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  Distraught, Tim cut class anyway. He did little but feel sorry for himself until noon, when he decided to call an old friend from his old school.

  Betrayed and humiliated by the gorgeous girl at the rich kids’ school, Tim turned to her exact opposite. Widely regarded as the most bad-ass kid at Tim’s old middle school, Kevin Madden was the antithesis of all things Rosedale Heights.

  At a little more than six feet tall and about 250 pounds, 16-year-old Kevin dwarfed almost all of his classmates and teachers. While Tim was astoundingly plain, Kevin was just plain ugly. He had tiny, darting eyes sunk deep in his fleshy face with no discernible eyelids. His chin was severely undersized, making it look like his flabby neck ended at his lower lip. He had a thick, rubbery mouth and the kind of slow-working tongue that would make him sound stupid even if he wasn’t.

  Severe discipline problems had led him to attend 10 different schools despite never having moved. Whenever he got into major trouble, he was usually punished by being kicked out of school. Since it’s against the law for someone his age not to attend school, he was always accepted by another, often less impressive school.

  A classmate at the last of Kevin’s schools, admittedly frightened of him, said to me that Kevin told him he wound up in that school because he had beaten up the principal at his last school. While that claim is almost certainly not true, it was widely believed and helped establish Kevin’s reputation as a hardcore tough guy at his new school. And his size and quick temper gave him instant credibility.

  Kevin was delighted to hear from his old friend. He told Tim that he and Pierre (not his real name) were cutting class and were “partying” at his house. Tim knew Kevin wasn’t allowed to have guests over at his house, but he also knew both of Kevin’s parents worked during the day, so he thought nothing of it. Tim accepted the invitation and hopped on the subway. He took up two seats.

  Before long, Tim arrived at Kevin’s house at 90 Dawes Road in Toronto’s east end. Like much of the city, spiraling housing prices had led to a slow but steady gentrification of the area, but there were still pockets where the original working-class population was intact. Among the teenagers I talked to at the schools Tim, Kevin and Ashley went to, it had a reputation as a tough, racially mixed neighborhood.

  Kevin shared the small, gray semidetached house with his 12-year-old brother Johnathon, his mother Joanne, his stepfather Ralston Champagnie and another family member who can’t be identified. It was a tight fit and tempers sometimes flared in this blended family.

  Particularly, Kevin didn’t always get along well with Ralston. “They had all the typical father-son problems—you know, he was a teenager,” a neighbor who knew the family well told me. “It was worse because Ralston was a stepfather, [and] he tried to move in and put in all this hard discipline, and Kevin didn’t react well to that at all.”

  Kevin and Johnathon’s biological father had split up with their mother on a memorable Christmas Eve about a decade earlier, and Ralston had moved in about four years after that. “And I don’t even know how well the two of them [Ralston and Joanne] got along—they didn’t always seem to,” the neighbor said. “I got the sense Kevin didn’t like the way he treated her . . . those boys were very protective of their mother.”

  She wasn’t the only one I spoke with who questioned Ralston’s ability to keep his anger in check. A former co-worker of his warned me “not to mess around with him,” but declined to elaborate further. Despite his stepfather’s intimidating presence, Kevin had decided to defy him that day and cut class.

  When Tim arrived at 90 Dawes sometime around 12:20, he found Kevin and Pierre upstairs in the dark cell of a bedroom that Kevin shared with Johnathon at the front of the house. They were smoking and playing a video game. Pierre noticed that they had taken the mattress off one of the beds and propped it up to block the room’s only window. Kevin explained that he blocked the window when he didn’t want his stepdad to see what he was doing. Ralston would occasionally drive past the house, Kevin said, to look through the front window and spy on him. They had also taken a television from another family member’s room and put it beside the one that was already there so they could play two games at once.

  Tim had run into Pierre a few times before, but they weren’t exactly buddies. Pierre went to Rosedale Heights with Ashley, though they weren’t friends. They knew each other by sight and by name—pretty well everybody in the school knew who Ashley was—but they didn’t have much in common. Instead, Tim knew Pierre through Kevin. Pierre and Kevin had grown up in the same neighborhood and, although they had taken different academic paths, they remained pretty close. More than a few observers have characterized their relationship as one that featured Kevin as a fearsome and impulsive leader and Pierre as his submissive, admiring follower.

  The boys had grown tired of the video game—Deathtrap Dungeon, a Dungeons & Dragons knockoff that one reviewer called a “typical hack and slash” game—and had moved downstairs to watch the big TV in the living room. Somehow, Kevin had gotten his hands on a hardcore porn DVD. He played Eat My Pussy, an oral sex-themed compilation film four hours long, but the boys soon lost interest.

  Kevin suggested they drink some of Ralston’s red wine. Tim knew that staying and drinking the wine was a pretty big step to take, one they couldn’t back down from later on. Ralston would obviously see that the wine was missing, and it would be nearly impossible for them to replace it. Although 16-year-old Kevin was big, he was clearly underage; and both Tim and Pierre looked, if anything, younger than their 15 years. The prudent thing to do, he knew, would be to get out of the house before Ralston came home, and let Kevin deal with the aftermath. Tim didn’t get wine very often and was always up for a good drunk.

  Kevin got some wine glasses and filled them for himself and his friends.

  Bored with the DVD, they abandoned the living room. Kevin got an idea. He told Pierre to go get his baseball bat from his room. Kevin wasn’t really into sports, that was more his little brother’s thing, but there were two bats—one wooden and one aluminum—in their room. Pierre gave Kevin the wooden one and kept the aluminum one for himself.

  Because Ralston worked as a chef at Shopsy’s—a popular downtown delicatessen famous for its hot dogs—and at the Air Canada Centre, he was familiar with handling large amounts of food. He liked to buy in bulk at big-box stores and always had a few one-gallon jars of mustard, ketchup or relish sitting around the house.

  Kevin found a mustard jar and placed it on a coffee table in the basement. Pierre handed him the wooden bat and Kevin took a Ruthian swing at the jar. The glass exploded into a billion pieces and mustard flew everywhere, splattering Kevin, Pierre, Tim and most of the room. The boys hooted their approval as Kevin twirled the bat in triumph.

  He felt like raising the stakes. The family had an old TV down the basement. It didn’t have cable, but it was hooked up to an equally ancient VHS player. Kevin pulled the bat back and swung at the screen’s dead center. When the bat hit, the reinforced glass screen shattered into a spider-web pattern with a dull thud. Apparently disappointed by the anticlimactic result, he kept smashing at it until it imploded and smoke started coming out of it.

  Their caution suddenly erased, Pierre and Tim joined in. Emboldened, Kevin looked for something else to smash. In an instant, he found what he wanted to destroy. Ralston had a fondness for Heineken and usually had a cache of empties in the basement. The boys lined a number of the green bottles up on the table and Kevin smashed them one by one.

  Bang! Followed by shouts of “awesome!” Then they lined up another set and, this time, Pierre swung as hard as he could. Pow! It felt very good for these very frustrated and down-on-their-luck young men to exercise their ids in this way. A few more whacks and they were through all the beer bottles. But that wasn’t the end. Encouraged by their own destructive pursuits, the boys went on a small rampage.

  Kevin told his friends that his parents kept money in the drawers of their dresser and the boys imme
diately raced to their bedroom. They emptied the drawers—throwing the contents on the bed and the floor—but didn’t find much money. They did, however, manage to secure some identification and a couple of credit cards. Pierre also found a pair of handcuffs with neon pink fun fur on the bracelets. He twirled them on his index finger and laughed. It didn’t make Kevin like Ralston any better.

  With nothing left to smash, the boys started looking for something else to do. They took the meager amount of money they’d found in the upstairs bedroom and went to a nearby convenience store. Kevin picked the one he knew would sell him cigarettes. They bought smokes and chips and other junk food, then returned to 90 Dawes.

  At 1:31, Tim talked them into calling Ashley. The other boys didn’t want to. Kevin even labeled the idea of calling a girl “gay,” without sensing any irony. But Tim persisted and eventually got his way. He told Kevin that Ashley was really into vampirism, which seemed to change his mind.

  She answered. At first he was a bit abusive to her, asking her crudely sexual questions about her family. She wanted to hang up, but he kept her on the line with an enigmatic boast. “You’re not going to believe this,” he told her. “We’re planning something big—you’ll hear about it on the news.” Intrigued, she asked what he was talking about. Finally feeling a little advantage in their relationship, he shouted: “None of your concern, bitch!”

  Now she was really going to hang up. The only thing that stopped her was call waiting. She excused herself and accepted the other call. It was her dad, checking in on her. Ashley had told him she was under the weather, and he wanted to make sure she was taking care of herself. She assured him she was okay and got rid of him. She realized that Tim’s calling her a “bitch” could be her out, it could be the excuse she needed to finally break it off with him.

  When she got back to Tim, she heard him talking to some other boys. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but could tell they were excited. Her curiosity once again aroused, she asked him what he was talking about. He asked Kevin if it was okay to tell her. Kevin gave him his permission. Tim then detailed a plan in which he, Pierre and Kevin would kill Kevin’s family, steal his parents’ cash and credit cards, use the money to buy weapons and explosives and then bomb malls and highways, killing as many people as possible.

  Ashley was stunned. While she didn’t believe that Tim really killed joggers in the park to suck their blood, she was very concerned by the phone call. Tim was desperate to impress her and capable of just about anything. Ashley had never met Kevin, but she had heard a little about him and knew that he was something of a tough guy, one with little or no feeling for anyone other than himself. She quickly ran through her options. She didn’t want her parents to know she was dating behind their back—especially a guy like Tim—so telling them was out. She didn’t have much respect for them anyway. The cops were an even worse idea. Not only would they ask all kinds of embarrassing questions, but they’d probably end up telling her parents anyway. After all, she was only 14.

  She decided instead to tell her oldest and most trusted friend Heather (not her real name). She dialed *69 on her phone, wrote down Kevin’s number, got dressed and caught a bus for school.

  While Ashley was on her way to school, Ralston got his first break at work. As a chef at Shopsy’s—a restaurant especially popular with commuters and tourists—he was bogged down by the lunch rush until after 2 p.m. But he was very concerned about Kevin. They had had another big fight on the weekend, and Ralston had punished his stepson by revoking his privileges on the family computer. It was a crushing blow. Using the computer was Kevin’s favorite pastime, and since he’d been banned from it, he’d grown more surly and standoffish than ever. Ralston was pretty sure he’d heard Kevin saying something about “skipping off ” (cutting class) on the phone. Eager to find out if Kevin went to school or not, he called home at 2:13. The phone rang and rang, but there was no answer.

  Ashley got to Rosedale Heights at 2:15 and caught Heather on her way out of drama class. Ashley was so obviously distraught that Heather immediately realized she had to calm her down before they could talk. A few friends who also saw how upset Ashley was and were eager to help gathered around as she told her dramatic tale.

  The group decided that, even though Ashley would definitely face punishment from her parents, they had to go to the police to keep anyone from being murdered. In the end, her parents might even be proud of her if she saved lives. But Heather pointed out that the police might not believe the word of a 14-year-old girl. And, even if they did, it was just her word against his. And what if it was all just a big joke or an elaborate stunt to get Ashley interested in Tim again? He had lied to her about killing people before.

  But what made the difference this time, Ashley told her friends, was that the murders were yet to happen and that Tim had identified the victims. If they didn’t end up dead, Tim wouldn’t be able to pretend he was a killer anymore. It just didn’t make sense. And he wasn’t alone; he was with Kevin, some tough guy from the vocational school that Ashley didn’t know, and Pierre.

  “Pierre Pierre?” one of the girls asked in disbelief. They all knew who he was—he went to Rosedale Heights and he was the only Pierre in the school—but none of them thought all that much of him. He was nice enough, but there was nothing special about him.

  “There’s a quick way to see if he’s telling the truth about that,” Heather said. “We’ll find out if Pierre is here [at school today].” But there was a problem with her plan—none of them knew Pierre’s last name. So Heather took Ashley to the library so they could look through a yearbook for him. After they found him, they headed to the office to page him. They hadn’t thought of an excuse, but didn’t really need one. As soon as they asked the school secretary if they could page him, she responded that Pierre hadn’t come to school that day.

  Pierre’s absence added even more credibility to Tim’s claims, and the girls regrouped to form a plan. But the problem remained that they had no evidence other than Ashley’s word. And to make matters worse, she didn’t know Kevin at all, not where he lived or even his last name. But she did, through her use of *69, have his phone number.

  That’s when one of the friends, Lindsay (not her real name) had an idea: Why not call the boys back, ask them about the plan and tape-record the whole thing. She had, she said, tape-recorded a few phone calls before—as a joke, of course—and still had the recorder at home. Heather asked her if they needed anything other than a tape recorder. Lindsay said she guessed not. So they decided to go to Heather’s house—she had a nice new tape recorder, after all—after school and call the boys back.

  One of the girls chickened out at that point, but two more were added, for a total of five.

  While Kevin and his buddies were trashing the house and Ashley was waiting to talk to her friend, Johnathon was just anxious to get out of school. It wasn’t that he didn’t like school; he was just excited about getting out. The same wintry weather that depressed Tim and made Ashley sick delighted Johnathon. The sun had come out that afternoon and he knew that would make the snow that fell the night before turn into packing snow, perfect for a snowball fight.

  The bell rang at 3:20 as usual, but his entire class was required to stay late due to a detention. It wasn’t uncommon for this class to be held back if there was an infraction nobody owned up to (and nobody squealed) and they waited quietly for the time to pass. At 3:30, Johnathon grabbed his bag, shot out of class, ran across the street and grabbed a double handful of snow. Snowball fights are against school rules, so Johnathon and his friends instinctively found each other across the street and were quickly firing snowballs at each other’s heads. They grabbed snow from the ground and scraped it off the hoods of parked cars. They were laughing and having a great time until Jeffrey’s mother stuck her head out their front door and called him in. He was grounded and not allowed to play any more. The irony was that he was grounded for leaving school grounds at recess—he’d gone home, across
the street, to get gloves to be ready for the snowball fight. Jeffrey begged his mom to let him stay in the fight, but she said no. He asked if he could “at least” go over to Johnathon’s house. Normally, Jeffrey was allowed to go to his pal’s house after school, but grounded is grounded, so she said no.

  Johnathon didn’t want his buddy to get in trouble, so he said good-bye to Jeffrey and looked for someone else to hang around with. He was in no hurry to get home.

  After a while, he spotted Jamal (not his real name). Jamal was a few years younger than Johnathon, and Johnathon worried about him. He was a nice kid, but didn’t have many friends and he had to walk home all by himself because his parents and older siblings never seemed to be around. Johnathon liked him and didn’t like the idea of him crossing the busy Danforth all by himself, so he decided to walk him home, even though it was a few blocks out of his way.

  Ashley and the girls raced to Heather’s house. Heather’s mom was already home and the girls blew by her on the way up to Heather’s room. Her mom stopped them and asked what was going on. Heather wouldn’t explain, but told her it was serious. Rather than pry further, she gave them their privacy. But she also assured them she’d be around just in case they needed her.

  Sitting on Heather’s bed, Ashley took Kevin’s number out of her pocket and dialed. One of the girls noticed it was written down in pink highlighter. Lindsay held Heather’s tiny tape recorder up to the phone receiver. It was 4:13 when Kevin answered the phone. Ashley asked for Tim. Kevin put him on. He tried to play it cool.

  Tim: Hey, what’s up?

  Ashley: Not much, what are you guys up to?

  Tim: Nothing. We’re here waiting.

  Ashley: Waiting for what?

  Tim: What do you think?

  Ashley: I don’t know.

  Tim: His family to come home.

  Ashley: Why?

  Tim: ’Cause we’re going to kill them.