Rampage (14 page)

Not long after hearing the confession, Mike Eastham stopped by the little cabin on the river and spoke to Don Gordon, a prison guard, who confirmed that he had encountered Shearing on the day in question. Inside the structure, police discovered the initials
DS+JJ
carved crudely into the wood. Yet David Shearing had never loved Janet Johnson — instead, he had wanted to own her. By repeatedly sexually assaulting her and extinguishing her life, he had ensured that he would be the only man she knew carnally.

One would think that Shearing’s cruel and pathetic behaviour would repel any woman from ever falling in love with him. This was not the case. While exchanging letters with Shearing in prison, a woman named Heather fell for him. Sometime in the vicinity of 1994 they were married, and today she is one of his most vocal supporters: “I have a hard time believing this man could kill a fly. He feels remorse. I’ve watched him cry. This has hurt everyone. The time has come for him to work his way back.”
****

While in prison, Shearing followed in the footsteps of fellow rampage murderers
Marc Lépine
and
Peter John Peters
(Chapter 1), and changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name, Ennis. As of 2012, David and Heather Ennis live in the hope that he will be paroled. None of his six victims were granted a second chance.

Many crimes dubbed spree killings, like those of
Rosaire Bilodeau
and
Robert Poulin
, actually bear a closer resemblance to mass murder, in that they generally end in a public place where the offender decides to make his last stand. They are usually marked by one or more earlier incidences of murder occurring within twenty-four hours of the subsequent massacre, and often directed toward a victim who is related to or knows the perpetrator. “Mass murder with an overture” is perhaps the most fitting designation. Unfortunately, rather than considering the spirit of the killings, many authors and academics focus too strictly on the “single location” criteria associated with mass murder, labelling the likes of Charles Whitman and Seung Hu Cho as spree killers. We’ll take a further look at spree killers in Part C. First, let’s examine the earliest examples of rampage murders in Canadian history.

*
Geographically the area was in the modern province of Alberta, though it was considered part of the North-West Territories until September 1, 1905.

**
Readers of my
Cold North Killers: Canadian Serial Murder
may recall that the use of metal detectors in locating ballistics was first pioneered by detectives from the Winnipeg RCMP during their search for the “Fort Rouge Sex Maniac” Michael Vescio. Though this forensic innovation had occurred as early as 1946, Staff Sergeant Eastham claims in his gripping
The Seventh
Shadow
(upon which most of this research was based) that good-quality metal detectors were still difficult for investigators to obtain in 1982. According to Eastham, if not for the high-profile nature of the Johnson/Bentley murders, he may not have been afforded this luxury at all.

***
Eastham doubts the veracity of such claims, proposing that the gunshots and screams would have caused the girls to react much less passively. He believes that Janet and Karen had seen the entire massacre unfold and probably took off running. Shearing would have chased them through the forest, caught up, and scared them into submitting to his twisted demands.

****
Dialogue used in this case was drawn entirely from Mike Eastham’s
The Seventh Shadow
, as it is assumed to be a true and accurate account of what was said during the investigation and interrogation.

Chapter 3

The First Rampage Killers in Canadian History

Canada’s first two mass murderers emerged within the boundaries of what is now Ontario; the third and fourth surfaced farther east, in the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. All of the perpetrators were first-generation immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, or the United States, and fire was involved to varying degrees in each of their crimes.
Thomas Easby
and
Henry Sovereign
were early examples of Family Annihilators, a subtype of mass murderer we will explore in Chapter 8. Though
Patrick Slavin
also slaughtered an entire family, it was not his own, and he did so purely for material gain.
Alexander Keith Jr.
shared Slavin’s motives, but their methods diverged greatly. Where the working class Slavin used an axe to bludgeon his victims, the privileged Keith relied purely on his intellect, and could not stomach the sight of blood.

Thomas Easby
   
      

“Justice has been done.”

Victims:
5 killed

Duration of rampage:
One day in early December 1828 (mass murder)

Location:
Drummond, Upper Canada (Ontario)

Weapons:
Bludgeoning/suffocation from fire

Father’s Game

Aside from the numerous state-sponsored massacres of Canada’s indigenous population, the nation’s first known mass murder occurred in Drummond, Upper Canada — roughly seventy kilometres southwest of present-day Ottawa. It is prescient that, as with many of our subsequent mass murders, fire was involved and the victims were the killer’s own flesh and blood.

In 1828, Thomas Easby — a former Scottish crofter turned immigrant — and his family inhabited a log house in Lanark County where he farmed his own land. One fateful night in early December, flames consumed the home, taking Thomas’s pregnant wife, Ann, and four of his five children with it. An inquest into the fire determined that the victims had suffocated to death in their sleep. Their remains were laid to rest, and the members of the small rural community did their best to console the gigantic widower and his surviving four-year-old child, Joseph. Everything was wrapped up neatly. The quiet, sober Thomas went back to work, while Joseph was fostered out to the neighbouring Richardsons until his father got back on his feet. Though his foster family had several children, Joseph was withdrawn and preferred to play alone. Reasoning that the boy was probably grieving, Mrs. Richardson allowed him his space, all the time keeping tabs on his emotional well-being. The accounts of what happened next differ. In their
Encyclopedia of Mass Murder
, Lane and Gregg claim that, upon seeing his foster family building a fire, Joseph exclaimed, “That was what Daddy did to Mammy!” A more plausible account comes from local author Susan Code, who writes that Mrs. Richardson observed the boy striking the ground with a stick while reciting the names of his dead brothers and sisters. After several weeks of this strange behaviour, she had asked Joseph if she was allowed to play the game with him, to which the youngster replied that it was his “father’s game” and only he could play it.

Joseph’s actions alerted the Richardsons to the possibility that Thomas Easby may have been responsible for his family’s deaths. They divulged this information to the police, and the Easby bodies were exhumed. Before a second inquest could occur, Thomas admitted murdering his wife and four children to a jailer. Easby was arrested on February 2, 1829. Upon re-examination that same month, indications of bludgeoning were observed on the skulls. By evidence and his own admission, it seemed obvious that Thomas Easby had bashed in his family’s heads and ignited the blaze. When asked why, his manner was aloof and evasive. Though Susan Code has proposed that Easby was a glutton who slaughtered his “bairns” because they were eating his food, in truth, he never provided a motive for his monstrous acts.

The Big Easby

Thomas Easby took rather well to life behind bars, gorging on supplies of pork, flour, and butter shipped in fresh from his farm. His girth grew astronomically to match his status as Perth Jail’s most notorious inmate. The months he spent awaiting his day in court may have been among the happiest of his life.

By the end of his trial in August 1829, the jury deliberated for a matter of minutes before reaching a guilty verdict. Days later, Thomas Easby stepped onto the gallows as angry onlookers jeered at him drunkenly in the hot noon sun. When asked if he had any parting words, Easby simply replied, “Justice has been done.” With that, a hood was placed over his head so that the crowd would be spared the unpleasantness of witnessing his bulging eyes and tongue. The gallows yawned under his colossal weight as Easby slowly strangled to death. His bloated corpse was interred in a local Anglican cemetery, but soon after was dug up and dissected by a Dr. Wilson and his students for medical research. Those expressing outrage at the retail of modern “murderabelia” should note that Easby’s hide was tanned and diced into squares which sold for $2 each. Often these were fashioned into wallets. Juxtaposing this with the controversy over true-crime trading cards, the idea of a moral decline is laughable.

Henry Sovereign
   
      

“I am afraid they have murdered my family.”

Victims:
8 killed

Duration of rampage:
January 23, 1832 (mass murder)

Location:
Waterford, Ontario

Weapons:
Jackknife/bludgeoning

Rain Check on a Stretched Neck

Henry Sovereign, born in 1790, almost never made the history books. Convicted of “knowingly, willfully, and maliciously shooting a horse” in August 1819, the New Jersey–born farmer was sentenced to hang in accordance with the British Criminal Code. However, due to the public outcry over the severity of his punishment, Sovereign was granted clemency by Justice James Buchanan. By 1821, he returned to farming and shingle-making in Windham County in southwestern Ontario, setting up his home on Lot 1 along Concession 5. Judging by the events of January 22, 1832, it would have been better if he had mounted the gallows.

On the dark winter’s morning of January 23, Ephraim Serils responded to an unexpected hammering on his door. He opened it to find his niece Polly’s husband, Henry Sovereign, dripping blood from his arms and chest. The frantic caller explained that two strangers with “blackened faces” had broken into his home, a farm northwest of Waterford, and attacked his family. He had escaped to find help. Arming himself, the relative hurried to the dwelling along with Sovereign and another neighbour. As they approached, Sovereign stopped short in his tracks.

“I am afraid they have murdered my family,” he exclaimed.

About eighty metres from the house, they came across the lifeless bodies of his wife, Polly, and his twelve-year-old son. Sovereign’s seventeen-year-old daughter lay similarly butchered a few metres away, along with two more of his offspring. Entering the house, they found the corpses of two children — the youngest burning in the fireplace. A third was discovered alive but badly wounded, and died soon after. The wailing of two-year-old Anna Sovereign — the lone survivor of the massacre — resounded through the blood-soaked dwelling.

The aptly named Constable John Massacer was summoned to the scene and, deciding to track the killers immediately, began searching the surrounding area with Henry Sovereign. Interestingly, neither of the alleged intruders had left prints in the snow. However, against its unblemished white blanket, a broken knife handle stood in stark contrast. The weapon’s bloodstained blade lay nearby. Upon observing the instrument of murder, Sovereign noted that it had belonged to his son. Something in the bereaved father’s manner stoked Constable Massacer’s suspicions. He was well aware of Sovereign’s reputation for violence when drinking — the alcoholic shingle-maker had abused his wife and children and threatened their lives on several occasions — so he ordered Sovereign to empty his pockets. When the suspect complied, Massacer discovered a jackknife caked in dried blood. Later, a beetle or maul used to bludgeon several family members to death was discovered secreted in a straw and feather mattress. Articles of Henry’s clothing, sullied with blood and brain, were also retrieved from the crime scene. Most tellingly, there were strands of his hair still clenched in Polly’s fist. An examining physician, Dr. John Crouse, determined that Henry Sovereign’s own injuries were superficial and, most likely, self-inflicted. The suspect was placed under arrested and taken to London jail.