Dearest Reddit,
I have lurked this subreddit for some time now (stalked it, you might say, haha) and I feel that it's an appropriate place to tell this story. It's a rather long one, and before I begin you may wish to make yourself a snack. It's really two stories woven into one; they both fit into the theme of LNM and I can't really tell one without telling the other.
A few disclaimers before we begin: All of the news stories related to the following events have been 404'd (convenient, I know) and the only traces I've been able to find via Google are a memorial to the dead and an outrage surrounding the imprisoned (taxpayers pay for prisoners guitar! Storm and thunder!). As it involves a ward of the Crown, few people care and most have forgotten. I haven't, though, for reasons which I will delve into. All of the names have been changed to protect the innocent, save one, which is a matter of public record anyway.
Trigger warning: rape I apologize profusely for the length, but there is a lot to the story, and it's better to get everything out.
It was early November of 2001. I was in my first year of university, away from home for the first time. It was an uncertain time; we blearily passed through Orientation Week by the skin of our livers and then 9/11 happened on the second day of regular classes. In the wake of the attacks a strange, eerie feeling settled over the city of Brantford, Ontario.
Brantford is a town with a sketchy history. Once in the running to be capital of Canada, the town began to decline after the manufacturing industries began to leave for cheaper venues in the late 1970s. Once a thriving blue-collar hub, by 2001 the city was a wasteland of decaying housing, abandoned industrial brownfields, and the scourge of crack cocaine. The worst part of the entire city was the main downtown street, Colborne St. If you have ever seen the movie
Silent Hill, you've seen Colborne St. The producers of the movie chose that street because it was already a largely abandoned, boarded-up strip. Very little had to be done to get the creepy vibe of the movie in place. The apartments above the closed shops were inhabited by all manner of strange, drugged-out individuals. The boards that covered the shops featured paintings of shadow people living what appeared to be a perfectly normal life. Shadow people waited in lines for a painted cinema; shadow people were lining up at the bank to take ATM lessons; shadow people and their shadow children were checking out a pet shop. Most of the crumbling buildings were owned by one slum lord, who spent most of the early part of the century hiring arsonists to torch his empty buildings.
My friend Andrew was fond of repeating the (I believe apocryphal) tale that a mystic sect of the nearby Six Nations reservation had stood on the centre of downtown Colborne St and laid a curse on the city radiating outward. Right in the midst of this, directly across the street from where the Turtle Clan supposedly laid their curse, Wilfrid Laurier University decided to place the first real residence of their satellite Brantford campus (the school is actually centrally located in Waterloo, ON).
Right from the beginning there were problems with the local wildlife. Crackheads would sometimes accost those who stood outside the residence's plaza for money or cigarettes. (as seen here:
http://brantford.mylaurier.ca/content/documents/Image/Res_life/GRH.jpg - the building was great, a real anomaly, and the dorm rooms were former executive suites, so they were swank). There were three less-savory bars within walking distance of this place, and the patrons of these bars would stumble through, drunk and belligerent. More than one fight occurred between wasted locals and wasted students. Right before this story, a homeless kid of maybe 16 or 17 had taken up sleeping in the unlocked portion of the residence's lobby. It was not an ideal situation for students, to say the least.
My roommate Bob and I lived on the top floor of that building, randomly selected to live together and fast friends in spite of that. A third friend of ours, Lorraine, was a de facto roommate as well; she had been assigned a room of five girls, and it was practically made to be an explosive situation. We would hang out together every night, watch TV, study, smoke copious amounts of weed, and bond over every conversation. On drinking nights we would usually grab the usual crew from our residence and head over to a nearby strip club, Moodys. Keep in mind that none of us went to Moody's for the nudity; the beer was relatively cheap and we were all friends with the DJ there. We called ourselves the Grass Skirt Crew, for reasons I no longer remember.
On this particular night (a Thursday, or so the internet tells me) we went to Moodys and proceeded to invest some time in getting our proverbial drink on. The beer flowed like water and in the course of the night Lorraine wound up talking to a group of randoms at another table. Around midnight these randoms invited us out to a party in the nearby village of Burford. Lorraine accepted but the rest of us declined; Burford is a strange, shadowy place and we didn't stomach going out there. Lorraine is made of wild roots, though; she was honour-student material but had grown up in the wilderness of Scarborough. Her acceptance to university had come shortly after her high school equivalency test, which had followed closely after she beat a charge of assault on a police officer during a cocaine bust. We all assumed that she could handle herself, and bid her goodnight.
Christina, one of our friends whom felt a motherly instinct towards Lorraine, offered to stay up until she came home, just to make sure. Feeling amazingly awake, despite the intake of beer and weed, I offered to stand watch with her. We all agreed it was the best plan and parted ways.
The rest of us returned to the residence, the outside of which was thankfully deserted. The homeless kid stopped us before the locked entrance to the residence and asked us if we had any cigarettes; I gave him one and we went upstairs. Christina and I went into my living room while Bob went to bed. We had an N64 set up and started to continue our playthrough of Ocarina of Time. We soon got bored of this and popped in Goldeneye. We smoked a joint and played through a number of multiplayer matches. Time passed. A lot of time passed. We looked at the clock and it had suddenly become 2:15AM. Startled, Christina wondered aloud what had happened to Lorraine. I assured her that she would probably be home soon, and that we should smoke another joint, and play through some more matches. I reasoned that if she wasn't home by then, we would worry.
My plan came and went; as the clock neared the witching hour Lorraine had still not called, or come home. Reluctantly, I agreed that something had gone wrong and we should go out to look. We took the elevator down and emerged out into the plaza. The homeless kid had vanished off into the night, and we saw that we were the only people on Colborne St. A fog had begun to descend upon the cold early morning; the moon had set and the streetlights offered an odd, chilled illumination that filtered strangely through the thickening mist.
We walked through the downtown, whispering when we needed to talk, moving in silence otherwise. The bars had long ago closed and the drunks had gone to their homes to sleep their way into hangovers. Our footfalls echoed off of blind brick walls as we made our methodical way towards the Grand River, which we agreed would be the limit of our search. There was a bridge, the Lorne Bridge, that crossed the river at the edge of downtown. This bridge was familiar to all of us, as we had to cross it to get to the closest grocery store (a half hour walk away). The area around the bridge was a stepped series of rocks that lead down the the surface of the river; there was also a footbridge and a railbridge nearby and the area was a popular spot for illicit activities. Behind the area was the then-new charity casino that was
also within walking distance of the residence (did I mention the unconventional living situation?). Lorraine had mentioned that the people she was taking off with were stopping by that area to pick up some friends.
Christina and I exhausted our search of the downtown core; from Colborne St. to the park that formed the center of our campus there was not a single soul to be found around at that hour. We swallowed nervously and made our way to the end of our search: Lorne Bridge.
At first glance, as we approached, there was no one. The river ran by with it's rather majestic roar, and it was the loudest sound around. We steeled ourselves and made our way down the stepped rocks towards the path that ran under the bridge. This area, directly under the bridge, was very popular for pot smokers and we thought that, possibly, we might find someone who knew these people and could tell us if they'd seen them, or our friend.
As we set foot on the path I became extremely nervous. We stopped to light cigarettes and I peered into the darkness beneath the bridge with more than a little apprehension. The night was dark and the light disappeared a foot along the path once it crossed under. I felt oddly off-balance, and agitated; I could actually feel the hair raise on the back of my neck. I could feel someone watching us, and although there was no way of proving it one way or another, I knew then that it was a stare that was formed from ill intent. I told Christina that we needed to leave, and she nodded, oddly subdued. We abandoned the idea of looking for her around the waterfront, and decided that the only thing we could do was head back to the residence and wait. We climbed back up the rocks, and I looked back every few steps to make sure that no one was emerging from that unsettling blackness to follow us through the night.
We came back to residence around 4:30 AM. We went up to my room and woke Bob up. He was confused about what we were saying at first but after he became further awake he began to be as worried as we were. He insisted that we escalate the situation up the residence's chain of command; not trusting our own RA, we called the RA of the only other residence at that time, our very good friend Andrew. He arrived at our room half an hour later, his face clearly worried. Andrew had grown up in Brantford and had seen a number of "LNM Moments". He voiced these worries aloud as he rolled up what was, at that point in time, the most ridiculously large joint I had ever seen. We proceeded to smoke this monstrosity and tried to figure out what our next move should be.
It was in the midst of these discussions, just after six in the morning, that Lorraine arrived, slamming through our dorm's door with a noise that startled us all. Her eyes were red, as though she'd been crying, and she stared off slightly to the left, as though she were avoiding our gazes. She sat down, took the remainder of the cannon, and smoked it until the end while telling us what had become of her on that night.
She'd left with the three randoms that she had met at Moody's and gotten into their truck. They had stopped by Lorne Bridge briefly to pick up one other person before they had continued on to the village of Burford. The trip took them around twenty-five minutes or so. They arrived at an old farmhouse on the outskirts of the village, where there was a large party happening. People were drinking outside and talking, the scene was peaceful and would have been instantly recognizable to anyone who'd grown up in rural Ontario. They went into the house and the four men led her to the kitchen.
It was the smell that hit her first. A smell of rich, ripe decay; blood and shit and rotting meat. She wrinkled her nose but saw that there were a number of people standing around in the kitchen who were carrying on as if they smelled nothing. They were drinking normal drinks, bottled domestic beer and sugary coolers and when one of the men offered Lorraine a beer she accepted it. She drank and made some terse conversation; while talking to one of the men from Moody's she noticed a plastic bag sitting on the kitchen counter. Curious, and feeling a steady rise of dread within her, she quickly went over to the counter and looked inside the bag.
Within was a dismembered, rotting cat. It looked as though it had been hacked apart with a large knife.
She stumbled backwards and staggered out into the hallway. She was retching, and everyone in the kitchen ceased their conversations and stared at her as she left quickly. The man she had been talking to swiftly left the kitchen behind her and followed her through the hallway that led outside. Lorraine stopped once she reached the cold air outside of the front door, and sat down heavily on the cracked stone steps. The man sat down beside her and began rubbing her back. He sipped at his beer and told her that it was alright, that it was going to be just fine. He repeated this a few times, rubbing her back and sipping his beer, and she began to calm down slightly.
Without warning he leaned in and began kissing her neck; she squirmed away but he kept on it, turning from kissing to biting. To her horror she realized that he was nearly gnawing on her neck, as though he was pretending to be a vampire. It was at this moment that she pushed him back and bolted from her position. She sprinted down the farmhouse's driveway without looking back, the inarticulate shouts coming from the man spurring her on to record speeds.
She wandered through the quiet, nearly-lightless countryside for three hours, getting lost and then finding her way again, stopping once in a while to hide, and smoke, and ensure that no one was following her. Eventually she came to the outskirts of Brantford; lacking any cash, she couldn't even call a cab, and had to walk through the dead of night in a city where strange fancies strike the people that wander through it's gloomy, silent streets. It was only by the grace of fortune that she encountered no one else.
She finished the joint and went to bed.
The next morning (early afternoon, really), Bob and I awoke to discover that we were out of milk. As this is a necessary ingredient in the making of Kraft Dinner (the student version of army C-Rations) we knew that we would have to go out to get some. We decided that, since we were out of a lot of other staple foods as well, we would take a trip to the grocery store. We wandered out into the weakly warm late autumn and made our way down Colborne towards the river.
As we approached the Lorne Bridge we saw flashing lights. We got closer and realized that there were a number of police cruisers blocking off the area around the bridge. We thought it might have been a car accident until we realized that they were blocking off the paths leading down to the area that lay under the bridge. We stopped to light cigarettes and try to see what was going on, but there wasn't a good angle and the police were insistent about no one getting near. We shrugged and crossed the bridge, unable to satisfy our curiosities. It wasn't until we'd finished shopping and had trundled the heavy cart back to residence that we learned what had happened. By that time the news had spilled out, and it was on everyone's lips.
An early morning walker had discovered the body of a 15-year old girl under the Lorne Bridge. She was later identified as Elisha Mercer, a foster-child (Ward of the Crown) who had been raped and beaten to death in the darkness under that bridge. There was, according to those early gossipers, no indication as to whom might have perpetrated the crime. Christina and I shared a number of low glances, but neither of us said anything. What was there to say?
Later, as November turned to December, we became engaged in studying for exams and preparing essays. We kept to the residence, hanging out and living student life. The homeless kid seemed to have taken up semi-permanent residence in the nooks and crannies around the building. He was reported to security but always seemed to show up despite them. He seemed fairly harmless, so we didn't push the issue too much. He told us that his name was Jake, and he would bum cigarettes off of us more than anything else. He would usually leave us alone otherwise, except to say hello.
One night in early December my friend Joanne, my friend Michelle (who would later become my wife, incidentially) and I took a walk across the downtown towards the other residence, where our friend Andrew was RA. As we walked I realized that Jake was following us at a uncomfortably close distance. I pointed this out to my friends and we began to walk quicker. He picked up his pace as well, and soon we were all walking at a tense pace. We came to the center of the core, the small park that sat in front of the main academic building of the school, and as we turned down the street that led towards the other residence he began to shout.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Wait up! Wait up, I want to show you something!"
None of us wanted to see what he had to show us so we ignored him. He shouted one more time, and then let out a blood-curdling scream. We scattered; Joanne and I ran straight ahead and Michelle took off towards the park. He ignored us and ran after Michelle. As we approached the park I curved out into the street and ran directly at him. This seemed to startle him badly and he turned and ran in the opposite direction. I caught up with Michelle, checked back with Joanne, and we made our shaky way towards the residence.
After that, Jake avoided students. Word went out and the bigger students voiced their disapproval to him. He slunk away and we left for Christmas break. When we returned, he had moved on to other places; we still saw him from time to time, but he seemed to have taken his homeless-teenager act to another part of the downtown.
The last time I saw Jake was in early March, 2002. The warm weather had arrived and we were starting to really explore the city. Bob had borrowed his mother's car for a month and we'd taken to driving out to take in the historical sites around the area (which have their own creepy tales attached to them, I might add). One day, Bob's friend John had come to visit. After having some lunch we decided to drive out into the other end of the city to visit the mall. We were leaving the residence when we found Jake sitting on the steps of the plaza outside, a duffel bag sitting forlornly beside him. He caught eyes with us and ran over to talk to us. We were disturbed by his sudden reappearance but were polite; we engaged in conversation with him and let him talk to us as we made our way down the walkway towards the parking garage that lay behind our residence. We started getting tense when he followed us into the parking garage and kept talking, his speech becoming more and more disjointed. Finally we were at the car and we made it clear to him that we were taking off. He looked around at us, confused, and hefted his duffel bag.
"So, are you going to pop the trunk?" he asked. We stared at him in disbelief. We told him that he was not, in any way, shape, or form, coming with us. We were not letting him get in the car. He began to get angry.
"But you said you'd give me a ride!" he exclaimed, indignant. "I walked all the way up here!" We informed him flatly that we never said any such thing and that he needed to get lost, quickly. When he insisted that he was coming with us, rage amplifying his voice, John (whose father was a local correction's officer), poked him in the chest and threatened to knock out his teeth if he kept bothering us. He swallowed hard, and walked away shaking his head and swearing. We waited until he'd been gone a while before we started the car and left the garage. I never saw Jake again.
Years later (2004 or 2005, my memory grows fuzzy as the ages pass and the news stories that kept it sharp begin to be pruned to save valuable server space) the newspapers reported that the murder of Elisha Mercer had been solved. A Toronto police officer had gone undercover in Brantford and befriended a teenaged suspect (who could not be identified due to the nature of Canada's Young Offenders Act). The suspect had trusted the officer totally and showed him how he had done it and where he had buried Ms. Mercer's clothes after he'd finished raping and brutally murdering her. The confession was had and the young man had been arrested, tried, and convicted. We read it in the local newspaper but, without details, the fact that the murderer had been caught and imprisoned seemed like victory enough.
John came to visit us a week later in our apartment, his usual quiet manner even graver. He'd been kept in the local jail while awaiting trial, and his father had still been a correctional officer at the Brantford lockup at that time. John would go to help his father out at work quite often; he was trying to get a leg up in the same field, and the experience helped greatly. He reported to us that he'd seen the homeless kid, Jake, in the lockup and asked his father what the kid had done. His father seemed disturbed and asked him where he knew the kid from. John explained the story and his father grew silent for a moment before replying that it was Jake that had been charged with, and convicted of, the murder of Elisha Mercer.
It had been Jake who watched as Christina and I stood nearby in the early morning darkness of Lorne Bridge, his victim a cooling corpse beside him.
These are the few remaining articles I can find online to shed some journalistic light on this tale:
http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1881&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
An interesting thing that I never knew about this: apparently the Brantford Police took another CAS crown ward into custody since she was the one who discovered the body on her way to school:
http://fixcas.com/cgi-bin/go.py?2011b.balloons
Her memorial: http://yourlifemoments.ca/sitepages/memoriam.asp?oId=437642
And, the outrage surrounding the "young murderer" and his admittance into a therapy program wherein he was given the wood to craft his own guitar:
http://forums.army.ca/forums/index.php?topic=63762.0
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