"Why?" That's apparently the last word uttered by the father of
Canada's youngest multiple murderer and certainly the first
question asked by most people who have heard her story. JR was just
twelve years old when, with her 23-year-old boyfriend, she
participated in killing her father, her mother, and her younger
brother in the grisly April 2006 murders that took place in
Medicine Hat, Alberta. We are used to adolescents having
rebellions, but many people continue to struggle to make sense of
this particular tragedy.
The vast majority of criminal offences happen in a context, though,
and finding an easy answer to the question of "Why?" risks missing
some of those important nuances and circumstances. Robert Remington
and Sherri Zickefoose are reporters from the Calgary Herald who
covered every aspect of this case, from the initial discovery of
the bodies by a boy looking for his playmate, through the separate
trials of JR and of Jeremy Steinke, and even up to the annual
review hearing for JR's court-mandated Intensive Rehabilitative
Custody and Supervision (IRCS) order. They are skilled writers with
knowledge of the intricacies of the murders and of the murderers,
though the story they tell in Runaway Devil never wallows in
unnecessary detail. Tenaciously, Mr. Remington and Ms. Zickefoose
tracked down members of the perpetrators' families, as well as
friends of JR and Jeremy, verifying versions of events, weaving in
courtroom testimony, and adding evidence never admitted in the
trials, all to tell the story of how a seemingly bright, friendly,
athletic young girl so quickly turned against her family. Was she
the puppet master, manipulating the immature Jeremy into acting out
her death fantasy or was he the Goth werewolf-wannabe who saw an
opportunity to become the hero in his own version of Natural Born
Killers?
Answering that question is where the book struggles, though not
through any fault of the authors. We know the story. We know how it
ends. At the time, however, as pieces of the narrative came
together, we were shocked. She was a missing child, the subject of
an Amber-Alert like media release. Suddenly, she became the
suspect. They had communicated via the Internet and spent time in
websites with names like Vampirefreaks.com. They had sex. They made
out in the midst of a friend's party just hours after the murders.
A marriage proposal was carried by police from one cell to the
other after their arrests. She said he forced her to kill her
brother. He said he wasn't even in the room when it happened. Each
case had excellent and well-prepared Crown and defence lawyers, and
the trials were overseen by respected justices who rarely stepped
into the proceedings. The details have been told and retold and
most people have likely formed their opinions about who really did
what, about where the blame rests (society? music lyrics? drugs?
parenting styles?), and about the justice system's response to a
12-year-old who, a full month before the murders, wrote of her
"plan" that "begins with me killing them and ends with me living
with you."
Mr. Remington and Ms. Zickefoose, then, took on a particular
challenge: attempting to write more than a simple true crime book
about a sensational event, while preserving the integrity of a
seemingly well-known story. The result is a polished work that
flows from beginning to end, that integrates the community's
history into the personal stories, that provides new glimpses into
the lives of the perpetrators and their families, that explains the
lethal mixture of JR's need for control and Jeremy's need for
acceptance, and that challenges the reader to look beyond the
notion of simple answers.