The Dooleys Call No Evidence
Jury's deliberations to start on Thursday
By Christie Blatchford
Originally published in the National Post, April 5, 2002
TORONTO — Lorraine Simpson, an agreeable young woman who was the 61st person to testify in the Randal Dooley case, was still gathering her things in the witness box yesterday when Mr. Justice Eugene Ewaschuk nodded in the direction of prosecutor Rita Zaied.
"That's the case for the Crown," Ms. Zaied said in her trademark soft voice.
Justice Ewaschuk promptly directed the accused Tony Dooley to stand.
"Mr. Dooley," the judge asked, "do you elect to call any evidence on your behalf?"
Mr. Dooley's senior lawyer, Mara Greene, replied on her client's behalf, "No, my Lord."
Justice Ewaschuk then asked Marcia Dooley to stand, asked her the same question, and from her chief lawyer, Damien Frost, received precisely the same answer.
Thus, with rat-tat-tat speed and to the apparent surprise of some of the jurors, did the evidence portion of the Dooleys' trial abruptly end.
Sixty-one witnesses, 92 exhibits and about eight weeks of testimony later, all that remains are the lawyers' closing addresses, Justice Ewaschuk's instructions on the law, and the jurors' own deliberations. These, according to the schedule presented them yesterday by the judge, are slated to begin next Thursday.
No accused person in Canada is ever obliged to present a defence: This is one practical effect of the ringing principle that everyone charged with a crime is, at a minimum, entitled to be presumed innocent. The other is that the burden of proof begins, remains and ends with the prosecution.
Arguably the most compelling and important evidence the jurors heard over the course of the past three months were lengthy videotaped statements Mr. and Mrs. Dooley gave to Toronto Police homicide detectives on the very day the seven-year-old boy who was respectively their son and stepson was found dead.
In Mr. Dooley's case, there was also a second police interview, also videotaped, three days later, and also a taped phone call he made to 911 on the morning of Sept. 25, 1998—purportedly after Mrs. Dooley had discovered Randal dead in his brother Teego's bed—to request an ambulance because, as Mr. Dooley unforgettably put it, "For some reason, it seems like my little son has killed himself or something. He's stiff as a board."
These various recordings were played for jurors in February and mark the only times they have heard, in the accuseds' own words and voices, their version of what happened on the day and night of Sept. 24, Randal's last hours alive.
That the little boy was battered almost beyond recognition is inarguable. As Mr. Frost once framed it to an expert witness who weakly agreed, "You don't have to be a brain surgeon to look at Randal's body and see obvious signs of abuse?"
And while it took an autopsy to detail the horrific internal toll—Randal had at least 13 broken ribs and a developing pneumonia, a torn liver and adrenal gland, and four areas of injury to his brain indicating at least two separate incidents—such were his external injuries that almost all the first responders who arrived at the Dooleys' townhouse that fall morning noticed them, and knew immediately what they meant.
There was barely an inch of the boy's once-glowing dark skin—only the soles of his feet, the palms of his hands and his scalp escaped unscathed—that was not at his death covered in welts, cuts, curious U-shaped scars, bruises, scratches, sores or open cuts.
Yet in their videotaped police statements, Mr. and Mrs. Dooley claimed either not to have noticed the injuries or not to have been sufficiently alarmed by those few marks they admitted seeing to ever suspect that something was seriously awry with Randal, who was about 42 pounds and stood two inches shy of four feet tall.
And in the main, neither adult admitted knowing how the injuries had been inflicted.
When homicide detectives pressed Mr. Dooley about the scars and wounds, he admitted to only once having beaten the slight child, this a month before his death and so severely that he said he kept Randal out of school at least in part out of fear that someone would notice the welts and alert child-welfare authorities.
Mr. Dooley adamantly denied ever inflicting any other injuries, appeared to only reluctantly and slowly conclude his wife must be the perpetrator (though he said he had never seen Mrs. Dooley hit either boy "with my own two eyes") and painted himself as a kindly, loving father who was blinded by love to any harsh punishment that might have been dispensed by his wife.
Mrs. Dooley, for her part, flatly denied ever hitting or hurting Randal, said casually a couple of times that she knew her husband sometimes had beaten the boys, and deflected the detectives' increasingly insistent questions about the little boy's injuries with a bored mantra of, "Speak to the father" that sounded like a ghastly version of the line from the 1997 comedy The Beautician and the Beast that briefly became a popular catchphrase—"Talk to the hand."
Instead, the parents together described Randal's last day on Earth as utterly normal, even as they blithely told the police he had vomited four or five times, wet himself, lost control of his bowels and appeared to end up, on his final night, to have suffered a seizure such that he was plonked in a bathtub of cold water in his pajamas before being put to bed as usual.
The essence of their collective statements was that, oh well, this was standard behaviour for the boy whose "usual self," as Mr. Dooley once said, "isn't much" and who was so regularly incontinent that in his last weeks was reduced to wearing pull-up diapers at night.
Expert evidence pointed to a brain hemorrhage, which caused swelling and bleeding and eventually shut down his body, as the cause of Randal's death, and that such an injury could not have happened as the Dooleys separately suggested to police it had—by the little boy slipping from a bunkbed ladder that last night and falling about four feet to the floor.
Some of the witnesses who testified told the jurors of their brief sightings of Randal in his final days—he clearly looked ill, and moved as an old person. Others, such as his Grade 1 teacher, described the affectionate, bright child they saw or came to know after Randal arrived in Canada with his brother from their native Jamaica to rejoin their father and his newly pregnant wife. Others reported second-hand stories of Mrs. Dooley's frustration with the little boy. Dramatically, a Johnny-come-lately witness, a funeral director, even testified that the Dooleys had phoned his funeral parlour before Mr. Dooley's notorious 911 call was placed.
But no evidence was as stark or arguably as damning to the accused parents as their own words, and their Arctic demeanour, in their voluntary police statements. It was only Mrs. Dooley who actually held the couple's first child together, the burbling infant Tyreek, in her arms as she answered the officers' questions, but what was clear was that neither parent was especially moved by their loss then only hours old.
Not wanted, dead or alive: It might well stand as the epitaph for Randal Dooley.
