Under the Bridge (41 page)

K
ELLY IN A LOW-CUT
red top revealing the curve of her breasts, Kelly being chased, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly! Kelly, with the cameras all about her. A stranger might have thought she was a movie star, for the cameraman chased her and the man with the microphone called her name. Kelly was in the parking lot, rushing toward her mother's car. Flashes and screams. “Kelly! Killer Kelly!” The look on her face could only be described as “tremendously pissed off.”

Why she wore such a furious look, one could not be sure. Perhaps the chase of the adults bothered her, for they moved so close to her body and their name-calling was so hostile. But, surely, she should have been happy, for on this day, February 4, 2003, Kelly Ellard was freed. The verdict of guilty might never have been uttered. She would have a new trial. She would have another chance.

Kelly had been freed once before. Sixteen months before. Almost immediately after her verdict of guilty, Mark Jette announced he would be filing an appeal, and a judge, saying, “Ms. Ellard poses no threat to
society,” allowed Kelly to go back home to View Royal and live under house arrest until the Supreme Court reached a decision on whether she would receive a new trial. Kelly's family provided a $50,000 surety. Her father mortgaged his home in View Royal.

“I think it's a gross injustice to allow her to go home,” Suman Virk said. “We've got Glowatski's testimony that Kelly committed the murder and she gets all the breaks. It's really unfair. Its also unfair to the young people who testified at Kelly Ellard's trial. The message is that if you have money and get a good lawyer, you get all the good breaks.”

Marissa and Tara were working behind the counter at New York Fries in the mall when they saw Kelly. The mall was alight with Christmas decorations, and past the beaming Santas and cavorting reindeers, the two girls spotted Kelly wandering about with her mother. An emotion close to panic was followed by a dark and volatile outrage.

“How can that be?” Tara wondered. “How can she be walking around a mall? It made me feel that everything I testified to in court, and giving a police statement, was a waste of time because this girl is walking around Christmas shopping. Me and Marissa were freaking out. I went and told the security ladies. I told them, ‘This girl is here!' And then I felt something on my back. It was Kelly. She bumped into me. I couldn't see her. I just felt this person bumping against my back, and when I turned around, she was walking away.”

•   •   •

Mark Jette spent “many, many” hours on the Factum, the document of appeal. Warren too had tried for an appeal of his conviction, which had been dismissed in 2001. Kelly's appeal was presented before three judges, named Lambert, Rowles, and Donald. Kelly sat in the witness box, seemingly oblivious to or disinterested in Mark Jetté's complex and comprehensive attempt to save her and set her free.

Of the presentation before the Honorable Three, Mark Jette would write:

•   •   •

Judge Donald stood and read his reasons for ordering a new trial: “The Crown's questioning of Kelly Marie Ellard was unfair and improper, in particular the questions like: ‘What reason would these people have to frame you?' Such questions could induce a jury to analyze the case on the reasoning that if an accused cannot say why a witness would give false evidence against her, the witness's testimony may be true. The risk of such a course of reasoning undermines the presumption of innocence and the doctrine of reasonable doubt.”

Interesting was the subtle denunciation of the youth of View Royal evident in the judge's statement. “The milieu in which the Crown witnesses moved, and the influences, peer and otherwise, may have affected their testimony.”

“There is no doubt,” Justice Donald wrote, “that most of the witnesses were exposed to rumor, gossip, and news reports surrounding the disappearance and the homicide of the victim.”

The “significant media attention” would be another reason the highest Court ruled in Kelly's favor. “The revulsion of community to the circumstances of the crime was palpable. It was therefore incumbent on the Crown to proceed with special care that the appellant receive a fair trial. Unfortunately, the cross-examination by the Crown on the question of motive crossed the line. The Crown's tactic makes a new trial necessary. For these reasons, I would set aside the guilty verdict and order a new trial.”

Kelly, brought to Vancouver and held in a cell in the bowels of the courthouse, learned of the decision from Mark Jetté. “She wasn't very excited,” he observed, thinking she must be “stunned. She's shut down.”

That evening, a journalist who'd attended all the trials recounted Kelly's apparel to a friend: “She had on this horrible outfit. This red top, it was like lingerie. It showed her entire cleavage. Her breasts were just
hanging out. She's got dyed black hair now. She's way bigger than she was at her trial. She's taller. I couldn't get over that top! It was so low-cut. You couldn't take your eyes off her breasts. She plunks in her car. She tells her mom, ‘Let's get the fuck out of here!' That top she had on, it was all satiny and shimmery. It was so extremely low-cut. She was walking so fast; she was bouncing. She was really mean looking, she just kept glaring at us all, with her dead eyes.”

In View Royal, Tara watched the constant footage of Kelly's walk to her parents' car. The improperness of the outfit did not arouse her wrath. She was upset far more by the decision of the Honorable: “I flipped! I was right pissed off,” she recalls. “My first reaction was, ‘Great. We've got to go through another trial again.' I had thought her first trial was the final chapter for us. And then, to know she's getting another chance….”

•   •   •

Warren received the news, well Warren saw the news, while in Ferndale Institution, a minimum security prison he'd been transferred to in 2003. It was not easy to get into this prison, the Harvard of prisons in a sense—one needed an immaculate record and numerous recommendations and an exhibited degree of responsibility and good intentions.

“Your co-accused is pretty hot,” a fellow inmate told him, as the footage of Kelly's stroll in her red top was played, and replayed, and played once more.

Though he'd taken a million courses in anger management (“It's best, when one is angry, to try and discuss your anger. Tell the other person about it. Have a discussion. ‘I'm feeling very hurt by what you just said.'”) Warren couldn't help but feel something stronger than anger as he watched Kelly walk with her family out to her car, on her way back to her home, back to View Royal.

He had been incarcerated since November 14, 1997. His only time outdoors had been when he was getting into the sheriffs van or working in the garden of the walled and gated grounds.
Everywhere I go, it will be there. I'll never get away from it.
He'd somehow managed to turn the institution into a makeshift academy. “I never did any homework until I got to prison,” he would later recall. He studied with a criminology professor who often came to discuss the justice system with the men inside. He hung out with another young inmate who was studying empire (as
in
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire),
and this young guy gave him a few books to read, one being
The Art of War.
Not that Ferndale was pleasant, for it most surely was a
prison
above all. But sometimes he thought he never would have learned all he was learning if he'd stayed in View Royal. “I probably would have just been some two-bit drug dealer.”

When he heard of Kelly's new chance, he went to his room so he would not have to find himself in a possible confrontation. He expressed his thoughts in a letter:

•   •   •

Kelly was pretty sure that lady took her cell phone.

Her mom had given her the cell phone because she was living in Vancouver now. Big deal. She was still under all these rules, and stupid rules they were. Rules were easy to break, especially if your boyfriend was a
member of the Triad, a hard-core Asian gang, and you'd been inside Wilingdon Detention Center since you were just sixteen. Killer Kelly, what a stupid name. That lady took her cell phone. Danica was just wasted. She'd been throwing back Buds since two in the afternoon. Danica was pretty pregnant, so that was going to be one messed-up baby. That lady stole her phone! The halfway house was run by the Elizabeth Fry Society. She was supposed to learn “life skills.”

“Danica, call that lady over here. She stole my fucking phone!”

Danica screamed, “Hey lady!”

Danica's hair was black, little pixie bangs, and she wasn't even at the Elizabeth Fry Society. Kelly met her one day on the street, and Danica was just hanging about, the way she and Nevada and Josephine used to hang about Marton Place hoping to get some weed or attention from Colin Jones. She and Danica would just wander over to this park and drink some beer and hope a cute guy would walk by, even though Kelly already had a boyfriend in the Triad. Do you know what that is? The Asian mob! Don't fuck with me. Nobody better even try.

Her bail conditions said she shouldn't be drinking beer in a public park at 2:30 in the afternoon. Life skills. She didn't even know what that shit was all about. Her mom gave her the phone just in case she ever got lonely or needed to talk or had some kind of emergency.

The lady came over.

“What's your name?” Danica asked.

“June.”

“June, sit down and have a beer.”

June sat down. She was fifty-eight.

“Hey, lady. Where's the cell phone?”

“I don't know—”

“Listen, lady!” Kelly screamed. “I've done some weird shit.”

“She stole the phone!” Danica screamed, and she hauled off and began to hit June in the face. When the cops found June, her lips were bleeding and there was a bruise on her face.

“These two girls,” June said, and she described them, though she had no idea one of the girls was the notorious Killer Kelly.

Kelly denied taking part in the assault and she denied drinking beer. “They're just trying to get her back in jail,” her mother mused.

The Crown filed a motion for Kelly's bail on the murder charge to be
revoked, and thus Kelly found herself before Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm of the Supreme Court, the same judge who had relaxed her bail conditions two months before, releasing her from house arrest so she could look for a job.

How many courtrooms had she been in? How many judges had she stood before? She might have counted as she waited for the judge to announce his decision. Her fingers moved through her hair, black with red streaks, and she clenched her palms and did not turn to look at her mother. She was dressed as so many girls dressed, in cargo pants and a loose sweatshirt. Judge Dohm revoked her bail and ordered Kelly back into custody. She would have to stay in jail now for at least four months, until her second murder trial in June. After that trial, she would face an assault trial for the incident in the park. Another trial, another courtroom.

For now, she was back on television and on the front pages of newspapers. Many were surprised to discover that she'd been out of jail for months, no longer under house arrest. In View Royal, people would shake their heads and say their banker or their Realtor had told them they'd heard Kelly was a vicious child who decapitated her Barbie dolls. A friend of a cousin of a friend said they'd heard that when Kelly went to her mothers wedding to George Pakos, the soccer star, she signed the guest book “Jeffrey Dahmer.”

Kelly's mother bristled when she heard such tales. “It's all false,” she said. Asked what Kelly was really like as a child, she said, “Kelly rode horses. She was a Brownie. She wasn't an abused child. We're honest, hard-working parents. And Kelly was just like every child. She had curfews. She came home on time. She never defied us.

“Before all this happened, she was just a regular girl.”