Under the Bridge (28 page)

“Why'd they kill her?”

Don Morrison did not reply, for such details were not to be revealed to the media. He didn't even recognize most of the crowd. He heard foreign accents; he saw only one local reporter looking rather perturbed by the presence of so many pushy interlopers.

“Why'd they kill her?” the crowd screamed, but Don Morrison turned and went inside.

I've prosecuted many more horrible crimes than this one, Don Morrison thought, and there have never been so many reporters. What was the big deal here? He'd prosecuted the “ice queen” case in which a young girl stabbed her boyfriend's mother to death, and there'd only been the few regular crime reporters in the courthouse for that one. He hadn't even recognized half those folks swarming him: the Asian lady with stiletto heels. Who was she? The vicious-looking lady with too much blush, in a black silk suit—never seen her before. He even thought he'd glimpsed the letters CNN on one of the cameras, but there was no way that could possibly be. Then he remembered. APEC. The prime ministers of Canada and Japan, the presidents of the United States and elsewhere
were all in Vancouver. The reporters must have caught wind of the Virk story and come hopping over on the helijet. They were probably bored out of their minds hearing about the near collapse of Yamiachi Securities and South Korea asking the IMF for a $20 billion bailout package. Here was something a little juicier, a little sexier, a little more human interest. Grisly Slaying of Girl, 14, Startles Small Town. Brutal Murder in Beautiful British Columbia. The Schoolgirl Killers. She Thought They Were Her Friends, But They Killed Her. Lonely Misfit Attacked by Female Gang. Or the headline might merely be the question they had screamed at him, the question to which he had given no answer. Why'd they kill her? Why did Reena Virk die?

In the Major Crimes office, Don Morrison found a stack of messages from reporters and flipped through the pink notepad, still surprised.

“Did you see the circus out there?” he asked his secretary.

“You're loving this,” Stan Lowe teased, wandering into the office, still dressed in the black gown all lawyers wear in Canada's courtrooms.

“What's the big fascination?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's the kids killing kids angle.”

“It's APEC,” Don Morrison said. “APEC must have been really boring.”

If he'd talked more to the media, he might have told his view: that this case was about
peer pressure
and the values of a
particular
group of kids. Bullying was a school district problem, and maybe
parents
should be a little more concerned. But from a legal point of view, the case was rather dull. He liked forensics: the bone in the bathtub, bullet residue on the steering wheel. In the courtroom, he could present elaborate but clear charts to the jury outlining the intricacies of the forensic case. But this case lacked any such fascinating elements. His first priority would be to make sure Ellard and Glowatski would be tried not as youths, but as adults in the Supreme Court. He could hear himself before the judge: “Due to the seriousness of the offense … the viciousness of the crime….” With such public attention, he didn't foresee a problem in having the accused murderers tried as adults.

As for the six girls, they were to be charged instead with aggravated assault, not murder. He'd tried to make this clear to the media. There were two separate incidents here: an assault under the bridge and then a murder. But by now, it seemed the public wrongly believed that all eight
kids had killed Reena Virk under the bridge. Oh well, soon enough the truth of the narrative would be public knowledge, probably when the assault trial of the six girls took place. Until then, he wasn't going to talk to the media about anything. The media weren't really his concern.

“This file is going to be huge,” Stan Lowe said. “You've got eight accused. You're looking at a massive investigation.”

“I know,” Don Morrison said. “We've got the dream team on it, Bond, Brown, and Poulton. And there are
thirty
investigators working on the file. They're executing search warrants right now.” He thought as well that the Dive Unit should go back into the Gorge. There might still be a weapon, some real evidence. Maybe one of these kids would have blood from the victim on his or her clothes. So far, the strongest bit of evidence they had was Billy, the boy who'd seen Kelly Ellard on the evening of the murder. The kid was reliable and sober. That was some solid, eyewitness evidence. Hopefully, more kids would come forward who had seen both Glowatski and Ellard right after the drowning.

“What was it? Some kind of thrill kill for the two of them? Was it a ‘kick' kind of thing?” Stan Lowe mused.

“Ellard's got Adrian Brooks,” Don said, pondering the significance of the girls defender.

Don Morrison, like most everyone in the chummy legal community, would speak reverentially of the man. “I have the utmost respect for Adrian Brooks,” those who wore black gowns would say. Brooks, as a young man, had learned his craft under the tutelage of two of Canada's most famous lawyers, Eddie Greenspan and Clayton Ruby. He was a worthy adversary, Don believed, and he enjoyed courtroom battles with the man, who had vast knowledge of the intricacies of reasonable doubt and evidence, and an intellect, Don believed, on par with his own.

His secretary came rushing in then, her face rather flushed.

“My mother just phoned. She saw you on CNN! And there's a reporter on the phone. From
GQ.
He's coming to Victoria and wants to set up a time to speak to you.”

“Take a message,” Don said, and he looked at Stan, and shook his head.

“APEC must have been really boring this year,” he said again, for this seemed the only explanation for a bunch of Americans trying to find out about the secret story behind a young girl's death.

*

The two men spent the afternoon reading through the thick file of transcribed interviews. They read of Polo Sport and Calvin Klein, of the smoke pit and the stolen phone book, of stomachaches and a rap song and a boy named Jack Batley and jealousy and beauty and longings and gossip and tears.

While some prosecutors believe their role is merely to “present the evidence,” Don Morrison saw each trial as the presentation of “a morality drama.” You need drama in the courtroom, he'd say, to reinforce the morality of society. A trial then, like a drama, needed both characters and themes, and above all, a clear narrative. The essence of the case needed to be conveyed in a phrase both concise and evocative.

The two Crown prosecutors would later not recall who exactly coined the phrase, only that they had come up with a rather haunting choice. On the bridge, three went over, two came back. Perfect, Don Morrison thought, and with this the men now had the linchpin of their strategy.

Three went over. Two came back.

I
N THREE TEAMS OF FOUR,
the men entered the bedrooms of the teenage girls. They were armed with search warrants to allow them entry into this most private realm.

Sergeant Bond, together with Sergeant Kroeker and two members of the Ident team, drove to the home of Kelly Ellard's father. Her father was unsurprised by their appearance at 8:15 in the morning. “Adrian Brooks said you'd be coming,” he said gruffly. He believed quite fervently that his little girl had been wrongly accused, and the police seemed to him like misguided interlopers. He handed them a paper bag full of Kelly's clothes. John Bond looked into the bag. He wanted to collect the Calvin Klein jacket, for Warren had told him this was the jacket Kelly wore as she waded into the water with murder on her mind, but the Calvin Klein jacket was not in the bag of clothes Kelly's father had prepared.

Twenty minutes later, while searching through a closet near the laundry room, Sergeant Kroeker, in this place of domestic normalcy, attained the first piece of possible proof: the Calvin Klein jacket with some telltale marks. On the sleeves there was sand and even small pieces of seashells. And there were white stains as if the jacket had been immersed in saltwater. He handed the jacket to his partner, with his eyebrow raised. Something real. At last. When the men touched the jacket, they could smell the tart scent of saltwater stronger than the faint fragrance of a soft lilac perfume.

Other men moved into the bedrooms of the young girls and searched uneasily in the piles of denim skirts and white bras. Surely they had never done this before, rifled through the possessions that signified innocence. The men touched and took Willow's diary. The men touched and took Maya's pillowcase. “A small drop of a dark foreign substance is evident on the pillow case,” the men would later note, explaining why they removed it from the girls bed.

The men took photographs, capturing the bedrooms. On the walls, there was no evidence of a criminal lifestyle, only photographs of cherished best friends and adored heartthrobs. Suntanned girls laughing on the beaches of Hawaii. Posters of rainbows and Snoop Dogg and Michael Jordan. Yearbooks inscribed with promises. “I'll love you forever, Maya.” “You're awesome, Willow.” “Let's party together this summer.”

The men took away and marked hoodies and black leather purses. In Laila's basement bedroom, they seized a pair of Tommy Hilfiger jeans, for “there appear to be blood drops on the thigh.”

Warren's paltry duffel bag was now less a totem of an unstable life and more a source of potential evidence. Bruce Brown wrote that Warren's belongings consisted of “some CDs, some clothes in the dresser, and three pairs of white jeans.” He seized the white jeans and Warren's Crip Mafia Cartel baseball cap, which sat atop a speaker.

After the searches were completed, the seized items would be driven by Scott Green to a forensic lab in Vancouver. There, they would be dusted and coded and analyzed. Bullets and machetes and syringes and shotguns were the usual telling tableaux in the forensic lab, but now the gowned experts waded through a very modern and ordinary collection. With gloves and microscopes, they conducted tests on black high heels and Club Monaco sweatshirts, on a Guess handbag and Nike sneakers
and a tube of Nivea cream. The evidence in the Virk file seemed less like evidence in a homicide investigation and more like the purchases from a particularly bountiful shopping trip at the seemingly wholesome environs of a suburban shopping mall.

On the day of the searches, Frances Olsen, the principal of Shoreline, contacted Bruce Brown to express her concern that there might be something connected to the murder in the high school hallways. “And maybe,” she said, anxiously, “there is something in the lockers that could jeopardize the safety and security of the school or other students.”

“I have the authority to open the lockers at any time,” she told Bruce Brown, “and I think I'll do it this evening. Can you be here?”

In this way, he found himself in the halls of a high school at 6:45. Principal Olsen touched the locks. She said, “Due to the nature of this offense, I feel this is….”

“It's fine,” he reassured her, and her hands trembled, as if anticipating a dagger to emerge.

“This is Kelly Ellard's locker,” she said, as she turned the silver wheel on locker 120.

The seasoned and very proud police officer found himself staring at a piece of adolescent artwork. Kelly had drawn the scene of the murder of a police officer. Beside a bank, a man in gangster gear (pin-striped vest and black armband, tilted fedora) aimed a black gun at a cop. Bullets flew toward his chest, drops of blood rose from his heart. On his hips, handcuffs dangled, unused. From his mouth, the words he said were, “Oink. Oink. Squeal. Squeal.” On the street by a fire hydrant, a disembodied head lay in blood, near a severed hand. Beside the bank, there were drawings of windows with gathered curtains.

“I think I'll take this,” he said to Frances Olsen.

In Mayas locker, there was nothing of evidentiary value, nothing to threaten the students, as she had feared, only another drawing by Kelly, which, as Bruce Brown noted, “shows a stoned-out guy smoking what looks like a marijuana joint.” On a piece of paper, attached to the steel door, he read various writings that were vaguely foreign to him, their meaning unknown.
B.K. 4 Life. Westside Wigger. CMC Crew. Crip. R.I.P. What'z up now Bitch!

In his notebook, he wrote, “I will seize the last paper with the words,
‘Should've never fucked with me,' and the one with, ‘So you wanna be a gangsta.'”

“In a Land Called Funk” was the title of the school essay found in locker 701. Written on July 21, 1997, the “essay” was Warren Glowatski's assignment for English class. In fact, it was not an original piece of prose, but the borrowed lyrics from the song “Ghetto Cartoon” by the rap star Coolio. The song, a revision of childhood cartoon episodes, features Minnie Mouse getting shot down, a crime witnessed by Kermit the Frog, who was too “scared” to testify.