Randal Dooley Was 'Ghost in That House'
Closing arguments begin in 'gruesome' murder trial
By Christie Blatchford
Originally published in the National Post, April 9, 2002
TORONTO — For the almost three months of their second-degree murder trial, Tony and Marcia Dooley have been allowed to sit with their lawyers at the counsel tables at the front of Mr. Justice Eugene Ewashchuk's courtroom.
It is a courtesy, born of practical consideration, that is sometimes granted at the judge's discretion to the criminally accused.
But an effect of the gesture can be to induce a sort of temporary amnesia in the accused such that he may forget that there is a seat, elsewhere in the room, with his name on it. Over time, he may acquire lawyerly mannerisms. His once idle jottings may turn serious and dutiful, as though he were his lawyer's junior, or a student, and not the client. He may grow relaxed, even chatty, with court officials and observers.
Yesterday, Mr. and Mrs. Dooley were back in the prisoners' box, their note-taking days abruptly over, the end game of this process begun.
She stared stolidly off to some point in the distance, perhaps, as someone drily remarked, given that Mrs. Dooley was facing east, as far as Kingston, the location of many of Ontario's federal prisons and reception centres.
Her husband sat gloomily beside her, his head often hung low.
If convicted as charged here, the couple faces a mandatory life sentence with no eligibility for parole for a minimum of 10 years.
Prosecutor Rita Zaied was making her final closing address. She was unexpectedly cut short when one of the jurors fell ill, but was on her feet long enough to offer a powerful reminder of how it is that the Dooleys came to have reserved seats.
Randal is the little boy they are accused of killing. He was Mr. Dooley's natural son, Mrs. Dooley's stepson, and early on the morning of Sept. 25, 1998, this child who had just turned seven was found cold and stiff in his brother Teego's bunkbed.
For eight weeks, the jurors have heard evidence Ms. Zaied properly characterized yesterday as "gruesome", "repugnant" and "revolting to any right-thinking person" even as she urged them not to let its grim nature stir their passions.
Randal, who with Teego had arrived in Canada the previous fall as a perfectly healthy child, had essentially been beaten to death.
An autopsy later revealed the ghastly toll: Only 3-foot-10 tall and not quite 42 pounds, Randy had 13 broken ribs; a torn liver and crushed adrenal gland; a damaged diaphragm; a fractured vertebrae; and several brain injuries, including the one that had caused his brain to bleed and swell and ultimately shut down his body.
In addition, his skin was covered, "head to toe, front to back" as Ms. Zaied said yesterday, with welts and bruises, cuts old and fresh, curious U-shaped scars, scratches and sores.
He also had a nicely developing pneumonia, likely exacerbated by his inability, because of his fractured ribs, to properly clear his chest.
The jurors were told by medical experts that Randal would have been almost perpetually in pain for the final month of his life; that some of the injuries would have had him crying out in agony; that the regressive behaviours he had been exhibiting to varying degrees almost since he arrived in Canada-- he was incontinent of bowel and bladder both and regularly vomiting—may have been rooted in psychological terror.
And, as Ms. Zaied noted, such was the boy's distress and the blatant nature of his external injuries that even a 13-year-old stranger from Randal's Scarborough neighbourhood who saw him briefly not long before his death was struck by his sorrow and suffering.
None of this was new to the jurors, who yesterday looked briefly again upon the two life-size pictures of Randal on the autopsy table which they have studied before so many times on so many other days.
What Ms. Zaied offered them was, at last, her blunt theory of why Randal was subjected to such punishment, and why, in short, he died.
"It can be difficult to accept that parents can dislike a child to the point of committing second-degree murder on that child," she said. "I am going to suggest to you that the evidence is replete with this dislike."
She reminded the jurors that when the parents made their plans to bring the boys, who Mr. Dooley had not seen for years and who Mrs. Dooley had never met, to Canada, Mrs. Dooley was not yet pregnant with her first child, though she had been trying unsuccessfully.
By the time Randal and Teego arrived in Toronto, Mrs. Dooley was pregnant.
She took a quick dislike to Randal, Ms. Zaied said, citing testimony from officials at his school, where he entered Grade 1, that early on, he appeared frightened by his stepmother. That may have led to his incontinence, or perhaps, Ms. Zaied said, he was merely "like other little boys whose bodies grow faster than their bladders" and who sometimes wet the bed at night.
Mrs. Dooley, she suggested, took such accidents personally. "To her, he was doing this to spite her."
She began to punish him for these mistakes, and a vicious cycle began to take shape: Randal would pee or poo whenever he was at home; Mrs. Dooley would beat him; he would vomit up his dinner; she would make him eat his vomit or clean it up; he began to hide the evidence of his bad behaviour; she would discover it and punish him again.
All this, Ms. Zaied said, is evidence of her special "animus," or ill will, against the boy.
It was well-established, the prosecutor alleged, by the time Mr. Dooley, who had headed to the United States for a stay of almost six months within two weeks of his children's arrival, came home.
"And in fairness to Mrs. Dooley, it must be said that the months of abuse to which she subjected Randal, while speaking volumes of her intense dislike for the child, cannot be said to account for the majority of injuries….
"With the return of Tony Dooley," Ms. Zaied alleged, "began the isolation of the Dooley family and a drastic escalation in the violence."
Mr. Dooley, she said, "would have us believe that he sees no evil, speaks no evil and hears no evil. He was deaf, blind and speechless as to what was happening in his own home. I suggest there is a massive amount of evidence to contradict this assertion."
She pointed to almost 30 pieces of evidence she said proved Mr. Dooley was fully aware of how his wife was abusing his son, and that he not only failed to stop it, but also joined her in it.
"The Crown does not have to prove that Mr. and Mrs. Dooley sat down and decided that they were going to kill Randal," Ms. Zaied said, only that they "intended to cause Randal bodily harm that they knew was likely to cause his death and were reckless whether death ensued or not."
Their various denials and explanations to police, she said, are preposterous, "a tissue of lies" designed to conceal their guilt. Ms. Zaied appeared to reserve particular scorn for the Dooleys' attempts to cast their son as a child who made himself vomit to irritate his parents, who purposely wet himself, and who was so innately bad that Mr. Dooley purported to fear "maybe Randal would someday do somethin' to the baby."
The terrible simplicity of it, she said, was that, "They didn't like him. They didn't care about him. He was a ghost in that house."
She is expected to conclude her remarks today, with defence lawyers slated to make their addresses tomorrow and Thursday, and Justice Ewaschuk to give the jurors final instructions next Monday.
