MONTREAL – The father of a boy sexually assaulted and murdered by a man on an extended pass from prison disrupted Superior Court Monday with an extended rant about injustice.
André Livernoche, whose son Alexandre, 13, was murdered in August, 2000, said there was no point in going through a trial to claim damages from the Quebec government.
"You are responsible," yelled Livernoche, jabbing a shaking finger at government lawyers. "You cause the death. It's your fault."
Livernoche had no lawyer with him but was accompanied by a woman who described herself as an investigator.
Justice Pepita Capriolo tried to calm the man, saying she had sympathy for the pain he felt.
Alexandre disappeared in Sorel, northeast of Montreal in August 2000, after a day of picking cucumbers. Mario Bastien, who was convicted of first-degree murder in 2001, enticed him with the promise of odd jobs.
Livernoche is demanding $2.5 million but refuses to present evidence or call witnesses.
Three weeks after the slaying, then-public security minister Serge Ménard said Bastien shouldn't have been let out.
She had to warn him several times not to approach the government lawyers.
Livernoche then stormed out of the courtroom.
The judge suspended the hearing and said she'd try to fix another date for the case. She said Livernoche should have a lawyer.
Aside from being a major communication and information searching tool, the Internet is often portrayed in the media as a deep dark space where the danger is lurking around like a giant spider spreading its net to elude, seduce and corrupt children and defraud and mislead adults. This reputation in part is well deserved. The censure of the Internet content and transactions even when existent is weak and slow to keep up with exponentially multiplying web pages.
The underbelly of the human expression found its way to the Internet where a lot of dark and heinous thoughts and acts are brewing ready to explode into the real world. Numerous assaulters declared their intentions on Internet before embarking on a shooting rampage. One such sombre personality found the way to expurgate his hatred and frustration on the infamous website Vampirefreaks.com and then opened a gunfire at the Dawson College on September 13, 2006 afternoon. Twenty innocent people were shot, one death reported; but the bullets didn’t just stop there - they have penetrated and shattered many people’s lives, hopes, dreams and sense of security.
QC starts $6M econ fraud squad
Montreal Gazette
MONTREAL -- A new, 11-member specialized squad will be assembled to investigate financial crime, the Quebec government announced Sunday.
Justice Minister Kathleen Weil, Public Security Minister Jacques Dupuis and Finance Minister Raymond Bachand announced $6 million worth of measures to fight financial crimes during a press conference at Sûreté du Québec headquarters.
Quebec will also ask for amendments to the federal Criminal code that would see financial fraudsters spend longer terms behind bars and ensure that criminals are forced to reimburse the proceeds of their crimes.
CANAAN, Vt. — Nobody missed her.
No grieving mother or father. No anguished sibling or grandparent ever came forward to claim her remains. Even the townspeople in this tiny border community forgot her.
To the Vermont State Police, she was simply Canaan Jane Doe, a young woman whose badly decomposed body was found in a Canaan ravine in 1988. She had lain there for nearly a year.
But one detective didn't forget her. Now she has an identity and a history. She was Chantal Sauriol, a 16-year-old runaway who spent her adolescence on the streets of Montreal, sleeping between parked cars or under bridges, doing drugs and selling her body.
Police still don't know who killed her, or how she ended up dead in a ravine off Route 114 a few hundred yards from the Canadian border. But because of the clues left by her life, her violent end seemed inevitable.
The clues lead to Montreal's Ste. Catherine Street, a seedy drug supermarket where teenage prostitutes beckon from street corners and sex shows fill the stores. Where children sleep on park benches and back alleys they regard as homes. Where hunger's a given, and violence, hard drugs and disease are the stuff of everyday life.
This was Chantal's world.
Chantal had long planned on running away from the Maison Notre Dame youth detention center in the Montreal suburb of Laval. She wanted to escape the rules and restrictions and ultimately escape Montreal.
On a Saturday in May 1987, she finally got her chance. She slipped away during a group outing and never came back.
"The last time I was with her before she ran, she was all nervous, paranoid, a package of nerves," said a friend who was with Chantal in the center and the streets. She spoke to a reporter on condition her real name not be published. Instead, she asked to be called "Chat," French for cat.
Now a 26-year-old mother of three, Chat only learned last month that the remains found in the ravine were those of her friend.
"At first I was shocked. Then I cried," said Chat, speaking through an interpreter. She and Chantal were like sisters, she said. "Everything she did, I did."
They had known each other on the streets and at the youth center, a converted convent that shelters young runaways from Quebec. A way station for troubled children on the road to adulthood, it isn't a jail. Only one locked door separates the children from the streets.
In the girls' section, each resident is given a small cubicle to decorate as she wants. Some are plastered with sexually provocative ads for jeans or rock stars such as Toni Braxton. Others are decorated with colorful drawings of Mickey Mouse.
When it comes to solving murders, the Vermont State Police has one of the highest success rates in the nation. But before police could begin their search for Canaan Jane Doe's killer, they had to find out who she was.
They started with a skull, found by a fisherman on May 15, 1988, a day short of a year after Chantal walked away from the outing. The skull, found near Leach Stream just off Route 114, told police how she died: Her head had been smashed repeatedly with a blunt object.
Investigators spent hours on their hands and knees with garden trowels and rakes, in a grid laid out for them by forensic anthropologists.
The mosquitoes were terrible.
They didn't find all the pieces, just enough for the medical examiner to determine they belonged to a woman in her late teens or early 20s, about 5 feet 2, with light hair and a pronounced overbite. At the time they estimated the remains could have been there up to six years.
They made a composite of her face and posted the case on the National Crime Information Center computer. They filed a similar request with the Canadian Royal Mounted Police and scoured the area for someone who might know where Canaan Jane Doe had come from.
Canaan is located where Vermont, New Hampshire and Quebec come together. It's Vermont's most remote community, but it's on the main route between Montreal and the Maine coast, a popular destination for Canadian tourists.
It might be small, but Canaan has its intrigue. Countless small paths lead smugglers across the border. Cigarettes and liquor go north into Canada. People, for the most part, head south.
About two miles east of the spot where Chantal's skull was discovered is Wallace Pond, a small lake that straddles the border. The Canadian side is lined with summer camps.
Experts determined that Canaan Jane Doe had been killed during the warm months, probably when Wallace Pond buzzed with activity.
The locals knew nothing of the girl.
At the youth center in Laval, workers are saddened but not surprised to learn of Chantal's death.
It's not unique. Several years ago a girl from the center was found shot to death in a nearby park. Her killer was just recently convicted. Last year a girl out on a pass to attend a baptism was killed in a drive-by shooting in Montreal. Her companion had been the target. Chantal was reported missing on May 19, 1987, three days after she disappeared. By that time, she was back on the streets of Montreal.
Her father, Gilles, still lives near Montreal, along with Chantal's brothers and a sister. But Gilles refuses to discuss his dead daughter.
The state police will say little about what they know about Chantal. A photo her family gave police shows a squatting teenager with a round face surrounded by cascading curls. In the photo she expressionlessly holds up a V for victory symbol with her right hand.
Her police file in Canada lists her as an alcoholic and a drug abuser. Police say her mother is dead, but they don't know how old Chantal was when her mother died.
The details of Chantal's life come from Chat. She was with Chantal at Notre Dame and knew of her plans to run away. Chat stayed at the center throughout 1987 and didn't know what Chantal did that summer before she died.
They used to sleep under park benches, bridges, between parked cars, anywhere. When asked how they managed in the winter, she said it was easier than the summer.
"We'd find some rich man with a warm bed," Chat said.
But it was an even darker side of Chantal that probably got her killed, Chat said. Chantal worked as a drug courier for one of Montreal's notoriously violent motorcycle gangs.
Chantal would carry the drugs from the dealer to the buyer. Chat and Chantal moved stolen property, prostituted themselves; they'd try anything.
She also had a big mouth. "She used to stick her nose in business that didn't concern her," Chat said.
"She was scared most of the time, but she wouldn't show it," Chat said.
Terrified of the gangs, even a decade later, Chat wouldn't discuss the details of the work, nor would she be more specific about the people they worked for.
Chantal had a dream. It's a dream shared by many Montreal street children: "She said she wanted to go away from Montreal and never be found again." That's why Chat didn't find it unusual when Chantal disappeared.
On the one hand, Chat laughs as she remembers running from police, climbing statues in Montreal's St. Louis Square messed up on drugs and screaming at passersby.
"The best time I spent with her was here," Chat said standing on the edge of the square. "We were free."
Detective Sgt. Roland Prairie of the Vermont State Police was one of the cops who scoured the Canaan ravine in 1988. Even when he moved on to new cases, he never forgot about the unidentified girl from the ravine.
"The case was on my mind all the time," Prairie said recently. "This was somebody's kid. Somebody out there knows who did this."
After the Canaan Jane Doe case was posted on the NCIC computer, the state police got hundreds of calls from across North America. Most were easy to discard, but others weren't;investigators spent countless hours answering those queries. Nothing matched.
The Vermont State Police work closely with their counterparts across the border in Canada. Last summer Prairie was talking with Noel Bolduc, an investigator with the Quebec provincial police, known along the border by its French name, Surete du Quebec, or SQ.
Prairie recited the facts of the Jane Doe case off the top of his head. Bolduc took the case to Luc Gregoire, the head of the SQ's major crimes division for the area.
Combing the missing-person files they narrowed the possibilities down to a handful.
In September Bolduc gave Prairie Chantal's dental records. Two weeks later a dentist working for the Vermont Medical Examiner's office found they matched. Her name was made public in January.
There is no explanation why her file didn't surface in 1988 when the trail to her killer was fresh.
"I have no idea why we came up with the possibilities and they didn't in 1988," said Bolduc. "I wasn't here in 1988."
The state police believe they can trace Chantal's movements in the summer of 1987 and eventually find out who killed her.
"We have homicides that are much older than this one," said state police Lt. Ronald DeVincenzi, who at one time oversaw the investigation. "We will go forth and actively pursue this."
Police won't tell everything they know about the case. They won't speculate if she was killed in Canaan or if her body was thrown into the ravine on Cole Hill.
"If you guess, you guess wrong," Prairie said.
Still, no one has claimed Chantal's remains, which sit in a box at the medical examiner's office in Burlington. There is no law in Vermont governing how to dispose of remains that are identified but unclaimed.
DeVincenzi said the state police would be happy to deliver Chantal to her family, but they haven't been asked to do so.
Margaret Douek, the head of the protection division for the Quebec agency that had custody of Chantal when she ran away, said it bothered her that no one had claimed her body. "I don't have the authority to pick up the remains," she said.
It's up to her family.
Douek said she would reach out to Chantal's father to let him know she needed to go home.
Meanwhile, her bones lie in the box, waiting.
Ummm... Civics lesson Chairperson Dauphin? your mechanisms are only working if you recover the $10 million. Until then it's all smoke.
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A career civil servant and a computer consultant were arrested and charged yesterday with defrauding the city of Montreal of millions of dollars in what the Crown and the city contend was a phony-billing scheme operating inside Montreal's computer-systems division.
Gilles Parent, who was fired as a section chief in the division one year ago today following an internal city probe, and businessman Benoit Bissonnette appeared in handcuffs at the Montreal courthouse, where they were arraigned on six counts each of fraud, breach of trust, creating false documents and conspiracy.
The Sûreté du Québec arrested Parent, 58, a resident of Ste. Anne des Lacs, and Bissonnette, 47, of Notre Dame de Grâce, earlier yesterday following a 14-month investigation that was dubbed Operation Killer Whale.
Parent and Bissonnette's lawyers entered no plea on their behalf yesterday.
Both men were ordered released on $15,000 bail and several conditions, including that they surrender their passports and agree to have no contact with the owners or directors of a list of companies that work in the computer field.
At Montreal city hall, down the street from the courthouse on Notre Dame St. E., Mayor Gérald Tremblay's administration took credit for the arrests, reminding reporters at a hastily prepared news conference that it was the city that called in the SQ to investigate the computer-systems division after the internal probe uncovered the false-billing scam that cost the city $10 million.
"It shows today that the (security) mechanisms we have put in place are working," city executive committee chairperson Claude Dauphin said.
"And in that respect I'm not upset about (the arrests), I'm happy, in the sense that those mechanisms are working."
Yesterday's arrests come just as other SQ investigations are under way into city deals that have raised questions about the ethics of some former politicians and former aides who surrounded Tremblay.
The administration is also awaiting a report by the city's auditor-general on a probe of how the city's $355.8-million water-management contract was awarded two years ago. The report is to be tabled in council on Sept. 21. The contract is also the subject of one of the SQ investigations.
With the campaign to the Nov. 1 municipal election set to begin at the end of next week, the mayor has gone to pains in recent weeks to portray himself as a crusader who is cleaning up city hall.
For instance, Tremblay has said he made the decision to phone the SQ to investigate an allegation by a contractor repairing the roof of city hall that a mafia figure tried to shake him down for a bribe that he was told would go to two councillors who sit on the executive committee.
"The message we have to understand today is that it's zero tolerance," Dauphin said.
"It's true there are investigations. But why are there investigations? It's because of our own requests the investigations were made."
Tremblay's political opponents, however, have called attention to the fact that the investigations involve deals that were all made during his tenure, including the water-management contract and a slew of transactions by the city's real-estate arm, the Société d'habitation et de développement de Montréal.
His rivals have also pointed out that an ethics code will be adopted for Montreal councillors at the Sept. 21 council meeting in the wake of controversies involving his team. For instance, former executive committee chairperson Frank Zampino acknowledged earlier this year that while still in office he vacationed on the yacht of a businessman whose company is a partner in the consortium that went on to win the water-management contract.
The lawyer representing Parent, the former mid-level city manager charged with fraud yesterday, said he was mindful of the political spin that would be put on the arrests.
"I'm sure that politicians will use whatever they can to their advantage in an election," lawyer Philip Schneider said.
"What they'll do with it, what they can do with it, I don't know. I'm not into politics, I'm into defending clients charged with criminal offences. They can play the politics. I'll play the courtroom."
Schneider added that while the Tremblay administration says the city lost $10 million, the Crown's charges involve
$4 million worth of fraud.
City officials revealed the results of the internal probe earlier this year. They said the fraud involved payments for consulting hours that were never worked by any of 10 computer firms that had multi-year contracts with the city.
The hours were filled in on time sheets that required Parent's approval.
Parent, who had been working for the city since 1982, was responsible for doling out work to outside computer consultants that were retained by the city following a public call for tenders.
The city fired Parent's superior, Joseph Hélal, earlier this year, for failing to catch onto the fraud scheme. Hélal is contesting his dismissal before a labour-relations board, the city confirmed yesterday.
A third bureaucrat was fired a few months later. The city says it cannot name the individual because the person has so far not contested the dismissal.
The Crown contends the fraud was committed between Aug. 1, 2006 and Sept. 30, 2008.
The Crown has four boxes of evidence, Schneider said.
"I'll look at the evidence before I advise my client what kind of plea he should enter," Schneider said.
The two men will also have a choice of a trial by jury or before a judge alone if they plead not guilty.
Bissonnette's lawyer, Marc Labelle, said he, too, would review the evidence, but added: "He will plead not guilty, that's for sure."
lgyulai@thegazette.canwest.com
Lawyer's request rejected, Jones told to leave Dorval condo
As of tomorrow the once high-flying Bertram Earl Jones will officially be homeless.
The man who once owned four properties in two countries, three cars, membership at the oldest golf club in North America and a lifestyle that included lavish wining and dining, will be evicted from the Dorval condo he has been living in since being charged with theft and fraud on July 28.
Despite an 11th-hour request from his lawyer sent to trustees late Tuesday night asking that Jones be allowed to stay in the condo at 870 Lakeshore Rd. until the end of the month, attendees at yesterday's credit meeting gave an overwhelming thumbs-down to any leniency.
"We would like him removed from the condo on Sept. 11, without exception," said Kevin Curran, son of an alleged Jones victim, and a member of a committee working with RSM Richter.
Bankruptcy trustees have been given keys to three other properties owned either jointly by Jones and his wife, Maxine, or by Maxine alone. All four properties will be handed over to real-estate agents to be put up for sale in the coming weeks.
Jones did not show up at the creditors' meeting, the first since he was declared personally bankrupt on Aug. 19.
The trustee handling both Jones's corporate and personal bankruptcy issued figures yesterday, first reported by The Gazette in July, that Jones's four properties, in Dorval, Mont Tremblant, Boca Raton, Fla. and Cape Cod, Mass., are worth $1.6 million and mortgaged for almost $1 million.
Gilles Robillard, representing trustee RSM Richter, told the assembled alleged victims that all accounts owned by Maxine Jones have been frozen as have her husband's.
Regarding missing bank statements from 1999 to 2008, Robillard said his firm has received six boxes of documents from the Royal Bank of Canada and expects another seven boxes next week.
Other highlights of yesterday's meeting from the trustee:
Subpoenas will be issued to the former employees of Earl Jones and his wife, and on Sept. 16, the trustees expect to begin interviewing these people.
Anyone who received drafts or payments from Jones will also be interviewed to better understand where the money went.
Based on the documents received since the last creditors' meeting on Aug. 18, it appears Jones has been using client funds for personal use since the mid-1980s, possibly up to the level of $20 million from previous estimates of $12.3 million.
The bookkeeper Jones used was not a certified public accountant or was there ever an audit done of the books of Earl Jones Corporation.
151 claims have been filed against Jones by creditors so far, representing a total of $74.5 million.
After his personal bankruptcy judgment last month, the trustee advised Jones and his lawyer that he was required to pay rent for staying in a property he no longer owned. There was no reply to this request.
"I'm not sure what they will do, change the locks as of Sept. 11?" asked Peter Kent, whose mother is an alleged victim
"If he's not out on Friday we will take whatever measures it takes to get him to leave," Robillard said.
asutherland@thegazette.canwest.com
MILWAUKEE — Investigators who used DNA from a toothbrush to link a former prisoner to a string of cold-case killings should have had a sample from him eight years earlier and before the last killing, but police say they couldn't find one.
Corrections officials were required to take DNA from Walter E. Ellis — and all other inmates with felony convictions — under a 2000 state law. Two state agencies now dispute whether Ellis' DNA was obtained while he was in prison and, if so, what happened to it.
The police chief has suggested that if authorities had a DNA sample, they may have identified a suspect more quickly and possibly prevented at least one death, but because police could not find a sample in the state's database, they had to execute a high-risk warrant to obtain the DNA that linked Ellis to the killings.
Police said Ellis, 49, of Milwaukee, was arrested Saturday after a state crime lab matched his DNA to samples taken from nine women killed between 1986 and 2007.
The state agency responsible for collecting samples from inmates insists it obtained DNA from Ellis, who was in prison from 1998 to 2001. But the state Department of Justice said it has no record that it ever received the sample, which would have been processed before the 2007 slaying.
In some cases, a person's sample yields an unusable profile, but the state Justice Department records of those people to ensure proper follow-up. Ellis didn't show up on that list either, Justice Department spokesman Kevin St. John added.
Wisconsin's Department of Corrections, which is responsible for obtaining samples, said it complied with the law.
"The only information we have is an indication in our system that the specimen was collected on Feb. 4, 2001," said John Dipko, a corrections spokesman. He said the sample would have been sent to the state crime lab, which is under the jurisdiction of the state DOJ.
Police Chief Edward Flynn said authorities couldn't find Ellis' DNA profile in a statewide database, forcing them to take the high-risk step of obtaining a sample directly by executing a search warrant Aug. 29, even if doing so tipped off Ellis that police were investigating him.
Ellis was charged in the deaths of two of the nine women, and more charges are expected this week, prosecutors said. The state public defender's office said Tuesday that no attorney had been assigned to him. He could make an initial court appearance Wednesday.
"It's certainly speculative but a plausible speculation that if his DNA had been collected in 2001 that certainly the pattern would have been discerned perhaps more quickly," Flynn told CNN. "Certainly we would have identified a suspect more quickly."
A message left with Flynn's office Tuesday was not returned.
Ellis served his previous prison sentence after pleading no contest to a reduced charge of second-degree reckless injury. He was released from prison in 2001 and from state supervision in 2003, when corrections officials would have verified that his DNA sample was in the system, Dipko said.
Police said Ellis' DNA was found on the bodies of nine women ages 16 to 41 who were killed on the city's north side. Investigators believe eight of the women were prostitutes and one was a runaway.
Authorities previously have speculated that the person whose DNA they recovered on the runaway had sex with that girl but that someone else killed her. But Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm would not say Monday whether anyone else would be charged in the killings.
Associated Press Writer Carrie Antlfinger contributed to this report.
