Randy's Stepmother Was His Chief Tormentor
Father morally guilty in son's 'painful, agonizing death'
By Christie Blatchford
riginally published in the National Post, May 4, 2002
TORONTO — In the end, it was defence lawyer Damien Frost who nailed it.
Mr. Frost was yesterday wrapping up his submission to Mr. Justice Eugene Ewaschuk on what a fitting sentence would be for his client, Marcia Dooley.
He ran through the three categories of cases that warrant the legal hammer, the maximum prescribed sentence: One is when either the offender or the offence is the very worst of a particular kind; another is when the offender is a seriously violent type who poses a continuing risk to the public; the third is reserved for those crimes committed in circumstances that even the necessarily bloodless law acknowledges are marked by "stark horror."
Mr. Frost is a fine lawyer, and he did his best, arguing that Mrs. Dooley fit none of these groups. Then, because he is also a good and sensible man, he sighed and said wanly, "These are distinctions only criminal lawyers and courts can make. To the public … it's all horrible."
Justice Ewaschuk, less than a half-hour later, sent Mrs. Dooley off to serve her mandatory life sentence with no chance of parole for 18 years; he found on the evidence that she was the actual murderer and chief tormentor of little Randy Dooley.
Tony Dooley, co-convicted of second-degree murder in Randy's Sept. 25, 1998, death, also faces an automatic life sentence, but will be able to apply for parole after serving 13 years. Justice Ewaschuk found that though he was as morally guilty as his wife, Mr. Dooley was less criminally responsible because he did not kill the little boy, was not there when Mrs. Dooley fatally assaulted him, and was thus a secondary player.
By the time of their sentencing yesterday, the Dooleys had each spent only 15 nights in prison, both of them in segregation for their own protection, for even by the questionable standards of the hoosegow, child killers are not fondly regarded.
The Dooleys have, respectively, she a minimum 6,555 and he 4,730 more nights to go before they will even have a crack at being paroled.
Yet their transformation is already stark, sobering, and hard evidence that even in Canada, prison remains the punishment it is meant to be.
Both the Dooleys had been on bail since shortly after their arrests, and were free throughout the three-month-long trial that ended April 18.
In those two weeks plus a day, he went from the cock of the courthouse walk—an assured fellow who every morning, upon entering the courtroom, would carefully Vaseline his lips and apply hand cream, who chatted easily to the ladies and offered opinions on the media coverage of the case, and seemed oblivious to what was in store for him—to the shrunken, distracted man in orange prison-issue overalls who yesterday appeared, like a creature from a nature show, to be picking invisible nits from his bare arms.
His hair was a wild tangle of fuzz, no longer in neat oiled corn rows. With his constant scratching, long periods of staring at his hands or the ceiling, Mr. Dooley looked a little mad.
Beside him in the prisoner's box, Mrs. Dooley wore a prison-issue baggy green sweatsuit, underneath it a maroon T-shirt.
Gone were the intricate, ever-changing hairdos that were the talk of the trial; her hair yesterday was in a clump of roll at the back of her big head. A strapping woman, who had noticeably lost weight as the case drew to a close, her strong features seemed coarsened, as if drawn for a caricature.
A stench of defeat, and some other primitive and unpleasant thing, rose from her almost tangibly: Was this the same woman who had sometimes strode out of court, high boots rat-tat-tatting on the floor, to give the finger to some of the Jamaican women bystanders who sucked their teeth in revulsion at her?
The prosecutor, Rita Zaied, had asked the judge to give both Dooleys between 20 and 25 years with no parole. "Some crimes," she snapped, "are so horrendous they cry out for the maximum sentence."
There were moments, during her lengthy submission to Justice Ewaschuk, that Ms. Zaied seemed perilously close to either tears or to leaping into the prisoner's box and throttling the Dooleys herself.
Hers was a soliloquy for the dead seven-year-old, Randy, and the "broken, shattered child," his brother Tego, now 11, who has since returned to his aunt Beatrice's home in Spanish Town, Jamaica, from whence the two boys had come to Canada, as bright as new pennies, in November of 1997.
She praised Randy's bravery in enduring his stepmother's assaults and his father's breathtaking indifference; she sang Tego's courage in returning to testify here. "It was a lot to ask of a little boy who had lost so much," she said. She spoke bluntly of Randy's unfulfilled dreams—we know he was so smart, she said, we can wonder what he might have become, a great doctor or scientist or artist perhaps, or maybe just "a great plumber or a great electrician"—and Tego's now-dwarfed ones, circumscribed by his haunting memories and the poverty to which he has been returned.
The cruellest stroke, she suggested, might be that as Tego still loves his father, so does he love Canada, and yet, when he turns 14, unless he is living here—and with whom could he live?—he will automatically lose the landed-immigrant status he acquired through his parents.
She ended, unusually for her, with a small personal story.
Just recently, Ms. Zaied said, she'd had a visit from her grand-nephew, all of five. He was so excited, she said, because he had just lost his first baby tooth, and the tooth fairy had left him $5.
Now, she said, gnawing at the edges of this universal golden sort of recollection, "We have the memory" of Randy, in whose battered tummy forensic pathologists had found a tooth at post-mortem.
"The reality is, he didn't lose that tooth," Justice Ewaschuk interjected, his ear, as ever, attuned to the cold bottom line called truth. "That tooth was smashed out of his mouth."
Yes, it was. And at least 13 of the little boy's ribs were broken, and his liver torn, and his adrenal gland crushed, and a bone in his back fractured, and his diaphragm damaged—all this in addition to the hundreds and hundreds of scars and wounds tattooed on his skin and the pneumonia in his chest and the subdural hemorrhage in his brain, which ultimately shut down his frail and weakened body, and caused what Justice Ewaschuk said was his "slow, painful, agonizing death."
But the awful Dooleys aren't the worst offenders of their kind, and the unspeakable things they collectively did to Randy are not unique, and for all the outrage engendered in the Canadian community, as of yesterday, the trust fund set up by the Toronto Child Abuse Centre for Tego, the money aimed squarely to get him counselling and pay for his education, had swollen only to a grand total of $12,182. 53, or little more than a buck for every night the Dooleys will spend in jail.
Three victim impact statements were read into the record yesterday, one from the boys' auntie, Beatrice Dooley, one from the boys' natural mother, Raquel Burth, and one from Gloria Robson, who was Randy's Grade 1 teacher.
As the lawyers were haggling about whether Mrs. Robson's statement should be allowed—was she really close enough to Randy to qualify as a victim?—she sat in the crowded courtroom with her husband, Jim, and began to cry.
Her sobs were audible, and in the prisoner's box, they penetrated the new fog that envelops Tony Dooley.
He turned in his seat and searched the courtroom until he spotted Mrs. Robson, her pink face buried in a Kleenex, convulsed. For just a few seconds, he looked at her, and you could almost hear him thinking, "Hmmmmm. What's that all about, then?"
The human capacity for stark horror—to inflict it and to be indifferent to it and to raise the bar on it—is boundless, as big as the sky.
