said. “This is who they send?”

“What do you have?” he asked.

Stewart told him about the human flesh.

“Want to take a look?”

“No.”

“What, are you chicken?” she said, then instantly regretted the remark.

“If you made the call, and you know what you saw, you don’t need me to look at it,” he said.

The officer told her to get ready for the Major Crime brass to show any minute. He suggested she get the cruiser out of the driveway, and he reached over and tucked Stewart’s gold chain inside her shirt collar out of view. Protocol.

At 7:10 p.m., Ident arrived — the forensic identification services van. Out stepped veteran Hamilton police forensic detective Ross Wood, and rookie Gary Zwicker.

It was a busy time for the section of late, a couple of homicides on the go early in the year. One was a stabbing case, with a lot of blood at the scene.

The Ident detectives had been working at Central when the call came in, Zwicker had been dusting a stolen car in the police garage for prints. Wood, Zwicker’s training officer, had been a cop coming up on 30 years, the last nine in forensic identification. He had seen it all, attended about 50 autopsies during his career, attended crime scenes where the sights and smells of murder were so ripe they sent even hardened cops for counselling.

When Woody had walked into the garage, he called out to Zwicker.

“You ready, Zwick?” he said. “We got another one.”

“Isn’t it someone else’s turn?” Zwicker said.

Zwicker was pretty green on the job, had not even taken the basic Ident course yet. He would reflect later that this new case would be a baptism by fire.

Up at the scene on the Mountain, Stewart took the two forensic detectives up the driveway, showed them the garbage bag, the box, explained what she had done. Ross Wood examined the inside of the bag.

“Yep,” he said. “It’s skin. Exterior skin.”

Later, Wood examined more contents of the bag. Among the items was a suede jacket wrapped with a foam pad. He cut the tape around the box that Stewart had not opened. Inside, more human tissue packed in bags and small containers. Flesh with skin. Hair attached to a piece of scalp. Reddish tone to the hair colour. Internal organs.

The air was thick with moisture, a thunderstorm brewing. They needed to get the evidence covered with a tarp, and ultimately get the body parts to Hamilton General Hospital morgue for examination.

Stewart was relieved at the scene. She was required downtown to tell her story.

She took a breather in her cruiser parked in the street. It was now 9 p.m. and she was starving. She finally opened the bag of Doritos and shoved some into her mouth.

Tap-tap.

Stewart looked out the window.

Abi-Rashed.

“Mmmyes?” was all she could manage.

“They asked me to check on you to see if you’re all right,” he said. “If you’re eating, I think you’re all right. Get down to Central and I’ll talk to you later.”

Good, she thought, she was not in trouble for the munchies. She ate the rest of the Doritos on the drive downtown.

Stewart didn’t get home that night until after 3 a.m., still wired. Her husband was sleeping on the couch. She woke him up. Couldn’t tell him much, just the basics.

A difficult thing for a rookie cop to experience, seeing human tissue like that. Wasn’t it? Her excitement and strong stomach surprised her.

“Do you think it’s weird this isn’t bugging me?” she asked him.

Her training had kicked in, and she had performed well at the scene, senior officers agreed. She now had a taste of homicide investigation — and liked it. Stewart went to bed, barely slept, and reported back to work four hours later.

***

Media had descended on the scene at Burns Place, reporters kept at bay by yellow crime scene tape. The coroner, Dr. Richard Porter, also arrived.

A decision was made that investigators should take a quick look inside the house. If there had been an attack in that house, there might be another victim. And they’re standing outside while someone’s bleeding to death inside?

They would need a search warrant to do the full exploration of the house. For now, though, under the provincial Coroner’s Act, they could lawfully do a walk-through.

Wood, Zwicker and Porter approached the front door. They gingerly entered the house, careful not to touch anything.

Through the living room, bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen; broken dishes, smashed furniture.

They went upstairs, and then down the eight stairs to the basement, around a corner to the rec room.

Dark red carpet with a black swirl design in it. Pool table. Padded brown bar. Mirror panelling on the walls and half-panel wainscotting. Couple of pool cues on the floor. A small fruit cellar, a fan on the floor, more mirror panelling on one wall.

Without a search warrant, there was no opportunity to search for clues, to use alternative light sources, spray chemicals that would reveal the hidden signs of life and death.

But before they exited, Ross Wood’s naked eye was zooming in on possible clues as they moved throughout the house. Dark smear on the bathtub, and on the frame of the rear door to the house. Blood?

Curious thing about the basement, too. Rest of the house looks like a tornado passed through, he thought. But the basement was tidy, for the most part. Smells clean, too. Like disinfectant.

And his eye picked up on something else.

There seemed to be a significant number of flies in the house, and most of them were in the basement.