Under the Bridge (45 page)

Just then Michelle walked by in her high heels and long black robe. “End the pain,” she said to Catherine. “Please. End the pain!”

The reporters were all on their phones, dictating tomorrow's headline:
ELLARD: I AM NOT A MONSTER.

After the break, Bob Claus again asked for a mistrial, citing a newspaper article about his prior request for a mistrial. “It's irresponsible,” he pleaded. “I renew my application for a mistrial.”

“Motion denied!” Judge Selwyn Romilly boomed. “Get the jury in here!”

“You were doing a lot of bragging about killing Reena Virk. Was that week your moment of glory?”

“No.”

From then on, Kelly's voice stayed monotone, but she began to repeat the same sentence over and over, like a mantra, and with the repetition, she seemed closer to unhinged.

“Let's talk about Jodene. She says you told her you put your foot on Reena's head.”

“Jodene is lying,” Kelly intoned. “I did not kill Reena Virk. I did not say any of those things. Keep going.”

“Can you listen to the question?”

“I did not kill Reena Virk,” she said, now robotically.

“And you held Reena's head under water and that's how she sucked up those pebbles.”

“I did not kill Reena Virk.”

“You were carried away with your own self-importance. You told Dimitri you finished her off.”

“I did not kill Reena Virk.”

“You told Lily you held Reena's head under water for five minutes.”

“Lily's a liar. She's not trustworthy. I would not have said such a thing!”

With this, she closed her eyes, folded her arms, and began to rock back and forth, up and down.

“Do you remember what Reena was wearing?”

“I did not cross the bridge.”

“You and Warren continued to beat on her.”

“I did not cross the bridge.”

“Kicking, stomping, jumping all over her.”

“I did not cross the bridge. I did not kill Reena Virk.”

This went on for a while. Every statement met with: “I did not cross the bridge.”

Kelly said this twenty-three times.

I did not cross the bridge. I did not cross the bridge. I did not cross the bridge.

She began to cry.

“Warren and you took Reena to the water's edge and then you dragged Reena all the way in.”

“I did not cross the bridge.”

“She started struggling when she was in the water! There was a bit of movement.”

“I wouldn't know. I did not cross the bridge.”

“So you karate chopped her to the throat. Do you remember that? And then you held her head under water.”

“I was a fifteen-year-old girl! I'm not a monster! I did not cross the bridge!”

“Well,” Catherine said, and she moved forward, and she put her finger directly in front of Kelly's face. “Then why does your jacket have saltwater on it?”

“There could be a number of reasons.” She became defiant again. “I put the jacket on the ground at the beach. I often did that.”

Catherine Murray then pulled the jacket out of a bag, and walked over to Kelly, and placed the jacket right before her, with her hands on the white lines of salt.

“You were wearing this jacket the night you killed Reena Virk.”

“You can stop!” Kelly screamed at her. “You've got what you wanted. I'm obviously going to be convicted. My life is over.” She put her head in her hands, and began sobbing, and for several seconds, short seconds, there was only the sound of her tears and ragged breath.

“This jacket has salt all over it,” Catherine said, holding the jacket up toward the jury. “This jacket tells the story, doesn't it?”

“I didn't kill Reena Virk,” Kelly said one last time, while covering her face with her hands.

“This jacket tells the story,” Catherine repeated once more, and then she left the girl alone at last, and the girl kept her head in her hands.

In his office, Andy Ivens of the
Vancouver Province
reworked his story. “Kelly Ellard predicted her own demise,” he'd written, but then his editors called and said they weren't so sure about the word
demise.

He looked in the thesaurus. “Perdition, downfall, ruination. Hey,” he said to his editor, “how about predicted her own Waterloo? Predicted her own perdition? Too highbrow. Yeah, I agree. Okay,
downfall,
then. Use
downfall.”

Reporters swarmed Catherine Murray, begging for an interview.

“Talk to Jeni,” she told them. “She's the brains behind the operation.”

To the reporters, Suman said, “Kelly seems to be a very sad and frustrated person. She doesn't seem to have any hope for herself. I see her as a very pitiable person.”

Manjit was more succinct. “She's just incorrigible,” he declared.

•   •   •

What was taking the jury so long? For three days they'd been deliberating. Catherine and Jeni went shopping, and Jeni bought only practical clothes and Catherine teased her that she should get married in a gown of khaki.

As the hours went on and on, Catherine kept thinking to herself,
I pushed Kelly too hard. I should have done, what should I have done, what could I have done differently?

More hours went by. The weekend passed.

“This is trial by exhaustion,” Bob Claus declared. “I ask for a mistrial.”

The atmosphere in the courthouse in which the families and media sat around from early morning to 10:00
P.M.,
waiting, began to resemble the sudden bonding of those aboard a sinking ship. Suman Virk brought in doughnuts and offered them about. Newspapers were shared. Mrs. Virk asked Kelly's mother if she was “hanging in there,” and soon the two women began to talk.

“I don't know what happened that night,” Suman said. “It was like evil took over everyone.”

“Maybe it was just peer pressure,” Susan said, “just teenagers. …” Her voice trailed off, and she began to cry. Her husband wore a blue stone around his neck, a good luck charm he'd picked up in his days as a soccer star, on tour in Florence. “I don't think it's doing me much good,” he remarked.

After five days of deliberations, the jury finally announced, on a Sunday afternoon, that they'd reached a decision. Reena's mother and Kelly's mother had been talking privately in a corner when they heard the news. The two women looked at each other and hugged suddenly.

“We are unable to reach a unanimous decision,” the jury wrote. “Eleven are for conviction. One is not. The past days have been extremely difficult and emotionally devastating for all of us. We have exhausted all avenues of deliberation and have reached an impasse that cannot be resolved by ANY further discussions.”

“I have no choice but to declare a mistrial,” the judge said, with a resigned sigh.

“This is unbelievable,” Suman said outside court. “I can't believe this is happening. I was prepared for guilty or not guilty, but this never entered my head.”

Catherine Murray, surrounded by cameras, tried to pull Jeni up to the literal spotlight with her, but Jeni dashed away.

“The Crown is prepared for a third trial,” Catherine announced, though she had not heard whether this was the case. “One juror was thinking with their emotions rather than their head. This was one juror.
One
juror.”

“Are you prepared to put all those witnesses through another trial?” “It's not a case of putting anybody through anything. This was a brutal murder, a brutal, brutal murder. These witnesses, they are never going to forget,” she said. “They'll never forget.”

T
HE MISTRIAL IS AN OUTRAGE,”
declared Nancy Upton of West Vancouver. “Why do we let twelve people with no experience make life-changing decisions? Now, all this time and money and stress must be repeated, and Kelly Ellard must be held accountable for her actions.”

This sentiment—the mistrial is an
outrage—
was voiced by many in coffee shops, taverns, and on talk-radio shows. (“All you need to do is take one look at her to know she's pure evil,” a caller said on Victoria's C-FAX radio.) The mystery of the holdout juror, dubbed the “rogue juror” by the media, also intrigued many. Who was this person? What had been his or her reason for believing, clearly, very strongly that Kelly should be found not guilty? The answer would never be known, for in Canada, jurors are strictly forbidden by law to discuss deliberations.

Nonetheless, outrage seemed even to rise to the highest levels of power. Shortly after the mistrial was declared, the province's attorney general mused publicly about national reforms to the jury system: “We should perhaps reduce the number of jurors from twelve to eight” or maybe remove the “requirement of unanimity.” “I think we've got a situation where we've got to look at reform,” he offered, amid the public outcry over the mistrial.

It might have seemed an unlikely turn of events—a single schoolgirl creating talk of legal reform. Yet Kelly, on the advice of her lawyers, offered no opinion on her many trials and the lack of a verdict. Had she answered questions, she might have screamed to her interrogators, as she had screamed on the night of her arrest: “Quit asking me questions! I can't take it anymore. I just want to go home. You can make me stay in my room for the rest of my life.”

𔄼   •   •

After a brief vacation to California, Catherine Murray returned to her office in the Victoria courthouse, across from the Cherry Bank Inn. The boxes of transcripts, police reports, and witness statements cluttered the hallways and were stacked to the ceiling. Now they would have to be reopened, reread, rather than sealed up and sent to the archives. There would be new transcripts arriving, thousands and thousands of pages, and these voluminous pages, marked Ellard #2, would have to be organized, analyzed, and memorized in preparation for Ellard #3.

Had she been a sigher, she might have sighed. Her cheerful fortitude might have been diminished by the prospect of a return to the prosecution of the girl who had screamed at her, “You're wasting time! You ask too many questions!”

Kelly had a new lawyer, her third prestigious and skilled defender.

Catherine wondered and worried as she faced the precarious mountain of cardboard boxes.
I did the best I could last time,
she thought.
I don't know if I can do it any better this time.

The youth in View Royal were approaching adulthood. (“I hope now that they've grown up, they'll start telling the truth,” Kelly's mom said to a reporter.) New witnesses might be called who were not battlescarred and exhausted by the often ruthless pummeling they withstood on the witness stand. There were kids who had told the police about the braggings of Kelly Ellard, kids who spoke with her on the night of the Russian satellite. There were her confidantes and girls who'd joined her in the first beating—girls like Laila and Eve and Josephine. Yet, these potential witnesses were perhaps aware of the cost of memory, and so they refused to speak out in the courtroom, telling the Crown they just couldn't, or wouldn't, for yes, they'd told the police this and that, but now they'd forgotten. It was so long ago. They'd blocked out the evil memory. Of a girl in wet pants, a girl confessing murder, they couldn't, so sorry, too bad, unfortunately, just could not remember anymore, not at all.

And so, drafting her trial plan, Catherine Murray would ask for assistance from the same witnesses: Dusty, Billy, Lily, Marissa, Tara, Maya, Warren, and others who did not run from memory and were willing to tell what they knew about the murder of Reena Virk. It seemed unreal to all of them, as if the night continued to linger, to hold them in some kind of fierce embrace. It seemed as if Kelly Ellard, once a girl, now possessed
an almost superhuman power to remain unvanquished and triumphant. But they told Catherine, with sighs of resignation, that, yes, they would testify once again.

These witnesses are so courageous,
she thought, knowing they were reluctant, frightened, weary, busy. She held no cynicism or uncertainty when it came to the moral goodness of the youth of View Royal.
These witnesses,
she thought, with her cheer returning,
are just amazing.

W
ARREN SAW,
on the pale blue envelope, a name in a familiar girlish scrawl, two words in the top left corner, two words that still caused his heart to catch and rise like a tuned guitar string:
Syreeta Hartley.

More than two years had passed since he'd heard from Syreeta. He could still remember, with a faint sting, the voice of her stepfather informing him that it would be best if he called the home no more.

“I'm really sorry for testifying against you,” Syreeta wrote from a new address, for she and her mother no longer lived in View Royal.

She told him she was studying to be a legal assistant, and hoped to one day do something in the legal field, though exactly what, she wasn't quite sure. “I don't want to defend the guilty and prosecute the innocent.” She said her mother said hello and wished him well. How are you doing? she asked. How are you?

She said only one thing about the night of the Russian satellite. “Life would have been different if I'd let you walk me home.”

“Don't apologize for anything,” he wrote back, for he was, in fact, rather stunned by her apology. (“I would have understood if she told me she hated me.”) He told her about his work with restorative justice and alternative-to-violence programs, how he was busy organizing meetings and working on a documentary. He told her he was going up for parole soon, and he thought maybe he'd get day parole soon, and if so, he'd move to a halfway house in Cowichan.