Death's Shadow (5 page)

Rock Bottom

Summer 2001

Cambridge, Ontario

Shane Mosher felt the barrel of the handgun grind into the back of his neck, forcing his head over the edge of the garbage dumpster. Urine ran down his leg. He heard himself pleading for his life, begging the man not to blow apart his skull.

That night Shane had done as instructed, entered the Chinese food restaurant, and left the paper bag on the counter. That was the signal. Leave the bag, place your order, and leave. He asked for an eight ball, which meant 3.5 milligrams of crack cocaine. He had just returned to make the pickup when a large man grabbed him from behind, pushed him out back behind the restaurant, to the dumpster, gun drawn.

“Are you a narc?” the man snarled.

“What, are you crazy?” said Shane, terrified. “What are you doing? Look, please, I’ve got a little girl. I’m nobody. I’m not a narc. I’ll smoke the whole thing right in front of you!”

The man let him live. But Shane’s old life was already dead. He was hooked on crack, and even after that night he kept using. He had started using in June, which was a year since his mom died. Shane was looking to numb his feelings and a guy he knew in Cambridge, a city just east of his home in Brantford, offered him a fix. Shane had never tried crack before.

“You’ll love it,” the guy said.

Shane inhaled the hit through a doctored-up asthma puffer, and the feeling — it seemed to him that was the answer, right there, for everything. The deeper into it he got … it was weird, Shane felt like he was on the outside, studying the guys he used with, as though he himself were the only sane one. The others … those guys were nuts! And yet he was doing it, too. He heard the other guys talk about how they lost it all through crack — their jobs, houses, families — but he kept using, too.

Through the summer and into August, Shane developed a routine. He slipped out of bed at 4:00 a.m. in his home in Brantford, while his wife and little girl slept. Out the sliding back patio door, in the car, 25-minute drive to Cambridge, get his crack fix. And each night Shane drove back home, high on crack, in disbelief, breaking it down, talking aloud to himself: “What is happening to me? I am nowhere near this person.”

He was blowing his life with crack, knew it, and couldn’t stop. Driving his family car back to Brantford in the middle of the night, the burgundy Altima, trying to beat it home before first light, he looked for signs. What was he supposed to do? Twice he thought he saw a shooting star, as though God were sending a message.

“Why is this happening!” he shouted in his car. “Is this how it’s going to end?”

Back home he eased back into bed beside Shannon. She was a heavy sleeper; he never woke her up, but she knew something was going on with him that summer. She didn’t want to ask questions, though; was busy with her job, raising Riley.

After an hour of restless sleep, Shane always got up for his job at a greenhouse. He had to keep reporting on time — the place was owned by Shannon’s parents. It was a sauna in there; he sweated like crazy, dropped weight, even as he had already lost 30 pounds on his thin frame from the crack.

He looked like the addict he was, fading into oblivion, heading for the rock bottom he had seen other guys hit. He blew about $15,000 in three months on crack. Sunday night, August 12, for the first time he didn’t make it home in time. Shannon called the hospital, worried. At 6:30 a.m. he pulled into the driveway. Shannon was standing on the front step, looking exhausted. Shane felt a sinking feeling inside, knowing this was it.

“You need to get help,” she said, “or else you are out of here.”

Death Sentence

One week later, on Sunday night, August 19, a woman wearing a red tank top, jeans, and running shoes entered a low-end bar called Big Lisa’s. Located on King Street East in Hamilton, it was a dive where the clientele rarely used their own names. It had been raided earlier that summer by 30 police officers, and more than a dozen regulars were charged with drug-related offences and hauled to Central Station jail. Big Lisa’s was shut down, but not for long.

The woman’s name was Jackie McLean. At first she sat alone. Just after 10:00 p.m., she was joined by a couple of men. One of them had a tightly cropped haircut and teardrop tattoos under one eye. The guy seemed perpetually on edge, not quite all there. His name was Barry. Another guy joined them at the table. He had short red hair, a white, ribbed T-shirt. He introduced himself. His name, he said, was Carl.

Later that night Jackie ended up with the two men down the street, in a crevice of the city frequented only by those in the downtown crack cocaine subculture. It was one of the apartment units on the second floor of 193 King East, located above the Sandbar, a boarded-up tavern and former drug haven. There were just 11 active units in the building, and some of these were like clubhouses for addicts. The apartments where the addicts hung out reeked of a sweet pungent odour, like burnt plastic, from the crack; it mixed with the smell of urine and sex. Bare light bulbs hung from ceilings, clothes were strewn on floors, and the walls were marked with graffiti and dried rivulets of blood, the detritus of violence and needle use.

One floor up from where the group gathered to smoke crack was unit 4, often used for smoking up and sex transactions. Tonight it was unoccupied. Long ago unit 4 might have been a trendy place to live downtown, with the high ceiling and loft at the top of a steep staircase. From the loft, out the window, the Royal Connaught Hotel was visible in the distance. A broken down hotel now, it had once played host to royalty, prime ministers and movie stars.

Jackie entered the apartment with the man with red hair and the pale blue-grey eyes, the one named Carl. The lock didn’t work; a fridge on the inside of the door was used to block it for privacy. Jackie helped slide the fridge across once they entered.

She had planned to leave town on a bus the next day, for a rehab centre in Niagara Falls. She would show everyone, especially her kids, that at 36 she was getting clean for good. She had no lack of motivation. A week earlier, August 12, her oldest child, Ashley, gave birth to her first grandchild. At Big Lisa’s it was all Jackie had wanted to talk about.

Jackie was born November 17, 1964. Her mother was a woman named Christina Isabelle Howard, who everyone called Bella, and who had served in the military. Jackie’s father was abusive to Bella, and so when Jackie was older, she decided to take the last name of her stepfather: McLean. When she was 18, Jackie had Ashley, her first of five children, and they lived with Bella, a strong woman who held the family together.

Jackie and her kids — Ashley, Brad, Candice, Danielle, and Patrick — moved around a lot in the city. For a time, living in the north end, Jackie had them take food to the homeless nearby, even as the family didn’t have much to live on themselves. She had a raw sense of humour, and big dreams, but was a restless spirit, easily bored, and could not hold down a steady job. She also had a rebellious streak; she liked to party, but got in with the wrong crowd. It led to a crack cocaine addiction.

Jackie McLean.
Hamilton Spectator.

In 1994 Bella died from lung cancer. At her request, she was buried in her military uniform with her medals on. Jackie took it very hard, and soon after left her family for a few years, took a bus out west, to Calgary and B.C. Out west Jackie planned to take courses in secretarial work, turn her life around. Her kids stayed with family in Hamilton, including Jackie’s older sister, Cindy. Jackie would phone home, tell the kids she was clean, and was going to come home and be the mother she had always wanted to be, get everyone under one roof.

She returned to Hamilton in 2000, but was denied access to custody of her kids, given her lack of employment and her history of drug abuse. For a time she lived across the street from Ashley, near King and Wentworth. Her daughter would go to her place before school for breakfast. Jackie was determined to be a good mother, and Ashley yearned for it to happen. She knew what her mom was really like; that she was a caring, funny woman, but one who led a double life.

Back in Hamilton for just a few months, it was too easy for Jackie to run into the old crowd and renewed temptation. One night Ashley had a boyfriend over at her mom’s place. To give them some space, Jackie said she’d go across the street to the bar for a drink — just one, she promised. But Jackie met a guy, they smoked up, and she was hooked again, bingeing. She started blowing her money on crack, and turned to prostitution to bankroll the addiction. Ashley worried about her constantly; she believed that crack addiction was often a death sentence.

In August Ashley awaited the birth of her child. She was 18, the same age her mom had been when Ashley had been born. Jackie told her she wanted to be there in the delivery room.

“Mom, if you aren’t clean, you’re not coming for the birth.”

“Of course I will be; I’ll prove it to you. I’m going to be the grandma.”

Ashley had her doubts, but did not voice them. She always let her mom feel that she believed in her. And on the day of the birth, Jackie made it; rode a bus across town to McMaster, a bag of presents on her lap. She was ecstatic in the delivery room and was the first to hold the baby boy, Nathan, even as nurses tried to pry him loose to clean him up.

On August 16 Ashley talked to her on the phone. “How’s my baby doing?” Jackie said.

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Not you, my other baby!”

Ashley wanted her mom to see Nathan one last time before Jackie went away to rehab in Niagara Falls. That afternoon she dropped by unannounced at an apartment downtown where Jackie was living. But she was gone.

“You just missed her,” a friend said.

Ashley rushed out of the apartment, drove around the block, but could not see her mom anywhere.

And then came August 19, when Jackie entered Big Lisa’s, as though needing to take one last dip in the wrong pool before getting clean. That night Jackie McLean was unable to stop it, unable to get off the train that hurtled toward her dark fate in unit 4 of the Sandbar. When it was all over, she lay on the floor of the loft, under a dust-caked fan high up on the cathedral ceiling. Out the window were chimneys, cloaked by the night, and further west, the Royal Connaught, a weathered monument to an era of glamour and chivalry, its neon red sign the backdrop for the final beat of Jackie’s heart.

Underworld

Detective Dave Place awoke to the sound of his pager beeping on the night table. It was Monday, August 20. He looked at the clock: 4:18 a.m. Place grimaced. He tiptoed out of the bedroom, careful not to wake his wife, Joanne, or his young kids, and phoned Central Station. An inspector told him there had been a homicide: female in an apartment above the Sandbar Tavern on King Street East. Sexually assaulted, possible strangulation.

He showered, shaved, and put on a suit. Place — a muscular six foot five, 220 pounds — looked like he could break a man in two, yet he came across as soft-spoken, cerebral, his expression deferential. He had been in homicide for a year; his first case had been that of a man who stabbed his gay lover 18 times, once through the middle of a flaming heart tattoo.

Place arrived at the station to learn that he would be the lead investigator. He spoke with uniformed officers who had been at the scene, and made notes detailing witnesses he needed to check out. An officer handed him three bags of shoes taken from people who had been in the apartment that night.

Place reviewed information on a suspect in custody named Barry Lane. Barry was 29, had a long criminal record, outstanding charges against him in Newfoundland, and a caution in his file that he could be violent. Barry had been inside unit 4 above the Sandbar, where the body was found. His shoes had left bloody footprints on the floor.

At 7:00 a.m. Place went downstairs to the holding cells. Barry was there, looking gaunt. He had teardrop tattoos under one eye and reeked from smoking crack much of the night. He was both angry and paranoid.

“Hey, Barry, how are you doing?” Place asked.

“All right.”

“Can I get you a coffee or something?”

“No.”

“What I’m interested in is what’s happened over at the Sandbar, and what you saw.”

“This is bull!” Barry said, shouting. “I’ve been here four hours, locked up. They took my sneakers. I paid a hundred and fifty bucks for those sneakers yesterday. And they’re gone.”

“They’re not gone. We have them.”

“I want my sneakers back, man. This is, like, weird, man.”

“Well, you have to understand, we’re dealing with a murder, right?”

“I guess so.”

When confronting a suspect, Place never tried to intimidate. His method was to just talk, build rapport, let the truth be revealed. He didn’t even call it an interrogation; called it, rather, an interview. He treated it like a science; studied non-verbal clues, variances in language that tipped off when a suspect was lying.

“Listen, Barry, I’m not here to make your life miserable,” Place said. “I’m a reasonable guy. Okay?”

“I want to go home, man.”

“I’ve got a murder, a dead woman. My understanding is that you went into the scene with another man.”

“I haven’t f––-ing done nothing, man. I just — buddy comes down the stairs, I was in buddy’s apartment, smoking rock. The old guy comes downstairs, says the girl up there is dead. I said you’re full of s––t. So I go upstairs. I saw the girl and I ran down the street. And the first thing I seen was a cop. I flagged a cop in. And I get locked up for five hours for this? ’Cause I flagged the cop in? And he takes my sneakers? That don’t make no sense to me.”

“No, it doesn’t make sense.”

Barry described the victim. Said there was blood on the floor at the top of the stairs where she lay, and that it looked like she had been raped.

“I swear on my daughter and my son’s life that I never touched her.”

“Okay.”

“Never did! I just — I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The inside of the old Sandbar Tavern, which was used as a crack house.
Hamilton Police Service.

Barry was a suspect, but then he had also been the one to notify police on the street. Does the killer do that? And, Place could tell that Barry was offering strong denials, not evasive ones. Forensics could be critical, though; if his DNA was found on the victim, if it showed that he had had sex with her, that would be strong evidence against him. However, Barry readily consented to give a DNA sample.

At 11:00 a.m. Place visited the morgue at Hamilton General Hospital along with detective Mike Thomas, who had been assigned as case manager for the Sandbar murder, in addition to his work overseeing Clark/Del Sordo. The detectives left the hospital with forensic pathologist Dr. Chitra Rao and headed to the crime scene in unit 4.

It was as brutal a crime scene as Place or Thomas had ever witnessed. The picture of what had likely happened was all too clear: a pool of blood was evident on the first floor of the unit, and transfer stains on each of the 16 carpeted stairs up to the loft floor. The killer had dragged her up the stairs after the initial assault. At the top, on the loft floor, lay the victim, and more blood. She had been beaten, and from the torn clothes and body position, it was clear that she had been sexually assaulted. A steel bar with blood on it leaned against the wall.

The detectives spoke with the ident men, Bill Cook and Stan Marek, who had been working the scene, circling blood spatter marks on the walls, measuring spatter. It was a difficult scene to process, with blood from the homicide but also dried blood from other past incidents all over the walls.

Twenty minutes later Place left. He walked down the street to a construction site at the northeast corner of Walnut and King. He noticed loose bars of structural steel. He spoke to the site supervisor. “Last Friday I saw two pieces of steel tubing about 18 to 20 inches long on the west side of the building,” the man told him. “There is only one there now.”

Later, Place received a call from another detective called in to assist — Don Forgan, who, while still the lead on Clark/Del Sordo, had his hand in several other cases now. Forgan passed along an update, that the deceased had been officially identified through fingerprints from a criminal record. Her name was Jacqueline Heather McLean. Forgan added that the cause of death was severe injury due to multiple blows to the head.

The challenge for Place was compiling accurate information from witnesses who had seen Jackie that night, but who had also been smoking crack. Rumours spread through the drug underworld that the victim had been strangled and her body disemboweled. None of that was true.

During the course of more interviews, Place learned that Jackie had talked with a few men at Big Lisa’s in the hours prior to her murder, and that a couple of these men had argued with her, accused her of shortchanging them on crack she had sold. This, he learned, was not entirely new: Jackie paid for crack on occasion through prostitution, and had ripped off clients. Barry was still on his radar as a suspect, but he was not looking strong, given his post-offence conduct. Place learned of another man, named Ken, who had been arguing with Jackie at the bar. He needed to find him. And there had been at least one other man who spoke with Jackie at Big Lisa’s, and who had likely been with her above the Sandbar. Place was missing a key piece of the puzzle. He decided to re-interview some witnesses.