THE SLEEPWALKER




By

JUNE CALLWOOD




Published by

Lester and Orpen Dennys Limited

	Toronto, Canada

Copyright June Callwood, 1990





June Callwood's most

recent books include:

A Portrait of Canada
Emma
Emotions
Twelve Weeks in Spring
Jim: A Life with AIDS


To Bill, of course



SLEEPWALKER


CHAPTER ONE

May 23, 1987


At eleven o'clock on a mild Saturday night, May 23, 1987, Ken
Parks was trying to sleep on the living-room couch when his wife
returned from work at the supermarket. Their narrow and steeply
stacked townhouse in Pickering, a suburb east of Toronto, was
dark. Karen Parks snapped on the hall light in the entrance and
Ken got to his feet, blinking. A huge man, six foot five and
bulging like a bear with winter fat, he has blond hair long over
his ears and a soft, nearly inaudible voice. Barefoot and dressed
in track pants and a T-shirt, he went down the steps from the
living-room to greet her with a hug.

They looked at one another wearily, two young people, the man
twenty-three years old, the woman twenty-two, and deep in
trouble.

Karen and Ken had seemed an ideal young couple, high school
sweethearts who had a picture perfect wedding when he was twenty
and she was nineteen. Despite the fact that he was a high-school
dropout, through hard work and an astounding capacity for thrift,
they already owned their own three bedroom home and had been on
the brink of buying a better one.

Upstairs in her crib was their five
month-old picture-perfect baby, Melissa.

The mess had started at Woodbine race track the summer before,
when Ken bet five dollars on a horse in the Queen's Plate and
won. He has a deep-seated belief that he's an inadequate person,
so it was exalting to think that he had an uncanny knack for
picking winners of horse races. In no time at all, he reasoned,
he could surprise Karen with the money for a trip to Australia,
where she had been happy as a child.

After that he came unglued. The speed of his progress from his
initial fallacy that he could beat the horses to utter ruin was
breathtaking. By the following spring he had embezzled $32,000
from his employer and lost it all at the track. Five days after
the fraud was discovered, he was arrested and spent a night in
jail. Then he went back to gambling with the crazy idea that he
could win enough to repay his employer and get out of trouble.
Rapidly he sank to stealing from his wife's savings and borrowing
from loan sharks. He lost that money too.

The thought of divorce didn't cross Karen's mind, not even when
she discovered that he had forged her name on cheques. Raised in
a family of six children and upright morality, she holds no truck
with situational ethics. To her mind, the homilies about families
sticking together through thick and thin mean that you can't bail
out in bad times. She also says, and means it, "Anyone can make a
mistake," and "You marry for better or worse."

Karen Woods Parks is in many ways almost Ken's opposite. Where he
is giant-size with a lazy, slouching posture, she is a tiny,
perky five foot three. He wears an embarrassed, shy expression
and is prone to sit, head down, cracking his knuckles. She has a
mane of almost black hair and dark eyes that look at the world
straight on. He tends to brooding withdrawal and evades analysis
by speaking in quips; her mind is quick and clever, and her
thoughts tumble out as soon as they're formed. Karen Parks is
feisty and backs down from nothing; Ken Parks prefers to retreat
inside himself and wait for unpleasantness to go away.

The unpleasantness brought about by his gambling spree had
nowhere to go. For weeks he staved off
Karen's discovery that he had returned to gambling and was taking
money from her account. He even pretended he had a job when, in
truth, he was being turned down everywhere. He told outlandish,
doomed lies, but eventually, inevitably, Karen discovered
everything. Well, almost everything. For two days she screamed at
him that he was loathesome, but he noted hopefully that she
didn't pack her bags.

He took her wild abuse without protest, a man far gone in
despair.

"I need help," he said humbly. "I can't control myself. When I'm
gambling it doesn't seem that I have any problems."

Finally, that Saturday afternoon, her rage at his betrayal spent
itself. In the exhaustion that followed, they discovered that the
sweetness they once felt for one another was still there. Karen
loves Ken's kindness and worshipful protectiveness, and he needs
her sturdiness and vitality. Emotionally drained and tender with
one another, they made plans for the future. They would cancel
the deal on the new house, sell the one they were in, repay Ken's
employer, and start over. It would take a while, but they would
be fine.

Karen laid out her terms. Ken would have to attend Gamblers
Anonymous, and he must make a clean breast of things to her
parents and his relatives.

"I'm sick of covering up for you," she told him sternly. He had
no choice but to accept. He agreed that they would spend the
next day, Sunday, going from one household to the next until
everyone knew. He could think of no greater punishment, not even
the prospect of spending time in prison for the embezzlement. His
self-esteem, never in ample supply, depends on the regard others
have for him.

Ken's nearest relatives--his mother, estranged father, two
brothers, and a half-sister--don't figure largely in his life. He
feels more affection for his two grandmothers, Janet Parks, his
father's mother, and Lilly Hodge, his mother's mother. He
expected that they would be disappointed in him when they learned
of his transgressions but would forgive him; his grandmothers
dote on him. The scene he dreaded was with Karen's people, the
Woods family. They had become his family: after Karen, they were
the best thing that had ever happened to him. Facing them to talk
about his folly would be painful.

Ken, in fact, was in awe of his in-laws, Barbara and Denis Woods.
His childhood had been short on affection and family
connectedness, leaving him with strong needs for both. A good
part of Karen's attraction for him, in fact, was that she came
complete with a cast of characters right out of a television
sit-com, all the Woodses incredibly decent and fond of one
another.

Karen's reserved father, Denis Woods, an electrical engineer,
respected Ken as a polite, sober, hard-working person who had
been a steadying influence on Karen, his oldest and most
headstrong child. Barbara, small and vivacious and ferociously
efficient, had a relationship with Ken that was full of fond
ribbing. Towering above her, he would pat her on the top of her
head and beam, "There, there, little woman."

Out of shame, Ken had avoided contact with Karen's family after
his arrest in February. Although he thought Barbara and Denis
didn't know about it (which wasn't the case--Karen had confided
in them), still he hadn't been able to face them. His absence had
been perplexing for Karen's five younger brothers and sisters
because Ken was almost as much a fixture in the Woods family as
they were. During the two-year period when Ken and Karen were
engaged, Barbara had routinely set a place at the dinner table
for him. To them he was an agreeable big brother, a counsellor
and confidant, a tolerant pal who went along with the
sisters on shopping trips to carry the parcels or took the
brothers to hockey games.

Karen and her mother had an ideal mother-daughter relationship.
After Karen finished with a spectacular teenaged rebellion that
culminated in her leaving home, they had become one another's
best friend. Their intimacy developed in the hustle of
preparations for Karen's wedding and deepened with the birth of
the baby, Melissa. Karen and Barbara talked every day on the
telephone, usually more than once, and several times a week Ken
drove Karen and Melissa to stay all day with Barbara in the Woods
family's Scarborough townhouse. Both women found the weeks of
Karen's post-partum a blissful time. They idled through the day
chatting companionably, and sometimes bundled up the infant and
took her to the Weight Watchers classes they attended together.
Their body types were alike: both tended to plumpness, and both
adored being thin.

Denis and Barbara found Ken's reckless behaviour simply
incomprehensible. "It isn't _like him," Barbara would comment.
Barbara positioned herself perfectly to be supportive of her
daughter but not directive. Her affection for her son-in
law didn't waver, and she refrained nobly from
giving Karen any advice. "I know you two can sort things out,"
she often said. "I just can't understand how this could have
happened."

For Ken the bad time was marked by panic. He couldn't sleep at
night, which left him groggy with fatigue by day. Unable to
settle in the bed they shared, he spent the nights on the
living-room couch, sipping Kool-Aid and watching television until
the small hours of the morning. The distraction of old movies
kept him from reviewing the mess he had made of things. In the
mornings, his body longed for sleep. He drove to work through
snowstorms with the car window down, hoping the cold air would
revive him, slapping his face to keep from dropping off.


Somehow the nightmare had ended better than he expected. Karen
and he would survive the mess he had created. She had blown her
stack, as he knew she would, but she was staying. Now all he had
to get through was the misery on Sunday of telling his
grandmothers --and facing Barbara and Denis.

On Karen's return from work that Saturday night, he tentatively
advanced to hug her and she accepted his embrace. They found to
their mutual relief that the peace between them was holding.

He took her handbag from her and dropped it on a side table. She
asked, "How's Melissa?"

Five-month-old Melissa had been reacting to the tension in the
household by crying hard for long periods of time.

Ken replied, "I had trouble getting her to go to sleep. She
didn't settle down until about nine o'clock, but she's all right
now."

"Did she take her bottle?"

"Yeah."

Karen stood in the living-room, uncomfortable and not sure what
else to say. Neither wanted to reopen discussion about the
gambling and the missing money.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" Ken asked, his voice soft. It was
an olive branch, one of the signals between them that meant a
return to normalcy. Karen, English-born, could never resist a cup
of tea.

"Sure," she responded with a warm grin, appreciating that he was
making an effort.

In the kitchen he poured himself a glass of Kool-Aid from a
pitcher in the refrigerator and put on the kettle. After a guilty
hesitation, Karen cut herself a slice of fruit-and-nut bread.
She was trying to stick to her Weight Watchers regime, but she
felt a need for something sweet. To compensate, she put skim milk
in her tea.

To fill in the silence she chattered about events that evening at
the supermarket, but there were awkward pauses. Karen abandoned
the pretence.

Her voice full of sympathy and concern, she said, "Tomorrow's a
big day."

"Yeah," he nodded, "but it's something that I've gotta do."

They moved to the living-room and sat on the rumpled couch,
pushing aside Ken's blanket and pillow to make room. He had been
sleeping there, banished from their bed since Thursday when Karen
had learned about the forged cheques and realized he was gambling
again. _Saturday _Night _Live was on television, a favourite of
theirs. Karen watched a while, ready to be amused, but she was
too tired. She got up and stretched.

"I think I'll go to bed," she said. He stood up, looming over
her, and tentatively bent to put his arms around her.
"Goodnight," he said wistfully. She studied him. He was a
shambles, with bloodshot eyes and a two-day growth of reddish
beard on his exhausted face. She gave him a brief forgiving hug
and stepped back.

On the stairs she hesitated and turned. "You can come up to bed
if you want," she offered.

"No," he answered quietly. "Not until I get back on the right
track. Not until you can trust me again."

She nodded, feeling a stab of pity and love. She checked on
the sleeping baby, undressed, read a few pages of a book by her
bed, and dropped off to sleep.

The last thing Ken remembers clearly that night is watching the
rest of _Saturday _Night _Live. He knows he saw the end of the
show and the beginning of something else, he doesn't remember
what, and then he was overtaken by deep sleep. After two
sleepless nights in a row, he had never been so worn out in his
life.

He awoke from a disturbing dream. He saw the face of Barbara
Woods, his mother-in-law. Her mouth was open in an expression of
horror and her eyes seemed to be pleading with him for help. In
the distance, he heard screams, the voices of Karen's sisters.
Where was he? He seemed to be at the home of his in-laws.

Next he was at the top of the stairs outside the children's
bedrooms. "The kids are in trouble," he was thinking. "Better see
what I can do." He called, "Kids. ... Kids!" No reply. He stood
in the upstairs hall but there was no one around. That was
strange. He'd better get help. Something terrible seemed to have
happened.

The next part of the dream--was it a dream?--is spotty. At some
point he may have picked up a telephone. Perhaps he didn't. Maybe
the thought of a telephone came to his mind because he heard the
noise a phone emits when it is off the hook. He ran outside,
using the basement door to the underground garage where his car
was parked.

Next he was at the wheel of his car. This was no dream, but he
couldn't understand how it could be real. He saw in his right
hand a long knife. Aghast, he threw it to the floor of the car.
Next he was at the police station a block away. He opened the
main doors leading to an office. A woman was seated behind a
counter. He became aware of his hands, from which blood was
pouring, and found he couldn't move his fingers.

The woman approached him. He leaned on the counter, taking his
weight on his elbows with his bloody hands high, and said, "Oh my
God. I think I just killed two people."


CHAPTER TWO

"My God, I've Just Killed

Two People."


The Woods' townhouse in Scarborough is number 85 in a
complex at 25 Brimwood Boulevard. The front door opens on a
park-like lawn, the nearest street a block away, so it rarely is
used by people arriving in cars. Family and visitors usually
enter the premises through a basement door that opens on
underground parking.

The basement floor contains a laundry and furnace area and two
finished rooms, one used for television viewing and the other a
bedroom where Karen's parents slept. On the main floor are a
combined living-room and dining-room, foyer, powder-room, and
kitchen. Four bedrooms and a bath are clustered around a hallway
on the top floor, sleeping quarters for the five Woods children
who still live at home.

Denis Woods, forty-five, and Barbara Woods, forty-two, had
enjoyed a sound marriage for twenty-three years, amiably raising
six children:

Karen, then twenty-two, Samantha, twenty-one, Emma, twenty,
Jonathan, seventeen, Prudence, fifteen, and Nicholas, twelve. On
the night of May 23, 1987, Denis spent the evening reading
quietly while Barbara did some typing. She talked for a while on
the phone to a friend and then announced she was packing it in
for the night. As she was preparing for bed around midnight,
Denis discovered that Jonathan had fallen asleep in front of the
television in the downstairs den. He sent him upstairs to bed,
then he too retired. Prudence was asleep in her room. That made
four people in the house. Emma was with her boy-friend, Jimmy
Sotirakos, and would be returning late. Samantha was spending the
weekend with her boy-friend and wasn't expected home at all.
Nicholas, the youngest, was in Philadelphia that weekend for a
soccer tournament.

Denis turned off all the lights except for a striplight at the
top of the basement stairs to help Emma find her way when she
returned home. A careful man, he checked that the outside doors
were locked and that the sliding door to the patio was braced
with a bar. Before getting into bed beside Barbara, he closed
their bedroom door. He didn't want them to be disturbed when Emma
returned.

He wakened in pitch darkness to feel hands around his throat.
Someone very heavy and strong was crouched on top of him, choking
him. He called out to his wife, "Help me, Bobbie! Someone's
trying to strangle me!" There was no reply. He thrashed out with
his leg and encountered something that didn't move. He couldn't
tell if it was his wife or his attacker. Then he lost
consciousness.

He roused to find that he was lying diagonally, face down, across
the bed. His shocked mind registered panic. Where were Bobbie and
the children? He rolled over and almost fell, landing on his
knees on the floor. He struggled to his feet and made his
way to the open door of the bedroom, grasping it for support. He
saw a bar of light under the door at the top of the basement
stairs.

Weariness overcame him. He thought dizzily that he might pass
out. He sank down on the stairs and leaned his head against the
wall. Something was wrong with the left side of his head; it was
hurting. As he slipped into unconsciousness, he heard a strong
male voice calling, "Police!"


Heidi Edith Turner, a civilian clerk with the
Metropolitan Toronto Police, was working in Scarborough's 42
Division at the corner of Brimley and Finch. At about a quarter
to five on the morning of May 24, the station was quiet; most of
the police officers were finishing a snack in the lunch-room down
the hall. Suddenly the double doors leading from the main
entrance were thrown open, and a tall blond man, crouching over,
lurched through and put his elbows on the counter. Turner was
aghast to see that his hands were pouring blood in such
quantities that a puddle already was spreading on the counter.

She thinks he said something like, "I just killed someone with my
bare hands."

The clerk whirled to call the sergeant, Henry Flavelle, who was
on duty that night as road sergeant. Flavelle had just entered
the station and was strolling to his office. Her agitation caught
his attention. He turned and hurried towards her. She gasped
incoherently, pointing at a crouched figure in a windbreaker.
"There's a man, there's a man."

Flavelle, a twenty-year veteran with the force, approached a man
leaning on his elbows on the counter with his hands in the air
and his head bent. The man looked up and said, in a tone of
amazement, "I've just killed two people." When the man
straightened, the sergeant was startled by his size.

"My God, I've just killed two people with my hands," the man
said, looking stunned. The sergeant shouted for help. No one
responded.

There are several versions of what Ken Parks said as he stood at
the counter of the police station. The sergeant isn't certain
himself. Maybe the man said, "My God, I've just killed two
people," then noticed the blood gushing from his wounds and said,
"My hands!"

Sergeant Flavelle shouted again and five officers came running
from the lunch-room. All were so flustered and excited that their
accounts of the scene differ. One of them later explained
apologetically that police are accustomed to going to the scene
of a crime and were not prepared when "The scene came to us."

Heidi Turner heard the man repeat, "I've just killed someone,"
several times as the officers crowded around him. She thought he
also said, "Oh God, I've just killed someone." Constable Cecil
Gerrard has the most colourful version. According to Gerrard the
man said, "I just killed my mother- and father-in-law. I stabbed
and beat them to death. It's all my fault."

Sergeant Colin Arthur Ashton, who was in charge of the 42
Division station that morning, agreed. He heard, "I just killed
my mother- and father-in-law. I beat and stabbed them to death.
It's all my fault."

Another officer, Constable Brian Russell Penwarden, had a
different recollection. He thought the man said, "I killed two
people. I killed them."

Flavelle and Gerrard led the man, who didn't resist, into the
Community Services operations room. Another officer ran for the
first-aid kit, hastily scooping up all the bandages he could
find. While someone telephoned for an ambulance, the police tried
in vain to control the bleeding. The wounded man was asked his
name. He said, "Ken Parks." Then he was asked who had been
killed. The reply was, "My mother- and father-in-law."

The officer asked, "Did you beat them? Did you strangle them? Did
you stab them?"

Ken's head jerked at the word "stab".

"The knife," he gasped. "The knife's in my car. There's a knife
in my car."

The sergeant concentrated on getting the address where the
killing had taken place. Ken said, "In the basement at
twenty-five Brimwood, number eighty-five." The police were
puzzled. Finally it was sorted out that the address was 25
Brimwood, unit 85. Flavelle raced for the door, followed by two
constables.

As they were climbing into a cruiser, another constable came
running. He said, breathlessly, "He says you'll need these to get
in," and handed over a set of bloody keys on a key chain.

Constable Gerrard remained with the heavily bleeding man. "Where
do you live?" he inquired.

Ken answered, "Sixteen fifty-five Geta Circle, unit thirteen, in
Pickering."

The constable remembered the rules. He put on his official
voice and said, "I am placing you under arrest for murder. You
have the right to speak to a lawyer without delay. Do you
understand that right?" Ken said, "Yeah." Then the officer told
him that anything he said would be taken down in writing and
could be used against him in evidence.

Ken was crying. According to the constable's notes, Ken moaned,
"I don't know why I did it, but I killed them."

The constable asked, "How did you kill them?"

"With a knife."

"Where is the knife?"

"In my car in the parking lot, the red Capri."

The police were appalled by Ken's hands, from which blood
continued to flow heavily through the wadding of bandages.
Sergeant Ashton decided not to wait for the ambulance. At ten to
five that morning, only five minutes after Ken's sensational
entrance, he was placed in the back seat of a squad car. Ashton
climbed in beside him, and Gerrard drove the car to Scarborough
Grace General Hospital, only minutes from the station. Ken wept
throughout the trip and kept saying, "Why did I kill them? Why
did I kill them? Why did I kill them?"

At the hospital, a doctor on duty in the emergency department
looked at Ken's mutilated hands and decided they needed more than
simple suturing.

Ken was placed on a stretcher bed against the wall of a room away
from the general traffic while Ashton called for help to guard
him. Constables Eric Puusa and Murray Grills, on patrol duty in a
marked scout car on the midnight shift, were not far from the
hospital when they heard the summons on the cruiser's radio.
Ashton and Gerrard met them in the hospital. Ashton, lowering his
voice, said there had been a murder in a townhouse behind the
station. "A stabbing, a messy situation," he said tersely. The
accused person--he indicated Ken Parks--was charged with murder
of one and possibly two persons, a man and a woman.

Puusa was impressed by the size of the man as the officers
assisted nurses to help Ken undress. Puusa showed presence of
mind. Realizing that the clothes would be produced in evidence,
he handled the bloody garments carefully to prevent matting them.
He noted blood-soaked grey track pants, a light-blue T-shirt,
size extra large, with a few bloodstains, a blue nylon Adidas
zipper jacket, also extra large, and blood
splattered Nike running shoes, size thirteen, partially laced.
The big man, still sobbing, wore no socks or underwear.

The jacket was difficult to remove because the elastic cuffs
dragged over the prisoner's mutilated hands. The injured man
tried to assist, but it was clear that his hands were useless.
The officers then removed a watch from Ken's wrist and spilled
out the contents of his pockets--a pen flashlight, a
blood-stained yellow envelope, a hairbrush, and a key chain
carrying a jack-knife and three keys.

When asked about them, he said they were his car keys and the key
to his house.

Scarborough Grace hospital staff waited for two hours for a
decision about whether Ken would be admitted there or sent to
another hospital for very tricky plastic surgery needed to repair
his hands. During the delay the patient police guards took up
positions, one near Ken's head and the other by his feet.

By the luck of the draw, Constable Puusa remained with Ken for
some five hours. In his notebook he recorded much of what
transpired over that long period. He rarely spoke to the
prisoner, but he made notes of everything Ken said to him,
including the time of each comment.

He reported that the first thing Ken said was, "I killed her
parents. I don't know why."

Then Ken said, "I had a problem gambling. I woke up in the middle
of the night. I don't know why."

The constable asked chattily, "Do you work?"

Ken replied, "No. I lost my job gambling. I'm on bail now for
fraud."

Ken was weeping and appeared to be in a state of fright and
disorientation. If the prisoner was going
to ramble on disconnectedly, Puusa wondered if anyone had
remembered to read him his rights. It wouldn't hurt to do it
again. Puusa took a laminated card from the back of his memo book
and read: "I am arresting you for murder. It is my duty to inform
you that you have the right to retain and instruct counsel
without delay. Do you understand?"

Ken, still crying, didn't appear to be paying much attention. He
said, "I know."

Constable Puusa decided to continue.

"You are charged with murder. Do you wish to say anything in
answer to the charge? You are not obliged to say anything unless
you wish to do so. Whatever you say may be given in evidence."
Ken nodded, watching blood seep through gauze wrapped
around his hands. "I know," he said dully.

The officer finished, "If you have spoken to any police officer
or anyone in authority, or any such person has spoken to you in
connection with this case, I want it clearly understood that I
don't want to influence you in making any statement." And Ken
repeated, "I know."

A few minutes after five, Ken held up his mittened hands and
groaned, "What the fuck did I do?" The officer shrugged. Ken lay
still, breathing heavily, his eyes closed. Then he asked Puusa,
more urgently, "What happened?" The officer indicated he didn't
know.

"I was sleeping on the couch," Ken went on, as if talking to
himself. "I just woke up." A long pause followed. "I had a dream.
I had a knife in my hand. I was killing them. I choked them, then
I went to the police station."

Several minutes passed quietly, the only sound Ken's hoarse
breathing. The clatter of the hospital emergency area seemed very
distant. Ken said suddenly, "Don't worry about me, get them."

The officer didn't know what to make of that but wrote it down.

Ken held up his hands. Panting heavily like a runner, he gasped,
"The pain is starting to come."

The officer called a nurse. At 5:12, Ashton came into the room
and urgently beckoned to Constable Grills. Puusa heard him say
something in a low voice about a man in the next room. After that
Puusa was alone with Ken except for intermittent visits by
hospital staff.

The prisoner appeared to be in agony but didn't complain. His
eyes full of tears, he blurted, "I can't face my wife."

A doctor arrived to examine the damaged hands. Ken was growing
more distraught. "Oh my family," he said. "What did I do? ... Oh
my poor wife. ... Somebody help me. ... Those poor people. I want
to go to jail. I need help. I hope I didn't kill them."

Constable Puusa dutifully wrote it all down, checking his watch
to get the times right. A nurse took the prisoner's blood
pressure and, when he complained of thirst, brought him ice chips
to suck.

The medication, Demerol and Gravol, was given at 5:30, by which
time Ken's face was contorted with pain. He swallowed the pills
gratefully but his agitation increased. He gasped, "I killed the
poor people. ... Is someone helping them? ... Can someone tell my
wife? ... Why did she marry me? ... What about my mum?
She's going to die. ... I don't care about my dad. ... They won't
phone my wife, will they? They'll go and see her?"

Puusa, writing the time--6:12--answered briefly, "Yes." He had no
idea if the police would show such consideration, but he hoped
so. A nurse brought in more ice chips and spread a blanket over
the shivering prisoner.

Dr. Ernest Arnold Trevelyan Salmon, a vascular and thoracic
surgeon at Scarborough Grace, arrived to examine Ken's hands. The
left hand had severe cuts to two fingers, and the right hand had
such deep lacerations to three fingers that the flexor tendons
were severed, exposing bone. The doctor asked Ken if he could
bend his fingers. The man tried, but couldn't. Salmon tested for
sensation in the fingertips and found none. The doctor concluded
that the nerves were severed as well.

Grace Hospital had no one available to perform the long delicate
plastic surgery that would be required. Accordingly, the doctor
made arrangements for Ken to be transported by ambulance to
Sunnybrook Hospital.

The doctor thought there was something strange about the big man
with the lacerated hands. He spoke fairly calmly but he had the
appearance of a man in a severe state of fright. His eyes were
wide open, the pupils tightened down, and he moved restlessly.
According to the doctor, "It was a funny appearance. He had that
stare about him."

Around 7:00, Constable Puusa put Ken's belongings in three brown
paper bags. The big man was quiet and seemed almost asleep. At
approximately 7:22, Puusa recorded that Ken suddenly said in a
loud clear voice, "How come I drove there and not know?"


Karen Parks wakened that morning around 7:30 to the sound of
someone knocking on the front door from within the house. Melissa
had been stirring but was not yet demanding attention, so Karen
had burrowed under the covers to doze as long as she could. The
knocking was followed by the sound of people moving around in the
house. A man's voice called from downstairs, "Police."

What now? she thought, hastily getting into her housecoat.

At the foot of the stairs to the bedrooms she saw two men in the
uniforms of Durham Regional Police.

One of them said, "Where's your husband?"

Karen was confused. How had they entered? She and Ken were always
careful to lock the door. She answered, "Isn't he on the couch?"

"No."

She descended into the living-room and saw that Ken was gone.
"What's going on?" she asked.

"Your mother has been killed," said one of the police officers.
"It appears that your husband is responsible."

"No way," she replied coldly.

Karen picked up the telephone to call her parents. After one
ring, a man answered, announcing himself as a police officer. "I
want to speak to Denis Woods," she told him.

"Who's this?" he said curtly.

"His daughter," she answered, fear beginning to crawl in her
throat.

"Which daughter?" the man asked.

"Karen," she told him stiffly. "Put my dad on the phone."

He said, "Are police officers with you? Can I talk to them?" She
handed over the receiver. From what she could gather, the officer
in her living-room was being rebuked.

He was saying defensively, "Well, she asked us what was going on,
so what could we do?"

Karen thought, _my _mother's _dead. She's dead. The police in her
living-room were real; the abrupt, official manner of the
policeman on the telephone had been convincing. This wasn't a
prank or a misunderstanding.

Protected by shock, she was unmoved. She was only perplexed.
Where was Ken?


Police on their way to investigate what had happened before dawn
in the Woods townhouse were confused only momentarily between 85
Brimwood and 25 Brimwood. Sergeant Flavelle quickly determined
that 25 Brimwood was a complex of townhouses in which number 85
was a unit. As the cruiser roared into the back lane, police
received a call from unit 87 that there was a burglary next door,
at 85.

"Each of the units has in the underground what I would describe
as the back door," Flavelle explains, "so when you enter the
underground along the walls there is a series of doors. You
park your car and you go into your home via that door."

Because both parking spaces next to number 85 were occupied, the
police stopped their two cruisers in the middle of the driveway
and piled out. They tried the basement door of 85, found it
locked, and knocked loudly. No one responded, so they used the
keys Ken had provided. After several attempts, one of the keys
worked.

With Flavelle in the lead, the three men went up a short flight
of stairs and found themselves in a laundrystfurnace room. Ahead
of them, slightly to the left, was a door open on a brightly lit
sitting-room. Flavelle called out, "Police!" and waited: not a
sound. He shouted again, more loudly, "Police. This is the
_police!" and heard a groan.

They stepped into the sitting-room and saw that the far wall was
smeared with blood. Beside the blood-stained wall was the body of
a woman dressed in a red, white, and blue striped cotton
night-gown. She was in a twisted position on her back, her eyes
and mouth open and her face covered with blood. Her stiffened
arms were raised with the fists clenched.

Someone moaned nearby. The police followed the sound to the
stairway leading to the first floor. They found a man in pyjamas
sitting on the steps, his head covered in blood.

"Is there anyone in the building?" Flavelle asked urgently.

"My wife and children," the man replied weakly. "They're
upstairs."

One officer stayed with the injured man while the others drew
their guns and raced up the stairs, noting a trail of blood on
the left-hand wall. The rooms on the main floor were deserted.
Braced for the horror of finding more bodies, they followed
streaks of blood on the wall of the stairway to the top floor. A
quick search showed that the bathroom and four bedrooms were
empty. Three beds evidently had been used but the occupants were
gone. In one of the bedrooms a window was wide open with the
screen pushed out. Flavelle stuck out his head to look at the
lawn one storey below, but saw no one.

The officers returned to the basement just as ambulance crews
arrived to place the bleeding man gently on a stretcher.
Flavelle, intending to call for help to search for the missing
children, looked around for a telephone. In the basement bedroom,
he saw a telephone almost under the dishevelled bed, the receiver
off the hook. He concluded that it had been knocked off the night
table next to the bed.

He picked up the receiver but there was no dial tone. He
studied the bed, which was covered with blood. When he lifted one
of the pillows by the corner, he was surprised at its weight. He
saw the reason: it was completely saturated in blood.

He went upstairs in search of another telephone and found one on
the wall of the kitchen. He tried to call, but the line was dead.
He remembered the burglary call from the next-door
unit, 87, and knocked there. The door opened on terrified faces.
When he learned who they were, the sergeant breathed a sigh of
relief. The teenagers quaking before him in their pyjamas were
three of the Woods children, unharmed. They had escaped through
the upstairs window and taken refuge with the neighbours.


About twenty minutes after Ken Parks arrived at Scarborough Grace
hospital, Denis Woods was delivered to the same hospital by
ambulance. Constable Grills, summoned from Ken's side, was
assigned to stay with the injured man. Grills found Denis bathed
with blood from wounds to his head and face.

Dr. Salmon went directly from examining Ken's hands to inspect
the older man's wounds. He was startled by the amount of blood
Denis Woods had lost. The man's head and shoulders were covered
in it and one wound was still pouring blood.

"What happened?" the doctor asked.

"Someone came into our bedroom," Denis replied, appearing dazed
and confused. "In the dark. I don't know who it was. I don't know
what happened."

The doctor made an examination. Denis had five sharp, clean cuts
to his head. The one still bleeding was a deep gash in front of
the left ear. Three other cuts were on his forehead and another,
a slice that exposed bone, was above his ear. A wound at his
throat had just missed the carotid artery, a close call. The
doctor then spotted another injury, a puncture wound that
penetrated to bone at the back of Denis Woods' left shoulder.


Karen told herself in the hours that followed her mother's death
that very soon she would have to think about it. She couldn't
continue in this numbed state, but meanwhile she was in no hurry
for the pain to begin.

Subdued by the scolding, the Durham police officers no longer
were volunteering information. One of them said with exaggerated
politeness, "We'd like you to get dressed and come with us."

She nodded. Her movements were aimless, her mind a blank. Melissa
made sounds of distress, so Karen collected herself. She put a
bottle to warm in the microwave oven and went upstairs to
change the baby's diaper. She carried her into the kitchen,
ignoring the police, who sat patiently in the living-room. She
fed the baby and took her back upstairs to dress her. Then she
strapped Melissa in a tilted bucket chair while she went to her
bedroom and dressed herself.

Karen went through the familiar routines without much awareness
of what she was doing. She can't remember, for instance, what she
wore that morning or how she dressed Melissa. She's sure she
prepared the baby's formula and poured it into bottles, but she
felt herself in a dream state, disconnected from the robot
performing those tasks.

She suddenly realized that there had been no mention of her
father.

"Where's my father?" she asked, turning wildly to the police. "Is
he all right?"

One of them replied uneasily that her father was in hospital with
serious injuries. Karen felt the shock of that news. Was he
dying? Was he dead? She felt light, porous, dizzy. The police
became restless with impatience. One of them said, "We have to
go. Don't you think you'd better get a baby sitter?"

"I don't have one," she answered, only vaguely registering what
he was asking. Her mother had been her only baby-sitter. She
turned her mind from that thought.

"A friend, maybe?" he suggested.

Karen considered a moment and then called Connie Sullivan, who
lived near Scarborough Grace hospital. They had been in high
school together. When she identified herself, Connie was
startled. It was eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, an unusual
time to call, and Karen had never before asked her to care for
Melissa. Karen offered no explanation. Connie, alert to the odd
tone in Karen's voice, asked no questions. She said, "Sure. Bring
her over."

The police ushered Karen to the back seat of their cruiser but
she balked at getting in.

"What about Melissa?" she asked. "Where is she going to be?"

An officer said. "It's a short ride. You can hold her on your
lap."

Karen protested. It wasn't safe, she told them indignantly. It
wasn't even _legal. At her insistence, they opened the trunk of
the cruiser to push through a seat-belt that she buckled
around Melissa's sturdy car seat.

Karen was beginning to emerge from shock. The officers had a
strange attitude when they first saw her, she thought, almost as
if they were relieved. Much later she
reflected that they had been prepared to find her dead. Their
fears would have been sharpened by finding her front door
standing half open. It was reasonable for them to think that a
man who had killed his mother-in-law and almost killed his
father-in-law might first have slain his wife and child.

She handed the baby to Connie, who looked at her sharply. Karen
said simply, "My mother's dead." Before Connie could speak, Karen
gave hurried instructions about how the baby should be fed and
when she napped. Then she backed away. "I'll talk to you later,"
she said hurriedly. "I've got to go now."

As the police drove her to the Scarborough police station, 42
Division, for questioning, Karen asked to be taken first to her
father. The police were evasive. "Maybe later," one said. Her
thoughts turned to Ken. Where was he? The officers said they
didn't know. She wouldn't accept that. By insistent prodding she
learned he was in custody.

She tried to put the crazy pieces together: Ken arrested, her
mother killed, her father injured. What was Ken doing in the
middle of the night at her parents' place? Maybe he had suddenly
decided to talk to them. That didn't make sense--he would be
seeing them the next day at the barbecue--but suppose that's what
he'd done. Maybe an argument had broken out.

Her imagination could take her no farther. Ken was not a violent
man. He was aggressive on the rugby field, but in all the years
they'd been together, even in the heat of their worst fights, he
had never lifted a finger against her.

She was escorted down a hallway in the police station to a room
where one of her brothers, Jonathan, and two sisters, Prudence
and Emma, were waiting. They were still trying to reach Samantha,
they said. Karen looked for Nicky, the youngest Woods child, and
then remembered that he was in Philadelphia for a soccer
tournament. She recognized the next-door neighbours who lived in
unit 87. Two strangers came forward and introduced themselves.
They said they were with the Salvation Army's victim assistance
program.

"What happened?" Karen asked, looking from one strained face to
another.

No one really knew. Prudence said she had been wakened by the
sound a telephone makes when it is off the hook. She had
dozed off and then heard a woman scream and some grunting noises.
Her first sleepy thought was that someone was watching television
with the volume too loud. Then she realized in fright that the
sounds were coming from the basement and the woman screaming was
her mother. She went down the stairs a short way and called,
"What's going on? What's happening?"

Her sister Emma came out of her bedroom. They shouted together,
"What's happening down there?"

The screams and grunting stopped abruptly. There was an ominous
silence; Pru retreated fearfully to the upstairs landing. Emma
called, "Mum, are you all right?" Emma's memory of the horrifying
events differs slightly from Pru's. She thinks the sound of the
telephone off the hook happened during the screaming and
continued afterwards, and she doesn't think Pru went down the
stairs.

They agree with what occurred next. The grunting noises started
again and with them the sound of heavy feet racing up the stairs
towards them, two at a time. They fled in terror into Emma's room
and shut the door. Emma jumped on her bed. Pru stood with her
back against the door and then, realizing how ineffective a
barrier that would be, ran to huddle behind Emma. Someone stood
on the other side of the door in the upstairs hall, panting and
walking around. After a paralysing minute, they heard footsteps
retreating down the stairs and then the familiar metallic slam of
the outside door in the basement. After that there was silence.

They ran across the hall and turned on the light in Jonathan's
room. He wasn't fully awake, but the sounds of screams and
banging had penetrated his sleep and he was beginning to stir.

Frightened and shaking, they had a quick low-voiced conference
about what to do. Jonathan, sixteen, bravely volunteered to go
downstairs to investigate. As he looked around for a weapon, his
sisters followed him into the hall. They were aghast to see
bright bloodstains on the frame of the bathroom door.

Jonathan whispered, "Maybe he's still down there."

They decided to call for help and bolted into Samantha's room
where there was a telephone. Jonny's recollection is that the
basement door clanged shut as they lifted the phone and found
that the line was dead.

Panic swept them; their one thought was to escape. They decided
to jump out a window. They picked Emma's room and pushed out the
screen. Emma grabbed shoes, a jacket, and her purse as
Jonathan jumped first. Pru followed, and then Emma. They
knocked on the door of unit 87 and eventually aroused their
neighbours. The words tumbling over one another, they said there
was someone in their house. The neighbours called the police and
reported a burglary.


"I want to die," Karen wept. "I wish it had been me instead. Why
couldn't it have been me he killed?"

Pru and Emma threw their arms around her. "No, no," they cried.
"We need you, Karen. We need you now to be our mother."


CHAPTER THREE

What Happened?


The lawn below the window from which Pru, Emma, and Jonny Woods
had jumped was an unforgiving surface on which to land. Emma
twisted her ankle and Pru wrenched her back. Karen was relieved
to find that, apart from those minor injuries, her siblings were
physically unharmed in the slaughter that had befallen the
family.

"How's dad?" she asked them.

"We don't know," they answered, weeping. "We can't find out
anything."

Anxiety for their father crowded out every other thought. The
horror of their mother's death was more than they were ready to
face while there was still a possibility that they would be left
with no parents at all. They cried, hugged one another, then
broke apart to pace the room. They begged the police for
information. The answers they received were vague and
unsatisfying. The children tried to put together the pieces of
the puzzle for themselves. They had assumed in the beginning that
a burglar somehow had gained entry, a maniac who attacked Barbara
and Denis when they wakened and discovered him. That theory was
coming unravelled. In the fragments of unguarded conversation
overheard among the police officers, the children learned that
someone had been arrested, and that person seemed to be Ken
Parks.

_Ken!

It couldn't have been Ken, they thought--but also, it could. The
intruder was big and heavy, judging from the sounds on the
stairs, and he seemed to know the house. Also, Ken would have a
key.

Still, they couldn't believe that Ken was the killer. It
made no sense. He was as close as a brother to them all, someone
they looked up to. Only a few weeks earlier, he had taken Jonny
to a hockey game and out to dinner. Besides, it was impossible
that he would harm their parents. They had a hundred memories of
Ken at their dinner table, laughing, exchanging affectionate
banter with Barbara and Denis. None of them had ever heard a
hostile or even unfriendly word pass between Ken and their
parents. Even with hints in recent weeks that Ken was in some
kind of trouble, neither Barbara nor Denis ever spoke ill of him.
Their mother, they knew, thought Ken was just about perfect.

And yet it seemed that Ken had just killed her, and maybe killed
their father as well.

Samantha arrived with her boy-friend, her face white and wet with
tears. Karen sat dry-eyed, wondering why she couldn't cry. If her
dad also died, she thought she would not be able to bear the
grief. Her life had been blasted; the disaster was of such
magnitude that she couldn't think about it. She concentrated
instead on praying that her dad would live. Whenever a police
officer came into the room, the children pleaded to be taken to
see their father. Finally, around nine that morning, an officer
told them it was being arranged.

"However, there are a lot of media people outside,"
the man said. The children looked at one another in
consternation. To avoid exposing the young people to cameras,
microphones, and reporters, the officers escorted them through a
side door into a closed garage. The children climbed into two
cruisers and slid down so that their heads were below the
windows. The garage doors opened and the cruisers swiftly left.

Anger boiled out of Karen. She turned to Emma and said harshly,
"Why didn't you help them? Why didn't you help when you heard the
screaming?"

Emma answered, miserably, "I was too scared." Karen, ashamed,
squeezed her hand in apology.

She couldn't stop thinking of her mother dying in agony, and the
terror her parents must have suffered. "I want to kill Ken," she
cried out suddenly. "I want to kill him."

To avoid the reporters waiting at the main entrance of
Scarborough Grace hospital, the police guided the family to
another door. The children were relieved. "The last thing we
needed," Karen reflected later, "was to be a side-show. We were
all in shock."

Police were taking a statement from Denis Woods, so the children
were instructed to wait. While they
sat in a drab lounge area, too numbed to speak, a nurse came to
report on their father's condition. He was fine, they were
assured. Denis Woods had some cuts to his head, but he was in no
danger. Though Karen remained tearless, the others sobbed in
relief. An officer who came to the waiting-room confirmed the
good news. He had just left their father, he said. Denis had lost
a good deal of blood, but he would be on his feet in no time.

The officer looked at Karen, a dignified small figure holding
herself together with obvious effort, and said gently, "Your
husband has been arrested for the murder."

She asked, "Where is he?" and he replied, "He was injured. He's
been taken to Sunnybrook Hospital."

She nodded. She heard him, but she made no connection to the
information. She would think about Ken some other time. She
marvelled at her calm. It was as though some force was protecting
her, she reflected. Almost as if her mother was watching over
her. _Her _mother! The conviction grew until she was certain of
it. Her mother was somewhere near, worried for her and hovering
around to make sure she was all right. Karen felt a flood of
gratitude so intense that she told her sisters about it.

"That's crazy," Samantha responded tersely.

A half-hour later, the police officer stood in the doorway again
and said they could see their father, two at a time.

By unspoken agreement, Karen seemed to have been designated as
the stricken family's leader. They turned to her and she
organized them sensibly in teams, using exactly the tone and
manner of their mother. She decided that she and Emma would go
first; no one objected.

They gasped at their father's appearance. Denis seemed small,
fragile, and broken, almost unrecognizable as the solid, decisive
person they knew. His face was ghastly pale, and dried blood was
matted in his hair. One side of his head was swathed in thick,
snow-white bandages, and another bulge of bandage was taped on
his neck. His left eye was swollen nearly shut and beside it was
a cut, bristling with fresh stitches.

He seemed to be dozing as they came in but opened his eyes at
their approach.

"Howya doing?" Karen asked tenderly, her throat tight.

"Not bad," he answered in a frail voice. "Is your mother all
right? Is everyone else okay?"

My God, Karen thought in dismay, he doesn't know. She groped for
words but what came out was, "Sure. We're all fine."

Denis closed his eyes gratefully. Karen tiptoed out to consult
with the others while Pru slipped in to take her place.

In the corridor outside, Karen told Jonny and Samantha, "He
doesn't know that mum is dead. Someone has to tell him."

They looked appalled, but were speechless. "Who's going to do
it?" Karen said, her voice shaking with her effort to keep her
feelings under control. "I can't."

"Not me," said Samantha. "Not me either," said Jonny.

Emma and Pru, when consulted, also refused. None of the children
wanted to be the one to bring their father such terrible grief.
The Salvation Army's victim assistance people, listening to the
discussion in quiet sympathy, offered to find a chaplain to break
the news, and the children readily agreed. While the man was
being summoned, Karen slipped back into her father's room.

Denis was saying querulously, "I don't even know what happened."

Karen moved to the bedside and took his limp hand. "Dad," she
said. "It was Ken."

Her father winced and turned away. "I figured as much," he said
bleakly. He had been thinking that the heaviness of the weight on
him indicated that his attacker was a very big man. As big as
Ken. He could think of no reason why it would have been Ken, but
the likelihood had been growing in his mind.

The merciful detachment that Karen had been able to maintain
abruptly shattered. She broke down and wailed. "It's my fault,"
she cried as Emma rushed to hold her. "I should have heard Ken
leave the house. I could have warned mum. I should have known
what he was going to do. I should have known what kind of a mood
he was in." She was moving into hysteria. "How could I have
married him? I'm the one who brought him into the family. If I'd
never married him, this wouldn't have happened."

"It's not your fault," Emma said, her arms around her sister.
"There, there." Despite the anguish that shook Karen, tears
didn't come. A hard knot of sickness was gathering in her
stomach.

The hospital rules were suspended to allow all
the Woods children to be with their father for the grim news. The
Salvation Army chaplain arrived quickly and introduced himself.
He sat down beside the bed and softly told Denis that his
wife was dead. Denis shook his head and his eyes filled with
tears. "Poor Bobbie," he moaned. "Poor, poor Bobbie."

He lay crying, his eyes closed for privacy, but with an absence
of shock that led Karen to suspect he had already guessed the
truth. "He keeps asking about Bobbie," the police had said. Karen
decided her father had deduced that his wife was dead from the
officers' evasive replies. The whole family was developing a
faculty for hearing what the police didn't say.

After a while Denis slipped into sleep, and the children left him
alone with his sorrow. They returned to the dreary waiting-room,
already almost as familiar to them as their home, and talked
about the family's future. They could not imagine how their
father would manage without his Bobbie, the family's centre, the
peacemaker, the organizer, the ballast, the one who steadied them
all, the housekeeper with an almost obsessive need for
perfection. Everyone in the Woods family depended on Barbara.
Only Barbara could find their missing gym shoes, or whip up
dinner single-handed; only she knew what to say when their hearts
were broken.

Denis Woods was an uncommunicative man who kept apart from the
family's rivalries and upheavals. His life revolved around his
spotless and smoothly run home, where Barbara could be depended
on to be good company when he wanted it or to protect his need
for seclusion when he didn't.

What would happen to him? the children wondered. They were
certain he couldn't manage without Bobbie. He had never bothered
to learn where utensils were kept, or how to operate the
appliances, or how to manage the finances. Barbara was a
faultless housewife and dedicated mother. Possessed of an orderly
mind and a gift for administration, she had taken complete charge
of the household, and Denis had been pleased to leave it that
way.

Like many long-married couples who find their needs compatible,
Barbara and Denis had fused. They were two separate people with
very different personalities, but in fact they had become over
the years an entity, like Siamese twins with one heart.

The children couldn't picture him without her. Denis should
return to England, they decided, because he had family there to
give him support. Certainly they
wouldn't be much help to him around the house. Barbara had not
even allowed her children to learn to cook, preferring to do
everything herself. The more they discussed it, the more it
seemed to them that England was the solution to the loneliness
Denis faced. Only Karen was doubtful. She couldn't see her father
uprooting them all again; but, on the other hand, she agreed it
wasn't possible that he could run the household alone.

With fear for their father's life at rest, the Woods children
were left to contemplate the loss of their mother. Grief for her
came in waves. One moment they were talking about the possibility
that their father would move to England and the next they were
sobbing for their lost mother. Sometimes all but Karen were
crying hard, standing in the hospital waiting-room with their
arms around one another. Karen, dry-eyed, gave comfort but asked
for none.

She thought about Ken, the cause of their pain. Her anger against
him had vanished, exhausted in the single wild outburst in the
police car when she had said she wanted to kill him. Karen probed
tentatively at her frozen feelings to discover if she hated her
husband; she could find no emotion at all. She was waiting, she
realized, to find out what had happened. Her sense that her
mother was watching over her was very
strong. Karen was sure that Barbara wanted her to proceed slowly
and carefully, to make sure that she was doing the right thing.

The killing was so out of character for Ken that there had to be
an explanation. Ken was not a murderer; of that Karen was
certain. Violence was completely foreign to his mild, passive
nature. Besides, she knew better than anyone that his fondness
for her parents was genuine. She didn't doubt that he loved
Barbara, and she knew he had great respect for Denis. Still, the
police said he was the killer. What could have happened?

She remembered that the police officer had said Ken was injured.
Maybe he had tried to kill himself, she thought. That was likely,
given Ken's capacity for remorse, but that still left unanswered
the question of how the killing had happened. Karen shook her
head in confusion and despair.

In part to divert them, she decided to tell her brother and
sisters the whole story of Ken's gambling and the embezzlement.
They listened in fascination to the account, grateful for the
distraction and the explanation of why Ken had stopped dropping
by. Looking for a link between the gentle Ken they knew and the
madman who had killed their mother, they were full of questions.
Had she and
Ken fought last night? Was Ken mad at mum and dad? Unknown to
them, was Ken a violent man who was in the habit of blowing up
and hitting her? No, no, and no.

They turned to the same plausible scenario that had occurred to
Karen, picturing Ken impulsively deciding to have it out with
Barbara and Denis in the middle of the night. Maybe Denis had
been hard on him and the men had exchanged hot words, leading to
a fight that Barbara got between. They could picture that: she
was certain to try to break them apart. Then they remembered that
Denis hadn't known who his attacker was, and they slumped
back in their chairs, that line of speculation ended.

Karen was developing another possibility. Perhaps Ken temporarily
had lost his sanity. She ticked off all the pressures on him in
recent months--the gambling losses, the theft, the arrest, his
joblessness, his lies. The strain might have unbalanced him, she
thought. The others nodded approvingly. That made more sense than
anything else they'd been able to imagine.

From time to time Karen called her friend Connie to ask about
Melissa. Connie always assured her that the baby was fine and
considerately kept her curiosity in check. No trouble at all,
don't worry, and I'm so sorry about your mother.

As noon approached, the Salvation Army's victim assistance people
were concerned that the Woods children hadn't eaten that day.
Since Samantha's boy-friend lived only a few blocks away, it was
decided to pick up hamburgers at a fast-food outlet and have
lunch at his place. The others chose to drive the few blocks, but
Karen wanted to walk, needing time alone to sort out her
thoughts. She plodded along the sidewalks and across
intersections oblivious of her surroundings and unable to keep
her thoughts coherent. By the time she arrived, everyone had
plunged hungrily into the food, but it looked repulsive to her.
She was certain that if she tried to eat she would vomit. She
felt like someone in the early queasy stages of flu.

None of them thought to call anyone, not Barbara's mother in
England, not her friends, not even the youngest Woods child,
twelve-year-old Nicky, who was playing soccer in Philadelphia
that day and still didn't know that his mother was dead.


Ken's first coherent memory of that bloody morning is the police
station. He was aware of being led into a room where he was
seated while a police officer wrapped bandages around his hands.
Police in uniform asked him questions--his name and address, the
address where the killing happened. His answers must have been
blurred because it was some time before they understood that when
he said "eighty-five Brimwood" he was referring to a unit at 25
Brimwood, not a street address.

He was trying to understand what had happened. The thought he had
was that something terrible had happened to Barbara and maybe the
kids. Barbara had had that "help me" look on her face, and the
kids had been screaming. What was he doing in the house anyway?
How did he get there? Where was Denis? Who cut his hands?

Ken was aware of driving to the hospital and waiting there
on a bed, but everything seemed to be at a hollow distance. He
remembers being transferred by ambulance to Sunnybrook Hospital.
News of the crime seemed to have preceded him. The plastic
surgeon assigned to examine him refused, fearing that Ken was too
dangerous to approach. Ken marvels at this, since two police
officers were inside his room to guard him, two stood outside the
room, and two others were posted down the hall.

At the surgeon's insistence, a psychiatrist was
dispatched to make an assessment of the wounded man. After half
an hour with Ken, the verdict of the psychiatrist was that the
prisoner was not psychotic and posed no threat to medical
personnel. With that assurance, the plastic surgeon agreed to
examine Ken's hands.

Ken's mind was reeling. He thought maybe Barbara and Denis were
dead, but he didn't know how he knew that. Who could have done
such a thing? Could he have done it? Why didn't he remember
anything? How come he didn't know what had happened to his hands?

After the psychiatrist left, a police officer in plain clothes
came into the room, his manner that of someone accustomed to
command.

Ken said, "Are they both dead?"

The officer, Staff Sergeant Bobby Burns Adair of the elite Metro
Toronto Police Central Homicide Squad, hesitated. Ken asked
insistently, "Did I kill them both?"

The officer, writing the remarks in his notebook, replied, "Wait
a minute."

Bobby Adair had been wakened at five that morning, May 24, 1987,
and ordered to open a homicide investigation into a killing in
Scarborough.

At about seven he was inside unit 85 of 25 Brimwood, having noted
with a seasoned police officer's care that the weather was cloudy
and cool, with no rain. He talked to the coroner, looked at the
blood on the stairway walls, noticed that Barbara's kitchen was
neat and tidy except for a smear of blood on one partially open
cutlery drawer, and then went into the basement, noting
disapprovingly a welter of shoes of all sizes on the floor of the
laundry room.

Barbara Woods' body was still in the television room where police
had found it two hours earlier. There was a great deal of blood
on her face and around her head, but the only obvious injury he
could see was in the area of her left eye. She was dressed in a
red, white, and blue striped night-shirt that was twisted to show
she was wearing white panties. On her feet were white socks.
The adjoining bedroom showed signs of a great struggle. The
amount of blood on the pillows and sheets was startling, and the
covers were wildly dishevelled. The homicide sergeant went from
there to 42 Division to check on the progress of the
investigation and at about eleven that morning arrived in Ken's
room at Sunnybrook Hospital. He was required to wait while the
psychiatrist completed his examination. Constable Eric Puusa was
on guard inside the room, and another constable stood at the door
outside.

At 11:38 the homicide officer saw Ken Parks for the first time, a
huge man lying on his back with his thickly bandaged hands raised
above his chest. Ken appeared agitated and in great pain.

The sergeant decided to postpone answering Ken's questions. He
had an investigation to conduct. He brusquely asked the man's
name--"Ken Parks"--and age--"twenty-three". He then asked if Ken
would object if he used a tape recorder to take a statement. Ken
replied that he didn't care.

The tape was filed as evidence, together with a transcript
because Ken's replies were almost inaudible. His normal speaking
voice is soft and people strain to hear him, but on the tape it
also was uneven, his breath coming in shallow gasps broken by
sobs.

Only when the tape was finished did the homicide officer tell Ken
that he had killed Barbara Woods but not Denis Woods.

Ken asked, the words dragged out, "How's my wife? Did I hurt
her?"

The sergeant said Karen was fine. Ken heard him but
wasn't convinced. The answer had been given somewhat evasively.
He began to cry again.

During the long wait for the surgery, police continued to
question him. At one point Sergeant Adair said he wanted to take
another statement on tape.

"You have the right to call a lawyer," he informed Ken.

Ken groaned, "I can't afford a lawyer. I have nothing more to
say. I've told you everything I can."

He and Karen had been shocked at the fees they had been charged
by the lawyer retained to defend him on the fraud charges. Most
certainly they couldn't take on any more legal expense. Sergeant
Adair insisted, and the second taped statement was taken.

Though two policemen testified otherwise and there is no reason
not to believe them, Ken does not remember that anyone ever
"read him his rights". He's not sure he would have remembered it
if they had.

It has been understood since the beginning of provincial
legal-aid plans that police will inform accused persons who say
they are indigent of their right to a publicly funded lawyer. In
fact, Ken Parks contributed to a Supreme Court of Canada decision
on that very issue. On February 1, 1990, the Supreme Court in a
unanimous decision by seven judges ruled that police failure to
do so violates a person's constitutional rights to such a degree
that all charges against that person could be dismissed. The
precedent on which they depended was written by Judge David Watt
when he barred from the Parks trial the second tape, the one made
after Ken had said he couldn't afford a lawyer.

A judgment written by Mr. Justice Antonio Lamer noted that "The
right to retain and instruct counsel, in modern Canadian society,
has come to mean more than the right to retain a lawyer
privately. It now means the right to have counsel free of charge
where the accused meets the financial criteria set up by the
provincial legal aid plan."

In Ken Parks' case, as police admitted in the trial, there was a
failure to advise him that a legal-aid lawyer could be called, an
oversight that was particularly grave since his charges were so
serious and his state of mind incoherent.

In fact, Ken's statements on the two tapes are strikingly
similar, so the issue was mainly one of law rather than content.
His replies are consistent and direct, but it is evident that he
was in the grip of powerful emotions. From time to time he
groans. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse and his breath
rasping and uneven.

The police treated Ken with courtesy and kindness, which
increased his inclination to be co-operative, but he had little
information to give. Despite persistent and expert police
questioning during the twelve hours before the surgery on his
hands, Ken was unable to unearth any memory of the actual killing
or the attack on Denis. He could not explain the appalling cuts
to his hands. No, he didn't remember driving the fourteen miles
from Pickering to Scarborough.

He repeated on both tapes his only clear recollection: "I woke
and saw my mother-in-law's face." The police took no note of the
curious verb "woke".

For their part, police interrogators found it impossible to
believe Ken's insistence that he couldn't remember anything.

At eight o'clock that night, Ken finally was taken to the
operating room. The delicate plastic surgery to repair nerves and
tendons lasted for four hours and was only partially successful.

Some time after midnight he awakened from the
anesthetic and recognized that he was back in his room. The first
people he saw were two uniformed police officers. Seeing that Ken
was regaining consciousness, one of them pressed the button for a
nurse.


Sergeant Adair appeared early the next morning. "Your father's
here," he said. "He wants to see you."

Ken was astounded. His father, Jim Parks, was a mysterious figure
in his life. Ken's parents separated when he was three years old
and Ken had seen or heard from his father fewer than half a dozen
times since, usually to exchange only a few impersonal sentences.

Jim Parks came into the room, a dark-haired man almost as big as
his son. There were tears in his eyes.

"Are you okay?" he asked huskily.

Ken, still overcome with astonishment, was so touched he began to
cry. "I'm fine," he stammered.

"I'm going to get you a lawyer," his father said. "Don't say
anything until I get you a lawyer."

Ken, thinking of the legal expenses already incurred
with the lawyer who was defending him on the fraud charge, shook
his head emphatically. "I don't want a lawyer," he said. "I've
already told the police that."

His father stared at him, uncertain what to do. "No lawyer," Ken
repeated. The police guard indicated that the visit was over, and
his father, after a long sorrowful look at Ken, turned and left.


Ken's family heard the news by degrees. His favourite blood
relative, his maternal grandmother, Lilly Hodge, had just
returned to Scarborough on that cool Sunday from the trailer home
at Balsam Lake north of Toronto where she vacations for most of
the summer. She had a telephone call from Tyrone Manuel, a
Newfoundlander who has been living with her daughter Betty, Ken's
mother, since 1972.

"Ken's in terrible trouble," Tyrone told her. "I can't tell you
about it on the phone, it's too serious. Can you come to Oshawa
right away?"

Her son, Glen Hodge, arrived with his wife, Diane, to drive
her the twenty miles to her daughter's tiny red-brick home
perched on the edge of rail yards in Oshawa. She remembers the
trip as a nightmare of terrified apprehension. Lil is
scrupulously impartial in her treatment of her brood of
grandchildren, insisting that each is perfect and she has no
favourites, but Ken was her first grandchild and she prizes him.
In 1980, when Tyrone landed a well-paid job on the truck-assembly
line of General Motors in Oshawa, Ken was sixteen and reluctant
to follow his mother. He wanted to stay in Scarborough to finish
high school, and his grandmother Hodge solved the problem by
inviting Ken to live with her. The arrangement worked smoothly
for them both. Ken was grateful for his grandmother's generous
disposition, and Lil was glad to have Ken's amiable company. Ken
stayed with his grandmother for four years until his marriage.
She gave him the mothering for which he was starved.

As Tyrone greeted her at the door, Lil noticed that two of
Betty's four children, Robby and the teenaged Tammy, were there.
Tense faces turned towards her. Robby was the first to speak.
"Ken killed Karen's mother," he said.

Lil was incredulous. "I can't believe it," she said, feeling
faint. "Not Kenneth. Not Kenneth. He couldn't do it, it's
impossible."

Tyrone and Glen assured her that it was true. The
Scarborough police had phoned Ken's brother Darrin at Ken's
request. Darrin promptly called his mother but got Tyrone, who
explained that Betty was out with a friend. "Ken's killed Karen's
mother," he blurted out. Ty couldn't believe it. He checked with
the Durham police and asked if there was a mistake, but the
police confirmed Darrin's account. There was no room for doubt
that the Ken Parks who had been charged with murder was the one
they knew. He was in a hospital somewhere, Ty was informed,
arrested and under police guard.

Ty then called Glen, Lilly Hodge's second son, a plumber, who
picked up Lil. Tammy, eighteen, the youngest of Betty's children,
was also summoned and arrived just before the three from
Scarborough. Mavis, Lil's youngest, was married to a draftsman in
the northern Ontario town of Dorset. She was on her way.

When Betty, Ken's mother, came through the door, she stopped in
amazement to see so many of her family. "What's this?" she cried
merrily, pulling up a chair. They all spoke at once. Betty
doesn't remember who gave her the gist of it, but once she
realized what they were saying she
started to scream. She jumped up and bolted out of the house,
throwing herself into the arms of the woman next door, a
neighbour accustomed to hearing her woes.
After a while Tyrone fetched her. Darrin Parks had arrived
and right after him Lil's other son, Ronald, an electrician in
the town of Port Perry, and his wife, Susan. The family tried to
deal with the incomprehensible nightmare. It wasn't possible,
they kept saying. They had known Ken all his life. In many ways,
he was the most easy-going and gentle person in the family. As
Tyrone kept saying, with his Newfoundland lilt, "He wouldn't hurt
_any-body." It had to be a mistake. They dispatched Tyrone and
Glen to drive to the Scarborough police station to get more
information.

The men returned unsatisfied. "Ken walked into the police station
and said he killed two people," they told the others. "Then they
found Barbara dead and Denis with his head cut. And Ken's hands
are all cut. That's all we can find out."

The house that Ty and Betty occupy was too small for them all,
but the stunned family didn't want to be separated. They got into
their cars and pick-up trucks and drove to Lil's
immaculate house in Scarborough to regroup.

"Please excuse the house," Lil apologized mechanically, as she
always does. "I've been up north." It's a family joke that she
always feels her home is not tidy enough, when in fact Lil's
house has a permanent shine, nothing an inch out of place.

Like Karen and her siblings, the Hodge-Parks family was trying to
find an explanation that would fit with the unlikelihood that Ken
was a killer. They turned over possibilities. The only theory
that made any sense was that Ken was trying to protect Barbara
and Denis from an attacker. That explained how his hands got cut.
His confession to the police was an attempt to shield the real
killer. That sounded like Ken, a very protective, loyal man.

It occurred to them suddenly that Ken would need a good criminal
lawyer. None of them knew one experienced in murder charges, so
Glen Hodge volunteered to make inquiries from the lawyer he used.
"Don't worry about the money," Lil Hodge said grimly. "I've got
some stock I can sell."

Tyrone cautioned, "It's going to be expensive." Glen Hodge said
quickly, "We'll worry about that when we get to it. The first
thing is to get Ken a good lawyer."

The Parks family is no stranger to legal difficulties. Ken's two
brothers, Robby and Darrin, have had trouble with the law most of
their lives. "They were full of mischief," their grandmother
Hodge explains loyally. She's being kind. The mischief includes
bar fights and burglaries.

Oshawa is a lunch-bucket automotive city of some 200,000 people
where couples go out for the evening in matching wind-breakers
covered with bowling crests. The tough, macho tone of the
high school was a disaster for the Parks boys. They arrived in
the city as youngsters who did occasional shop-lifting but very
soon were accomplished thieves. Because of their youth, judges
usually sentenced them to serve terms of probation and community
service. For a while, though, Darrin was kept in a detention
centre. Betty and Ty, heartsick, grew accustomed to police calls
in the night and bail hearings in the morning.

Glen Hodge called his lawyer friend at home and was given the
names of what were described as "the three best criminal lawyers
in Canada--the tops". When he left the phone, he read the names
to the others: Clay Ruby, Morris Manning, Edward Greenspan.

The family decided that nothing more could be done until the next
morning, so they went their separate ways. The men took Monday
off work and met again at Lil's neat house. They looked up the
telephone number of the first lawyer on the list, Clayton C.
Ruby, a name familiar to them all. They had seen Clay Ruby many
times on television news clips, dressed in black robes and
standing outside some courthouse, his hair tousled in the wind
and his dark eyes burning with conviction as he spoke of the
justice of his case. Glen Hodge, who placed the call, was
dismayed when a secretary explained that Mr. Ruby was away on
vacation.

Mr. Ruby's partner, however, might be available to assist until
Mr. Ruby returned. Would they like to speak to Marlys Edwardh?

The name was unknown to them, but they reasoned that she must be
good if she worked with Clay Ruby. When Glen described to her
what had happened, she said she would see Ken at once.

Betty Parks went with Tyrone and her mother, Lil Hodge, to
Sunnybrook Hospital. They were allowed into Ken's room and they
found him weeping.

"I can't believe the things the police are telling me," he said.
"Is it true that I hit Barbara with a tire-iron?"

Betty hadn't heard anything about a tire iron, she said. To
comfort her son, she told him about the lawyer.

"I don't want a lawyer," he protested. "I don't want you spending
your money on me."

"We're going to help you as much as we can," Betty told him.
"We're all here for you."

Betty turned to the guard standing inside the door.
"Can I hug him?" she asked. He nodded, so she put her arms
around her son. Ken burst into tears.

Marlys Edwardh, then thirty-seven and already rated as one of the
country's leading criminal lawyers, is a small, slender, erect
woman with a cap of hair the colour and gloss of chestnuts, cool
grey eyes, and a warm, impish face. She arrived at Sunnybrook
Hospital soon after she was retained, and was accompanied by a
big, bearded man, Delmar Doucette, thirty-two, her articling
student. She had two imperatives. One was to insure that her
client made no further statements to the police unless she was
present; the other was to get her name on the chart as Ken's
lawyer so she could have access to him.

They introduced themselves to Ken as lawyers his family had
retained until Clay Ruby could take over. Ken liked them both on
sight. Marlys impressed him when she requested, her manner
pleasant but firm, that the officer in the room withdraw and the
man did so.

When the door whispered shut behind the officer's back, Marlys
settled down to ask Ken what had happened. Ken replied miserably
that he didn't know. She had expected to encounter someone of
tougher disposition; the youth before her was distraught,
frightened, and confused. Marlys thought, "This man is a teddy
bear."

She said to Ken, "You've given the police your explanation and
nothing more needs to be said at this stage. You have a right to
remain silent, and you should exercise that right from now on."

Ken mumbled, "There wasn't much to tell them. I don't remember
anything after going to sleep on the couch. I woke up and saw my
mother-in-law's face. ..."

Marlys asked carefully, "How did you get along with your
mother-in-law?"

Ken answered with tears in his eyes, "I really cared for her. We
got along great. We were pretty close."

"And your father-in-law?"

"I like him a lot, and I think he liked me."

She had more questions about the events of that night, but Ken
could remember nothing. He had no comprehension of what happened;
it was inexplicable to him.

Marlys believed him. She has interviewed many people newly
arrested for murder but never one like Ken Parks. His profound
remorse and horror conveyed powerfully to her that she was
hearing his truth. The real question was what his truth
meant. Was he mentally ill? Was it psychogenic repression? Why
didn't he have access to his memories?

Whatever the explanation, Marlys was convinced that Ken was being
honest when he said he couldn't remember the killing. It remained
for her to find a defence that would explain Ken's inability to
recall what had happened. Her husband is a noted psychologist,
Dr. Graham Turrall, so she would start by asking his help. The
defence would require neuro pathologic or psychiatric sleuth work
of a high order, and Graham had the contacts to find the help she
needed.

The range of psychiatric defences available in modern criminal
law is wide and subtle. Marlys Edwardh happens to have amassed as
much experience in that arcane field as any criminal lawyer in
the country. Defences that involve some element of insanity in
the plea have become almost her specialty. She's familiar with a
world-wide network of experts on whom she can call for help, and
they, in turn, respect her grasp of their labyrinthine field.

She said to Ken: "Tell me everything you did the day before this
happened."

Ken retraced his activities. When he mentioned that he had played
rugby on Saturday morning, she made a note to order tests to see
if he had sustained a head injury that would cause his memory
blackout. She was also thinking, __it might be a brain _tumour.

She checked Ken's chart and was shocked to see that a
psychiatrist had already examined him. Her defence almost
certainly would rest on psychiatric testimony and she didn't want
doctors she didn't know dipping into Ken's mental state and
sharing that information with the Crown. She wrote across the
chart in a firm hand, "No psychiatric tests."

As she left, she politely notified Sergeant Adair that her client
would be making no more statements in her absence. The sergeant
nodded, content with what he had. The long delay over the surgery
and Ken's insistence that he didn't want a lawyer had combined to
give Adair uninterrupted access to his prisoner, something rare
in modern police experience.

When Marlys left, the police guard stepped back into the hospital
room, regaining his turf. Marlys hurried to a telephone and
placed a call to a Sunnybrook psychiatrist, Dr. Ronald Billings.

"My client, Kenneth Parks, will need a psychiatric assessment,"
she said. "I'd like to retain you for the defence."

Billings agreed and said he would order whatever tests of Ken's
brain were necessary. Marlys hung up, much relieved. A
measure of control had been restored. With Ken's consent, his
medical records would be her property, part of a private file,
and the Crown could get access to them only by means of a search
warrant. Soon after, Billings, trailing a resident, Dr. Hersch,
bustled in to start his assessment of the patient.

Ronald Billings is a distinguished member of the profession. He
is a psychiatrist on the Sunnybrook staff who is also the
assistant head of the department of psychiatry at the hospital,
associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto,
and co-author of a textbook on psychiatry. Significantly, he has
expertise in the field of forensic psychiatry: Ron Billings sits
on the regional review board that examines people sent to
Penetanguishene's Oak Ridge institution because they have been
found to be criminally insane.

On the way to the room, Ron Billings had a brief outline of the
situation from his resident. The patient's inability to remember
was puzzling, he thought. Probably a schizophrenic episode. Maybe
a paranoid state, or a delusional state. Or it could be a
deliberate act and the patient had a self-induced amnesia. Or
possibly a fugue state, a form of hysteria caused by emotional
stress. If the person turned out to have a personality disorder
with antisocial tendencies, it could have been episodic
discontrol syndrome, where people with minor provocation
over-react and do something violent.

Del Doucette, who had lingered out of concern for Ken's distress,
got up to leave when the doctors came into the room. He suggested
that the police officer also withdraw. "The doctors should have
privacy to examine their patient," Del told him. The police
officer demurred, saying that his instructions were to the
contrary. Though Del protested, the man was unmoved. Del left,
but the officer remained and conspicuously scribbled in a
notebook as Ken spoke to the doctors.

Dr. Billings began by asking if Ken had ever experienced
blackouts, seizures, or memory loss. "No, never," Ken said. Dr.
Billings then probed Ken's state of mind in recent weeks. Ken
told him that he hadn't been sleeping well, and that he had been
despondent. Was his memory of the event returning? Could he
recall anything more, anything at all?

Ken had thought of little else in every waking moment, but he
couldn't picture anything beyond the scattered fragments he had
described, over and over, to the police: Barbara's pleading face,
something about the telephone, the kids screaming upstairs,
himself

running up the stairs, himself in the car with the knife, 76
then the police station. That was all. Ron Billings was puzzled.
How could this man drive fourteen miles, kill someone brutally
and attack a second person, cut his hands to the bone--and yet
not remember _anything?

Yet Billings had the impression that Ken was rational and sane.
His immediate concern therefore was the condition of his brain.
He decided to order some tests, a brain scan and an
electroencephalogram (EEG). He was dismayed when he was advised
that Ken was leaving soon for the Don Jail.

"The tests will have to wait, then," he said, "but I want that
neurological assessment done. I'll send Dr. Edmeads around right
away and we'll make the appointments."

Before leaving, Ron Billings paused to write on Ken's chart an
order for a full examination of Ken's brain. A number of
possibilities had to be studied, among them complex partial
seizures, temporal lobe epilepsy or limbic seizures, malfunction
related to drugs or alcohol, or post-concussive or post-ectal
confusional state. He worried about a tumour. If Ken's memory
loss was caused by a tumour it was a big one, almost certainly of
fatal dimensions.

Dr. John Edmeads, the neurologist, had the same concern. He
concurred that a CAT scan and EEG were imperative.


CHAPTER FOUR

Two Prisons


On the day of her mother's death, Karen was almost too
demoralized to have a coherent thought. She found it impossible
to reconcile the two parts of her life: her beloved mother had
been murdered and her beloved husband was the murderer. Ken must
have had a crazy spell. Television was full of plots about people
who went berserk. She had read about murder trials where
ordinary, decent people pleaded temporary insanity. It seemed to
happen. It was the _only way it could have happened.

She couldn't believe that Ken would deliberately and coolly set
out to kill her parents. For one thing, he cared too much for
them; for another he simply wasn't a violent man. She had been
with him almost daily for six years; she couldn't be wrong about
something as fundamental as that.

Karen seized on a crumb of information dropped by a police
officer, who said that Ken couldn't remember anything. That
sounded to her like a man who had killed in a fit of mental
breakdown.

Her sisters and brothers, she noted, were taking the view that
they were lucky that Ken hadn't killed them too. Karen didn't
want to get into an argument about it. The fact was that they
didn't know what had happened any more than she did.

The day of the disaster was endurable only because none of them
could quite believe it. The six Woods children had never been in
such pain and confusion in their lives. In their keening grief,
what hurt most bitterly was that they didn't have the support of
either parent. Nothing had ever happened to any of them that
Barbara hadn't tried to soothe and make better. The worst part of
their agony was that their mother wasn't there to give comfort.

They spent most of the day at the hospital. They had no place
else to go, since their house was cordoned off to allow police
forensic teams to complete their investigation. Samantha clung to
her boy-friend, who looked bewildered. When Emma's boy-friend,
Jimmy Sotirakos, turned up she threw herself into his arms. Karen
watched, feeling nothing. Later that day she left the
waiting-room and walked to Connie Sullivan's to see how Melissa
was faring.

She couldn't avoid the questions in Connie's eyes. Keeping her
voice under control and not embellishing the
story, she said that Ken had killed her mother and attacked 80
her father. Her father would survive. Connie's reaction was
incredulity. "That's not Ken!" she gasped. Connie's boy-friend
wasn't so certain.

"I'm not surprised," he commented. "He's deep. You never know
what's really going on with him."

Karen said stubbornly, "We just don't know what happened.
Apparently even Ken doesn't know what happened."

"He's lying," the other insisted. "He's just bullshitting."

Karen was hurt. Her loyalty to family, a deep force in her
nature, was aroused, and she found herself defending her husband.

"You can't say that," she said indignantly. "We have to wait and
see what the police turn up."

Connie agreed to keep Melissa a while longer, so Karen went back
to the hospital. The young people took turns sitting quietly with
their father, who slept most of the time. They watched him
breathe raggedly, and when he wakened his face was twisted with
his suffering. They held his hand. There wasn't much to say.

That evening Barbara's closest friend, Linda Taylor, came to the
hospital in a distraught state. She had seen a report on the
television news that Barbara Woods of Scarborough had been
murdered.

"Why didn't you call me?" she asked Karen.

"I'm sorry," Karen said lamely. "We just didn't think of it. We
haven't called anyone."

Linda Taylor collapsed in a chair in the waiting-room. "I can't
believe that Ken did this," she said. "He and Barbara were so
close. Barbara thought the world of him. Remember, she called him
`teddy bear`? She used to say he wouldn't hurt a flea."

"She used to call him `the gentle giant`," Karen said, her face
twisted. "We're trying to find out what happened. I think Ken
just went nuts."

Linda shook her head in disbelief and went to visit Denis. Denis
told Linda that he was worried about Karen. The rest of the
family would find some way to go on, but how could Karen survive
such a double blow? She loved her mother deeply, and he knew she
loved Ken too. He feared that she would be torn apart. Linda
assured him that Karen appeared calm. In fact, she was the most
collected of all the Woods children.

He asked if Nicky had been notified. Linda checked with the other
children, who were aghast that they had forgotten. He was
expected home the following night with Linda's son, Robert,
another member of the soccer team. Karen volunteered to pick up
Nicky when he arrived back.

Karen suddenly remembered that she was supposed to work that
night at midnight to enter price changes in the supermarket
computer. She called the store to explain that she wouldn't be
there. She gave as a reason, "There's been a death in the
family." She couldn't trust herself to keep her composure if she
had to say, "My mother has been killed and my husband did it."
The shattered Woods children clung together. When night fell,
they considered where they would sleep. They agreed that they
didn't want to be scattered to the homes of friends and
neighbours. Karen suggested that they all drive to Pickering and
sleep at her house. There was plenty of room--a queensize bed in
the master bedroom, a couch in Melissa's room, the living-room
couch, and bunk beds in the third bedroom where Nicky and Pru
were accustomed to sleeping when they came for weekend visits.
Samantha's boy-friend drove some of them in his car, and Jimmy,
Emma's boy-friend, took the others.

Karen prepared something for them to eat but found she couldn't
get down a bite herself. To her dismay, her sisters and brothers
were apprehensive for their safety. They asked nervously, "What
if Ken gets away and comes here?"

Karen dismissed their fears as nonsense. She pointed out that Ken
was under arrest somewhere and under police guard. He couldn't
escape; and if he did, they should know that Ken wouldn't hurt
them. That, in fact, was exactly what they did fear. Ken wanted
to kill everyone in the family, they said, and could be expected
to come after them if he could get away.

They jumped at sounds in the street. To distract themselves, they
decided to flick around the channels and watch the television
news. Maybe there would be something about the killing, and they
could pick up some information. Three news clips showed reporters
standing in front of the Woods house describing the murder of
"Barbara Woods, Scarborough mother of six". While the camera
panned over police cars parked in the garage around the rear door
of the townhouse, reporters described the crime as a domestic
dispute between Kenneth James Parks, twentythree, of Pickering,
and his mother-in-law. They confidently
offered the opinion that the two had a longstanding conflict.

A fourth channel, Toronto's enterprising and brash CITY-TV, gave
them a shock. The camera showed two men carrying a stretcher out
of the house and on the stretcher was Barbara Woods in a body
bag. The children screamed and burst into tears. For the
first time, Karen was able to weep too.

After that the young people were too shaken to sleep. They
resisted going to bed until around two in the morning. Karen
settled them in the various available beds, taking
thirteen-year-old Pru into bed with her. Pru dropped asleep, but
none of the others could settle down. Karen found them in the
living-room where they had arranged themselves on the couch and
on the floor. One of them was staying awake for guard duty, they
told Karen, in case Ken turned up.

"That's stupid," Karen said disgustedly. They stared at her with
stony faces until she turned and went back to her bed. In the
morning the family bought the three Toronto newspapers at coin
boxes and read the terse facts of the murder and subsequent
arrest. They learned nothing new. The police still had no details
apart from the obvious facts that two people had been attacked
and one was dead.

Karen was driven to the Scarborough supermarket where
she worked. The manager had read the morning paper and was
sympathetic when she explained that she wouldn't be coming to
work for a while. "Take as long as you like, Karen," he said
kindly.

Emma and Samantha called their employers and asked for leaves of
absence. Karen dropped Melissa off at Connie's again, and the
Woods children spent the day at Scarborough Grace hospital,
taking turns at Denis's bedside. Their father was more coherent
and was beginning to make decisions. At his suggestion, it was
agreed that Barbara's funeral would be postponed until Denis was
well enough to attend. Several times that day Karen went to
Connie's, an easy walk from the hospital, and rested herself in
the tranquil presence of the baby.

She would need transportation, she realized. Her car, hers and
Ken's, was in the hands of the police, so she asked her father if
she could use his. He agreed and told the police that his keys
could be found in Barbara's purse or in his pants pocket. An
obliging police officer went to the Scarborough townhouse and
fetched the keys, leaving them at the police station.

That night Karen and Linda Taylor drove to a drop-off location to
meet the soccer team returning from Philadelphia. They found the
players and their parents milling around a litter of equipment
and baggage. Karen located Nicky in the throng. "Where's mom?" he
asked immediately, when he saw her.

Karen had been rehearsing her answer to that question. "There's
been a terrible accident," she explained. "Come over here, I have
to talk to you."

They found privacy in the hubbub by standing near a wall.

"What kind of accident?" he asked.

Karen avoided that question. "Dad's okay," she said. "He's in
hospital, but he's okay."

Nicky asked, "But where's mom?"

"She's gone to heaven," Karen told him.

"What happened?" said Nicky, looking perplexed.

"A terrible accident," Karen repeated.

She drove him to the hospital, noting that the twelve-year-old
appeared very natural and unconcerned. Wise now in the way of
shock, she kept an eye on him. He remained poised during a visit
to his father. He decided he would spend the night with his
friend Robert, and it was there that Linda Taylor filled him in
on the details, telling him that Ken had killed his mother.
Linda's grief had turned into rage against Ken. She told Nicky
that Ken Parks was a vicious murderer and the law would punish
him.

The Woods children, with the exception of Nicky, slept a second
night at Karen's. Despite Karen's protest that they were being
unreasonable, they again huddled together in the living-room with
one of them posted as sentinel to warn the others if Ken turned
up. To relieve their anxiety, Karen called the Durham police.

Explaining who she was, she said, "We're all a little nervous and
it would make us feel better if you would keep an eye on us
tonight. Do you think you could drive by every now and then?"
When the police agreed to send a cruiser past the house at
intervals throughout the night, the children sighed with relief.

The telephone kept ringing. One caller was one of Ken's
colleagues from Revere Electric, his former employer. She said
she couldn't believe that Ken would kill anyone. What had
happened?

Karen said, "We don't know."

Ken's aunt Mavis phoned to see if Karen was all right. "We're in
shock here," she said. "We can't believe it. What happened, do
you know?"

"No," Karen told her tersely. "Not exactly."

She doesn't admire herself for it, but Karen wanted Ken's family
to suffer. "We think what happened was that he came in the house
and tried to strangle my dad and then he went upstairs and
got a knife out of the kitchen and killed my mother, and then he
went back and used the knife on my father's head, and then he
went upstairs where my sisters and brother were hiding, and then
he ran out."

"That's awful," said Mavis weakly.

"Yes it is," said Karen in a bitter tone.

When she hung up she was appalled. She didn't believe that Ken
had acted deliberately, so why had she been so mean? She faced
herself and didn't like what she saw. She'd lashed out at Ken's
family out of pure spite.

The next morning Emma and Jimmy Sotirakos drove Karen to the
police station to pick up the keys to her father's car. The
officer asked for identification and Karen exploded.

"Just give me the keys," she snapped, her pent-up feelings
finding release.

"Would you expect me to hand over these car keys to anyone who
comes in?" asked the officer.

Karen, red-faced, shouted, "Who else would know they are here?
Just hand them over!"

Her father's car was parked near the rear door of the town-house,
which was still under police guard. Karen avoided looking at the
basement door. She didn't want to think about what had happened
behind that door. As she unlocked her father's car, she saw a
trail of blood leading from the back door. She called her
brothers and sisters and they followed the trail. It went in one
direction towards a visitor's parking spot and then veered and
went to another, as if the person wasn't sure where the car was
parked. The bloody trail ended in the parking space behind Number
77. Close to it, as though Ken had tripped and almost fallen, was
a partial handprint in blood on the concrete, a large handprint.

Karen tried to remain detached. She listened as her brothers and
sisters gave instructions to a police officer who was bringing
them fresh clothes. Despite her anguish, she was amused at the
officer's exasperation as her siblings gave their full attention
to their wardrobes. They were being fussy: "No, not that one, the
_light green one." "The sweater in the bottom drawer on the left
side." "No, those are Nicky's shoes. Mine are in the laundry
room. No? Try the closet in the room near the bathroom."

She noted that the Woods children were too shy to ask the police
to bring underwear.

"You have enough," Karen protested several times, impatient A90
to get back to the hospital.

"No, no," one would say. "I haven't got my beige shirt!" "And I
need my jeans," another would say.

At noon that day, Tuesday, police asked the Woods children for
statements. The interview with Karen lasted for two hours and was
mutually unsatisfactory. The investigating officers had expected
that she would provide them with a motive, but Karen insisted
that Ken loved her mother and father and bore them no ill will.
On the other hand, she could get little information from them.

"How's Ken?" she asked.

"He's fine," she was informed. "He's had an operation on his
hands. They were pretty badly cut so it isn't certain how much
movement he'll get back."

"Where is he?"

"At Sunnybrook Hospital."

"What does he say about what happened?"

"He says he doesn't remember."

"I'd like to see him," she said.

The police exchanged glances.

"Later," she was told.

The other children trooped in for their interviews, one after the
other throughout the day. Afterwards they pooled the information
they had gleaned from the officers. They concluded that the
police were still baffled. The consensus seemed to be that Ken
was lying or insane.

Karen still couldn't eat, though it was the third day since her
mother's death. She was coaxed on all sides to have something,
but the sight of food revolted her. On Tuesday morning, when she
didn't touch her breakfast, her family was frantic. "You'll make
yourself sick," Emma protested. Karen shrugged.

When she went to Connie's later to check on Melissa, her friend
made a tuna sandwich and insisted that Karen eat it. She tried a
bite, apprehensive that she would vomit, but it stayed down, so
she gulped the rest of the sandwich.


That afternoon police called a family meeting of the

six Woods children to show them photographs. The first was
of a carving knife. "Is this yours?" they asked Karen. "Is it
from your house?" She shook her head. Emma looked at the picture.
"Yeah, yeah," she said excitedly. "That's our knife." All of them
then identified it as one their mother kept in a protective
sheath in a kitchen drawer.

She was asked about a tire-iron. Did Ken have one? Yes, she told
them, sickened. Maybe he had two. Ken kept one under the
passenger seat of his car.

Karen asked urgently when she could see Ken. Ken would be leaving
the hospital soon for prison, she reasoned, and probably wouldn't
be allowed to touch Melissa once he was behind bars. It was only
fair that she take Melissa to him while he could still hold her.
Most of all, though, she wanted to end the painful indecision
over how she felt about Ken. She had to see him to know if she
hated him.

Staff Sergeant Adair said he would take her to Sunnybrook to see
Ken at one o'clock the next day, Wednesday.

Karen decided not to tell her sisters and brothers. They were
ranting about Ken and what they would do if they ever saw him.
During their tension-relieving tirades she kept silent. It would
only upset them to know she wanted to visit Ken.

Her father asked if she had any money. Karen had to confess she
didn't. It wasn't necessary to remind him that Ken had taken all
their savings. Denis wrote her a cheque for $500, and she used
the funds to replenish food supplies, seriously depleted by her
siblings, and to buy gas for the car.

Denis was regaining his strength rapidly and with it came burning
anger. "I don't care what Ken's reasons were," he told Karen with
flashing eyes. "I'd like to kill him. If I had a gun and Ken was
standing in front of me, I'd shoot him. I'd be able to pull the
trigger."

Karen didn't speak. Her father was entitled to his feelings. She
just didn't happen to share them. Not yet, anyway.

On Tuesday night the other Woods children slept at the home of a
friendly school teacher. They explained to Karen that they hated
being in the house where Ken had lived and, besides, it was too
scary. At the same time, they didn't want to abandon Karen, whose
silence and air of remoteness frightened them. They insisted that
she have Connie stay with her.

When Karen and Connie were alone in the Pickering house, Karen
confided that she would be visiting Ken the next day.

"Why?" Connie asked in astonishment.

"I want to see him and find out why he did it," Karen explained.

"I'll come with you," Connie said loyally.

Now that the meeting was scheduled, Karen was impatient to get it
done. One look at Ken, she thought, and she would have some
answers. Ken had gone crazy and maybe still was, but she needed
to see that madman in him for herself. Maybe it would be clear to
her that he had had the potential all along to be a killer. If
so, she could get over feeling stunned and confused. It wouldn't
be easy to accept that she'd been wrong about him for six years,
but she could begin to deal with that. Anything was better than
her present bewilderment.


Marlys Edwardh was working on the Sinclair Stevens inquiry when
the call came about Ken Parks. It was alleged that Sinclair
Stevens as a federal cabinet minister had misused his office to
salvage his personal finances. Marlys Edwardh had a suggestion
that dramatically altered what had been a plodding inquiry that
was long on conjecture and coincidence and short on evidence.
Sinclair Stevens probably had a crackerjack secretary, she
thought. Such a woman, under oath, could supply all the
information the inquiry needed.

Her hunch proved astute. Shirley Walker sat in the witnessbox for
almost two weeks and provided the commissioner, Chief Justice
William D. Parker, with incriminating evidence, some of which
Walker had stored in paper bags in her closet. Chief Justice
Parker subsequently found that Sinclair Stevens indeed had put
himself in a conflict-of-interest position.

The first call to Marlys was made by Glen Hodge, Ken's young
uncle, who asked her to take the case until Clay Ruby returned.
She agreed, her ego unruffled. Many clients have come to her by
that route. To date, none has ever switched to Clay Ruby when he
became available.

Soon after, a man who said he was Ken's father came unannounced
to see her.

The lawyer recalls Jim Parks as a sad and listless man who sat on
the couch in her office looking mostly at the floor. He explained
that he didn't know his son very well, but it was hard to believe
that Ken was a murderer. He offered some money and said he would
get more.

Marlys Edwardh was not concerned about the money. She had
been raised in an environment steeped in concern for social
causes. Her parents, Melvin Edwardh and Catherine Muir Edwardh,
are conscientious, hard-working, erudite people with deep
convictions about social justice. Marlys, the youngest of three,
was born in 1950 and was raised in Alberta until she was seven,
when the family lived briefly in Colorado while her father got
his Ph.D. and her mother an M.A. In 1958 they moved to Toronto
where Melvin Edwardh took a position as president of Gage
Educational Publishing, a respected publishing house specializing
in textbooks, and her mother taught high school English.

Later when Seneca College, a community college, opened, Catherine
Edwardh taught English there until her retirement. She and her
husband then went to China, where she taught school in Shanghai
for a while.

Marlys doesn't know where she got the idea to be a lawyer, but it
was firmly fixed in her mind from the age of thirteen, at which
time in her life she had never even met one. Possibly the impetus
came from her family's devotion to social causes and a link
Marlys saw between the law and the protection of civil liberties.
She comes from a long line of people who care about such matters.
Marlys' maternal grandfather had to flee the United States when
his efforts to organize a railway union outraged the authorities.

Dinner conversation in the Edwardh household boiled with
discussion about current events. In the sixties civil rights
movement in the United States, Marlys' sister, Joanne, known as
Joey, was active in the struggle to permit blacks to register to
vote. Her father kept bail money in the house in case she was
arrested at an inconvenient time when banks were closed. Since
those tumultuous years Joey has worked consistently in the Third
World, her field the aged; she now lives in Santiago, Chile.

Marlys Edwardh is imbued with the same drive to live a purposeful
life. "I think I see the law as an instrument for social change,"
Marlys comments.

She obtained an undergraduate degree in sociology and political
science at Carleton University in Ottawa and then was accepted at
Osgoode Hall Law School. In study week of her first year she went
to Ottawa to visit some friends, who introduced her to Susan
Reisler. Susie Reisler, who has been Marlys' closest friend ever
since, is best known in recent years as a commentator on CBC
television's _The _Journal.

That week Susan Reisler had a young lawyer, Clayton Ruby, staying
with her. He was in Ottawa to defend a young Puerto Rican,
Hernandez Pagan, who had escaped to Canada after an attempted
assassination of the head of the police riot squad in San Juan.
Clay Ruby, though very new as a lawyer, already had a
public reputation through his efforts to help young drifters,
known then as hippies, who were drawn to the gaudy, raunchy
Yorkville area of Toronto. With another young lawyer, Paul
Copeland, he had authored an impertinent law book, _Law _Law
_Law, which could fit into the hip pocket of jeans and provided
the bearer with useful information about such matters as the
right to remain silent.

Though Clay Ruby was the son of an exceedingly wealthy man, it
was a matter of intense pride with him that he relied solely on
his own resources.

Accordingly he was cutting costs by sleeping on the living-room
floor of Susie Reisler's apartment.

"Maybe Marlys can help you," Reisler suggested. "She's in law
school."

Clay was not inclined to believe that a first-year law student
could be much use, but the situation was desperate. He had some
fifteen witnesses who were arriving by air from Puerto Rico to
give testimony, and all of them needed to be sorted out and
interviewed before the trial. He didn't see how he could do it by
himself. He met Marlys and put her to work.

They divided the witnesses roughly in half. Almost at once Clay
discovered that Marlys was as astute as she was pretty. He puts
it simply: "She has judgement."

They have been colleagues ever since. The Pagan case dragged over
two years, during which time Marlys continued to assist Clay.
When she was finishing her third year in law school, Clay
suggested casually that she article with him, though at that time
criminal law, his field, had known few women lawyers. When she
finished articling, he asked her to come into practice with him.

"It's been a very straight path," she notes with a grin. They
work in tiny quarters on the second floor rear of a handsome
Victorian-era house near the Bloor Street-Avenue Road
intersection of Toronto. Their long association and friendship
accommodates itself smoothly to the succession of dogs, all of
them named Berkman, that Clay brings to the office, and a period
of maternity leave in 1984 when Marlys gave birth to a bright and
charming son, Kyle, whom she adores. She and husband Graham
Turrall, a psychologist, live in a handsome rambling house in an
upper-middle-class area of Toronto.

While Marlys and Clay usually work separately on important and
difficult cases, some of which result in landmark decisions at
the Supreme Court of Canada, they almost always consult with one
another and sometimes share the work. Their most notable
collaboration was on the inquiry into the failure of the justice
system in Nova Scotia that led to Donald Marshall, a
Micmac teenager, serving eleven years in prison for a murder he
didn't commit.

One of her cases that attracted much public attention was the
appeal on behalf of Mahmoud Issa Mohammad, a convicted
Palestinian terrorist ordered deported from Canada.

Several times, more than she can count, Marlys has defended
people accused of murder. The question most frequently asked of
criminal lawyers is, "How can you help a killer?"

Her reply to that perennial query is: "There is a vast range of
responsibility to be assessed in those cases. When someone causes
the death of another human being, our law makes many distinctions
in determining what level of criminal responsibility, if any,
ought to be applied to that death. Causing death may lead to a
complete acquittal, because if you accidentally cause death we
don't punish. We don't find criminal liability. If you
intentionally, deliberately, plan and carry out a homicide, that
is first-degree murder.

She continues. "Part of any defence lawyer's job is to ensure
that the state mounts a case that proves the charge. Every single
one of us is entitled to rest assured that a conviction will
occur only on the basis of proper evidence.

"That's my first answer. My second is that because
there is this gradation of responsibility, one looks to a range
of defences. Perhaps the death is not purely accidental and
therefore might be manslaughter, or perhaps the person is
mentally ill and there ought to be a defence of not guilty by
reason of insanity. We're trained not to make judgements. We're
trained to look exhaustively at the range of possible defences
that should be put forward."

She explains, "If you believe in a system that focuses
responsibility only on those who are truly blameworthy, then our
job is to make sure that the state proves its case and people
aren't sent to prison on the basis of either the Crown not
proving its case or there not being a proper defence."

When she left Ken Parks' hospital room on Monday, Marlys was
thinking of all the defences open to her. She was convinced that
Ken wasn't a man who would kill deliberately, so the options were
narrowing to a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity or some
evidence of a damaged brain. If it turned out that the defence
would be insanity, Ken would be sent to the prison-like hospital
for the criminally insane at Penetanguishene, to be held there
indefinitely-"at the pleasure", as the warrant reads, of the
lieutenant-governor.

By coincidence, Marlys Edwardh was soon to challenge the
constitutionality of such warrants. In February 1990, she and
Clay Ruby appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada to argue
the fundamental injustice of lieutenant-governor warrants, which
hold people in custody for an indefinite time when the courts in
fact have found them innocent.

Marlys wondered about Ken's wife. Karen Parks wouldn't be
testifying against her husband, since the law does not place that
obligation on spouses, but she would make a formidable witness
for the defence. No jury could fail to be moved by a young woman
speaking in favour of a husband who had killed her mother.

On the morning of Wednesday, May 27, 1987, Marlys heard that "the
wife", Karen Parks, was on her way to Sunnybrook Hospital to see
Ken. To the lawyer's dismay, she was informed that Staff Sergeant
Bobby Burns Adair, the homicide detective assigned to the Parks
case, was bringing Karen to her husband's side. It would seem
that Karen Parks had lined up with the Crown. Sergeant Adair
would witness and record the scene when the wife confronted her

husband. Karen's accusations most certainly would be repeated in
court as evidence against Ken.

"I thought the occasion was being used for forensic police work,"
Marlys later related with a tight smile. "It wasn't to give two
people an opportunity to be together."

The lawyer was unable to leave her office to avert the impending
disaster. She would have to rely on the good sense of Delmar
Doucette, her articling student, who was at Sunnybrook Hospital.
Marlys had learned that Ken was about to be sent to prison and
she had sent Doucette to the hospital to try to get a delay until
Dr. Edmeads, the neurologist, could complete the brain tests. She
didn't know how to reach Doucette, but Marlys hoped he would be
able to do something about Karen Parks.

Del Doucette at that moment was in an elevator on his way to
Ken's room to tell him that he had been unable to stall the order
to have him taken to prison. The best that could be done,
Doucette discovered, was to ensure that Ken went to the Toronto
Jail, which has a hospital range staffed twenty-four hours a day,
rather than to the Metro East Detention Centre, where medical
facilities are more primitive and the attention Ken
needed for his hands would not be available.

Doucette noticed two women, one of them holding a baby, getting
off the elevator at the same floor he did. They went to a nursing
station, apparently to get directions, while he headed for Ken's
room.

As Karen, carrying Melissa and accompanied by Connie, got
off the elevator, she had an attack of panic. She had been
demanding to see Ken but, as the moment neared, she wasn't sure
how to conduct herself. So much depended on how she felt when she
saw him. She trembled with trepidation. A nurse gave her
instructions, pointing back the way she had come. Karen hurried,
anxious to get it over, and in her haste sped past Ken's room.

Ken's room was equipped with an observation window on the
corridor, and he saw Karen go by.

"My wife is out there," he told Doucette.

"Your wife!" Doucette gasped. He went out to intercept her just
as Sergeant Adair and Constable Higgins arrived to escort Karen
into the room.

"Are you Karen Parks?" Del asked.

"Yes I am," she replied.

"What are you doing here?" he said, stalling for time.

"I want to talk to Ken."

Doucette, his heart pounding, said, "I'm Del Doucette. I'm an
articling student with Ken's lawyer. I'm not sure you can go in
there. I'll have to think about it."

Karen was astounded. She had given no thought to Ken's legal
situation. She knew he was charged with first-degree murder, but
it had a distant sound, a mere phrase, a piece of television
drama. She had a sense of matters slipping out of her control.
Normally she would have been part of the decision to hire a
lawyer.

"Why not?" she retorted sharply, glaring at the big, dark,
bearded man. Doucette couldn't tell her the real reason,
certainly not in front of Sergeant Adair, so he suggested lamely
that "it wouldn't be a good idea" for Karen to go in.

Karen regarded him coldly, as one would an obstruction to go
around or through.

"He's my husband," she declared stiffly, "and I have a right to
see him."

Karen's moment of dread was over, and the delays had sharpened
her impatience. Three days had passed since the killing, and she
was still in a state of numbed confusion. It was profoundly
unsettling not to know how she felt about Ken. She had loved the
man for six years--it was strange to feel nothing but emptiness.
Maybe he was a monster she would hate for ever, but before she
started down that path she had to _look at him. She owed that
much, at least, to herself, to Melissa, and to him.

"Please wait," Del asked her. "I have to talk to Ken's lawyer."

He called Marlys, who was appalled that Adair was with Karen.
Meanwhile a jurisdictional dispute was emerging. Ken's prison
guard told Karen that she couldn't enter the room without
permission. Staff Sergeant Adair assured him that it was all
right, but the guard wasn't so sure. He too went to a telephone
and placed a call.

Del returned with instructions from Marlys to keep Karen out if
possible. She told him to advise Ken that he shouldn't see Karen
under those conditions. At that moment the guard had word that
Ken could see his wife if he wished. The guard accordingly asked
Karen for identification, which she produced without her
customary protest about unnecessary bureaucracy.

As Karen, flanked by Sergeant Adair and Constable Higgins, moved
towards the door of Ken's room, Del Doucette stood in her way.

"You can't go in there," he told her.

"I'm his wife," she insisted. "I have permission to see him."

Doucette turned to the police. "She can't see him," he said, with
some agitation. "My client hasn't agreed to this. It's an
invasion of his rights."

Karen began to understand the objection. The lawyer feared that
there was going to be a scene that would be damaging to Ken in
court. Maybe, she thought shrewdly, that's what Sergeant Adair
expected too.

"How about my rights!" she said heatedly. "He's my _husband."

"It's not in my client's interests ...,was Doucette began. "It's
in _my interests," she retorted, "and I have police permission to
see him."

"Just a minute," the lawyer said desperately. "I need to talk to
my client about this."

Through the window in the hospital room, Karen glimpsed Ken
standing by his bed. She thought he might be returning from the
bathroom, but in fact he was watching his second guard put
shackles on his ankles in preparation for taking him in a
wheelchair to the shower room.

Ken was stunned that Karen was there. He had never expected to
see her again, but his first reaction was
relief that she apparently was unharmed. He had been groggy with
sedatives in the two days since the surgery, but the question
that had burned in his mind was Karen's safety. Had he hurt her
too? He asked anxiously about her, but no one seemed to know.
Police guards told him she was fine, but their tone lacked
conviction. When prison guards arrived to take over from the
police, they had even less information.

Relief was replaced by amazement. Obviously she had come to tell
him she wanted a divorce, but he had not expected her to do that
in person. Better than anyone, he knew that the woman who had
been killed was not only Karen's mother but also her dearest
friend.

Ken got back into bed to await Karen. Through the window, Karen
watched Doucette talking to him and noted the lawyer's urgent,
alarmed body language. When he emerged a few minutes later, he
was dejected. He reported candidly that he had advised Ken that
he should refuse to see Karen but that Ken had rejected the
advice.

"I don't care what she says to me," he told Doucette. "I want to
talk to her."

Doucette, his face worried, repeated this to Karen. "I told him
not to see you," he told her, "but he won't listen. Wait a minute
while I talk to the police."

Del turned to Sergeant Adair. "Where do you intend to be while
Karen is having a conversation with her husband?" he asked.

"We'll be with her in the room," the homicide detective replied.

"If you go in there and Sergeant Adair goes in and Constable
Higgins goes in there, so do I," Doucette said.

Karen was steaming. "Look, I don't want a whole room of people
when I see my husband. I'm his wife and we want some privacy."

"That's completely unacceptable," Del told her. "I'll have to
call Marlys about this."

Marlys told him that under no circumstances were the police to be
in the room when Karen met Ken. Doucette put down the phone
thinking that he just might have a heart attack.

"It was the typical confrontational situation," he explained
later. "You put someone dear to the accused into the room so he
will say everything that's on his mind. Then you write it all
down and produce it at the trial."
Del consulted with Ken, advising him that it would not be in his
interests to have police in the room. Ken didn't want the police
there either. He said it was bad enough that prison guards would
be present.

That raised a new issue for Del. He asked the guard what his
position would be about whatever he overheard during the meeting.
The guard said he wasn't sure. He made another call to his
superior, who said that Ken's wishes could be respected with
regard to the police presence and the guards would take no note
of what they heard. It is correctional policy that guards do not
testify, though it is always open to the Crown to issue subpoenas
to require them to tell what they know.

Staff Sergeant Adair was unhappy with the decision, but the
correctional system had charge of the prisoner.

"All right," he agreed, scowling at Karen, "but remember that
you're not to touch him."

Karen suddenly decided that her initial meeting with Ken might be
so emotional that it would be better for Melissa to stay with
Connie. She handed over the baby and stepped through the door.

After all the fuss she expected to be alone with Ken, but one of
the prison guards stayed in the room,
companionably drawing up a chair near the door where he could
keep both in sight. She turned to Ken, who was propped against
pillows with both hands in thick bandages like a child's mittens.
She noted cuts on both his beefy forearms.

Ken said quickly, "If you want a divorce, I won't fight it." Then
he burst into tears. For a long time he sobbed without being able
to speak.

Karen, disarmed, stood by the bed helplessly. She said, "Don't
cry. There, there, Ken, don't cry."

A nurse, checking Ken's vital signs on a monitor in her station,
noted that he was hyperventilating and hurried into the room. She
and Karen tried to calm Ken, but it was almost ten minutes before
he got himself under control. In a strangled voice, he said,
"Karen, I don't remember anything."

"There, there," Karen murmured again, her emotions swimming. This
was the same Ken, the one she had loved for six years. Something
appalling had happened, but this was no monster; this was her
husband, a sweet man.

Connie was watching them through the observation window. She
later reported to Karen that the minute she saw Ken she felt the
same way. Ken was not a mad beast responsible for a revolting
crime, but a broken and bewildered man.

"I have Melissa with me," Karen said gently.

Ken shook his head.

"Don't you want to see your daughter?" she asked, as one would a
child who needed comforting.

He nodded, weeping again. She stepped out of the room and took
Melissa from Connie. She returned and put the baby on Ken's
chest.

Melissa burped and spit up. Ken grinned for the first time and
said, "Gee, she hasn't changed, has she?" Karen laughed.

He had a feeling of unreality. Karen's tone with him seemed
unaffected by the events of Saturday night. She was her usual
self, wry and affectionate. Awed at the wonder of it, he chose
his words carefully for fear he would break the spell.

The baby gurgled on his chest, making a bridge of normality
between them.

"How's your father?" he asked.

"He's just fine," she replied.

"Karen, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."

She said, "I know."

He drew a ragged breath. He said again, "I can understand if you
want a divorce. I won't fight it."

"I don't know what I want right now," she said. "Let's not talk
about it."

"Did I hurt any of your brothers and sisters?"

She was taken aback. She had been expecting to get information
from him, but instead it was going the other way.

"No. They weren't touched," she told him. "How are your hands?"

"They're sore," he confessed.

In defiance of her instructions, she bent and kissed him on the
lips. As she straightened she saw the police officer and Delmar
Doucette standing at the window, watching them. Both looked
perplexed. The scene they were witnessing was one of perfect
domesticity: a man and woman talking quietly and lovingly,
with a baby dozing in the man's arms.

"The lawyer didn't want me to see you," she said to Ken. "Yeah,"
he said. "I said that whatever happens, I had to talk to you."

She said, "I'm glad. That's how I felt too."

When she left, they embraced and she kissed him again.

When she came out of the room, the lawyer smiled broadly at her.
"Thank you," he said, with fervency in his voice, handing her a
business card for Marlys Edwardh.

She looked steadily at him, not liking his assumption that she
was friendly to the defence. Her hostility flared and she replied
coldly, "You're welcome."

But she took the card.

Sergeant Adair stepped into the room. "What did they talk about?"
he asked the guard.

"I don't know," said the guard blandly. "I didn't hear a thing."
The next day Karen awakened with a sense that something profound
had shifted. She was confused for a moment, and then she realized
what it was. Her mother's spirit had left her. She didn't have
the feeling any more that her mother was keeping her safe. Now
she was on her own. Karen didn't feel abandoned. It was as though
her mother had been worried about her and had waited to leave
until she was sure Karen could manage.

Ken was moved from the hospital soon after Karen left his room.
After many discussions between Del Doucette, Marlys Edwardh, Dr.
Billings, Ken's surgeon, and correctional people, the decision
to send him to Metro East Detention Centre had been revoked. He
went instead to the Toronto Jail, which everyone calls "the Don".
With both hands effectively out of commission in the heavy casts
and bandages, Ken would need help to eat and wash.

The Don Jail is a grim building high on the banks of the
malodorous Don River in a neighbourhood of densely crowded
Chinese grocery stores and narrow streets jammed with old brick
houses that in recent years have sprouted skylights and timber
porches. He was transported in chains by taxi, wearing clothes
supplied by the jail, and was put in the medical range.

Karen decided not to tell her family that she had seen Ken. It
would only hurt and bewilder them. Her sisters and brothers, once
as fond of Ken as of one another, had turned against him with a
vengeance. They seemed to enjoy saying that Ken would spend his
life in prison or, better still, be executed.
The country had just entered into a debate about
reinstating capital punishment. Parliament would decide in an
unusual way, a free vote. The Woods children were solidly on the
side of the death penalty. Karen, feeling isolated from the
family
solidarity that had developed, decided to keep silent. She still
hadn't made up her mind what she would do, she reminded herself,
so there was no point in ruffling feelings already raw.

She saw her father later that day. He was taking charge of his
motherless brood. "How are you going to manage, Karen?" he asked
anxiously. "You must have mortgage payments to meet."

She didn't want to depend on him, especially not if she was
seeing Ken. It wouldn't be fair. "I'll be fine," she assured him.
"You've got enough to worry about. Don't think about me, I'll
manage."

That Wednesday night she called Ken's maternal grandmother, Lil
Hodge, and was invited to drop in. Others of the Hodge family
were there and the visit went badly. Karen's anger boiled up
again and she was helpless to stop herself from sounding tough
and unforgiving. When Lil Hodge was stiffly defensive of Ken, it
only fuelled Karen's bitterness. She told them about her visit to
Ken but she didn't say that her heart had gone out to him.

They asked if she knew what had happened on that night of horror.
"We still don't know," she admitted. The family talked of little
else. The earlier version Karen had given Mavis was full of
inconsistencies. For instance, how did Ken get such terrible cuts
on his hands and arms? Karen had concluded that it must have been
her mother who got the knife from the kitchen drawer. Assuming
that the first attack was an attempt to strangle Denis, it made
sense that Barbara would run to get a weapon to protect him.
Perhaps she had cut Ken's arms, and he cut his hands when he took
it away from her. Then he killed her.

"He stabbed her with the knife, and the police think he also hit
her with a tire-iron," Karen told them.

A dismal silence fell on the room. Karen left feeling triumphant
at their misery but immediately afterwards was sorry and ashamed
of herself. What was making her act like that?

That night Ken called her from the Don Jail. He was in pain. The
staff had refused him medication, and it worried him that his
dressings hadn't been changed.

Karen consulted the business card Delmar Doucette had given her
and called Marlys Edwardh.

"I'll take care of that," said Marlys warmly.

"We should get together."

"I don't think so," Karen said firmly. She still hadn't made up
her mind where she stood, but she wasn't yet ready to line up
with the defence.

Marlys recognized the tone of a woman who couldn't be pushed.

"Whatever you like," she said mildly. "I know the doctor who is
in charge of the provision of medical care through the whole
provincial correctional system, Dr. Paul Humphries. He's a good
person, and I know he'll do something about Ken's hands."

"Thanks," said Karen, hanging up abruptly.

The two major components of Karen's life, her family and her
husband, no longer fit together. So many questions about the
crime were unanswered. Maybe when she had the whole story she
could decide, but meanwhile she resented being pulled two ways,
the police on one side and Ken's lawyers on the other. She wanted
time to consider. If she sided with Ken, it was becoming clear
that her father and her brothers and sisters might be lost to
her.

She had no one with whom to share her dilemma. A dozen times a
day she had an impulse to talk to her mother; each time the
impulse was followed by a wash of grief. When the phone rang, her
first reaction was joy that it would be Barbara. The desolation
that followed was so deep it was difficult to claw her way out.
Sometimes, absent-mindedly, she went to the phone and started to
dial her mother's number, and then sobbed.

Karen suspected that her family knew from the police that she had
visited Ken in Sunnybrook Hospital. They said nothing, and she
appreciated their tactfulness. Both sides hesitated to mention
Ken. Out of consideration for her, her brothers and sisters no
longer discussed the death penalty, at least in her presence, and
Karen never referred to her contacts with her husband. Like Karen
herself, the Woods family was waiting to see what she would do.

Denis pressed Karen into service as his agent. She spent the rest
of the week doing such errands as using his bank card to withdraw
money for the family's daily living expenses. The children, who
still were staying with friends, needed pocket money.

Emma and Pru and Jonny continued to sleep at the home of their
teacher, while Samantha moved in with her boy-friend. Nicky was
the only Woods child who retained a semblance of normal life. He
was staying with his friend Robert and attending school.

On Thursday Karen paid her first visit to the Don Jail to see
Ken. She was revolted by the clang of metal doors as she
submitted her request to a man behind bullet-proof glass. The
venomously ugly room where she waited was full of weary women and
cranky children crowded along hard benches that lined the walls
and stood back to back in the middle of a dingy, smoky room. She
was assigned a number and found a place to squeeze in, where she
waited what seemed an interminable time.

Her number was called and she went through a door to find a line
of people standing with telephones at their ears, each one facing
a man through a thick glass wall. "You have fifteen minutes," an
attendant told her sternly. She looked at Ken in prison clothes.
He was holding a phone clumsily to his ear with a hugely bandaged
hand.

"How are you?" Karen asked.

His voice came back, distorted by a poor connection.

"I'm all right," he said. "They're going to give me my pain
medication today and they've said they'll change the dressing. I
think Marlys called them about it."

"That's good," said Karen. She was touched to see that
he was struggling not to cry. She changed the subject and talked
about Melissa. The baby was neutral ground and he welcomed the
diversion, plying her with questions about where the baby was
staying and if she was sleeping well.

Then Ken remembered that Marlys had warned him that the phones
were bugged. He explained to Karen that he was supposed to be
cautious.

"I don't care about that," he said earnestly. "It's more
important that I be straight with you and tell you everything I
know."

"Well, what happened?" Karen asked.

"All I remember is waking to see your mother's face. That's all,
I swear. I don't remember driving there, I don't remember Denis,
I don't know how I cut my hands."

He was having nightmares, he said. He kept seeing Barbara's face,
her mouth open and her eyes begging him to help her. He couldn't
escape the memory even when awake.

Karen left with a burning need to talk to someone about the
turmoil inside her. She ached for her mother, and her heart
twisted again at the enormity of her loss. She considered
confiding her dilemma to her father, who always was sensible and
rational, but she had to reject that.

He could not be expected to have any sympathy for Ken and she
couldn't ask it of him. This struggle was hers, and hers alone.

She wished, as she had a hundred times, that Ken had killed her
instead of her mother. _Why _not _me? It made more sense for him
to have an attack of insanity and kill her, who had been taunting
him about his shortcomings, than to drive to Scarborough and kill
Barbara, who had never offended him.

When the madness overcame him, why hadn't he simply come up the
short flight of stairs to her bedroom and killed her? Then she
wouldn't have to face her grieving family every day and see the
accusation in their eyes.

She wished for oblivion, for an end to pain. If she were dead,
there would be the relief of nothingness. She roughly pulled
herself back from that temptation. It had its attractions, but
she could not leave Melissa without a mother. She simply couldn't
do that to a helpless baby.

Her financial problems needed immediate attention. She was
penniless and deep in debt. Since she had decided against taking
money from her father, how would she and Melissa survive? She
decided to confide in the attentive Salvation Army officer from
the victim assistance program.

"Our taxes and the mortgage payment are due," she said, "and I
don't have a dime. We're about three thousand dollars in debt."

"We can help you," the man said. "That's what we do."

The Salvation Army provided $1,500, which paid the monthly
mortgage instalment, and he coached her through the steps to
apply for welfare.

Melissa was having a thoroughly miserable time. The tiny girl,
bewildered at having her normally stable life shattered, fretted
in Connie Sullivan's care. Connie was as unaccustomed to caring
for a baby as Melissa was unused to her. She made frantic calls
to her mother. "She keeps crying," she wailed. "What do I do?"

In the first week after Barbara's death, Karen was only dimly
aware of her daughter's distress. She moved her from Connie's
care after the first two days, and for two nights, Thursday and
Friday, Melissa stayed with the school teacher who was providing
shelter for the Woods family. Another time Lil Hodge, Ken's
grandmother, took her.

Karen sank into a depression so deep that her family was alarmed.
Her most frequent comment was that
it was her fault. She should have known that Ken was about
to crack. She could have prevented the tragedy if she hadn't
pushed him so hard. If she had wakened after Ken left she could
have telephoned her parents and warned them. How could she have
slept while her mother was being killed? And so on. ...

Karen's brothers and sisters worried that Karen would kill
herself. They were insistent that she should not be alone at
night. When Connie decided to return to her own bed, they
prevailed upon Karen to sleep at Connie's house for a few nights.

"We don't want you to be alone," Emma said. "Please, Karen, stay
with Connie."

Karen agreed. Her normal bubbling energy had vanished, to be
replaced with exhaustion. When she wakened from fitful sleep,
there was an instant of blessed forgetfulness, followed by a wave
of despair that crashed down and left her sobbing.

She couldn't bear to think of her mother's suffering before she
died. Barbara had screamed in her agony and terror. Karen didn't
want to think about it, but her wandering thoughts kept fastening
on the screams. If Ken had killed her instead of Barbara, it
would have worked out better. Her mother would have raised
Melissa lovingly, and the baby would be fine. Samantha,
Emma, Pru, Jonny, and Nicky would still have their mother; Denis
would have his beloved Bobbie.

They would miss her, but Karen Parks was dispensable in the
family; Barbara Woods was not.

It was some time after the killing before Karen saw Ken's mother.
Betty Parks and Tyrone had been dreading the moment.

"We didn't know what to say," comments Tyrone. "Like, `Sorry
about your mom,` is kinda ... I dunno. ... You don't want to say
anything the wrong way, but what can you say?"

"We thought she'd be bitter and maybe mean," says Betty, "but she
wasn't like that. She couldn't believe that Ken had done it."

"There was a lot of tension, though," Tyrone recalls. "No one
knew what to say. Actually none of us said much."


On Friday, May 29, five days after the slaying, police forensic
teams finished in the Woods house and said the family could move
back. None of the children could bear the thought. On Sunday,
when Denis was released from hospital, he too found it
intolerable to return. Linda Taylor hospitably made room for him
in her house.

Though still weak from his ordeal, Denis Woods purposefully went
about making funeral arrangements. He went straight from the
hospital to Pine Hill Cemetery to pick out a plot and on Monday
consulted a funeral director. Emma, Karen, and Melissa went with
him, along with a sympathetic colleague from his company.

They had to keep in mind Barbara's disdain for expensive
funerals. "A waste," she often said. "When I die I want to be
buried in a plain wooden box. Don't you forget. Promise me,
right? Promise."

In deference to her views, Denis asked to see the cheapest coffin
available. They were shown a clothcovered box that he, Emma, and
Karen agreed was repulsive. The compromise was to buy the least
expensive wooden coffin in the display, at $800, but Emma and
Karen thought it left something to be desired.

Denis said firmly, "That's what she would have wanted. We'll have
to do what she wished."

The funeral directors prepared the body for viewing on Tuesday
night. Someone in the coroner's office had advised the
undertakers that Barbara's injuries were such that an open casket
would not be desirable. Denis and the children protested, and the
Salvation Army came to the rescue again. An officer explained to
the funeral director that it was important for the grieving
family to see Barbara, that it would be very traumatic for them
to have a closed casket.

Since Barbara Woods had been dead for ten days, the family was
enjoined not to touch the body. They stood around the casket and
were shocked at what they saw. Barbara's nose, which had been
crushed by the tire-iron, had been repaired with plastic. Some
rebuilding was done as well on the side of her head where the
skull had caved in under blows. Her hair was curled and combed
and there was make-up on her face.

"They did their best to make her look all right," Karen says in
her fair-minded way. "But it didn't look much like her." Still,
the Salvation Army people were right. The children had been
yearning to see their mother a last time; they had needed to make
a final farewell. It gave them a measure of peace to look at her
even though they wept inconsolably afterwards.

Karen doesn't usually feel comfortable about open coffins. When
she goes through the ritual of a funeral home visit, she avoids
looking at the casket for as long as she decently can. When she
finally approaches the casket, she gives it only a hurried
glance. With her mother, however, she stood beside the coffin and
couldn't tear herself away. Much was wrong about the repair and
make-up, but it _was Barbara and she found it difficult to stop
looking.

Denis and his bereaved children were surprised that so many
people sent flowers. The family thought of itself as somewhat
insular, but their gregarious mother apparently had made friends
wherever she went. Most touching were the flowers from clerks in
the Zeller's store in the mall where Barbara went for breakfast
tea with her mother.

Ken's grandmother, Lil Hodge, bravely came to the funeral home,
accompanied by her daughter Mavis. Both women were apprehensive.

"I didn't know how I would be received," Lil Hodge says with
dignity, "but I wanted to pay my respects."

She was touched when the Woods family recognized her and even
greeted her with hugs. "Towards the end the girls were treating
me a bit coolly," she comments, "but everyone was polite."

The saddest moment came when the family was left in the viewing
room to say goodbye. The children stood around the casket sobbing
and then withdrew to allow Denis a final moment alone with his
Bobbie.

The service was conducted by the same Salvation Army officer who
had been so kind to them throughout the ordeal. The family had no
other connection to clergy, and they trusted him. He spoke simply
of the suddenness of the death and what a loss Barbara was to her
family.

The next day Karen went to see Ken and told him the funeral was
over. Ken said wistfully, "I wish I could have seen her. Not when
you and your family were there, of course, but maybe after
everyone was gone. It's hard for me to believe she's dead."

Ken was allowed visitors twice a week, for fifteen minutes at a
time, and Karen filled his quota. She found it painful to see
him, but it didn't feel right to stay away. Ken's mother and Lil
Hodge mildly resented that Karen left no space for them, but they
didn't rebuke her. Ken's family satisfied themselves with
telephone calls that Ken was allowed on a pay phone in the jail.
Ken was apologetic that the visiting slots were filled, but he
explained that he and Karen had a lot to work out. That much was
obvious to all.

Ken's family developed a new explanation for the awful events of
that night. They decided that someone must have telephoned Ken in
the night to come to the Woods house. When he got there, Barbara
and Denis were being attacked. Ken tried to stop the assailant by
grabbing the knife, which was how he cut his hands.

The police were no help. They had nothing new in the baffling
case. It seemed no one ever would find out what had happened. Ken
was still searching his memory in vain. Only Barbara knew, and
she was dead.

Karen and Ken no longer discussed it. On static-ridden
telephones, they talked of household matters. Poverty was
pinching Karen, making her anxious. She was juggling the
creditors, she told him. Melissa had a cold. Her family had moved
back into the house.

"How are they?" he asked cautiously.

"Okay," she replied laconically, though it wasn't true. The Woods
family was staggering through a painful adjustment as father and
children tried to cope with the unfamiliar territory of the
kitchen and laundry.

Karen was lending a hand when she could, but she said little to
Ken about this. It worked both ways. She didn't talk about Ken
with her family, and she wasn't discussing her family with Ken.

Once Karen and Ken had a row reminiscent of the ones that
preceded the ghastly night of the killing. It
began with a mysterious bill from a kennel. When Karen telephoned
the kennel to say there was a mistake, she was informed that
weeks earlier a Ken Parks had placed a puppy there to be boarded.
Karen was stunned until she remembered that Ken had brought home
a puppy that she wouldn't let him keep. The times tallied:
another deception.

When she confronted Ken angrily, he explained, "I thought I had a
friend to take the dog, but he changed his mind. I didn't know
what to do. He was such a cute little puppy and I was afraid that
if I took him to the Humane Society, maybe he would be killed."

"That's all very well, but what am I supposed to do now?" Karen
asked with some of her old fire.

"I'll find someone," Ken promised. "Maybe one of the guys in here
wants a puppy."

Someone did, a man who was being released. To Karen's relief, he
paid the kennel bill.

A few weeks after leaving the hospital, Ken returned to
Sunnybrook Hospital to have the casts removed. To his dismay, he
found it impossible to move any of the damaged fingers.
Physiotherapy would help restore function, he was told. "Fat
chance of that," he thought.

Marlys Edwardh was delighted. Getting permission for Ken to
return to Sunnybrook for treatment to his hands was a victory.
The next part would be trickier--having the brain tests done at
Sunnybrook. She was expecting that at any moment the Crown would
move for a remand to send Ken to Penetanguishene's locked
hospital for the criminally insane for a pre-trial assessment.
That would be a disaster because the examination would be routine
and conservative of outlook, with all the results available to
the Crown. "In effect, the client is served up to the Crown," she
comments. Maybe, just maybe, she could wangle to have the tests
done at Sunnybrook instead and keep the medical evidence within
her control.

The business with Ken's hands was an important precedent. She
started to work on that.


At first Karen was grateful for the welfare income of about $700
a month, but as the summer progressed she discovered as all poor
people do that welfare is a trap. When Karen, always
enterprising, considered helping herself with such initiatives as
part-time employment or subletting part of her house, she was
informed that her welfare income would be cut accordingly.
She couldn't afford to lose her welfare payments in case the
sublet or temporary job fell through, so she concluded with
exasperation that welfare intends its recipients to be passive.

She thought of moving but could find nothing cheaper to rent.
Monthly mortgage payments were $460, and with utilities,
condominium contribution, and taxes the total was $700,
approximately the cost of a small apartment. She concluded that
she might as well stay where she was. She didn't attempt to pay
her condominium charges or the Pickering taxes. She assumed that
she wouldn't be evicted, given the circumstances. Her telephone
and utilities bills she paid only when she had to in order to
prevent the service from being cut: one month she would catch up
with Hydro, the next with the television cable.

When she was desperate, Lil Hodge helped out. Ken's grandmother
was standing by with infinite loyalty, stripping her savings to
help Karen and to pay Ken's legal bills.


CHAPTER FIVE

Kenneth Parks


The first impression a stranger receives of Kenneth James Parks
is his size. He's six foot five--or what used to be six foot five
before metric conversion--and his normal weight is 275 pounds.
Until recently his thick, straight hair was the colour of a wheat
field and in summer would bleach almost white, but it has
darkened to a strawberry blond. When he grows a beard, it's red.

He's blue-eyed, with fair skin that turns a bright pink when
exposed to the sun, and he holds his body loosely, his shoulders
slouched. His physical movements are slow, those of a man
perpetually not in a hurry. He takes little interest in clothes
and usually is dressed in jeans, sweatshirt, and zippered jacket.

With people he doesn't know well, he has an embarrassed,
diffident manner and cracks his knuckles nervously. His friends,
however, find him easy-going, seemingly carefree, and full of
comic, good-natured comments. The side his wife knows, the
brooding sadness at the heart of him, is not seen by others. He
seems free of any degree of introspection or existential wonder.
More than two years after the killing, his mother said of him,
"He's beginning to be his old self again. You know, always
kidding around."

Ken's appetites are simple: uncomplicated food--steaks and pie
being favourites--washed down with pop. He has never been
interested in such young-male rituals as having a beer with the
boys--or, for that matter, in drinking anything alcoholic except
an occasional glass of wine--and he doesn't smoke. In high school
he tried drugs, but he found that scene unpalatable. Instead he
turned to the heartiness of team sports, rugby and soccer, which
he plays with such dedicated fierceness that in the process he
has broken his nose twice and each of his fingers at least once.

His colouring comes from his Norwegian heritage, and his size
from his father, who is of Ukrainian stock. His complex, private
nature, screened by geniality, is his own construction. Ken Parks
comes from a turbulent background and learned early to retreat to
the safety and anonymity of good behaviour.

His maternal grandmother, Lilly Lokken Hodge, in her early
seventies, is the family favourite. She's a
woman gifted with common sense who wears her heart on her sleeve.
Erect, firmbodied, vigorous, and well groomed, she wears pretty
colours and likes to be tanned. Her parents came to the North
American Midwest from Norway and she was born in Minnesota on
Christmas day in 1917, the second-youngest in a family of
eight. When Lil was very young the Lokkens moved to Canada and
took up mixed farming near Broomhead, a fragment of a village in
southern Saskatchewan.

Her childhood was bitter and hard. Lil's mother died when she was
small, and her father, a severe disciplinarian, ruled the
household with little patience or skill for the nurturing of
children. Lil endured the searing depression of the thirties,
which fell most severely on south Saskatchewan. A drought brought
winds that blew away the topsoil and then clouds of ravenous
grasshoppers descended from the sky and ate the fields bare.
Women went mad; the mental hospital in Weyburn was said to be
full of farm wives driven crazy by the wind and grinding poverty.

Lil Lokken left school in Grade 8, as
many farmers' children did, to help with the chores. She was
twenty-two years old and working in a jewellery store in Weyburn
when Canada declared war in 1939. Soon after, she married a young
soldier, Stanley Hodge, a happy-go-lucky twenty-year-old of
English and Scottish heritage. Stan had enlisted in the South
Saskatchewans, an infantry regiment. He was sent overseas in
1940, leaving her pregnant. A daughter, Betty Irene Hodge, was
born on June 24, 1941. Betty Hodge would be Ken Parks' mother.

Betty Hodge was a pretty little girl, blonde and blue-eyed like
her mother. When she was only two, the child simultaneously
developed scarlet fever and measles, either of which can lead to
serious complications. In her case, it was deafness. Betty still
remembers the day sound stopped for her. She was playing outdoors
when a sudden silence fell. No wind, no voices, no traffic
sounds. She could hear nothing.

Betty became unresponsive and irritable, and she stopped
speaking. Lil suspected from the beginning of the change that her
child was deaf, but the local doctor insisted that her ears were
fine. The doctor explained to Lil that the child was "backward".

In August 1942, Stan Hodge's regiment had the misfortune to be
part of the disastrous sacrificial beach landing at Dieppe, where
about 1,000 Canadians died and 2,153 were seriously wounded or
taken prisoner. Some 60 per cent of the men involved became
casualties, the highest rate of losses in any major Allied
operation of the entire war. For present generations, Dieppe has
come to symbolize the ill-conceived battles that have dotted
history, where young men are slaughtered because of the vanity
and stupidity of their leaders.

Stan Hodge was among those Dieppe survivors who spent the rest of
the war, three years, in a German prisoner-of-war camp. The diet
and strain almost destroyed his health. He developed such severe
ulcers that on his return to Canada half his stomach had
to be removed.

The country that welcomed home the troops in 1945 was innocent of
any understanding of the emotional trauma that wars can cause.
The scars don't show, but many Canadian veterans of the Second
World War came home emotionally crippled. In old age some became
derelicts, drunken men in rags who swelled the ranks of the
homeless, but in the simpler age immediately after the war their
pain went unacknowledged. Veterans were expected to pick up their
lives where they had left off--and most did, as seamlessly as if
they had not killed, or seen friends die, or lived in terror for
long stretches of time, or been penned for years in a prison
camp. It wasn't until the seventies, when Americans confronted
the post-traumatic stress disorders of Vietnam veterans, that
society began to have any appreciation of the lifelong emotional
havoc that combat can inflict on those who seemingly survive it.

The Stanley Hodge who married Lilly Lokken in 1939 was a pleasant
youth, sober, affectionate, and full of cheer. The Stanley Hodge
who returned from prison camp in 1945 was a man who was morose,
bitter, and hard-drinking. In the final years of his life he was
an alcoholic and a violent man as well.

Betty was four when her father returned to Canada and saw her for
the first time. He decided he didn't like her. She was a stupid
and stubborn child, he thought, and he said so. In truth, he was
still a very young, unsure man, unprepared to share his wife's
attention with an entrenched rival.

Lil Hodge was distressed by his rejection of the child, but she
is an optimist and she counted on his changing his mind. Betty
was appealing, she thought, and would win him over. In order to
avoid his wrath, she was careful not to show the child any
affection while he was around. If she cuddled the child or
consoled her when she hurt herself, Stan would erupt in fury.
Getting along with Stanley became the ruling principle of their
relationship. Lil tried endlessly to please him, but even so,
Stan was edgy, nervous, and quick to take offence.

Stan's sleep was lacerated by nightmares that left him drenched
with sweat. Often he would sit up in bed, crying out hoarsely, or
jump out of bed and walk around, wildly waving his arms. He would
breathe with deep, grunting noises, like a man who had been
running hard, and his eyes would be open and staring, almost
bulging out of his head. If she tried to speak to him or nudge
him awake, he would push her away roughly and continue his
mutterings. In the morning, Lil would say, "You walked in your
sleep again last night," and he would glare at her, amazed, with
no recollection that his sleep had been disturbed.

When Betty was five the Hodges decided there was no future
for them in Saskatchewan, a
province still so poor that main highways were unpaved. They
moved to St. Thomas, a pleasant town in southwestern Ontario,
where Stanley had some friends who rented them a second-floor
apartment in their big house. Stan held a job briefly as a
security guard but soon became restless and moved his family to
the Toronto area, settling first in a cousin's house on the
northeastern outskirts. Then he moved to Scarborough, a sprawling
community on the city's eastern flank.

Five more children were born, but two died in infancy, leaving
them with four children, Betty, Ronald, Glen, and Mavis. With the
birth of Ronald, their first son, Stan lost all tolerance for
Betty. He blamed her for mishaps the other children caused and
treated her with open contempt. Lil endured in silence his
tirades against the little girl, and when he was out of the house
she tried to make it up to the child with comforting hugs.

Lil's life was a round of toil. In addition to raising four small
children and running the household, she had to cope with a meagre
budget and a husband who frequently flew into rages. She accepted
her hardships without complaint: they were the familiar stuff of
her childhood. Besides, she was part of a generation of women who
lived by a code of silence. Like others in
her situation, she took it as a personal shame that her husband
had a mean, judgemental nature and an explosive temper, and that
he rejected one of his children. Women in the fifties counted
their blessings--a roof over their heads, a man who was a good
provider, the children they had welcomed. The rule was to
maintain a stoic pretence that their marriages were perfect in
every way. Friends and neighbours might guess otherwise, might
_know otherwise, but none would be so callous as to intrude on
the family's privacy and pride by offering sympathy or help.

Lil hadn't given up her conviction that Betty couldn't hear. In
the years that followed Betty's illnesses and her sudden loss of
language, Lil and Betty developed their own means of
communication. The child seemed to have a vestige of hearing and
could understand if someone got her attention and shouted, but
her speech was reduced to making sounds that only Lil understood.
Mostly they got along amiably by pointing and making other broad
gestures.

Lil stoutly argued with Stan that Betty had had normal
intelligence before her illnesses and the consequent ear
infections, but Stan's view was that Betty simply was stupid.

Matters came to a head when Betty was six and started school.
When her hearing was tested, she was found to have a type of
nerve deafness. She was equipped with hearing aids, huge
cumbersome devices she loathed, and her Grade 1 teacher
attempted to teach the child to speak again. Within a few weeks
the effort was abandoned, and Betty was transferred to a special
school for the deaf and hardof-hearing.

She has no pleasant memories of her childhood. Other children
taunted her about the hearing aid apparatus she wore prominently
on her chest. "They teased me a lot," she says. "I can't remember
what they used to call me, but I went through a rough time." Her
response was to cry. She doesn't remember anyone being kind
except her mother, and then only when her father was absent.

Incalculable damage was done in that bleak childhood to Betty's
confidence in herself. As an adult, she's an uneasy person. Her
eyes slide away in conversation, and she seems a woman whose
feelings are readily hurt.

While Betty was growing up, Stan Hodge had found steady work as a
carpenter with the Toronto Board of Education, a job he held
until a year before his death in 1984. With the assistance of
Stan's veteran's grant, the family bought a small three-bedroom
brick bungalow in Scarborough, at 28 Par Avenue, and Lil
blissfully threw herself into the task of keeping it shining
clean. She discovered in herself a passion for growing flowers,
and she started a remarkable garden that became the pride of the
neighbourhood.

Meanwhile Betty was bussed to her school each day, increasing her
isolation from the children on the street. She finished Grade 6
and was placed in a threeyear hairdressing course. Because she
failed a year, she didn't graduate for four years and then, at
seventeen, found work in a salon. Her income wasn't sufficient
for her to establish a place of her own, so she continued to live
with her parents, though her father still belittled and berated
her without mercy.

She had grown to be a pretty woman, but her loneliness robbed her
of sparkle and she was awkward in social situations. As happens
with many people with hearing difficulties, her voice lacks
modulation and she has a tendency to mishear or mispronounce some
words. With progress in technology, however, her hearing aids
became unobtrusive, hidden behind her ear and covered by her
hair. Though she didn't have to tell anyone about them, she made
it a point of honour to inform her dates that she wore hearing
aids.

At a school dance in the spring of 1963, when she was twenty-two
years old, she met James Parks, a tall, skinny, pleasant man, and
was drawn to him at once. His background was Ukrainian, and he
worked as a shipper. They became lovers and she discovered she
was pregnant. Her father, who had accepted Jim grudgingly, then
turned against him and ordered her not to marry. He argued A146
that Jim was a social inferior, not nearly good enough for his
daughter. Despite Stan's heated opposition, Betty and Jim Parks
were married in June 1963, in a United Church ceremony, and the
wedding was followed by a reception in the back of a restaurant.

The young couple lived first in the basement of Jim Parks'
parents' house. Betty hugely enjoyed that period of her life
because the Parkses, Albert and Janet, were affectionate people
who treated her well. Ken was born on February 21, 1964; eighteen
months later, the couple had a second son, Robert Albert. Because
the basement was too crowded for four people, Betty and Jim moved
to an apartment in Scarborough.

After that, Jim's behaviour changed. He went out every night,
giving no explanation, and Betty grew more and more resentful.
Their arguments increased in volume and energy. Jim showed
himself to be a stormy man with a terrifying temper. One night
there was a fight that frightened the children and Jim left,
slamming the door behind him thunderously. Betty packed up the
boys and went home for a few days, after which the couple, making
mutual vows to improve, were reunited.

Lil Hodge liked Jim Parks through it all and feels warmly towards
him still, but she's an openhearted woman who usually sees others
in a good light. Stan, however, detested him and directed the
full force of his stormy disposition against his son-inlaw. It is
Lil Hodge's view that Betty's marriage might have
lasted if Stan had not displayed such ill feeling towards Jim. In
any case, Jim's nightly wanderings continued and remained a
matter of contention between them until Betty decided on a
separation and moved back with her parents. The arrangement was a
difficult one so, very soon, she went hunting for space and found
two rooms in a basement.

Her divorce lawyer advised her that a judge would look more
favourably on granting a decree if she could demonstrate that she
had tried reconciliation. Accordingly, Betty and Jim lived
together again for a month. They found their relationship as
untenable as before, but she became pregnant with their third
son, Darrin. The divorce was granted in September 1967, the
grounds of adultery supported by medical evidence that Jim Parks
had gonorrhoea. Darrin was born in April the following year.

Jim Parks cut all communication with his family, though Lil
believes he would have kept in touch with his sons except for
Stan's blistering opposition. Betty, raising three small boys
with no support payments from their father, was obliged to apply
for welfare. The family was placed on the waiting list for a
subsidized apartment, which became available in about a year.
They moved into a three-bedroom unit on the sixth floor of a high
rise in Scarborough occupied by other welfare families. By that
time Betty was pregnant again from a liaison she regrets, with a
construction worker who immediately disappeared from her life,
and her daughter, Tammy, was born in 1969.

Kenneth James Parks, her oldest child, was a big handsome baby.
As a first grandson in both the Hodge and Parks families, he
enjoyed special status. His father adored the tow-headed
youngster. In Lil Hodge's view, Jim spoiled his first-born,
indulging him in every whim and readily forgiving the boy for the
mischievous pranks to which he was prone. Ken has no memory of
such good times. He can't recall any warmth from his father, but
he can't forget the time, when he was about three, that his
father, at the height of a rage, slammed the door and caught the
boy's big toe in it, breaking the nail.

Ken grew up a wilful youngster, quick to get into fights with his
brothers, restless, easily discouraged, and with a short
attention span. When he started school at Mason Road Public
School, he was an indifferent student and a frequent truant. In
Grade 4 he failed his year because he was absent much of the time
and couldn't settle down in class when he did attend. Since
school had no rewards for him, he much preferred to hang out with
a gang of boys who also lived in subsidized apartments, boys who,
like Ken, had distracted parents with little time to worry about
their children's whereabouts or activities.

The boy-pack, all of them nine or ten years old, delighted in
bold theft. A favourite target was the loading dock behind a
Dominion supermarket where food was dropped at six in the morning
and left unattended. The children rummaged through the boxes,
taking cakes and pies and jugs of milk. They were never caught,
even when they brazenly returned the milk jugs for refunds.
Another productive activity was to offer to run errands for
people in the building. If someone wanted a package of hot dogs
from the store, for instance, the boys would steal the wieners
instead and pocket the money.

One day a clerk caught them and called the police, who took them
to the station and notified their parents. Betty grounded Ken for
two weeks as punishment, but he wasn't chastened. He continued to
steal whatever caught his eye and about a year later, when he was
ten, he was caught again. A department store security officer saw
him take a Swiss army knife, and police were summoned. Betty, her
hands full because Rob and Darrin also were stealing, grounded
him again for two weeks.

It didn't stop him from stealing, but he was never caught again.



Slowly but significantly, however, the wild, unruly boy was
changing. He was beginning to like school, a transformation that
began when he failed Grade 4. While he was humiliated to be kept
back a year, he took consolation in the fact that his younger
brother Rob, in Grade 3, also failed and therefore didn't catch
up with him. That year Ken suddenly began to grow, and by spring
he was the biggest boy in his class. On the next Hallowe'en, when
he went door to door with friends of his own age, some people
refused to give him candy, accusing him of being too old to be
trick-or-treating.

His life turned around when he gained enough coordination to get
involved in team sports. Success on the soccer
field and volleyball court led to better school attendance, with
the result that his grades improved dramatically and his
disposition began to settle down into friendly co-operativeness.

He had another piece of luck: he encountered one of those gifted,
caring teachers who can make a difference in a troubled child's
life. Mr. Finley, a man in the grip of the prevailing hippie
movement and its dreams of peace and mutual caring, was in charge
of the school's remedial maths program. After class, he would put
his feet on the desk, light a cigarette, and play his guitar,
while his entranced students bent over their maths projects. Ken
adored Mr. Finley, who in turn treated the boy with an affection
that eased the child's hunger for fathering. As a side benefit,
Ken developed a skill and interest in mathematics that never left
him. In the computer age to come, he would be a whiz.

By this time Ken had a stepfather, Tyrone Manuel, an itinerant
labourer who had moved in with Betty Hodge. Betty and Tyrone met
soon after Tammy was born and two years later, in 1970, they
decided to live together in a common-law relationship. The union
has lasted; they find one another good company. Once Tyrone and
Betty planned to be married and even picked out the church, but
the plan fell through and it never seemed important to revive it.

Tyrone Manuel is a stocky, bearded man who was raised in a
Newfoundland village, which he left at the age of seventeen to
find work in Toronto. He's a rough and ready person, affable and
bright-eyed, the sort to spend his leisure time with a beer in
his hand. Betty has appreciated him for his solid support of her
through stressful times as she
struggled to raise her four children. Ken didn't warm to Tyrone,
however. He didn't like the drinking. He hated the times that
Tyrone and Betty argued. To shut out their voices, he would hide
under his covers.

Betty's hearing impairment is a factor that her family takes for
granted. The children have always known that their mother's
hearing, even with a hearing device in each ear, is
imperfect. To get her attention, they stand in front of her where
she can see them. They aren't sure, of course, but they suspect
that much of her ability to understand what they say depends on
lipreading. As the family has come to know, when Betty isn't
certain what has been said, she has a tendency to bluff: She'll
nod her head, smiling warmly.

Betty had remained in close contact with Jim Parks' parents after
her divorce, and she took the boys to visit their paternal
grandparents on a frequent and regular basis. Ken has fond
memories of Janet and Albert Parks. Albert worked in a Loblaw's
warehouse, with a second job on weekends with a nursery. In
addition to their two children--Ken's father, Jim, and his
younger sister, Mary-they raised three foster children taken from
disrupted families. To their great credit, they were patient and
loving with the unhappy youngsters, who eventually settled down
contentedly.

Ken was struck by the warmth of that household, so different from
his own experience. He never heard his paternal grandparents
speak unkindly to one another, or to anyone. He was impressed by
their spirit of charity and the volunteer work they did. When his
grandfather Parks died in 1979, it was a dreadful blow for his
grandmother, who never entirely recovered. In recent years she
has suffered greatly from Parkinson's disease.

When the boys visited the senior Parkses, their father was never
there. Sometimes, on a birthday or Christmas, a gift would
arrive. Once it was a small pool table, another time a rocking
horse, the gifts of a man out of contact with children and
wandering in a toy store with his own wish list. Ken used to
think about his father, yearning for him, especially when he was
depressed. Other boys had fathers; it seemed that every other boy
had a father who doted on him and took him to hockey games. When
other boys talked of good times with their fathers, Ken suffered
deeply.

Despite the unrelenting criticism she had to endure from her
father, Betty visited her own parents at least once a week,
bringing her children. From his grandfather Hodge, Ken received
the dismaying opinion, firmly expressed, that his father was a
worthless person. His mother was more close-mouthed on the
subject, but something in her attitude seemed to confirm that his
grandfather was right.

When he finished Grade 6 at Mason Road Public School, Ken moved
to Bliss Carman Junior High School. By this time a robust athlete
and a good student, his personality had turned sunny. He was
playing soccer on school teams and organized volleyball as well.
But he was also shy. He was convinced that he was a
homely, dumb, oversized person who was unlikable. To show he
didn't care, he developed a happy-go-lucky air, but he was a
curiously affectionless youngster. Though he belonged to a large
extended family who kept in touch with one another, he felt no
real closeness to any of his relatives. He could not attach to
anyone; there was no one he loved or could not do without, though
he would have described his grandmother Hodge as the best of the
lot.

In high school at Sir Wilfrid Laurier, where he played
basketball, football, and rugby, Ken found a job weekends and
after school doing maintenance work at Woodside Square
Mall. In summer he worked full time, cutting grass. His best
friends were the Ramanis, a swarm of fifteen youngsters, born in
Austria, whose widowed mother was black. All the Ramani children
were black too, in startling contrast to Ken's Scandinavian
blondness.

Ken was fifteen when he met two of the Ramanis, the twins
Richmond and Honif, who played soccer. Gregarious and fun-loving,
they folded him into their huge, warm family. Unlike the boys Ken
had hung out with before, the Ramanis had no interest in
stealing. Instead, their idea of a good time was sports or
horsing around at home.

That family had a profound influence on the young, lonely,
socially unskilled Ken Parks. It was a fascinating household. The
mother of the Ramani brood spoke thirteen languages, none of
which was English, so her children spoke to her in German or an
African language. The older children actually ran the family,
paying the bills and supervising the household with a degree of
responsibility that Ken had never seen before. All the older
Ramanis had after-school jobs at the mall, and they divided up
the chores at home with equanimity and fairness.

The Ramanis came into Ken's life at the right
time. Betty and Tyrone had moved to a townhouse in a nearby
subsidized housing project, a neighbourhood that housed a
distinctly rougher group of teenagers. Boys his age were getting
into serious trouble with the law, mostly for robberies and
drugs; territorial battles were conducted with brutal weapons.

Ken was insulated from much of what was happening by his
friendships with the Ramanis and with another soccer buddy, Gus
Tsorkidis, the son of the coach.

Soccer had become Ken's obsession. He played goalie for Clara-Lee
Westview in a minor soccer league and travelled with the team.
Clara-Lee Westview had been a consistent loser when Ken first
joined the team, but steadily its fortunes improved. When he
wasn't playing or at a practice, Ken went his own way, conscious
of his loneliness. If he came home late, or didn't come
home at all, his mother asked no questions.

In the summer of 1980, just as Ken finished Grade 8, he separated
from his family. Tyrone Manuel landed a good job in Oshawa
working for General Motors on the truck-assembly line, and Betty
Hodge was moving with him. Ken, fearing for himself if he lost
the friendships that were propping him up,
pleaded to be allowed to stay in Scarborough and go to high
school there. Lil Hodge came to the rescue. Ken could live with
them, she said. She would make a bedroom for him in the room next
to the living-room.

Lil's hospitality was not without a personal motive. Her husband
had become an alcoholic. Stan's verbal abuse of her, something
she had learned to tolerate, had turned uglier. Often while drunk
he would strike her. Though Stan had prided himself on his work
record in the past, he no longer cared. His absences were causing
his employer, the Toronto Board of Education, great concern. Lil
hoped that the presence of their big grandson would act as a curb
on her husband's violence.

Betty was agreeable and Ken was ecstatic. The boy was sixteen and
not fully grown when he gathered up his belongings happily and
moved in with his grandparents, to bask in Lil's solicitous care
and a larder always stocked with his favourite foods. "You know
what it's like to live with your grandmother," he once explained
with a wide grin. "Cakes and cookies."

Ken's casual comings and goings were distressing to his
grandparents, whose supervision of their own children had been
more exacting, but they came to accept that he was accustomed to
missing meals without explanation and to coming home when he
pleased. They were less tolerant about his habit of sleeping in
when he wished, going late to school or missing it altogether.
His mother had never cared, but Lil wouldn't tolerate it.

Accordingly, Ken was a diligent student that year at Wilfrid
Laurier high school and did well in Grade 9. After school and on
weekends he worked in the mall, mopping floors, or in the
Becker's store run by the father of his friend Gus. In the summer
he worked full time at the mall in order to have money for rugby
and soccer equipment and the travel costs of league play. Lil
accepted room and board money from him when he offered it--and
banked it in his name.

In the fall he started Grade 10 and promptly was caught up in the
school's drug culture. The most dominant, popular group in the
school, it seemed to him, used drugs. He joined a gang of
teenagers who habitually cut classes to hang out on the
Scarborough bluffs and smoke marijuana. Twice Ken took acid for
its kaleidoscopic clarity. He liked being high: it made him feel
sexually attractive and staved off the moods of depression
that sometimes threatened to swamp
him. Other boys his age bragged about their sexual triumphs, but
Ken had never even approached a girl for a date. He yearned over
the pretty young women in the school, but he was convinced that
girls saw him as clumsy and dull.

"He looked like a druggie at that time," Karen comments, with a
forgiving smile. "He wore his hair long, parted on one side and
combed over. I wouldn't have looked at him twice if I'd seen him
then."

Most of that reckless crowd drank beer in great quantities, but
Ken didn't like the taste. Wine suited him better, but getting
drunk never appealed to him. He was dismayed to find that he had
a physical aversion to tobacco: it made him choke. If he
persisted in trying to smoke cigarettes, he would have a coughing
fit so protracted and severe that eventually he would vomit.

He realized in the spring, too late to catch up, that he was
about to fail some of his Grade 10 year, and he did. Ken passed
in five subjects and failed three; he would have to repeat
geography. He took stock of himself and decided that the
environment of Wilfrid Laurier would destroy his chances to have
the kind of stable, productive life he wanted. The Ramanis were
at nearby Cedarbrae High School, so he decided to switch schools
to be with them.

The transfer was not without a price. The geography he had missed
was a Grade 9 subject at Cedarbrae. He was too embarrassed by his
size--six foot five--to take the subject with smaller teenagers.
That year he proved a brilliant student at maths, pulling down
marks in the nineties, but he continued to be abysmal in English.
The fact was, he read almost nothing; except for compulsory
reading in English courses, he had never read an entire book in
his life.

Ken developed an easy style of dealing with his grandfather
Hodge. When Stan would launch into a drunken tirade, Ken simply
agreed with him. He maintained a friendly manner that seemed to
take no note of his grandfather's slurred speech or staggering
walk. Stan drank beer steadily, beginning when he wakened, and
fell into bed dead drunk early in the evening. Until he passed
out, he was a mean man to cross. Lil was shocked the first time
he hit her, but came to accept the blows as part of the price of
what was otherwise a good life.

In his cups, Stan dwelt on the wretchedness of
his prisoncamp experience in Germany. It became almost his only
topic; he couldn't get it out of his head. After nearly forty
years, the memories of that bleak experience surfaced full force;
the misery was fresh again and his grievances raw.

His memories of prison camp were dominated by the ravenous hunger
he had endured. He talked about food--what he had to eat, what he
dreamed of eating. His sleepwalking took a curious turn. He
developed a strange habit of rising from his bed, sound asleep,
and going to the kitchen to cook himself a meal. In the morning
Lil would find the debris in the kitchen, steak and onions in one
pan, fried potatoes in another. Stan protested that he couldn't
remember a thing.

The mere act of cooking seemed to satisfy his unconscious needs:
he never ate any of the food he cooked. He would turn on all four
burners, get out food and bowls and pans, prepare something
carefully, and then, satisfied, go back to bed to sleep
contentedly the rest of the night. A few times when his son Glen
attempted to waken him during these strange activities, Stan
would whirl and strike him violently.

His daughter Betty remembers being roused one
night by the smell of bacon. She went into the kitchen to find
her father in his underwear, his regular sleeping costume,
cooking a hearty breakfast. Many times when Ken came home late at
night, he would interrupt his grandfather in the act of making
scrambled eggs, his eyes open in a fixed, manic stare, his
breathing hoarse and excited. The sound of the rasping breathing,
in fact, became the family's alarm; it alerted them to the fact
that Stan was headed for the kitchen.

Stan and Lil owned a trailer parked permanently in a park near
Balsam Lake in the Muskokas north of Toronto, where they lived
much of the summer. Their son Glen would visit with his wife,
Diane, and the couple slept in an attached canvas room where the
cooking was done. Many times Diane smelled propane and saw her
father-in-law in his shorts heating up leftovers. If she spoke to
him he would stare at her in bewilderment.

Occasionally Stan would dress himself in his sleep, go through
the door of the extension room, and stroll into the park. Diane
would waken Glen, who would pull on some clothes, chase after his
father, and lead him back. Once Glen lost his father in the dark.
When he returned to the trailer he found Stan crouched
outside what the family calls the "adder room", trying to open
the zippered doorway. Glen helped him and Stan went quietly
through it and back to bed; the next day he denied hotly that any
of it had happened.

Some mornings Lil found even more unsettling evidence of her
husband's odd nocturnal roamings. In the night Stan would go into
a closet to urinate, or would pull out a dresser drawer and
defecate in it. She found it was no use to rebuke him or
complain; Stan had no recollection of it at all.
Lil resigned herself to the morning clean-ups, since
sleepwalking seemed to be a family trait. When her sister Minnie
Lokken, four years younger, came to Canada from Scotland for a
visit, the two women shared a bed during a pilgrimage they made
to Saskatchewan. Lil was disturbed almost every night by Minnie
mumbling in her sleep. When Lil would nudge her, saying, "You're
talking in your sleep!" there was no reply.

Another sister, Gladys, also talked in her sleep, shouting out
with such urgency that the family would rush to her room to see
what was the matter. One of Gladys' children, Arlene, walked in
her sleep at the age of nine. The child went out of the house in
the middle of the night, crossed the street to a neighbour's, and
sat in a bucket to urinate.

Ron and Glen, Stan and Lil's two sons, also seemed to be
afflicted. As a boy Glen used to walk around the house in his
sleep, talking to himself unintelligibly, sometimes calling out.
When Ron was about eight, he got up one night and ran screaming
into the living-room, hiding himself behind the chesterfield.
When his parents tried to reach him, he ran across the room,
still yelling, and hid behind a chair. They captured the boy and
took him to bed, but he was a long time calming down. He
continued to leap up and yell, waving his hands wildly. When he
was spoken to, he didn't appear to hear. Lil and Stan took him
into their bed for the night; in the morning Ron could remember
nothing of what had happened or even of what frightening thing he
had been dreaming.

From the ages of about twelve to sixteen, both Ron and Glen went
through an embarrassing period of bed-wetting. Lil tried to help
by shaking them awake during the night to take them to the
bathroom, but she found them exceedingly difficult to rouse.

As an adult Glen slept so heavily that his wife, Diane, found him
almost impossible to wake in the morning. If she shook him, he
would flail his arms, sometimes striking her heavily, so she
learned to keep a wary distance and wake him by shouting. Once or
twice a week he mumbled in his sleep, and sometimes a night
terror seemed to sweep him, leaving him drenched in sweat.

Glen's two sons, John and Phillip, suffered the same difficulty.
Until he was ten, John wet his bed two or three times a night;
after that it tapered off until it ceased when he was twelve.
Medical tests showed no physical cause, but doctors surmised that
the reason for it was that the boy slept so deeply.

It was suggested that the parents wake the boy during the night
and take him to the bathroom, but this proved of little help.
Glen and Diane found that they couldn't wake him unless they
shook him vigorously, and even then he didn't seem to wake A166
up entirely. Sometimes Glen would carry the boy to the bathroom
and prop him up in front of the toilet. Johnny would urinate but
clearly wasn't aware of doing so; if his father loosened his
grasp, Johnny would fall.

A few times John urinated in his closet. When his mother accused
him of it the next morning, he would laugh, thinking she was
kidding him. Similarly, he had no recollection of the times when
nightmares seized him and he would shout loudly and then sit up
in bed sobbing. When his parents attempted to comfort him, he
would only stare, looking confused and uncomprehending.

Phillip repeated the pattern. At the age of ten he was wetting
his bed two or three times a night and, again, doctors could find
no organic reason for it. Often while Diane was changing the
boy's bed, Phillip would go into the living-room and sit beside
his father, mumbling. Other times he simply appeared in the
living-room, staring at his parents. When asked what he wanted,
he didn't respond.

The next morning Diane would tell him about it.

"Mummy," the boy would protest, "I don't do that!"

"Yes you do."

Ken Parks had similar experiences. At about the same age, he too
was a bed-wetter and difficult to rouse. On one shocking occasion
when he was eleven he was almost killed while sleepwalking. Betty
went in his room one night to check on him and saw his legs just
disappearing over the window-sill. She screamed for help and Rob
and Darrin came running.

They succeeded in pulling him back into the room, preventing a
six-storey fall. The next day Ken was bemused at the story; it
was news to him.

Sometimes Ken woke up sweating and with shortness of breath, as
if he had been gripped by a terrifying nightmare. He could never
remember the dream.

Ken's brother Darrin also wet his bed until the age of about ten,
and often he disturbed the household by talking loudly in his
sleep. On at least one occasion his sleep disturbance took the
same form as his grandfather's. When Darrin was nineteen Betty
found him, sound asleep, cooking a fried-egg sandwich. In the
morning the sandwich was on the kitchen table, untouched, and
Darrin denied knowing anything about it.

Ken's uncle Glen tells of a time when Ken fell asleep in the
front passenger seat of Glen's car on the way to a fishing
expedition. After snoring for a few minutes, Ken suddenly
sat bolt upright in great agitation and seized the dashboard with
both hands, eyes staring. He mumbled sounds that Glen described
as "parts of words", and then slumped back, still asleep.

Lil's bedroom was next to Ken's, and two or three nights a week
she could hear him talking in his sleep. She learned that it was
no use to call him in the morning to waken him; he simply didn't
hear her. Most mornings she had to go into his room and shake him
awake.

Stan's behaviour made Lil increasingly anxious for their safety.
Often he left pots on the stove until they burned dry. Once the
house filled with smoke from something he had cooked and left.
The couple no longer slept together--Stan had a bed in the
basement--but she often woke to hear his panting as he moved
along the hall towards the kitchen. She would follow him and
watch while he would get a cup out of the cupboard, put tea in
it, place the sugar and milk next to it, plug in the kettle, and
then complacently go back to bed. Lil would wait until he was
gone, then turn off the kettle and go to her own bed.

Ken, coming home from the mall alter work, would find the lights
on in the kitchen and all the stove burners lit. It was such a
regular occurrence that he took it matter of factly. It was
routine to turn off the stove and switch off the kitchen lights
before going to bed.

One night Ken heard his grandfather shouting. He hurried to the
basement and found him lying in a pool of blood and urine. He had
fallen and cut his arm on a bottle and then wet himself. His
grandmother came as Ken tried to lift Stan, who stared at them,
panting like an animal, his eyes bulging. When they spoke to him,
there was no reply or movement. Ken carried his grandfather to
the bathroom, where Lil took over the task of getting him into
dry clothes and bandaging his bleeding arm. In the morning, Stan
irately demanded an explanation for the bandages.

The difficulties of dealing with Stan's drunkenness and nightly
excursions made comrades of Lil Hodge and Ken. He loved living
with her; for the first time he had a family member with whom he
felt secure. He could confide in her, he thought, though he never
did. He was touched that she was unconditionally on his side. She
seemed to think he was just about perfect. The shy teenager was
in bliss. Lil's plight with a drunken husband wrung his heart. It
hurt to hear Stan yell at her or refuse to drive her to the
trailer, and he would try to soften his grandfather's mood by
saying something to make him smile.

Lil Hodge was aware of Ken's loneliness and gave him what he
needed most, praise and tender mothering. His presence was
protection. Stan never hit her when Ken was in the house.

Ken rarely saw his mother and Tyrone, or his brothers and sister.
He almost never thought about them, but he continued to fantasize
about one day meeting his father. He had begun to believe it
might never happen, that he would grow old and die without ever
knowing his father. That appeared more likely than ever when his
paternal grandfather, Albert Parks, died of a heart attack in the
summer of 1979. Ken assumed that he would see his father at the
funeral and was braced for it, imagining how the scene would go.
Just before the service he was told that his father had left a
note saying he was too upset to attend.

Ken was shocked. He appreciated that it would be uncomfortable
for Jim Parks to encounter his three sons after an absence of
twelve years, but he thought it callous of his father not to be a
comfort for his grieving mother at the funeral.

Then, on Easter Sunday 1981, Ken and his father unexpectedly met.
It happened when Ken dropped in unannounced to visit his widowed
grandmother. Janet Parks said, "Your father's here," and
indicated her bedroom down the hall where the television was
located.

Ken was shaking as he walked to the partly open door. He pushed
it open and saw a big man seated in a chair watching television,
half turned from him. The man looked around. Ken said, "Hi." The
man replied, "Hi," and turned back to the screen.

Silence hung between them. The man resolutely concentrated on the
screen. Ken stared at the averted face of his father1' undecided
what to do, and then bolted from the house in tears.

The Ramani twins were waiting outside in a car with Ken's new
girl-friend, Karen Woods. He told them about the encounter, his
anger beginning to build. They had a solution: they all went
roller-skating.


CHAPTER SIX

Karen Woods Parks


Woodside Square Mall in Scarborough on Toronto's northeast flank
draws youth from miles around. Some are employed at the minimum
wage in the mall's fast-food outlets and shops; others merely
hang out in the mall's eating area amid the litter and midway din
of stalls selling an international hash of fried rice, pizza, and
perogi.

Shopping malls have a peculiar social ecosystem of their own: one
element formed of the managers and owners of shops, another the
employees, another the regular shoppers who move purposefully
through the maze of strollers and potted trees, and another the
loiterers, a group made up of house-bound mothers, elderly people
looking for costfree entertainment, the homeless who come for
warmth, and dislocated teenagers, the most visible of all in
their bright mating attire.

The young are drawn to modern shopping plazas for the same reason
that their grandparents flocked to drugstore soda fountains.
Malls are places where the young are certain to be found and
where parents, usually, are not.

Young people flee to malls from homes that cramp them. They
escape fond parents who can't bear their nestleaving activities;
they escape exacting parents who won't tolerate their messiness;
they escape from vicious or drunken or crazy parents who hurt
them, and from overburdened parents who are impatient for them to
be gone, and from indifferent parents who don't care where they
are or who they are, and from anxious, uncertain parents with
sharp tongues.

The teenagers who hang out in malls care for one another with a
degree of concern and wisdom that would astonish their elders.
For the price of a cup of coffee, they join a social order as
clannish, exacting, and complex as the Masons. The tribes they
form provide a moral structure with welldefined rules, give
comfort to the wounded, and offer conviction
to the uncertain and distraction to the fearful. Malls can be
sanity stations for a generation overwhelmed by a sense of
futility. In the malls, the young can forget the ill omens of
poor school records and harsh hom experience.

Teenagers in malls are always falling

into romantic love with one another. The malls are indifferent
witnesses to the burning love affairs that blaze from
adolescent loneliness and confusion, but those wistful and ardent
spring matings have a timeless history: almost all dissolve by
autumn.

A few survive. In Woodside Square Mall in the summer of 1981, Ken
Parks met Karen Woods. Three years later they married.

One of the privileges most enjoyed by teenagers who worked in the
Woodside Square Mall that summer was going to movies free. Ken,
Gus, and the Ramani twins, with the collusion of cronies taking
tickets at the door, saw every film that came to the Odeon
theatre in the mall, and some of them many times. Movie-going was
more than an entertainment: it was a scouting opportunity. The
popcorn counter had a high turnover of teenaged women, and the
men kept an eye out for promising newcomers. In the summer of
1981, when the love affair of Ken Parks and Karen Woods began,
Ken, a boy who mopped the floors in the mall, was seventeen and
Karen, the theatre's new candy girl, was sixteen.

Karen's friend Lorraine Fernandez also worked behind the popcorn
counter and was dating Richmond Ramani, one of the twins. One
night when Ken and Richmond were
collecting Lorraine after work, she brought along Karen and
introduced her. The men offered Karen a lift home in Richmond's
car, but she refused, saying she lived only a short distance away
and preferred to walk. Ken thought to himself, "She's scared of
us."

After that Ken was aware of her bright, cheerful presence in the
young crowd that worked at the mall. He liked her Australian
accent, her smallness, and her quickness, but she seemed
indifferent to him. That got his attention, even though he had
just started dating someone else, a mall friend named Lisa who at
that time was vacationing with her family in Florida. Somehow a
comfortable foursome developed, with Lorraine and Richmond, Ken
and Karen meeting after work to have something to eat and to talk
about their lives.

Lisa returned from vacation but Ken had become enthralled by
Karen. He behaved honourably, breaking off with Lisa by telling
her he cared for someone else. That left him free to concentrate
on his new crush, who continued to put out signals that he should
keep his distance. The foursome came together daily in the mall
through the rest of the summer, with Ken increasingly intrigued
by Karen's determination to give him no opening to declare his
love.

For a long time, Karen accepted the foursome as just another
temporary grouping within the mall family of teenagers. She could
sense Ken's growing interest in her but she kept a wall of
reserve between them. One brief liaison with a school
friend had been a disaster. He had broken it off without
explanation after about a month, and she feared a repeat of that
hurt. Still Ken attracted her. He was almost painfully polite,
his gallantry with her in marked contrast to the attitudes of the
other males in the gang, and he was so blushingly unsure of
himself that he aroused her maternal instinct.

Towards the end of August, the gang had gathered one evening as
usual, but Karen drifted away from Ken and fell into deep
conversation with another male. Ken watched them laughing
together and felt the sting of jealousy. His worst fears were
realized, he decided: Karen was lost to him. In his misery, he
drank more than his customary one or two beers. Later, in the
car, Karen told him that he was drinking too much and Ken,
mortified and hurt, snapped back at her. Karen got out of the car
and indignantly slammed the door. Looking back, she saw to her
consternation that Ken was crying.

That night Ken shyly asked her for a date.
Touched by his vulnerability, she couldn't refuse.

The next night over hamburgers she told him she was having an
impossible time at home. Her parents, but especially her mother,
were on her back all the time about the hours she was keeping.
She was thinking of moving out.

He was aghast. She had seemed so sensible, a person from one of
those solid, intact, affectionate families he admired and envied.
Teenagers were always talking like that, he reflected; she didn't
mean it. The next day when he was hanging out with Richmond at
the mall, he heard his name on the page. The call was from a
distraught Karen, her voice scarcely recognizable through tears.
She wanted him to come and get her. She was leaving home.

Ken found her behaviour extraordinary, and so did everyone else
who knew the Woods family. Both Karen's parents were
conventional, dutyconscious, upright middle-class people who were
raising their six children in what appeared to be a model
environment of stability and benign discipline. Karen was the
neighbourhood's first choice for baby-sitting; the oldest Woods
girl was so dependable, people said, so good with children. Karen
Woods was the most improbable runaway teen anyone could imagine.


Barbara and Denis Woods, Karen's parents, were born and grew up
in England. Barbara Ann was adopted and raised as the only child
of Albert and Constance Lancaster. Barbara's natural mother, it
was said, was killed in a wartime bombing.

Albert Lancaster was an itinerant civil servant who attained
managerial status in the municipal housing field and wound
up in West Kirby, a small city near Liverpool. In that town a
teenaged Barbara Lancaster met Denis Woods, twenty, the only son
in a military family, and they fell in love.

It was a romantic courtship, spiced by vigorous opposition from
Denis's parents. His father, a permanent army officer, and his
austere mother shared a view of an orderly universe regulated by
hereditary rank and privilege. Their concern was that Barbara,
being adopted, came from an unknown genetic pool that might
produce flawed grandchildren. In the hope that the young people
would tire of one another, Denis's parents forbade him to marry
Barbara for two years.

Denis is a logical, careful man who considers every alternative
before making a move, calculating the degree of risk with
mathematical precision. Concepts of rebellion or rashness were
abhorrent to him even as a youth, so he agreed without resentment
to his parents' ban. Barbara, a more impulsive and optimistic
person, was hurt.

Denis was enchanted by Barbara's sparkle and prettiness. It was
new for him, a cautious, reserved man raised in an environment of
emotional distance, to give his trust so freely, but he was
head-over-heels in love. Every morning he could be found leaning
against the wall outside Barbara's home, waiting to walk her to
school. They found they danced well together and went often to a
favourite place, a club in Liverpool that featured an
up-and-coming group, the Beatles.

At the time they started going together, Denis was working his
way towards a degree in electrical engineering. Because his
father wouldn't pay university tuition, Denis had enrolled in a
painfully slow semester program in which he could work for
extended periods to meet his expenses.

On January 25, 1964, when Denis was twenty-two and Barbara
nineteen, they were married.

He was still completing his education, so they began domesticity
in an almost penniless state.

Barbara became pregnant a month after the wedding. Stung by her
in-laws' continuing disapproval, she struggled to disarm their
criticism by being the perfect wife: unfailingly supportive and
loving of her husband, a splendid cook, and matchless in her
ability to polish a table top.

She made little headway with the senior Woodses, and to add to
her distress, her mother also had a faultfinding nature. Barbara
went tearfully to Denis for emotional support and approval. The
pattern of their marriage was formed in that crucible of mutual
dependence: he needed her bounce and affection, and she needed
his steadiness. Each was the major focus of the other's life;
their disparities became the union's strength.

Karen Anne was born to them on November 29, 1964, exactly on the
day she was expected. The infant had a thatch of spiky black hair
that led the nurses to dub her "the Beatle".

Karen says Barbara was "just a natural mother, always wonderful
with babies". Denis and Barbara took their small daughter home to
a frugal flat. Their resources were so meagre that they couldn't
afford to keep the place heated that winter. Barbara would huddle
in bed with her baby all day to keep warm, turning on the heat in
the evening just before Denis was expected home.

Barbara's mother and father helped with gifts of money, clothing,
and even furniture, but little was forthcoming from Denis's
parents.

Samantha Louise, their second daughter, was born December 11,
1965, eleven months after Karen, and Emma Victoria was born
October 16, 1967. By that time the family income was more
forgiving. Denis had graduated in electrical engineering and was
employed at a respectable wage by English Electric. The family
was living in a semi-detached house in Stafford that Barbara kept
deliciously warm.

In the interval Barbara's father died. Karen has only one memory
of him, that of a kindly man who carried her to the corner store
in Stafford and bought her Smarties. Barbara's mother, widowed
and with no other children, began spending a great deal of time
with her daughter, and eventually moved in. Constance Lancaster
had the compulsive nature of a perfectionist, but it was
accompanied by missionary zeal for the improvement of others.
Barbara tried to please her exacting mother, but she never seemed
to get the house clean enough or raise her children well enough.
Denis often returned home from work to find his wife huddled in
their bedroom, sobbing.

In 1969 rumours swept Denis's office that English Electric was
about to be sold. In great alarm, Denis and several other
engineers sent out a blizzard of job applications to hydro
companies in other countries. Denis received two offers, one from
Ontario Hydro in Canada and the other from Tasmania Hydro in
Australia. He chose Australia because he pictured the island of
Tasmania as a good place to raise children. Barbara protested in
horror that it was too far from England, but Denis consoled her
with a promise that they would move back in two years if she
didn't like Australia. Karen was four when the family sailed on
the _Fair _Sky, a voyage that lasted six weeks. She was seasick
for most of it.

They settled in a big house in Hobart, the capital, and a
few months later Barbara's mother arrived to live with them. The
couple had three more children, Jonathan Leslie, born on August
17, 1970, Prudence Mary, born on September 14, 1972, and then
Nicholas Lancaster, born July 1, 1975. Far from feeling burdened
by the task of raising six children, Barbara seemed to thrive on
doing everything herself and didn't allow her children to assist
with the household chores. Karen, as the oldest, was not even
required to help with the younger children. "I didn't have you
because I wanted a baby-sitter," her mother would say, sending
her out to play.

Despite her preoccupation with her growing brood, Barbara was
intensely homesick for England. She hated the fauna of her new
country: hairy spiders as big as her hand, snakes in the
backyard, tarantulas under the porch. She didn't mind the rainy
winters, but the hot, dry summers depleted her. She pined for
England.

Barbara grew increasingly insistent that Denis should keep his
promise to move them back to England. Whenever she felt blue, she
reminded him of his pledge, but he always put her off. They had a
big family, he pointed out, and Tasmania was far cheaper than
England. She was unimpressed by his arguments. Finally, after
eleven years in Tasmania, he suggested a compromise: Canada.

On May 17, 1980, the Woodses packed up and left Australia for
Canada. Karen, fifteen years old, cried throughout the long plane
ride. The change could not have come at a worse time for her. She
was in Grade 10 in high school, hugely successful in her subjects
and popular, part of a gang of friends who went camping and
sailing together. The most important reason
for her tears was that she had fallen in love with a school
friend, Robert Hand. Their friendship, which began in Grade 8,
had flowered in Grade 10 and they were going steady. Robert was
an easy-going, athletic youth who made Karen feel comfortable and
valued. At fifteen, Karen had never been happier in her life.

She still believes that if she had remained in Hobart she and
Robert Hand eventually would have married. She would have gone to
university, as he did. She pictures their life together as
secure, pleasant, and affluent.

She pleaded with her parents to allow her to stay in Hobart as a
boarder at her school, but Denis and Barbara would not tolerate
breaking up the family. With a distraught teenager in tow, they
flew to Vancouver, changed planes, and went on to Toronto. For a
few weeks all eight of them stayed in Mississauga with the
Bowrings, the hospitable family of an engineer and former
colleague at English Electric. On Karen's first night in Canada
she cried so hard that Mrs. Bowring brought her headache pills
and warm milk and endeavoured, without success, to console her.

Karen's parents had given up trying to soothe their outraged and
desolate daughter. "They got to the point where they ignored me,"
Karen says, grinning at the recollection. She adds forgivingly,
"There's no talking sense to a fifteen-year-old."

Denis Woods readily found a management job with a company that
sold transformers and other major components used by hydro
companies. He moved his family to a four-bedroom townhouse in
Scarborough at 25 Brimwood Boulevard, number 85. After renting
for a year, the Woodses decided to purchase the house. In time
Barbara and Denis made themselves a comfortable bedroom and
adjoining den in what had been an unfinished basement, so that
the four top-floor bedrooms could be given to the children and to
Barbara's mother, who rejoined them a few months after they
settled in Canada.

Barbara had a strong sense of family responsibility concerning
her mother and she drilled that into her children. Family, she
often said, means that you take care of one another.

In the fall of 1980, the six Woods children were launched in
Canadian schools. All of them adjusted happily except for Karen,
who was still nursing a grudge about the move and writing long
tear-soaked letters to Robert Hand.

Karen hated everything about Albert Campbell Collegiate, which
conveniently was only a few blocks from her house and directly
across the street from Woodside Square Mall. She was shocked at
the tight jeans everyone wore, and alarmed that the school seemed
to be full of drugs, which repelled her. Her peers had an air of
sexual looseness she found disconcerting.

Because her academic credits in Australia didn't fit into the
Ontario curriculum, Karen was given a scrambled timetable. She
was placed in Grade 11, but took some subjects in Grade 12 and a
few in Grade 13. The arrangement made academic sense but left her
socially rootless. She was unable to attach to the groupings of
classmates who spent the academic day together.

Another barrier, at least in her own mind, was her Australian
accent. Sometimes she couldn't be understood at all, and would
repeat words over and over. With a fierce determination much like
her mother's, Karen set to work to eradicate every vestige of the
hated twang.

Partly because of her disjointed schedule, and mostly because she
was miserable and seething with resentment at being in Canada,
Karen had poor grades. The teenager who had been a top
student in Hobart got only average grades in Scarborough. She was
skipping classes to hang out with other truants at the Woodside
Square Mall's eating area amid the carnival atmosphere of booths
selling fast food.

"I was rebelling," Karen comments now. "I was saying to my
parents, `Well, you made me come here, so now see what you've
done.`"

Barbara and Denis were not aware that Karen had become an
inferior student until the summer of 1981 when they saw her Grade
11 report card. They chastised her indignantly but with less
steam than Karen expected. Her parents seemed to see the low
marks as a temporary aberration caused by adjustment to a new
country. They assumed that Karen would soon settle down and
become her dependable self.

The truth was that Karen had become an openly defiant teenager.
Her confrontations with her mother began only days after their
arrival in Canada when Karen had her ears pierced, something
Barbara had expressly forbidden. Other acts of mutiny were less
overt. In March 1981, Karen got a job as candy girl in the
Woodside Square Mall's Odeon theatre, working Monday nights and
Saturday matinees. She became a full-fledged member of the mall
gang and was enthralled. At her friends' urging she would sneak
liquor from her parents' stock and share it at school dances.
Sometimes, slightly tipsy and afraid to go home, she would spend
the night at a girl-friend's home.

Collisions between Barbara and Karen became daily occurrences in
the Woods household. In the summer of 1981, when Karen worked
almost every night at the theatre's candy counter, the situation
was aggravated. After work Karen liked to unwind with the other
teenagers who made the mall their headquarters. She was coming
home long after midnight, to find her furious mother waiting for
her.

She remembers the warm spring night Richmond Ramani and her
friend Lorraine Fernandez introduced her to Ken Parks. Lorraine
wanted the men to drive Karen home, but Karen felt uneasy about
accepting. They were an unlikely pair, she thought, one of them a
black man and the other so huge, with startlingly white skin and
pale blond hair. Over Lorraine's protests, Karen wheeled away and
walked home, regretting it almost immediately because she was
wearing high heels that hurt her feet, regretting it even more
when a strange man started to trail her. She escaped what might
have been at the very least an unpleasant scene when she happened
to meet a co-worker from the theatre who escorted her to her
door.

Karen loved the freedom and friendships the nightly job at the
theatre gave her. After work she would sit for hours over
coffee or beer with others from the mall's improvised family of
youth, enjoying their acceptance. One night when she went home a
bit the worse for drink, her grandmother was waiting up for her.
After that, Barbara and Constance were unrelenting in their
efforts to control the errant teenager.

A point of mutual intolerance rapidly was reached, a terrain not
unfamiliar in families with teenagers. Barbara and her wayward
daughter rarely exchanged a civil word. As Barbara's frustration
and exasperation escalated, Karen's stubborn
defiance increased to meet it. She had been coming home at around
two in the morning; she began to stay out until four.

Unlike many other parents in the same situation, Denis and
Barbara had no fear that Karen was off the rails with sex or
drugs or drinking. Despite the smell of beer that sometimes
accompanied Karen home, her parents had complete confidence in
their daughter's good sense. The sole issue for them was
disobedience.

Their analysis of the situation was correct. After the mall
closed, Karen was mostly to be found in the basement recreation
room of the Ramani clan, where teenagers gathered to sip soft
drinks while listening to music, or talking, or--the new
rage--watching videos on rented equipment. The Ramanis were
opposed to drugs and drank beer only moderately; if any sexual
experimentation was happening in the group, it didn't occur at
the home of the Ramanis. Besides, Karen wasn't much interested in
any of the men in the group.

The summer was ending and Karen's frantic parents decided they
would have to take serious measures before school started. If
Karen continued to keep unruly hours, she certainly would fail
her year. They discussed what they would do, and Denis, in his
meticulous way, made a list of rules. They notified Karen that
they wanted to talk to her the next day at five when Denis
returned from work.

The three met tensely in her parents' bedroom on the basement
floor. Denis read the items on his prepared list. Most of them
concerned curfew: Karen was to be home at nine every weekday
night that she wasn't working and at eleven every night that she
was; on weekends she would be home by midnight.

Karen was braced for an ultimatum of some kind; the night before,
she had predicted to Ken that it was coming. She was shocked,
none the less, at the severity of the restrictions. Yelling and
red-faced, she told her parents they were outrageous. How could
she be home at eleven, __she didn't finish work until _eleven.
Did they expect her to fly!

Denis and Barbara were unmoved. They said that if she
wanted to continue living at home she would have to abide by the
rules. Otherwise ....

Karen screamed that that was fine with her, she was leaving.

She stormed out of the room, snatched some garbage bags from the
kitchen, and ran upstairs to her bedroom, crying wildly. Denis
stepped into the upstairs hall to be out of the way while Karen
flung her clothes into the garbage bags. Karen could hear her
mother pleading with him, "Den, Den, don't let her leave!" and
Denis's gruff reply, "Let her go."

Barbara wept as Karen stormed around the room, recklessly jamming
her possessions into the bags until three were full. She realized
she would need transportation and was stymied momentarily. Then
she remembered that Ken could always borrow a car from the
Ramanis. She called the mall and asked to have Ken paged. "Come
and get me," she said.

"Where are you going?" her mother asked.

"None of your business," Karen snapped. In truth, she didn't
know.

Barbara sobbed but Denis was expressionless. As Karen picked up
the garbage bags full of clothes, her brother Jonny appeared from
somewhere and took one of them. He carried it down the stairs and
out the front door while Karen followed with the two others,
passing her weeping mother without a glance.

She waited by the road that led to the underground parking area
until she saw a car with Ken and Richmond and her friend Lorraine
Fernandez. The four teenagers automatically went to the mall to
discuss Karen's next move and sat around a metal table in the
eating area. Karen was buoyant: __her parents would be worried
_sick! The only cloud on her triumph was that she had no place to
stay. Then she thought of a school friend, Connie Sullivan, who
had just been hired at the mall. Karen had slept at Connie's
house several times when she wanted to stay out especially late.

Connie checked with her mother, who agreed that Karen could come
for a few days while she looked for another arrangement. Ken was
stunned by the speed and finality with which Karen had made
herself a refugee. It didn't fit with his picture of her as a
model of rational behaviour. In his mild way, he suggested to her
that it would be better to talk matters through with her parents.
She flared at him, so he gave up and drove her to Connie's.

Karen piled the garbage bags behind the bar in Connie's
recreation room, and the gang of teenagers went out to celebrate.
Karen was joyful and the others, with the exception of a
worried Ken Parks, took vicarious delight in her audacity.

Denis and Barbara already had telephoned the police to ask for
their help in finding their runaway child. The next day at the
movie theatre, Karen learned that police had been asking about
her. She coolly went to the police station only a block away and
told them she was alive and fine.

The officer with whom she spoke said, "Your parents are worried.
Why don't you give them a call?"

She replied airily, "No way."

In fact, fear was stirring in her. She's a careful and practical
person, not normally impulsive, and the thought of her uncertain
future made her tremble. How could she support herself and still
stay in school? Where would she live?

Karen solved part of her problem when she found a job at a fish
and chips store, working as cashier every night and every other
Saturday for four dollars an hour. She wouldn't be seeing her
friends at the theatre any more, a desolating thought, but the
pay was better and she had no choice.

Housing proved more difficult, but Ken offered a temporary
solution. He had left his room at the home of his Hodge
grandparents because they needed the space temporarily. Their
youngest child, Mavis, was about to be married, and relatives
from Scotland and Saskatchewan were converging on Scarborough for
the event. In the emergency, Ken had moved in with his
grandmother Parks, who lived alone in a threebedroom bungalow,
down the street from Karen's parents and only a short distance
from the mall. At Ken's request, Janet Parks agreed to allow
Karen to stay in one of the empty bedrooms, setting a limit of
two weeks.

Janet Parks liked Karen but disapproved of her flight from home.
She brought gentle but steady pressure on the runaway to
telephone her parents to tell them where she was. Karen politely
refused. She wanted to talk to her parents, but strategy dictated
that they make the first move. If she called them, they would
expect her to accept their terms. Her parents seemed to take the
same view and were making no attempt to contact her. Barbara
tried to persuade Denis to call, but Denis, as stubborn as Karen,
wouldn't hear of it.

Karen searched a bulletin board at Centennial College listing
student housing and found a place offering room and board for $60
a week. It was affordable if she was careful with her earnings.

Ken remained uneasy. Finally, as a concession to him,
Karen called her mother and arranged to go home for a talk. She
took Ken with her for courage. Barbara served them coffee in the
living-room, but the civilities were short-lived. Barbara went on
the attack about Karen's late hours, her sloth with her
homework, her unauthorized absences from school. Karen fired back
that it was her business what she did, none of her friends had
stupid curfews, and her mother had no right to interfere in her
life.

Ken sat between them, his shoulders hunched in embarrassment, and
sipped his coffee.

Abruptly, Karen stood up and stormed out of the house. Barbara
and Ken, strangers to one another, exchanged disconcerted looks.
Ken set down his cup carefully and, with all the poise he could
summon, said pleasantly, "Thank you for the coffee, Mrs. Woods,"
and left.

School began a few days later. Ken resumed classes at Cedarbrae
in Grade 11, though trailing a few subjects, and Karen returned
to Albert Campbell Collegiate for a mixture of Grades 12 and 13.
Her friends from the previous year were all in Grade 13 so Karen
found herself in classrooms of strangers. She was appalled that
her lunch periods didn't coincide with any of her gang.

She found the isolation unbearable. Two days after school began,
she transferred herself to Agincourt Collegiate, a brisk
fifteen-minute walk from her boarding-house. In the mood of
defiant independence that had propelled her into leaving home,
she somehow felt better among people who were total strangers
than being able to see her friends but not be with them.

In two weeks the usually level-headed Karen Woods had discarded
all the fixed points in her life: her home and family, her job,
her school, her friends. Her loneliness literally threw her into
Ken's arms.

And Ken Parks had been waiting all his life for a chance to be
important to someone.

They made an unusual pair. Ken and Karen are oddly matched
physically, the tall blond man fifteen inches taller than his
tiny dark wife. Their backgrounds are dissimilar, his troubled
and lonely, hers a model of closeness and stability. In the
normal course of events, she and Ken Parks could have been in the
same high school without speaking. Karen would be the charmer who
won all the math prizes and Ken the bashful guy destined to drop
out early. Academic distinctions between teenagers are rarely
bridged in the ruthless caste system of high schools. The social
levels are based largely on academic achievement; young people
live in the solitudes of the streaming system, which sorts them
out into winners and losers. The mating would not have happened
except for Karen's state of rebellion. She had become dislocated
from the stream of teenagers in which she belonged: the high
achievers whose futures are as certain as the stars. For one
startling period in her life, Karen Woods had made herself
indistinguishable from any street kid.

They saw one another every day. In order to be with Karen after
school, Ken gave up his beloved sports programs and was waiting
for her at Agincourt Collegiate when she came out the door. She
told him she loved him; he was the happiest man alive. In return,
he gave her his total devotion, all he had.

"He was there for me," she explains simply. "He'd have done
almost anything for me."

Ken had a girl-friend at last, the first serious relationship he
had ever known, someone who counted on him. He had begun to
believe that no one would ever love him. Karen's dependence on
him made him feel adult; he wore an air of assurance and
authority he had never known.

He loved to carry her over puddles; it became the metaphor for
their relationship. The deposit money for her boarding-house came
from him. Cupped in the safety of his adoration, Karen was her
most bubbling, confident self. Ken was charmed by her brightness
and quick responses. She was so tiny and alive next to his huge,
slow self and, best of all, he filled her life entirely. He had
Karen to himself, and it brought out the best in him, his
tenderness and decency.

His only rival, Robert Hand, lived on the other side of the
globe. Still, he hated to hear Karen speak of her former
boyfriend. He was dismayed when she gave the name "Rob" to a
little blue Smerf someone had given her. He insisted that she
discard it in a Goodwill box and he bought her a replacement.

They became lovers one night when his grandmother Hodge was at
her trailer; both were virgins. Practical Karen promptly went to
a doctor in a Scarborough medical clinic and obtained
birthcontrol pills.

He escorted her proudly to the wedding of his aunt Mavis. Karen
met Ken's mother, Betty Parks, for the first time. Betty was
charmed by her. Karen clearly came from a good family, so well
mannered and friendly. Lil Hodge liked Karen too, but attached no
importance to her presence at Ken's side. He was young; there
would be other girls.

Ken moved back with his Hodge grandparents and frequently
brought Karen there. Stan lurched out of the basement to greet
her in a state of drunkenness that frightened the teenager. She
thought the Hodge home a poor environment for Ken and wished he
would move. She learned, however, that Ken would tolerate no
criticism of his grandfather. When she complained about the
drinking, Ken would leap loyally to Stan's defence.

Lil Hodge was an imperturbable hostess, immaculate as her house
and always hospitable to Karen. Karen was an amused witness to
the warm relationship Ken had with his grandmother. Lil kept up a
patter of sardonic observation on her huge grandson's
shortcomings, which he received, grinning, with evasions she
accepted tolerantly. "School called today," she would say. "You
weren't there. Where did you go?" Or, "Your room is a mess."
Karen thought they had fallen into that kind of exchange as a way
of expressing affection. Occasionally Ken drove Karen to Oshawa
to see his mother. Karen was disconcerted by Betty and Tyrone,
and thought Ken's younger brothers were somewhat wild. Beer
seemed a staple of their diet, she noted, and it alarmed her that
Betty almost never spoke to her.

"I thought she hated me," Karen explains. "Then I found out that
she really couldn't hear, so that's why she didn't talk."

Karen discovered that Ken wouldn't stand for criticism of his
mother either. His loyalty to her and to his brothers, though
both seemed to be in constant trouble with the police, was
formidable. Karen learned to keep her opinions of his family to
herself.

As weeks passed, Karen grew increasingly homesick. With the
exception of Ken, nothing in her life was quite right. She hated
Agincourt Collegiate: going there had been a mistake. Many times
she signed herself out of classes; more often still she was
absent because of sickness. She kept getting heavy colds, one
after another, which she attributed to her irregular diet. She
longed to be home but wouldn't make the first move.

Her sisters Emma and Samantha often came to visit her at the fish
and chips store. They would talk about inconsequentials, but
Karen suspected they were the family's scouts checking on her
well-being. Her seventeenth birthday came, November 29, 1981, and
she got a cordial telephone call from her mother inviting her to
drop by the house and pick up presents.

Reassured by Barbara's impersonal but friendly tone, Karen
accepted gratefully. The Woods family normally celebrate each
birthday with a festive gathering, complete with egg-salad
sandwiches and one of Barbara's delicious cakes. When Karen
arrived at the time her mother had specified, she discovered that
there was no party. Her father, in fact, made a point of
being absent, but her mother gave her a hug when she left, and
her grandmother held her tongue. The gifts were mostly of money,
which Karen sorely needed.

Habits of reticence have made Ken a perceptive observer. After
that visit, he noted that Karen talked about her family
increasingly and with a marked absence of her old anger. He
guessed that she wanted to return. Proceeding gently in case he
had misread the situation, he began to talk about a reunion. He
was careful not to be critical, knowing that Karen had a volatile
temper on the subject of her good judgement in running away, but
he privately felt that Barbara and Denis had been right to impose
a curfew. He had a lot of respect for parents who cared enough to
set limits. One day when Karen was talking wistfully about her
family, he grasped the opportunity. He had given it some thought,
he said, and perhaps it would help if he opened the negotiations.
Karen was delighted to accept; the first phone call had become an
insurmountable barrier. With Ken as an intermediary, perhaps a
compromise could be found. Ken telephoned Barbara and asked if he
could come over.

All sides were weary of the impasse, and the preliminary meeting
between Ken and Karen's parents went smoothly. When Ken said that
Karen was interested in returning home, Barbara and Denis
repeated their position that she couldn't return unless she
followed the house rules. Ken was undismayed; in his slow,
patient style, he suggested that there would have to be give and
take on both sides. Karen was ready to agree to a curfew, but it
would have to be reasonable.

Barbara and Denis were impressed by Ken. They liked his
respectful manner and his air of calm. They agreed to discuss the
curfew with Barbara on neutral ground, and fixed on dinner at a
pizza restaurant called Mother's.

Karen suddenly was terrified at the prospect of facing her
parents. Ken assured her that they were in a conciliatory mood,
not a bit hostile or rigid, but her panic didn't ease. The meal
began awkwardly. Denis Woods, controlled and pleasant, obviously
had rehearsed for the occasion. Habits of preparation are strong
in him: he's a man who reads consumer magazines extensively
before making a purchase. Barbara Woods was tense and talkative,
while Karen spoke almost not at all. Ken was the focus of the
conversation, as Barbara and Denis attempted to get his measure.

The subject on all their minds--Karen's return--was not discussed
until coffee was served. Predictably, Barbara raised it.

"Well," she said, drawing a breath, "let's talk about what we're
here to talk about. We want you to come home, Karen, but we can't
have you come home and give us the same trouble."
Karen said firmly, "Yes, but I can't live under the rules
you set when I left."

"You must respect us," Denis said. "If you're going to be out
late, you're going to have to call and tell us where you are so
we don't worry. And there's a limit to how late you can stay
out."

With that, negotiations began. Both sides made compromises until
it was agreed that the weeknight curfew would be twelve o'clock
and on weekends it would be one-thirty.

Karen wanted to make the transition a slow one. Her rent was paid
for another ten days and she was fond of her landlady, who had
been kind to her. It was decided therefore that she would move
home about a week later.

She arrived in time for Christmas, 1981, after an absence of
almost three months, and was thrilled to be in her own bed again.

Ken's father had abruptly entered his life. Jim Parks was living
with Ken's grandmother Janet Parks at her urgent request
following some crank phone calls. She was fearful of being alone
in her house. For a few months around the Christmas of 1981, Ken
grew accustomed to the jolt of hearing his father's voice when he
telephoned his grandmother, or seeing him there when he dropped
in.

The two men behaved towards each other as strangers would. They
didn't touch, not even to shake hands, and their conversations
were perfunctory. If Jim Parks answered the door he would say,
"I'll get grandma," and disappear down the hall to shut himself
in the bedroom with the television. Over time, the exchanges
progressed to "How are you?" "Fine, and you?" "Fine." "Good."
Then his father would wheel and leave the room.

Janet Parks consoled the shocked teenager. His father behaved
that way, she said, because he was sorry he had abandoned his
family. Gradually Ken overcame his own hurt feelings and was able
to see his father in a sympathetic light. He sensed the older
man's loneliness, so much like his own.

Because Ken is the only person in the Hodge family who keeps in
touch with Janet Parks, his two brothers have never had such
accidental meetings with their father. They have not seen their
father since his departure when they were babies, and they show
no interest in doing so.

Ken seems to be the only one of Betty's children who values
family. He alone makes an effort to maintain relationships. Even
when she moved a distance away, he continued to visit his
grandmother Parks. He's very close as well to his mother's
brother, Glen Hodge, and makes a point of staying in touch. Ken
dropped by Glen's home in Scarborough so regularly that the two
men, with only twelve years between them, have a relationship
that is brotherly.

Ken's feelings for his mother and Tyrone were complicated when he
was young by something close to embarrassment. He didn't like the
casual disorder of their home or the raucous atmosphere, so
unlike the decorum his grandmothers tried to maintain. His
mother's deafness made her manner abrupt, so he hesitated to
bring friends home. He was bothered as well by Tyrone's drinking
and the instability of his brothers, who seemed always to be in
some kind of trouble. It wasn't the way Ken wanted to live his
life.

The Woods household, on the other hand, was Ken's ideal of
domesticity. People were friendly, relaxed, dependable, polite,
presentable. He watched for clues on how he could fit in, and his
tact was appreciated. Denis and Barbara were disposed to like him
on sight. They sensed that he was on their side in the dispute
with their daughter, and they appreciated his efforts to repair
the rift. They saw him as a good influence on Karen and were
grateful.

They gave him the best gift: trust. When they were away, Ken was
the only outsider allowed in the house. The terms of the new
house rules reflected their confidence in Ken: Karen could stay
out beyond her curfew as long as she was with Ken. She had only
to phone to say where she was. If Ken and Karen went
to a bar, Ken drank soft drinks; he has a horror of drunkenness.
Under his influence, Karen almost ceased drinking, an improvement
not lost on her parents, who gave Ken credit for it.

Ken became an oldest brother in the Woods family, a role that was
the culmination of his dreams. Samantha, the quiet sister closest
in age to Karen, brought him her confidences, and he gravely gave
advice. When Karen was working, Ken would squire Samantha when
she went shopping. Often he and Karen would join Samantha and her
date for a night together.

When he reached his eighteenth birthday, Ken got a gift of money
from his grandmother Parks, the proceeds from bonds she had
purchased for her grandchildren. He used $1,700 of it to buy a
used car, a big black Fury, hard-driven by its former owners, the
Ontario Provincial Police.

By spring of 1982, it was clear that Ken would fail all his Grade
11 subjects. He and his friends had drifted out of the academic,
college-bound stream. He saw no point in making a drudge of
himself when graduation was unlikely and lacking in meaning for
him.

Karen felt the same about school. The
subjects, with few exceptions, seemed to her irrelevant and a
waste of her time. Her marks were not impressive that year,
although they were adequate enough to secure her credits.

All summer Karen and Ken talked disconsolately about the
necessity of returning to school. They thought it might be more
palatable if they went to the same one. That way, maybe Ken would
buckle down and pass. It was decided that Karen would transfer to
Cedarbrae to see that Ken didn't cut classes.

By the fall of 1982 Ken seemed almost to have moved in to the
Woods household. He was there after school and usually stayed for
dinner. His humour and playfulness were a huge hit with Karen's
younger brothers and sisters. He wrestled with Nicky, and would
walk about the house with Pru and Nicky hanging from his huge
arms. Denis would disappear into his bedroom to read or play
computer games, while Barbara joshed with Ken about his size. He
treated her with mock condescension and liked to get a rise out
of her by making outrageously chauvinistic remarks.

Privacy was hard for the young couple to come by. When Karen and
Ken made love, usually it was in the back seat of a car.

Both had new jobs. Ken was working in a hardware store and Karen
as a waitress in the restaurant in Zeller's in the mall.

Without saying anything to Karen about it, Ken went shopping for
an engagement ring. He chose a small, brave diamond ring, paying
$300. He decided on a romantic location, the spot in the mall
parking lot where he had first asked Karen for a date. That night
as they walked to his car, he said, "Karen, will you marry me?"
She grinned and said, "Yeah."

Barbara and Denis were pleased but protested that they were too
young to marry. The couple assured them that they planned to wait
two or three years, until they had finished high school and their
lives were in order.

That autumn Karen and Ken entered Cedarbrae high school, the only
officially engaged couple in the school. Every morning they met
on a corner to walk to school, and between classes they were
inseparable. After school was another matter. Ken resumed playing
rugby despite Karen's displeasure at the amount of time it
consumed. She went to every game, a small and somewhat grumpy
figure in the stands.

She saw a new side of him. Ken on a playing field was an
aggressive, competitive man whose great size gave him an air of
command. Ken seemed to assume that his size made him responsible
for the enforcement of fairness. If anyone showed unnecessary
roughness, Ken was an avenging giant.

His mantle of protector of the innocent extended off the field.
Karen learned of a time after a soccer game three years earlier
when Ken's attention was drawn to a frightened teenaged girl who
was surrounded by about ten of the opposing team. Though she
tried to get away, they pursued her, taunting her about
something. Ken went roaring to her assistance, piling into all
ten by himself until joined a minute later by three of his
teammates. The baffle turned ugly and someone called the police,
who broke it up.

A few months after high school resumed that fall, Ken and Karen
fell to bickering. The flash points varied, but fundamentally all
the quarrels were the same. Karen was furious that Ken spent so
much time on sports and that he was hanging around again with his
male friends. She thought it unfair, since he was almost the only
person she knew at Cedarbrae. She had transferred to be with him,
she told him, and she was outraged when he deserted her.

In February 1983, just after Ken had given her a stuffed cat for
a Valentine's present, they had an argument so bitter that Ken
suggested they break up. Karen, shocked, promptly gave him back
the ring.

Ken wasn't at school for the next few days. Karen expected to
feel abandoned, but she was pleasantly surprised to find a
considerable amount of sympathy on her side. Students she
scarcely knew made a point of keeping her company in the
cafeteria or walking with her between classes. Ken's teammates on
his rugby team informed her that they were telling him he was a
jerk. It helped, but Karen was in anguish; often at home she
sobbed in her room.

Ken was disconcerted that his friends were flocking to Karen's
support. His old insecurities came to the fore. He let it be
known that no one was allowed to date Karen. To guard against a
rival, he insisted on picking her up after work to drive her
home. He watched her enter her house, and then, satisfied, he
drove away to join his friends.

They reconciled, only to break apart again over the same cause.
The engagement ring was on and off her finger; friends checked
her hand to see how things were going. Her parents gave up trying
to keep abreast of developments. Once Ken was so angry with her
that he gave her back everything she had given him,
including a car blanket.

Ken's jealousy finally brought them together. It happened one
night when Karen told him not to pick her up the next
night, she was going to a dance with Samantha and Samantha's
boy-friend. Ken, aghast, blurted out, "How about going with me?"

She went, but she gave him a chilly time.

He was not only stung by her haughtiness; in truth Ken was
missing Karen. "Hanging out with the guys," as he put it, began
to lose its charm. He kept thinking about Karen and worrying that
she would find someone else.

In March he went to the Bahamas with his rugby team and
telephoned her twice. On his return they were reunited, this time
for good.

Ken's grades improved that year and he earned five credits. Karen
graduated. They considered their options and decided that Ken
should return in the fall to finish Grade 12. Meanwhile they kept
their jobs. Ken worked almost full time that summer at the
hardware store, while Karen continued as a part-time waitress at
Zeller's.

Her mother grew annoyed. One afternoon as Karen was lolling in
front of the television, Barbara presented her with two options.
"Either you go to college this fall or you get a fulltime job,"
she said. "You're not going to sit around at home."

College had no appeal for Karen; she had decided education was a
complete waste of time. She found a job for $200 a week as a
cashier at a Regal Photo one-hour outlet. To her disgust, her
parents immediately obliged her to pay rent. Ken was cooling to
the idea of going back to school. With Karen gone from Cedarbrae,
the prospect was unappealing. He was too old for homework, he
thought, and the byzantine politics of adolescents.

He looked for a better-paying job and found one for $200 a week
in sales with an electrical company, Independent Electric. In an
electrical course in high school, his marks had been excellent.
He loved the field and it gave him something in common with Denis
Woods, an electrical engineer.

By November 1983, they had saved enough money to buy a car
together, a Chevette. Ken was nineteen and Karen was approaching
her nineteenth birthday; they were a ripe age. They began to
discuss marriage.



CHAPTER SEVEN

Marriage


The entire Woods family was relieved when peace was restored
between Ken and Karen, and the sheepish teenager was welcomed
like the prodigal son. Barbara Woods set a place for him at the
dinner table every night: to all appearances, the Woodses had
seven children, not six. Except that he did not sleep there, Ken
was a permanent part of the household at townhouse 85, 25
Brimwood Boulevard.

Barbara and Denis saw Ken as someone with a positive influence on
all their children, but especially Karen, their most headstrong
child. Besides, he was easy to have around. Ken was sensitive to
the family's politics and was careful not to take liberties with
hospitality. He did not, for instance, help himself to something
in the refrigerator uninvited or enter the house without
knocking.

The Woodses provided Ken with the family of his dreams. The warm
and gregarious Ramanis had given him a taste of it, but Karen
introduced him to the real thing: a solid-gold traditional
family. They had taken him in without a ripple, and he returned
their generosity with all the consideration he
could summon.

"Mom thought the sun shone from Ken," Karen says. "He could do no
wrong."

A stereotype about teenagers is that they are feckless about
money. In the early days of their courtship, Karen and Ken had
been no exception; the money they earned trickled away like water
in a hand. Their carelessness vanished, however, when Ken's car
broke down for good and they urgently needed another. To the
amazement of their families, they had no difficulty summoning the
discipline to become thrifty. With the goal of a car and marriage
in mind, both found it satisfying to be frugal. They took
pleasure in seeing savings grow, and they hated spending.

Karen, who liked to joke about her father's predilection for
researching cost and quality before making a purchase, discovered
she was cut from the same cloth.

Ken and Karen, in fact, don't enjoy extravagance. They are not
obsessed by clothes; jeans suit him fine and she's comfortable in
track suits. Neither drinks much or smokes at all. The couple's
biggest outlay was in restaurants where they ate a few times a
week in order to have privacy to talk. Though they dined in
modest places and ordered with a sharp eye on the righthand
column, the expense dismayed them. It pained them to see how
slowly their savings grew.

Karen and Ken sat down to consider cost-cutting measures: The
best way to save, they concluded, was to get married. The biggest
economy would be on food; if they married, they'd eat at home.
Also, they would save the rent money Karen was paying her
parents. They pored over budget projections and decided that, if
they lived cheaply for a year or two, they could save enough
money to buy a modest house. Neither was going to school, so why
delay?

In February 1984, just as Ken turned twenty, they announced their
decision to get married. Denis Woods promptly suggested they
elope and he would give them a sum equivalent to a wedding
reception. Karen turned the offer down flat. She was dreaming of
a formal wedding with all the trimmings: a white gown and veil,
bridesmaids, a white stretch limousine--the works. Like her
parents, she wanted the pleasure of having everything right. A
summer wedding wouldn't give her time to organize properly, she
decided; accordingly, the couple elected to be married in
September.

Their families accepted the news without surprise; Karen and Ken
had been engaged for almost two years. The most serious
opposition came from Ken's uncle, Glen Hodge, and Glen's wife,
Diane, who thought that Ken and Karen, at twenty and nineteen,
were far too young.

Grandmother Hodge was gracious about the news but showed little
enthusiasm. A major concern to Lil was the loss of Ken's
protection. Stan's drinking had become so severe that his
employer, the Toronto Board of Education, had retired him on a
medical pension. That dismissal removed the last inhibition on
his drinking. Stan was growing daily more drunken, quarrelsome,
perverse, and violent. Though Ken wasn't around the house much,
still he slept there and was a great help to his grandmother on
those nights when Stan sleepwalked, cooking his desperate meals
and panting like an animal.

The wedding arrangements were marked by acrimony so bitter that
the couple almost came apart. The strife centred on the tight
budget that Denis had set. Looking ahead, Karen's father made a
decision to provide equal amounts for the weddings of his four
daughters. Karen's wedding therefore would establish the
benchmark. Factoring in inflation and his annual
raises over the next ten years, he fixed the cost of Karen's
wedding at $2,500, which they estimated would allow for a total
of forty-five guests at the reception.

The Woodses had few relatives or close friends in Canada,
so restricting the size of the reception posed little hardship
for them. Ten of the available spots would suffice. Ken's
families, however, the Parkses and the Hodges, had numerous
relatives and friends and were aghast to be notified that they
could have only thirty-five guests, the wedding party included.

Ken's family protested to him and he loyally relayed their
objections to Karen, who responded indignantly. She criticized
his family: Why didn't they offer to chip in with the costs? Why
didn't they volunteer to take over some of the myriad details of
the preparations?

Neither Ken nor Karen can tolerate criticism of family. Their
discussions of wedding plans often deteriorated into argument,
vocal on Karen's side, mute and steaming on Ken's. Karen was
prone to sarcasm and Ken would retreat into gloom. When peace
finally was restored, Ken, nudged by his family, would have more
complaints. Surely there would be an open bar. Shouldn't there be
dancing? Karen, tired and testy, would explode again.

Another wrangle resulted when Ken discovered that the
restrictions on guests meant that he couldn't have friends stand
up with him; to remain within the allowable limit, he would have
to choose brothers to be groomsmen. Karen retorted indignantly
that the same was true for her: her attendants also would be
family.

Fortune smiled on the troubled pair when they looked for a place
to hold the luncheon reception. Because the Pope was visiting
Toronto on the day selected, September 15, 1984, their first
choice was available. It was the Guild Inn on Scarborough bluffs,
an imposing and historic building surrounded by beautiful gardens
with a spectacular view of Lake Ontario.

The summer flashed by, a hectic time of showers and fittings.
Over the months that Karen and her mother worked on preparations,
their relationship underwent a marked transformation. The
mother-daughter power struggle quietly ended and they became
allies. Both were outraged by the complaints from Ken's family
and both were determined to produce a lean masterpiece of a
wedding. As the two women bent their heads over lists
of errands and catalogues of announcements, they discovered,
tentatively and with delight, that they were very similar. In
fact, they liked one another very much.

Ken and Karen priced city hall weddings with a justice of the
peace, but the cost was not much less than a church wedding.
Though neither was attached to any religious denomination, the
thought of a solemn ecclesiastical service appealed to both. They
sought the United church where Ken's mother had married, and an
obliging minister there agreed to perform the ceremony.

With increasing alarm, Ken and Karen hunted for an inexpensive
place to live. Confronted with Toronto's notoriously low
occupancy rates and high rents, they began to despair. At a point
only weeks from the ceremony when they were close to panic,
Barbara saved the situation. One day when she and Karen were
cruising the Victoria Park and Lawrence Avenue area looking for
vacancy signs, Barbara suggested that they buzz the supervisor of
an apartment house that didn't have a sign. The supervisor said a
two-bedroom apartment had just come available, renting for $424 a
month, and could be occupied on October 1.

Ken and Karen were thrilled. The apartment wasn't
impressive, but it cost only slightly more than they had decided
they could afford and the building was clean. They took it, and
Lil Hodge said they could stay with her in Ken's former room
until it was ready.

The morning Karen Woods and Ken Parks were married dawned cloudy
with rain, but the sun emerged in time for the eleven o'clock
ceremony. Denis Woods, who had refused to rent a tuxedo, was
gallant in a business suit as he helped Karen into the white
stretch limousine of her dreams. She sank into the deep seats,
looked down with satisfaction at her bouquet, smiled blissfully
at her excited sisters clambering into the folding seats of the
limousine's vast interior, and suddenly felt a cold wash of
terror. __What am I doing? she _thought. She began to shake. __Oh
my God. This is for ever! How can I be doing _this?

Ken was in an even greater state of fright. His mind was on the
ordeal of the speech he would have to make at the luncheon
reception, the groom's obligatory response to the toast to the
bride.

The double-ring ceremony was simple and moving. A touch suggested
by the minister made an arresting tableau. Betty Parks and
Barbara Woods, standing on either side of the bridal couple, held
lighted candles, which each mother gave to her child. After the
vows, Karen and Ken exchanged the candles their mothers had given
them and joined them to light a single symbolic candle.

Ken spotted his father sitting at the back of the church, a
solitary, drooping figure trying not to be noticed. When the
wedding party moved outside for pictures, Jim Parks drew his son
aside and pressed an envelope containing money into his son's
hand. He said, "Don't make the same mistake I made." With that,
he mumbled an apology and left.

Karen's memories of the service are full of sweetness. She loved
the feeling the church gave her; it was the magical moment in her
life that she had hoped it would be. She was vastly amused
that Ken, earnest and red-faced, was dripping with sweat. He
later confessed that the ceremony was a blur; he couldn't get his
mind off the horror of his impending speech.

As his moment approached at the luncheon reception, Ken's terror
mounted. Champagne was served for the toasts, and Ken bolted his
down. That did nothing for the butterflies in his stomach, so he
drank Karen's too, and then a moment later begged someone else's
champagne. "What'll I say?" he whispered to Karen. "What'll I
_say?" She made some hasty suggestions as he rose to his feet.
The three fast champagnes gave him such a glow that when he
finished the speech he thought he might just make another, but
Karen held him down.

They spent their honeymoon in Florida, having fun at Disney World
in Orlando. They returned to stay with Lil and Stan Hodge, an
uncomfortable period for Karen, who dreaded encountering Ken's
grandfather, but the time passed quickly. The move into their
apartment was delayed a week to allow time for cleaning and
painting. Barbara Woods came to help, providing invaluable
assistance to the inexperienced young couple, and Denis pitched
in to lay a paint-stained but otherwise presentable carpet a
neighbour had discarded. On October 8, 1984, Ken and Karen
proudly moved into their new home.

The furnishings, acquired with the help of wedding gifts of cash
(Grandmother Parks gave the couple $1,000), were spartan and
cheap. They did without a bed, sleeping on two queen-sized
mattresses stacked on the floor. Their television set was an
old one that had belonged to Lil Hodge.

Karen's family was invited for Thanksgiving dinner, a brave
undertaking since Ken and Karen had discovered, to their mutual
astonishment, that Karen couldn't cook. "Thanksgiving dinner went
all right," Karen recalls, her eyes dancing. "Once I figured out
how to turn on the stove."

Barbara had never allowed her children to help her with meal
preparation, an arrangement that had always suited Karen just
fine, but she came to regret her lost opportunities. Ken's dismay
over the mess Karen made of even simple dishes like scrambled
eggs was unnerving. His efforts to help, prefaced with "This is
the way my grandmother does it ...,was drove her wild.

As Karen floundered in the kitchen, Barbara came to the rescue.
Mindful of how she had felt when her own mother interfered,
Barbara never criticized or belittled Karen. Karen could ask her
mother how to roast a chicken without fear of ridicule. As a
result, Karen consulted her mother every day, and often
several times a day. What kind of cleaner is best for windows?
And how do you clean windows? Barbara always went with her on
Tuesdays, when Karen did her weekly grocery shopping, and taught
her daughter the intricacies of finding value in a supermarket.
The first time Karen used a laundromat, Barbara was with her to
explain that coloured garments had to be separated from white,
and how to use bleach.

Though only twenty years old, Karen and Ken were an earnest,
hard-working pair. They were bringing home about $160 a week
each, out of which they made regular deposits in a savings
account. By natural selection, and without even a discussion,
responsibility for money management fell to Karen. Always a
methodical person, she showed a shrewd head for figures and a
will of iron against the temptations of impulse buying. It was
her idea, for instance, to purchase their appliances and
furniture on time, even though they had the cash available. She
argued that their money could be earning interest in a savings
account; meanwhile, by making payments promptly, they would build
up a credit rating against the day when they would apply for a
house mortgage.

Ken was transferred to Markham, a half-hour drive from their
apartment, and he worked Thursday nights in addition to five days
a week. Though no salary increase went with it, the move was
something of a promotion. Instead of domestic fixtures, Ken was
selling industrial wiring. Karen worked two nights a week and all
day Saturdays, with Tuesdays off. Their ill-matched shifts meant
they had long stretches of time alone. Karen usually spent her
days off with her mother; on Saturdays, when Karen was working,
Ken resumed playing rugby for Balmy Beach.

Ken's place in the Woods family was already secure, but the
marriage increased the cosiness of his position. That Christmas
of 1984 there were gifts under the tree for him from everyone.
Barbara's present was his favourite cookies--chocolate chip--and
his favourite carrot cake, which she baked for him and wrapped
with a big bow. She knew he would be touched, and he was; his
pleasure made him inarticulate. Several Woods children protested
that she didn't make cookies for them, but Barbara replied
serenely that Ken was different. "He's my favourite son-in-law,"
she told them, adding dryly, "Also, he's my only son-in-law."

His role with the children in the family was often that of
fatherly arbitrator in their quarrels. One or two of Karen's
half-grown siblings were in a brash period of annoying
selfcentredness, but they accepted Ken's
gentle chiding in good grace.

To Karen's surprise, Ken even got along well with
Constance Lancaster, Barbara's tart mother. Ken had an easy way
with her, and Constance thought he was wonderful. He was perhaps
the family member who was most sorry when Constance went to
England for a visit in the spring of 1985 and wrote to say that
she had decided to stay there.

Ken remained in close touch with his grandmothers and his uncle,
Glen Hodge. He almost never saw his brothers or half-sister, and
rarely saw his mother and Tyrone. Once his mother and Tyrone
popped in to see the apartment, but otherwise there was no
contact. He explains, his manner reflective, "I was more
interested in pleasing Karen's parents than mine. I liked the
stability of their home, the good family atmosphere."

As 1985 began, the couple had a serious talk about becoming
parents. Their savings account was growing, so a baby was
something they could afford. Karen was the one who was eager to
begin a family and Ken, who likes children --"Especially my
own"--had no objection. "Let's have ten," he suggested.

Karen stopped taking the birth-control pill and became pregnant
immediately.

The pregnancy did not go well. In March, when she was three
months' pregnant, some spotting of blood signalled trouble.
Karen's family physician recommended bed rest for two weeks, but
Barbara was worried.

She took Karen to a specialist, who was concerned that Karen's
abdomen was more distended than could be expected. He told her
she might be carrying twins and arranged for an ultrasound
examination. A few hours afterwards he telephoned to tell Karen
that she didn't have a baby. Instead she had a rare form of
reproductive malfunction, a molar pregnancy. There was no foetus
in her womb, only a rapidly expanding placenta, which he would
have to remove at once.

Karen was shocked and devastated. Her first thought, and one she
couldn't shake, was that she was defective. She underwent surgery
to scrape her uterus. Ken and Barbara waited in her room for
hours, playing cards and drinking too much coffee, and were there
when she returned from the recovery room. When Karen saw them
sitting exactly where she had left them three hours before, she
burst into tears of gratitude for their patience.

Because Karen's hormonal level was dangerously
high, it required careful monitoring by means of regular blood
tests. The weekly routine intensified her morbid view of herself
as abnormal. Her conviction that she was a freak was strengthened
when her doctor warned that she should not attempt another
pregnancy for a year.

Her story for everyone outside the family was that she had
suffered a routine miscarriage. When she was alone with Ken, she
often retreated into inconsolable despair. Ken longed to give
comfort, but her sorrow was so deep that he decided it was more
helpful to try to keep her distracted. For months she was deeply
depressed. In order to avoid questions that could bring on tears,
she notified her employer at Regal Photo that she was taking some
time off her job.

The manager called a few times, pressing her to hurry up and
return. Her sisters reported that other employees were sneering
that Karen was having a "vacation". Karen has a low tolerance for
being pushed. She quit and applied for unemployment insurance. In
May she was feeling better and got a job on a part-time basis as
a cashier at a new Safeway supermarket in Scarborough. Within a
few days her bright efficiency was recognized and she was trained
to make price changes in the computer.

Starting pay was $4.88 an hour, but employees who stay are
rewarded with raises. Four years later, Karen's wage had risen to
$10 an hour.

Ken bought her a thoughtful gift, a black-andwhite kitten she
named Muffin.

Apart from the periodic bouts of mourning that Karen suffered,
their life went smoothly that year. Sometimes she and Ken
marvelled at how easy it was to be married. Their bad times at
Cedarbrae high school seemed to have washed away all doubts about
the permanency of their relationship. They had been almost
inseparable for four years, since they were sixteen, so they saw
themselves as having travelled comfortably beyond surprise.

In many ways they were alike. Both had a casual attitude towards
housekeeping, both enjoyed being careful with money, and both
slept deeply. Both were so sleepy in the morning that they set
the alarm for half an hour or an hour earlier than necessary. Ken
was especially hard to rouse; Karen had to struggle to get him
going.

Their tiffs were rare but always on the same theme--his family.
Betty and Tyrone frequently called Ken to obtain something for
them on
his company discount or to come to Oshawa to help with a repair,
and he always rushed to oblige. Karen would fume. She thought
that Ken's family took advantage of his good nature and pointed
out to him that _her parents never asked for anything.

Ken's style when Karen was angry was to button up and wait for
her to cool. He was humiliated when she compared his family to
hers, but he never put that into words. On the other hand, Karen
didn't convey to him how his readiness to be available to others
made her feel unwanted. Instead she attacked his family,
and Ken, hurt that something integral about himself was being
rejected, defended them with his silent pain.

They rarely saw their old friends. Marriage changed their social
habits and they spent their evenings together in front of their
VCR watching rented movies. Mostly, however, they worked to build
their savings in order to buy a house. In the fall of 1985, Karen
took a full-time job at a Shopper's Drug Mart outlet while
continuing to work part-time at the supermarket. Ken had changed
jobs and was working for a thriving electrical outlet in
Scarborough, Revere Electric Incorporated, where he was making
about $315 a week. With Karen's two jobs bringing in about $300 a
week, they managed to save enough to start house-hunting.

They found a condominium, a seven-year-old, three-bedroom,
steeply stacked townhouse in Pickering for $61,500. The financing
obliged them to put up 10 per cent of the cost in cash by the end
of December 1985. To meet the deadline they resorted to heroic
measures. For a while, Karen kept the grocery budget to twenty
dollars a week and Ken took a second job working nights as an
electrician's assistant.

They made the final payment of $4,000 cash just under the wire.
During the suspenseful period when their ability to handle the
mortgage was being investigated, Denis Woods lent them a thousand
dollars to make their bank account more impressive.

On December 31, 1985, they moved into 1655 Geta Circle, unit 13,
their own home. The two twenty-one-year-olds were as proud a pair
as could be found anywhere on the planet.

The first mortgage carried for $460 a month, the second for $90 a
month, and the condominium fees were $97.50 a month. For a couple
holding four jobs, the overhead could be managed with savings to
spare.

Barbara and Denis made them a housewarming gift of bunk beds. Ken
and Karen owned an impressive array of appliances, a VCR, a
microwave oven, a freezer. They could afford a new sofa and love
seat, they decided.

In March 1986, her doctor advised Karen that it was safe for her
to become pregnant again. "Don't worry," the doctor said. "It
might take you a while. Just relax." Their fertility, however,
was impressive. Once again, Karen became pregnant immediately. At
eight weeks an ultrasound examination was done.

"Is there a baby there?" Karen asked anxiously.

"Yes," said the technician. "I've even got a heartbeat."

At twelve weeks, Karen felt confident that everything was fine.
She began to delight in her pregnancy.

Ken was enjoying success as well. In the spring of 1986 Revere
promoted him, assigning him to deal with Begg and Daigle, store
and office outfitters, the company's biggest customer. It was his
job to ensure that electrical material arrived at the job sites
when it was required, in addition to which
he had to read blueprints and quote estimates. The stress of it
was unnerving and he often put in ten-hour days, but he was
exhilarated to be rising so fast in the company.

He joined a rugby team, the Ajax Wanderers, and relished the
exhilaration of hard-fought weekly games.

In June 1986, Karen and Ken joined some friends for an unusual
outing, Queen's Plate day at Woodbine race track northwest of
Toronto. They decided in advance to limit themselves to one
twodollar bet a race. Ken, always good in matters involving
mathematics, was intrigued by the Racing Form. Ken's friend
showed him how to read it, and Ken compared the past
performances, weighing each against track conditions and the
quality of the competition.

His selections in the early races mostly lost, but there were
some modest wins that allowed the couple almost to break even.
When the exciting Queen's Plate race came late in the afternoon,
Ken was feeling confident. He pondered long over the chart,
selected a horse at acceptable odds, neither a favourite nor a
long shot, lined up at a wicket, and bet five dollars to win. The
horse won in the stretch, and Ken jubilantly collected
forty-five dollars. His friends pounded his back, chortling that
Ken was a natural, a born winner.

Ken was amazed that money could be so easy to make. He reasoned
that if he studied the Racing Form carefully, he could astonish
and impress everyone. He would surprise Karen with the price of a
trip to Australia. She often talked wistfully of going back for a
visit and it would be wonderful to make it possible.

Ken had never been a gambler. In high school when friends bet on
baseball or football games, he was never interested. The
risk-taking behaviour of his youth when he stole from stores and
tried drugs was behind him. Others in his family loved the races.
His grandmother Parks went to the track every day and his brother
Rob also followed the horses; it didn't seem to do them any harm.
He had been missing a sense of adventure, and gambling filled
that void.

The next Saturday afternoon while Karen was working, Ken went to
the track and came home a winner. After that he was
hooked. He slipped away whenever he could, and the size of his
bets increased. Most of the time he lost, but sometimes he won
and felt like a king.

He loved the atmosphere of the race track--the festive mood of
the good-natured crowds, the suspense as the horses lined up for
the start, the undercurrent of raw emotion. Even rugby wasn't as
exciting as holding a ticket on a horse pounding down the stretch
to the finish line.

His losses, however, were a worry. He was dismayed but put it
down to temporary bad luck. He would make it up in the next race,
or the next week; meanwhile, he couldn't tell Karen. She would be
appalled at his foolishness. As soon as he won back the money
he'd taken from their savings, he'd quit.

By the end of the summer his losses were substantial. Desperate
to replace the money, he went most nights to the harness races at
Greenwood race track in Toronto's east end, telling Karen that he
was moonlighting as an electrician's assistant. He needed a big
win. He started betting the triactor; nothing at the track pays
off better than the triactor. It requires that the bettor pick
the win, place, and show in the order they finish. The odds
against picking even one horse to finish in the money are poor;
the odds against picking all three are astronomical. A winning
triactor ticket, therefore, can be worth many thousands of
dollars.

One good triactor ticket, he reasoned, and the mess he'd made
would be behind him.

By the end of the first month the triactor bonanza still eluded
him. Karen soon would see the bank statement and spot the
withdrawals; he had to replace the money right away. He started
to steal from his employer. He thought of it as borrowing; Revere
was merely loaning him the money until one of his triactor bets
paid off.

The scam was ingenious. He based it on the normal purchasing and
supplying practices of his firm. He would enter a phoney order
for supplies into the computer, using the name of a regular
customer to avoid arousing suspicion, and then make out a
purchase order on a bogus wholesaler for the required goods. A
cheque made out to the fictitious wholesaler would be presented
for signature to his employer, Revere vicepresident Neil Wagman,
who signed such cheques without
hesitation. The "wholesaler" actually was Ken, using an invented
company name, Minaz; one of the Ramani brothers had a name
something like that. Ken cashed the cheques at his own bank,
explaining that Minaz was his company.

Towards the end of the month, before the bills were sent, Ken
erased the computer record of the fake sale.

Revere, a small company with twenty-five employees, did a million
and a half dollars in business every month. In such a blizzard of
activity, discreet stealing can go undetected for a long time.

The first cheque Ken created was for three thousand dollars, most
of which he needed to cover withdrawals from the joint savings
account. His boss signed it without looking up. Ken had an
explanation ready for Karen when she saw the withdrawals and
deposit on the bank statement. He explained that he was making
purchases of supplies as a favour for the electrician he assisted
at night. Since the amounts always were replaced, Karen accepted
his story.

In September Barbara came to Karen with the wonderful idea that
they should go to England together. The trip wouldn't cost much
except for the air fare, she pointed out, because they would stay
with relatives. And it would be Karen's last chance to travel for
a long time, because she would soon have her baby.

Karen jumped at the chance. There was money enough in their
savings and she could think of nothing better than three
weeks in England with her mother.

The day Ken dropped an excited Karen off at the airport, he drove
straight to the race track.

Barbara, Karen, and Nicky, the youngest Woods child, had a great
time in England. They visited Denis's formidable parents and got
along merrily with them. Barbara's mother, Constance Lancaster,
was failing in health, so the time with her was gentle and
healing. Karen shopped for rugby shoes for Ken and bought toys
for her baby. Photographs they brought home show Karen and
Barbara grinning with delight, arms around one another, and they
returned better friends than ever.

As Karen entered her eighth month of the pregnancy in November,
she suddenly developed toxemia. Her doctor was worried about her
soaring blood pressure and, fearing a stroke, he ordered her into
Centenary Hospital in Scarborough on November 28, the day before
her twenty-second birthday. The enforced idleness made Karen
restless and depressed. On December 13, she persuaded her doctor
to allow her to leave on a day pass. Ken drove her home, and
Denis and Barbara arrived with a gift, a crib for the baby. Then
Karen and Ken went to a movie, _Crocodile
_Dundee, and afterwards to a restaurant for a bite to eat.

As Ken was parking the car outside the restaurant, Karen had "a
really weird feeling". Amniotic fluid was seeping from her
vagina, but she was in no hurry to go back to the hospital. Her
contractions started, five minutes apart. Unperturbed, she
announced she'd like a sandwich or a milk shake, but Ken wouldn't
allow either. He ordered a sandwich for himself but was too
nervous to finish it. He was becoming thoroughly frightened, but
Karen remained relaxed. To allay his concern, Karen consented to
stop for an examination at a nearby hospital, AjaxPickering. The
nurse who saw her told them she was dilated. The
baby was on the way.

Karen was unimpressed and insisted that there was time for her to
travel to Centenary Hospital for the delivery. Ken drove in a
panic, swearing at every delay while Karen laughed helplessly at
his agitation. Around five she was wheeled into a labour room and
the work of labour began, but there were intermittent stops. Ken
stayed with her until one in the morning, when a doctor advised
him to get some sleep. "Nothing's going to happen for a while,"
he was told.

His grandmother Hodge lived around the corner from the hospital
so he went there. About an hour later, he was roused by a call.
The baby was about to be born.

Ken hadn't been able to reach Barbara and Denis, who were out
that evening. When they returned later on and heard the news that
the baby was coming, Barbara was too excited to go to bed. To
calm herself she started to clean the house, and she was still
scrubbing at three in the morning when Ken called to say that the
baby's birth was imminent. She reached the hospital with only
minutes to spare. The infant was a girl, six pounds and half an
ounce, and mother and baby were fine.

Ken was appalled at the sight of his daughter covered in bloody
muck. In the films of childbirth he had seen, new-borns always
were pink and clean. Though his heart sank, he said to Karen,
"The baby's fine. She's just fine."

While Karen dozed, Barbara and Ken went for a coffee to
celebrate. They came back by way of the nursery and pressed their
faces against the window in rapture at the sight of tiny Melissa
Anne Parks curled up in a pink blanket.

The name had been chosen well in advance. If the baby had been a
boy, they had decided on Geoffrey (Karen's choice of spelling) or
Jeffrey (Ken's choice).

In their practical way, Ken and Karen already had discussed their
finances and worked out a way of keeping up their mortgage
payments. As soon as Karen was able, she would go back to her
parttime job at the supermarket. Barbara volunteered, and
insisted, on caring for the baby when Karen returned to work.
With commissions, Ken was earning as much as $500 a week
at Revere, a real achievement for a twenty-twoyear-old highschool
drop-out, but he was working long hours. Often, the
responsibility he was asked to assume for making estimates
frightened him.

His employer saw Ken as an easy, friendly person, a favourite
with customers, who showed good judgement and accepted overtime
assignments cheerfully. He was marked as an industrious young man
on the rise.

Ken's losses at the race track continued. He was betting hundreds
of dollars on a single race, caught in the gambler's downward
vortex. He couldn't stop gambling until he won enough to repay
Revere Electric what he had stolen, and he couldn't continue to
bet without stealing more from his employer. He estimated that he
already owed Revere close to twenty thousand dollars. He had
figured a way to pay it back as soon as his horses came in. He
would issue cheques for the stolen amount and call them refunds.

When the Revere money was exhausted, he took betting money from
their savings account, to be replaced with his next falsified
cheque at Revere. Karen noticed the money coming and going from
the account, but Ken's plausible explanation that he was buying
supplies continued to satisfy her.

Ken's behaviour was changing. His light-hearted approach to life
was disappearing. He seemed a deeply worried, exhausted man.
Karen assumed that his new responsibilities at work and with the
baby were weighing on him. Sometimes when she spoke to him, he
was so distracted by whatever was on his mind that he didn't hear
her. Ken seemed addicted to television, snapping it on every
evening. At bedtime he was hyper, too tense to sleep, so he sat
looking at television long after Karen had fallen into bed. When
she woke to attend to Melissa, she would find Ken asleep in the
living-room in front of the television set. She had to shake him
awake to get him to go to bed.

Melissa slept poorly. At the age of one
month, she developed colic and cried through the night. Ken's
original enchantment with his daughter evaporated. By the time
she was a few weeks old, he took little interest in the infant,
refusing to change her diaper or bath her, protesting when asked
to hold her, refusing to get up in the night when she cried.

Karen put all that down to the rough time he was having with the
responsibilities thrust upon him at Revere Electric.

"He wasn't what I expected from him as a father," she says. "I
thought it was because he was working too hard."

His excuse was that the baby was her job, her only job.
"When you go back to work," he told her, "I'll help more."

She protested, "But this _is work."

To Karen's exasperation, Ken was indifferent as well to household
tasks she thought were his responsibility. She asked him to fix a
light that was out of her reach, but he never seemed to get
around to it. Glued to the television, he didn't even seem to
hear her when she complained. She saw herself turning into a nag.

Because Karen resented his absences, Ken was finding it
more difficult to get away in the evening to bet at Greenwood
race track. He was becoming frantic. He was convinced that the
race he missed was the one he would have won, solving all his
problems. Time was running out. In the spring there would be an
inventory and an audit at Revere, either of which could reveal
his fraud. The need for a big win was urgent; he could see
disgrace and prison ahead. He thought about winning, dreamed
about it, saw himself cashing a ticket for $100,000 on the
triactor. One big win would be more than enough to put his
troubles behind him. If he could get out of the mess he was in,
he promised himself he'd never steal again.

He started to "box" the triactor, meaning that he was purchasing
triactor tickets on six horses that would pay off if any three of
his selections finished in the money. The track takes a bigger
risk with such tickets, and therefore the bets are expensive. A
one-dollar box costs $120, a two-dollar box $240, a three-dollar
box $360, and so on. He liked the three-dollar box. Winning the
triactor was his only hope of saving his job, his marriage, his
reputation, his future.

He won rarely. When he did cash a ticket, it was for small
amounts such as $150, less than the cost of his bet.

He was consumed with guilt and terror, but there was no one to
confide in. Barbara and Denis thought he was wonderful; they were
the last people on earth he wanted to know of his shame. His
grandmothers doted on him; he couldn't tell them. And Karen would
be furious. Maybe she would leave him.

Karen, fully occupied with the baby, seemed completely unaware of
the distress that was devouring him. She talked of getting a
better house and they went looking. They had always regarded
their Pickering townhouse as a "starter" house, the first step in
moving up in a real estate market that saw housing increase
steeply in value every year. By paying down the mortgage with
their hardearning savings, they had succeeded in reducing it to
$45,000, giving them enough equity to move into something
grander.

They found a detached house in Ajax that they loved, asking price
$138,000. It wasn't out of their reach: they expected to be able
to sell their Pickering townhouse for about $105,000, a stunning
profit for a property purchased only two years earlier for
$61,500.

The new house required a deposit of $3,500, the sale to be
conditional on approval of their financing. Ken sweated. The
money to cover the cheque was gone from their account, drained by
him to bet the horses. The fastest way to replace it, he decided,
was a finance company. He obtained a loan of $3,500 to cover the
deposit cheque, putting up their appliances as collateral.

Ken fell in with other regulars at the track, and they groused
together about sure winners that inexplicably trailed the field.
If the others were desperate and over their heads, as he was, no
one spoke of that. In the gamblers' code, no one ever mentions
losses; it's always the next race that consumes their attention.

In February 1987, Karen and Ken went to the Bahamas. They had
reached the point where they both thought they would crack if
they didn't get some respite. Ken was owed some time off, and
they found a package deal at a resort near Freeport at an
affordable $800 each, with air fare, hotel, and meals included.
To make the trip possible, Barbara offered to care for
three-month-old Melissa while they were gone. Karen was spending
so much time at her mother's that it was already home to the
infant. Barbara had equipped the house for her grandchild's
comfort, purchasing a small playpen that could be used as a crib,
together with such amenities as sheets, blankets, and a baby
bath.

The young couple had some good times in Freeport, where Ken
celebrated his twenty-third birthday, but the rift that had
opened between them was still there. Once when Karen wanted Ken
to take her into Freeport to shop, he went fishing by himself
instead. The truth was that he wanted to avoid Freeport and its
gambling casinos. On the first night of their vacation they had
gone to Freeport to enjoy the casinos. Ken had a thousand dollars
with him, money stolen from Revere, and he slipped away from
Karen in the crowd. While she played the slot machines, limiting
herself to quit when she lost $20, he hit the roulette wheel and
the blackjack tables. In less than an hour most of the $1,000 was
gone.

They returned home more relaxed and rested, but the strain
between them was still there. Karen was preoccupied with Melissa
and irate that Ken continued to ignore the baby, and Ken was too
choked with panic to care.

"We didn't think about divorce, or anything like that,"
Karen says sadly, "but we weren't communicating very much. It was
partly my fault. I was concentrating on Melissa and I didn't have
much time for him."

Karen returned to work on a part-time basis with Food City,
dropping Melissa off at her mother's. The entire Woods household
was pleased with the arrangement, and Barbara was ecstatic.
Melissa settled down comfortably with her grandmother three days
a week. Karen tried to press money on her mother, but Barbara
indignantly refused X.

Ken was out most evenings, telling Karen that he was helping an
electrician. Usually she was asleep when he returned. Depressed
by his fresh losses at the track, he didn't feel sleepy. He would
turn on the television set, get a soft drink from the
refrigerator, and settle on the couch to escape into late-night
movies. On television people were always having fascinating
adventures, and most of the time the endings were happy.


CHAPTER EIGHT

The Gambler


In retrospect it seems that Ken Parks wanted to be caught. In
February 1987, just before he and Karen went to the Bahamas, he
falsified the most audacious of his frauds, a $9,984 invoice made
out to his invented supplier, Minaz. He had an idea that all
purchases of more than $10,000 required a stringent
authorization, so he had reached the ceiling. As usual, he
justified the fake purchase by entering a matching order from one
of Revere's regular customers. This time he chose Concept
Electrical Contractors and entered that billing into the
computer.

Ken planned to delete the Concept Electrical order from the
computer before going on vacation because he knew that bills
would be sent out while he was away. Inexplicably, he forgot.

Ken and Karen returned on February 28, 1987, and a few days later
a woman who worked in accounts receivable said to Ken, "Something
funny, Ken. Do you know anything about this? Concept
Electrical is complaining that they got a bill for something they
didn't order."

Ken felt an icy chill. "I'll deal with it," he told her in an
offhand way.

She nodded. These mix-ups happen, her attitude said.

He called Concept. "There's been a mistake," he said
apologetically. "I'll straighten it out. Don't worry about it."

That day went by, and the next. Ken's lassitude was profound. He
couldn't seem to concentrate long enough to erase the damning
evidence from the computer, though he used the computer every
day. It would have taken him only a few minutes to make the
alterations, print out, and destroy the copy. Often he was alone
in the office, working overtime at night or coming in early, but
he somehow didn't do it. Two weeks passed, and he couldn't summon
the will to hide his theft.

He had been keeping count of how much money he had taken. He
needed to have the accurate amount because he intended to replace
every penny as soon as his horses won. By his estimates, in
mid-March he owed Revere $32,000. The only possible way for him
to get that much money was to win a big triactor. He thought it
could happen any day now; certainly, he was due.

When the rest of the $9,984 was lost at the track, he hesitated
to take more money from Revere. To postpone that shameful moment,
he dipped into their joint savings again. Meanwhile he knew he
should wipe the Concept Electrical bill from the computer. Part
of him was screaming at him to do it but something else
prevailed. He really didn't care what happened to him. He
couldn't go on like this much longer.

As it happened, it wasn't the Concept account that tripped him
up. On a sunny cold Friday morning, March 24, 1987, Ken's crime
was discovered when the $9,984 cheque for Minaz came back from
the bank. Someone turned it over and thought it odd that it was
endorsed by Ken Parks.

A major flaw in Ken's plan always had been that the bank returned
Revere cheques to the office. The annual audit certainly would
have caught him, but his signature had escaped earlier notice. It
was the bookkeeper's habit to put the monthly bundle of cancelled
cheques in a file without examining them closely.

Perhaps it was the substantial amount that drew attention; it was
more than double any previous cheque
that Ken had falsified. In any case, the bookkeeper spotted it
and showed the cheque to the company accountant, Irving Pinsky,
who immediately suspected fraud. Irving Pinsky took the cancelled
cheque to Ken's boss, Neil Wagman, vice-president of Revere.

Ken wasn't at work that fateful day. When he awoke he had a
strong premonition that everything was about to come unravelled,
so he called in sick and went back to bed. Karen thought nothing
of it. Ken worked irregular hours and not infrequently went to
work late, making up the time in the evenings. At Revere, Ken
Parks, a favourite employee, could almost do as he pleased.

That morning someone knocked at the door of the townhouse. Karen
started down the stairs to answer it, but Ken stopped her. "Don't
go," he whispered.

He peeked out the upstairs window, keeping himself concealed
behind the drape, and recognized the car of his friend Sean
Trainer, a salesman who worked at Revere. From another angle he
noted that Neil Wagman was with Sean. The knocking continued.
Karen made a face at Ken signifying, "What's going on?" but got
an impatient _sssh in reply.

When the knocking stopped and Sean's car left,
Ken said lamely, "That was a salesman. I just didn't want us to
be bothered."

Karen didn't believe it.
At noon Sean returned alone. Ken stepped out the front
door and closed it behind him so that Karen wouldn't hear while
they talked. Sean told him that a cheque had been found with
Ken's signature on the back. Sean's suggestion on the doorstep
was that Ken raise the ten thousand dollars and return it to
Revere with the explanation that it had been a joke.

"They'll never believe it was a joke," Ken protested.

Sean shrugged. "Well, what are you going to do?"

Ken didn't know. "Tell Neil Wagman that I'll meet him here at
seven tonight," he said. "We'll talk it over then."

When he stepped back into the house, he faced Karen, who insisted
on an explanation.

"I made a mistake at work," he said.

"How bad a mistake?"

"Really bad."

"Is it money?" He nodded.

"How much?"

He couldn't look at her. "Thirty thousand."

She was stunned. "_Thirty _thousand!"

Karen wondered about the repercussions of a blooper of that
extent. She asked, her voice rising as it does when she's
anxious, "Are you going to get fired?"

Not looking at her, Ken paced the room with the urgency of a man
who would rather be running. "Yeah, I guess so."

Her loyalty flashed. "They put too much pressure on you," she
said heatedly. "You've been working too hard. It's partly their
fault. Sooner or later when you're tired and overworked you're
bound to make an error."

Ken realized that she had drawn a wrong conclusion. She thought
he had been talking about an accounting slip or a mistake in an
estimate. For a wild moment he considered fabricating a story to
fit her image of him as an exhausted employee pushed too hard,
but she was pelting him with questions faster than his mind could
work. Besides, there was a certain peace to be found in telling
Karen the truth at last.

He told her flatly that he had stolen the money.

"You stole thirty thousand dollars?" she gasped.

He nodded.

"I haven't seen any of it. Where's the money?"

"Gone. I've been gambling."

She couldn't take it all in. "Gambling! You don't gamble! What
kind of gambling?"

"Horses. I've been going to Greenwood race track."

"Those nights when I thought you were working?"

"Yeah."

She stared at him, the pieces coming together: his absences every
night, his lack of interest in the baby, his depression and
abstraction. Her first reaction was almost relief. After months
of fearing that he didn't love her and didn't care for the baby,
she had an explanation that gave her back her dignity. She
studied the abject misery on his face and felt sympathy. She said
slowly, "I'll support you through this. We'll have to sell the
house to pay the money back, but there's enough equity in it.
We'll give back the money and we'll start over. We can get
through."

She found she had almost no anger in her. She had never seen him
so humble and ashamed, so there seemed no point in blowing up at
him. She was still amazed and uncomprehending that the honest,
mild man she thought she knew could have carried off such
duplicity, but adversity brings out Karen's stubborn streak. She
was already considering what they must do to survive the crisis.

The most urgent matter was that they were on the brink, that very
day, of entering into final negotiations to buy the new house in
Ajax. By an ironlc twist of fate, approval of their financing had
come early that morning. Karen and Ken promptly had signed a
waiver and it was waiting at that moment in their mailbox for the
real-estate agent to collect.

Karen plucked the waiver out of the mail-box. Obviously, she
said, they weren't in a position to be buying a new house. In
perfect control, she called the real-estate agent to say that the
arrangement was off. "We can't fit under the terms of the
financial arrangement any more," she said crisply. "My husband
has lost his job."

"That's too bad," the agent said. "What happened?"

Karen is acutely uncomfortable with deception. "Something
about cutting back staff," she said lamely.

When she hung up, they could think of nothing to say. Ken
contemplated with a sinking heart the coming scene with his
employer and decided he couldn't bear to have Karen witness his
disgrace. He sat cracking his knuckles, head down, and said,
"Neil is coming here this evening to talk about it. You'd better
take Melissa to your mother's while we sort it out."

It was decided that she would stay overnight with her parents.
Karen packed a small bag for herself and the baby and Ken drove
her to the Woodses' Scarborough townhouse. On the way she asked,
"What will I tell my mum? She's going to wonder why I'm suddenly
on her doorstep with my overnight bag."

He said, the full wretchedness of his predicament hitting him
afresh, "Make up something. Please don't tell her what I did
until I get this straightened out."

She agreed, but when she saw her mother she threw herself sobbing
into Barbara's arms and told her everything. Her mother was
incredulous. "That's impossible. That's not like Ken. Are you
sure?"

On his way back to Pickering, driving very fast along Highway
401, Ken suddenly was seized with the idea of simply running
away. He didn't have to face this mess. He could hide somewhere
for a while until he felt more in command of himself. He started
to feel better.

He remembered that he had no money with him, so he drove to his
mother's house in Oshawa. His brother Darrin was there. "I'm in
trouble with the police," Ken explained. "Can you lend me some
money?"

Darrin was shocked. This was Kenneth, the good Parks boy who
didn't drink and didn't get arrested and didn't make girlfriends
pregnant: the family's big success. Darrin had about forty
dollars in his wallet and handed it over without hesitation. Ken
suffered Darrin's grin and stuffed the money in his pocket. He
got back in the car and drove east on the rolling Highway 401,
which parallels the Lake Ontario shore, his thoughts churning in
a black void. He considered suicide. If he drove into an abutment
and made it look like an accident, Karen could pay back Revere
and have money left over.

The notion passed. He didn't seem to have the energy for it. He'd
go to the States, he thought, take a new name.

He was too tired to drive any farther. He pulled off the highway
near Kingston and checked into a cheap motel. For an hour
or two he lay on his back studying the ceiling. Sometimes his
mind was completely blank.

At seven that evening Neil Wagman and Sean Trainer knocked on the
door of the darkened Pickering townhouse and got no answer.
Concluding that Ken had fled, they returned to Revere and looked
up Ken's employment record. It contained an emergency number: his
parents-in-law, Barbara and Denis Woods in Scarborough. Sean made
the call, asking for Ken. Karen came breathlessly on the line.

"If Ken doesn't turn up right away, Revere is going to the
police," Sean told her.

Karen begged him to ask Revere not to do that. "We're going to
pay the money back," she said. "There's no need to call the
police."

She was fearful for Ken. Where was he? Karen called Betty Parks'
number in Oshawa and got Darrin. "Have you seen Ken?" she asked.

"He's taken off," Darrin told her. "Up north somewhere I think."

Sean called Karen a short time later. "He still isn't here. Neil
Wagman is furious. What's going on anyway?"

"I don't know," she told him honestly. "But please don't go to
the police. We're going to sell our house and make it good."

Sean said he'd do what he could.

Karen's alarm was turning into panic. She had a terrible fear
that Ken was dead against an abutment somewhere.

Barbara decided matters were getting out of hand. It was time to
tell Denis what Ken had done and get his advice. Denis was
astounded by the story of Ken's theft and gambling, but he was
also outraged, a reaction far stronger than that of forgiving
Karen or bewildered Barbara. He had a practical concern: did Ken
have credit cards with him? Karen considered. Yes, he did, her
Visa on the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and his own on the
Bank of Nova Scotia.

"He could be running up quite a tab on plane tickets or something
like that," Denis warned her. "It's hard to tell what frame of
mind he's in right now."

Denis called emergency numbers for Visa and was relieved to find
that vendors likely wouldn't accept Ken's signature on Karen's
Visa and she wouldn't be responsible for debts he incurred on his
own.

In the motel in Kingston, Ken was gaining fatalistic resolve.
_Can't _run _away, he thought. He could see no workable
alternative but to go back and face whatever consequences awaited
him. Karen seemed to have forgiven him the stealing, but she
would never go into hiding with him. He got wearily to his feet
and drove back down the highway to Scarborough, stopping only to
use his credit card to get some food. He parked in the lot of 41
Division of the Metropolitan Toronto Police, the police station
closest to Revere Electric.

"There's a warrant for fraud out for me," he politely informed
the person behind the desk. "I believe my employer at Revere
Electric has sworn out a warrant."

The officer looked through the files, then checked them again.

"Wait a minute," he said brusquely, and went to consult his
colleagues.

Half an hour later the officer returned. "There's no warrant," he
told Ken.

It was night, around ten o'clock. Ken called Karen.

"I'm at the police station," he said. "There isn't a warrant so I
think I'll just go home."

His voice sounded listless and strange. Karen had been about to
tear into him for taking so long to contact her,
but she held back. "You'd better come and get me," she told him,
her anxiety showing. "I should be with you."

"No, no," he said. "You stay where you are."

She remembered the calls. "Revere has been looking for you," she
told him. "Neil's upset because you didn't show."

He felt tired. "Yeah, I figured that. It's too late now to do
anything about it," he said. "In the morning I'd better talk to a
lawyer."

Karen called him minutes after he got through the door, needing
assurance that he hadn't killed himself on the way.

"I'm fine," he said, his voice full of sadness. "I'll talk to you
in the morning."

"Come and get me before you see the lawyer," she told him, and he
promised. They said a strained good night.

Though he was exhausted, his mind was churning so that he
couldn't sleep. He sat watching television in the
living-room until, close to dawn, he fell asleep in his clothes.
He woke feeling grubby and gritty-eyed, his thoughts sluggish.
The yellow pages of the telephone directory listed lawyers with
Saturday office hours, and he picked one,
Gary McNeely in Oshawa. He made an appointment for later that
morning.

He collected Karen and Melissa at her mother's, spending as
little time in the house as he could decently manage. Denis
wasn't around, but Barbara seemed her usual self. Ken believed
she didn't yet know of his shame, but still he couldn't look her
in the eye.

Karen called Food City to say she couldn't work that day and, at
his insistence, Ken went alone to see the lawyer. He was
disconcerted by the lawyer's appearance and manner. Gary McNeely
turned out to be a casual man, wearing cowboy boots and blue
jeans. Ken wondered if all lawyers dressed that way for work. The
lawyer listened to his story and flatly informed Ken that he'd be
arrested soon, he'd be convicted, and he'd go to jail.

Ken signed something, a sort of contract; he was too devastated
by his prospects to pay attention to the lawyer's explanation of
the agreement. McNeely then telephoned Neil Wagman to ask what
Revere planned to do. Wagman said he didn't intend to press
charges so long as the money was returned. McNeely said he would
handle the arrangement.

"How are you going to get the money?" McNeely asked Ken when he
hung up the phone.

"We're putting our house on the market," he said.

"You own a house?" said the lawyer, looking with new respect at
the big twenty-three-year-old in front of him.

Ken returned to the townhouse with the good news that he wasn't
going to be arrested. He and Karen discussed what would happen
next. She was in a quiet, determined state of mind, and his mood
was contrite and resigned. The Pickering townhouse should go on
the market right away, they agreed, and Ken would have to start
immediately to find another job. From time to time, Ken was so
overcome by remorse that he wept, his face in his hands, and
said, "I need help."

Ken's brother Rob Parks turned up. His own recent problems with
the law consisted mostly of bar fights, so he was curious to
learn what kind of trouble his big brother was in. Ken was
evasive. Just a minor matter, he said; it had been straightened
out.

Ken was beginning to feel almost light-headed with relief
that the worst was over. The months of lies and deceptions to
Karen were over, and he was a lucky
man: Karen was taking his disgrace in stride. Indeed, she had
settled into a managerial mood and was organizing them both. To
tide them over until he found work, she would ask for more hours
at Food City. As soon as McNeely, the lawyer, worked out the
payment schedule with Revere, they would sell the house. By that
time, Ken should have another job. With his experience at Revere,
it shouldn't be too difficult for him to find something in the
same range of salary, around $23,000 a year.

Ken couldn't let a prospective employer call Revere for a
reference. He had to concoct a plausible story to prevent people
from finding out he had stolen money. He decided that when he
applied for a job he would say he was still working at Revere. He
would ask the personnel manager not to call his employer because
he didn't want it known that he was job-hunting.

Karen nodded. "I guess that's what you've got to do," she agreed
reluctantly. They could get through this, she concluded sternly,
but some changes had to be made. For a starter, Ken must promise
her that he would never gamble again.

"I know I can't gamble ever again. I know that, but I'll need
help," Ken agreed humbly. Karen asked, "Isn't there something
like Alcoholics Anonymous for gamblers?" Ken didn't think so,
he'd never heard of it. He promised to find out.

Melissa, four months old, sensed the tension in the house and
wailed for attention.

Neither can remember much about that weekend. Karen recalls that,
after the flood of adrenalin with which she met the crisis of the
first two days, she was overcome by a deep fatigue. She went to
bed early leaving Ken watching television. That night he slept on
the couch. Their sex life hadn't resumed following Melissa's
birth, and he thought it best to give Karen privacy to adjust to
the calamity he had brought on them.

On Monday morning Ken bought newspapers and looked in the
classifieds for jobs. He saw one for electrical estimating and
applied. He was told he wasn't qualified enough, which came as a
blow. He tried five more places, but was turned down at each.

"Did you check the jobs posted in the unemployment insurance
office?" Karen asked.

"Of course," he assured her.

He had no intention of doing that. In order
to apply for positions listed there, he would have to fill
out a form that asked the reason for his leaving his previous
employment. He didn't want to lie-that would be useless, in any
case, because references would be checked--and he couldn't write
"embezzlement". Who would hire him if he did?

Ken and Karen waited tensely but no call came from the lawyer. It
worried them that negotiations with Revere seemed to be taking so
long. Meanwhile Karen worked almost full-time at the supermarket,
where the manager was delighted to have her. Barbara insisted
that it was no trouble to look after Melissa every day, and she
continued to refuse Karen's offer to pay her.

Ken, miserable and ashamed, sat in the car while Karen went
inside with the baby. He couldn't bring himself to face Barbara;
he didn't think he could carry off the pretence of being
light-hearted with her, in the way they had always been together.

Denis got reports from Barbara. He wasn't impressed by stories
that Ken was looking everywhere for work. He wanted to hear about
rehabilitation. Was Ken going to Gamblers Anonymous? Barbara
relayed Karen's information that Ken didn't think such an
organization existed. The next time she dropped Melissa off,
Barbara told her that Denis had
found a listing for Gamblers Anonymous in the telephone book.

Karen gave the number to Ken, telling him she had happened to
pick up the information at work. Ken said he would call right
away.

He never did. He doesn't know why.

Around ten o'clock on Tuesday night, March 31, 1987, just as Ken
and Karen were preparing for bed, there was a knock at the door.
Karen watched from the living-room while Ken went down the stairs
to the entrance and opened it. Two big bearded men in jeans and
sweat-shirts stepped in; they looked to Karen like bikers. They
said they were police and produced badges to prove it. They had
come to arrest Kenneth James Parks for fraud.

Karen burst into tears. One of the officers went up the steps to
her and offered gruff comfort. "Don't worry," he said. "He'll be
back tonight. This won't take long."

The other officer kept an eye on Ken, who was zipping up his
jacket. "Call the lawyer," Ken told Karen, and she nodded, still
crying.

Ken paused and studied her. "Please don't tell your mother," he
said. Karen nodded again, embarrassed.

Outside, where Karen couldn't see, the police searched Ken and
put handcuffs on his wrists.

One of them seemed sympathetic. "It's too bad," he said to Ken.
"Gambling is an awful addiction."

Karen was on the telephone, talking to the lawyer's answering
machine.

Gary McNeely returned Karen's call a few minutes later. He told
her not to worry and telephoned the police station, 41 Division,
asking to speak to his client.

"Just answer the questions they ask," he advised Ken.

Ken agreed and listened numbly as a police officer read him his
right to remain silent and some other stuff he didn't catch. Then
he was asked to make a statement. He freely admitted the fraud
and provided details. A police officer was summoned and Ken
dictated a confession to him, which the officer then typed. Ken
read it through and signed it.

Karen heard again from McNeely, the lawyer. "He'll be home soon,"
the lawyer informed her. "They aren't going to hold him."

An hour later he called again. "They've changed their minds,"
McNeely said. "They're keeping him overnight, and you can go down
in the morning and post bail."

Karen called her mother. She'd kept her promise to Ken long
enough; she needed Barbara's shoulder to cry on.

An officer came to the holding cell where Ken was awaiting
release and advised him that he was going to be held overnight.
"In the morning you'll go for a bail hearing," he was told.

Around one in the morning Ken was stripped of his shoes, his
jacket, his belt, and everything in his pockets. Police put him
in a cell so stark he was shocked. A metal shelf served as a bed
but there was no mattress, pillow, or blanket. The only thing in
the space other than the shelf was a toilet with no seat or
cover. He stretched out, but the metal was icy to the touch and
the room so cold he shivered.

He heard people screaming, a woman and a man. From what he could
gather they were part of a family that had been arrested on a
drug charge. The woman was being strip-searched, a procedure that
obliges the person to undress completely and submit to
examination of the rectum and vagina.

In a cell not far from his, a drunken prisoner spat at a passing
police officer. As Ken watched in horror, the prisoner was
taken out and beaten severely by two officers and then thrown
back into the cell.

Ken slept fitfully. In the morning he was given toast and coffee
and his clothes were returned. He was handcuffed again, his
wrists behind his back, and loaded into a paddy wagon.

Karen was on the phone to Barbara several times that night and
the next morning, pouring out her grief and receiving comfort in
return. Barbara offered to take Melissa while Karen arranged
bail.

Karen paused in thought. "No," she said slowly. "I guess I can't
do it that way. If I don't have Melissa with me, Ken will know
I've talked to you. He's feeling terrible and doesn't want you to
know."

Barbara sighed and agreed that Karen was right.

In the morning Karen dressed Melissa warmly against the cold and
packed a bag of diapers and formula bottles. Gary McNeely had
instructed her where to go, the Scarborough court-house at Warden
and Eglinton. She tried to enter the courtroom but she was barred
because of the baby. Instead she waited on
a bench in the corridor, watching the human misery around her:
lawyers with briefcases and the air of busy people, and an
assortment of young people, dressed in their best and looking
frightened.

The court proceedings started at ten; Gary McNeely appeared at
eleven just as the judge recessed the court for morning coffee.
McNeely told her regretfully that the morning roll-call of bail
applications was over. Ken's case could come up again at one
o'clock.

"Could I see Ken?" she asked.

"No."

The Crown attorney on duty that day set bail for Kenneth James
Parks at $10,000. Ken's lawyer offered no argument. In fact, he
hadn't consulted with Ken in the holding cells where he was
waiting his turn. His only communication with his client was a
curt nod of recognition when Ken was led into the courtroom.

McNeely stepped into the corridor and informed Karen she would
have to post $10,000 bail. When she burst into tears, he lost
patience. "Stop being so stupid," he told her roughly.

Karen has a low tolerance for bullies. She yelled at him, tears
still running down her cheeks, and said she wouldn't take that
kind of abuse. McNeely sat beside her and went through the steps
she would have to take to get Ken released.

"It's late," he warned her. "You probably won't be able to get
him out today."

Karen called the lawyer who had handled their realestate
transactions and asked if he had a copy of the deed for
the house. He didn't, but he gave her directions to the registry
office in Whitby. Karen drove as fast as she dared and after a
long wait in the registry office got a copy of the deed. As she
left Whitby she noticed that the needle on the gas gauge in her
car was resting on E, for empty, but she didn't want to take the
time to stop to refuel. The court office would close at five and
she couldn't bear the thought of Ken's spending another night in
jail.

She arrived back at the court-house just after five to find it
almost deserted. She asked to see the Crown attorney, as McNeely
had instructed her, in order to get his approval on her surety.
She was informed that it was too late, the office was closed and
she should come back in the morning. She said, her voice rising,
that she wasn't going to do that. "You don't know what I've been
through today," she cried.
"Please, please, please."

She was irresistible: a small woman, very young, clutching a
baby, and weeping. To her relief, the Crown attorney saw her,
checked the papers, and signed them.

Ken was in the Metro East Detention Centre. Karen found it around
six that evening and discovered that visitors don't just walk
into prisons. Printed instructions on the solid metal door told
her to press a button. An electronic voice crackled out of a
speaker in the wall, asking whom she wanted to see.

"My husband," she told the wall.

"What's his name?" asked the wall.

"Ken Parks."

"Just a minute."

After a while a buzzer sounded and the wall told her to enter.
Inside was what seemed a mirror but proved to be one-way glass.
Someone behind it told her she would have to wait. The justice of
the peace who issued bail bonds would not arrive before nine
o'clock. Baby and mother were exhausted, but there was no choice
but to sit with the baby in the prison waiting-room for three
hours. She had been rationing her supply of diapers, but they
were almost gone. To soothe the fretful baby, Karen walked the
length of the waiting-room and back until she was almost dizzy.

Ken waited on range 5B; he had not yet been assigned to a cell.
On his arrival he had been photographed--"the mug shot", he
thought, something learned from television. His fingerprints were
taken, the technician rolling his fingers expertly on a card.
Then Ken was given a number and prison clothes.

His state of mind was peculiar. He saw himself being pleasant to
everyone, an affable, polite person who was getting along
swimmingly with police and guards and other prisoners, most of
whom were burglars and drug offenders. He could admire the
good-natured person he was being, since it seemed to be someone
else. The real Ken Parks had gone to a place so deep within him
that he couldn't be found.

A guard summoned him. "Your wife is here," he said. "She's
bailing you out."

Karen drove them home, surprised that Ken seemed so normal and
relaxed. He was noncommittal about what had happened to him in
the cells, content to
listen to her account of her adventures. People weren't very
considerate, she complained. He said gravely that he had noticed
the same thing.

"One thing sure," she said, getting angry. "We're not going to
rush to pay Revere back. They promised not to charge you, and
then they go ahead and do it."

That was the night Melissa's bottle exploded in the microwave
oven. Karen was so distracted that she hit the wrong settings.
The resultant mess took a long time to clean up.

On Thursday Ken was too disheartened to leave the house. He
searched the papers and made phone calls, setting up appointments
for job interviews. Karen stayed with him, telling her employer
at Food City that she had some personal problems she was sorting
out. The man was understanding; Karen was such a dependable
person that he accepted that something serious must have
happened.

Ken's court date was set for the second week of April. Revere had
not given Ken his last paycheque so their financial needs were
acute. They hesitated to touch their savings, so Karen worked
every day at Food City. Day after discouraging day, Ken could
find nothing.

The mood between them was tranquil. "I was angry at him," Karen
admits, "but he was my husband. People make mistakes. I wondered
why he'd done such a thing; but he'd done it, so we just had to
make the best of it. That's what it's all about. He'd made a
mistake and we had to work together to get through it."

Their relationship, in fact, was markedly better. Ken was
relieved of the burden of juggling lies, and Karen was grateful
for an explanation for the strange way he had been acting. Now
she could understand his bad moods, his absences, the
indifference to Melissa.

"It wouldn't have done any good to yell at him," she reflects
today. "Why make him feel any worse than he already did? He was
obviously upset at what he'd done to himself and what he'd done
to me, so there was no point making a big deal about it."

A week went by, two weeks, without a job. Karen asked if he was
checking every day at the employment office to see what jobs were
posted there. He always assured her that he did, without fail.
Had he called Gamblers Anonymous? He'd do that right away.

He went to court on the day set for his hearing, but his lawyer,
Gary McNeely, wasn't there. The judge adjourned the matter for
two weeks. On the next appointed day, his lawyer was absent once
more, so the case again was adjourned. McNeely sent Ken a letter
stating which days he would be available. Ken went to court with
the list and another date, December 14, was fixed. Easy to
remember, Ken reflected; it was Melissa's first birthday.

Ken and Karen thought that Gary McNeely's behaviour was peculiar,
but they assumed all lawyers were the same. A bill arrived:
$1,200.

Ken's confidence, never robust, vanished entirely as his efforts
to find a job proved fruitless. He was humiliated that they were
living on Karen's income, less than half the money they were
accustomed to receive. He dreamed of a magical solution, a pot of
money that would end their problems. He had been avoiding the
race results in the newspapers, but he began to take a quick peek
every now and then. He recognized horses that he had bet in the
past. They were winners now, confirming his judgement. People
were cashing tickets for huge amounts of money.

It couldn't hurt, he thought, to try a bet or two. Often he had
been so close on the triactor. One more try, he thought; all it
would take was one big win. His luck was due to change.

He wrote a cheque for $1,000 on Karen's savings account, forging
her signature, went to the track, and lost it.

"When I was gambling," he explains with a distance in his manner
as if he was discussing an eccentric stranger, "it didn't
seem that I had any problems. Gambling's a great escape."

He told Karen he was looking for work, but instead he went almost
every day to the track, using money he was draining from her
account. He still liked the triactor: such a big pay-off. He
bought one-dollar tickets because they cost the least, $120 a
race. Still he lost, and lost.

Occasionally, not expecting much, he called people about jobs
advertised in the classified ads. One day in mid-April he was
hired. He went home jubilantly to tell Karen that he would be
starting work right away at Guild Electric and that a company
vehicle went with the job.

However the manager at Guild Electric called Revere to check
Ken's story that he was working there. When Ken reported to work
the next day, he was told that the offer was withdrawn. Ken was
devastated. The worst part of the disappointment was facing
Karen, who had been excited and proud that he was on his feet
again. He made a desperate, crazy decision not to tell her that
the job had fallen through. He'd get another job soon to replace
it, but meanwhile he didn't have to give her bad news just when
she was feeling happy for the first time since the nightmare had
begun.

The hitch in the deception was that he had mentioned a company
vehicle. He stopped at a car-rental place. Using his credit card,
he rented a car.

"I thought you said it was a company car," Karen said when she
saw it.

"The company car is in the shop for repairs," Ken explained.
"They gave me this one until it's fixed."

His fiction that he had a job obliged him to be out of the house
all day. He looked for work, still without success. To forget his
troubles, he liked to go to the track. He continued to forge
Karen's name to draw on her savings account. It was a loan, he
told himself. One win, one _big win, and everything would be fine
again.

Ken's absences from the Woods family's townhouse did not go
unnoticed by Karen's brothers and sisters, who were puzzled that
suddenly they didn't see him. Barbara issued invitations but
Karen declined them on Ken's behalf. "Wait until
we get this mess behind us," she explained. "He's feeling too
ashamed to be comfortable with you."

Karen was clinging to Barbara, the family's bulwark in a time of
trouble. Barbara had a clear-headed solution to everything. In
Karen's case, however, she paid her daughter the
compliment of offering no advice, while making it plain that her
affection for Ken hadn't changed. Her line was, "You'll get
through this, I know. Whatever you decide to do, your father and
I are with you.

Once when Karen was berating him for something, Ken looked at her
bleakly. "I've got life insurance," he said quietly. "You'd be
better off without me. Maybe I'll just drive off the road and
kill myself."

She stiffened in shock. It was a moment before she could speak.
Then she burst out, "You can't. We don't have insurance any more.
We're behind with the premiums."

Ken had to invent a story for his family to explain why he wasn't
at Revere. An argument with his boss, he said. They wondered why
it was taking him so long to find another job. He told them he
was being particular--he wanted something with good prospects in
the electrical field. He asked Karen to back up his stories when
she talked with his mother and grandmothers.
She did, but it galled her. She hated lying for him, she told
him. Ken pleaded with her not to embarrass him. He'd make a clean
breast of it when he had a new job and the trial was over.

When Karen's brothers and sisters asked why they didn't see Ken,
Barbara made excuses that Ken and Karen were busy with the new
baby. As Easter approached the story was wearing thin. Barbara's
invitation to a family gathering on Easter Sunday couldn't be
refused.

Ken was profoundly uneasy on the drive to Scarborough that day
but Barbara greeted him with great warmth, and he soon relaxed.
Denis seemed reserved, but that was Denis's way. Samantha, Emma,
Pru, Nicky, and Jonny teased him fondly in the way they always
had, and he almost recaptured his old sense of being at peace in
the Woods family.

April was turning into May when Karen began to have suspicions.
Some odd things were happening. For one, Ken always found some
excuse to stall her when she talked of going to the bank to
examine her statement. She was working out a new budget for them
and wasn't sure where their savings stood, but he kept finding a
reason for putting it off. A utilities bill she
was certain she had paid came a second time marked "unpaid", with
a penalty added. Ken's paycheque from Guild Electric was
strangely delayed. First he said
that the company always held back the first two weeks' pay. When
two weeks had passed, he then said the process to put new
employees on the payroll was slow. He'd been promised it soon.

He brought home a puppy he found. Karen told him they couldn't
keep it. They were away from the house too much, she
reminded him, and since they would have to move soon it might not
be possible to find a place that would accept a dog.

Ken tried to coax her to change her mind, but she was adamant. He
left with the puppy and on his return said he had found a friend
to care for it.

In addition to the puzzling matters concerning money, Ken was
acting strangely again. When she tried to talk to him about his
long silences and his obsession with television, he was remote
and out of reach. She could understand that he was preoccupied
with his dread of a prison sentence and the humiliation of the
embezzlement trial, but there seemed to be darker forces at work.
Not infrequently, he cried.

Anxious for him, she pelted him with sharp questions.
Had he made an appointment with Gamblers Anonymous? Well, why
not? Ken's response was to put his face in his hands and weep. "I
need help," he said brokenly.

Karen talked to her mother about it the next day. "I can't stand
it that Ken thinks you don't know about this," she complained. "I
hate lying to him. I'd like us to come over there and have a talk
about it, all of us. It's time the family got together on this.
Could we maybe come on Sunday?"

"Sure," Barbara said promptly. "We're having a barbecue. That
would be a good time."

The following day, May 20, 1987, Karen was exasperated that Ken
still had not called Gamblers Anonymous. She made the call
herself and was directed to the office of the Canadian Federation
for Compulsive Gamblers, an organization that places people in
Gamblers Anonymous self-help groups. That afternoon she and Ken
and Melissa sat in the office of the president, Tibor Barsony, a
quiet man, who talked reassuringly to them. He explained that the
compulsion to gamble is an addiction like alcoholism. "It's a
sickness," he emphasized. "I'm a compulsive gambler myself."

He told his story and Ken was astounded at the
resemblance to his own: the absolute belief that the next bet
will be the big one, the stealing to get betting money, the lies.

Barsony administered a written test. "If you answer more than
seven of these twenty questions," he told Ken genially, "then
you're a compulsive gambler."

To his discomfiture, Ken answered yes to fourteen.

Barsony gave them a schedule of meetings of Gamblers Anonymous
and advised Ken sternly that he should make a clean breast of his
activities with his family and Karen's family. He agreed
unhappily.

The next day, Thursday, May 21, 1987, Karen was at work when her
employer in some embarrassment came to her with a cheque she had
written for groceries. It had been returned by her bank, Canada
Trust, with the notation "NSF". She protested it was impossible,
there was money in that account. At the back of her mind, fear
was gathering. Surely Ken wasn't stealing their savings. Dear
God, surely not.

Only hours later, someone called from a Scarborough branch of the
Royal Bank where Karen had an old account. The teller said there
was a cheque signed by her for $1,500, payable to Ken Parks, but
there wasn't sufficient money in the account to cover it. Karen
walked to the Canada Trust bank that had bounced her food cheque
and was given a sheaf of cancelled cheques, several of them drawn
to Ken Parks. The account had been wiped out.

She walked home weeping all the way, oblivious of the stares of
passers-by, and called her mother in a state close to hysteria.
While waiting for her, Karen tried to reach Ken at a number he
had given her for Guild Electric. The man who answered said Ken
had stepped out of the office. Karen was certain she recognized
the voice of a friend of Ken's. He said he would have Ken return
the call.

Ken called a few minutes later and Karen asked him about the
missing money. "I took it," he said. "We'll talk about it when I
get home."

When Barbara arrived the two women paced the living-room, a habit
they shared when agitated. Obviously Ken was gambling again.
There could be no other explanation.

Barbara consoled her daughter. "This is a bad time, all right,"
she said. "I can't understand it at all. This really isn't like
Ken. It doesn't make any sense that he would go back to
gambling."

Karen described the visit to the compulsive gamblers association.
"It's a sickness, like being an alcoholic," she said wearily. "He
can't help it."

Barbara said, "I'm sure Gamblers Anonymous can help. They say
Alcoholics Anonymous does wonders."

"I'll be glad when Ken talks to you on Sunday about it," Karen
said resentfully. "I hate being in this position. It will be
better when it's all out in the open."

Barbara said warmly, "It's time for a family reunion
anyway. The kids have been missing Ken."

Karen nodded sadly. "We haven't been over there together since
Easter."

"Two o'clock," Barbara said, giving her daughter a hug. "We'll
see you at two."

Barbara was gone before Ken returned. The scene between Ken and
Karen was the worst they had ever experienced. Her temper wildly
out of control, she called him every name that came into her
head, some of them words she had never used before. She accused
him of taking her money and he admitted it without hesitation.
His expression was wretched, but this time her heart wasn't
touched. She told him what was going to happen: the house would
be put on the market at once and when it was sold she would leave
him and take Melissa with her.

Was he gambling again? Only a bit. Had he lined up a meeting with
Gamblers Anonymous yet, as Barsony had suggested? No. There was a
meeting on Friday at an address on Dundas Street and he would go
to that.

She was screaming. "I can't go on this way," she yelled. "You're
hopeless."

She needed to unburden herself of her own secret. "I'd better
tell you my parents know everything," she said. "I've been
talking to my mother about it all along."

She saw his shock. The one shred of comfort Ken held through the
d‚bcle was that no one knew except Karen. He plunged into fresh
despair, thinking of how Barbara and Denis must despise him.

"What am I supposed to tell them?" he said, weeping.

"They aren't mad at you," she said. "They're just concerned for
me and Melissa, and they need to hear from you
how you're going to sort this out. It will ease their minds for
you to tell them that you're going to Gamblers Anonymous and that
you've got things under control."

"I've really let them down," he groaned. Karen had nothing to
say; it was true.

He could sleep on the couch, she said coldly, and she went to
bed.

Ken couldn't sleep. He had never known such pain. He thought
maybe he was losing his mind; he wished he was dead. Full of
self-loathing, he watched movies on television, sipping
KoolAid. He tried to concentrate on the sunny world occupied by
such mythic beings as the charming Harts, wealthy, handsome,
assured, carefree, and so in love. He was still awake at dawn.

The next morning after Ken left, ostensibly for work, Karen
looked up Guild Electric in the telephone book and called. She
was informed that there was no employee there named Ken Parks,
and never had been. She slammed down the receiver.

Her Visa bill arrived. On it was an item for a Budget car rental.
When Ken strolled in around dinner time that Friday, Karen was
wild with anger. In rough language she told him of her contempt.
She repeated that they would be selling the
house at once, but he caught a significant change. The night
before she had been definite that she and Melissa would leave
him. This time she was saying that they would go __if he didn't
straighten _up.

He took hope.

Head down, too ashamed to look at her, he said, "I need help. I
know that. I can't control myself. Gambling is such a great
feeling."

She was shouting at him and crying at the same time, but she too
had noticed the shift. Her message was, "Tell me you'll stop
gambling and lying, so I can stay."

She said flatly, "Give me the straight story about Guild." He
didn't spare himself. He told her it was true he didn't have a
job. He had rented the car because he didn't want to admit his
failure to get a job.

Minutes later they were on their way to return the car. After
that she demanded a full accounting of his gambling losses and
pushed him without mercy to tell what he had done with the money.
He was open with her about everything, including the finance
company. He had borrowed to cover the cheque for $3,500, the
deposit on the house they intended to buy in Ajax.

"Why did you do that?"

"Because I took the money out of savings to gamble. I had to
cover it with money from the finance company or else the cheque
would have bounced."

Her head was reeling. "What interest did the finance company
get?" she asked.

He cringed from her blazing eyes. "Thirty per cent."
"What collateral did you use?"

"It gets worse," he told her. "The house and the appliances."

"How could you do this to me!" she exploded.

"I couldn't seem to help myself," he told her lamely.

Then she remembered. "Weren't you supposed to go to Gamblers
Anonymous today?" she snapped.

"It's not in Toronto," he said. At her look of disbelief, he
pulled out the pamphlet. "See, the address is Dundas Street, but
it's in London. The next meeting in Toronto is Sunday night at
six. It's something for wives too. We can go together if your
mother will take care of Melissa."

She cooked him a steak and they ate a desultory dinner. Sometimes
she returned to the
attack and sometimes she wept uncontrollably. He said little and
picked at his food.

"You've got to start right away with Gamblers Anonymous," she
told him bitterly.

"Yeah, I will."

"You've said that before."

"This time I mean it, I really do. I know I need help."

Cleaning up the kitchen from the meal, she hit on another point
of resentment. "I'm sick of covering up for you," she told him.
"Tomorrow you're going to go to my parents and your grandmothers
and your mother and tell them everything."

He couldn't object though every fibre of him, a man who hates a
scene, was protesting. His mother wouldn't care, he thought, but
he cringed at the idea of telling his grandmothers, who doted on
him. They would be shocked and disappointed. Would they turn
against him? Probably not. The worst would be facing Karen's
family.

"I don't want to lose you and Melissa," he said in a broken
voice.

"So smarten up," she told him.

Karen went to bed and Ken switched on the
television to keep himself from complete disintegration. His mind
was in a turmoil. Though this was his second night without sleep,
he couldn't escape his frantic thoughts. He watched television
and waited for morning.

The next morning he heard Melissa stirring. Remembering that
Karen would be working late that Saturday night, he decided she
needed the rest. He hurried to the baby's room and picked her up,
changed her, and fed her a bottle. When Karen awoke he announced
a change in plans. He might as well wait until the barbecue on
Sunday to tell Denis and Barbara, he said. Then, after the six
o'clock meetings--Gamblers Anonymous for him and Gam-Anon for
her-he would make a circuit and see his grandmothers and maybe
his mother. It would be easier for him to confess if he could say
he already had started to do something about it. Maybe when the
people he loved saw that he was trying to deal with the mess they
would accept it better.

Karen could see his point, but she was still snappish. To escape
her tart tongue he announced that he had a rugby game with his
team, the Ajax Wanderers. The season had started a few weeks
earlier and he was looking forward to the outing. "I need to let
off some steam," he said. "Why don't you come?" She gave him a
frosty refusal. He picked up his gear and went out, leaving her
in a baleful state. She was outraged that he could go carefree to
play rugby and leave her alone with the shambles he had created.

When he returned, she said with sarcastic fury, "So, do you feel
better!"

He read her mood and bowed his head. He didn't really feel well
at all, he said. He hadn't been sleeping, and besides he was so
out of shape that he had played badly. With junk food consumed in
front of the television every night and lack of exercise, his
weight had ballooned to three hundred pounds or more, at least
fifty pounds over his normal playing weight. To avoid meeting
Karen's furious glare, he gazed mournfully at his bulging belly.
"I'm exhausted," he told her. "I didn't sleep last night."

She was unmoved. In a white anger, she descended on him again for
gambling. He sat with his head down and listened. "Your whole
family is a mess," she told him. "Your brothers are always in
jail, your sister gets into trouble. I thought you were
different, but you're just the same."

That hurt. He winced visibly.

"I'll never gamble again," he promised her. "I know I can't. I
have to stop."

"If you go back to gambling," she told him, bursting into tears,
"it's game over. Melissa and I are gone."

He looked at her levelly and said quietly, "I know that."
Her anger evaporated. Two days of tirade had spent it all.
She couldn't change the way she felt about him. She loved him.
Ken had messed up, but everything could be explained as an
illness that had swept him away.

Peace was restored when Karen left for work around four that
afternoon. She was chief cashier that night, responsible for all
the cashiers, but found it difficult to concentrate. From time to
time she called home to ask about Melissa. Ken admitted he was
having trouble getting her to settle down. The baby's usual
bedtime was six, but she wasn't as comfortable with her father as
with Karen. It was nearly nine before she fell into an exhausted
sleep in her crib.

Ken realized he hadn't eaten all day. He warmed up some ravioli,
made himself a salmon and cheese sandwich, and opened a bag of
potato chips.

He mixed a pitcher of Kool-Aid and drank that. He could hardly
keep his eyes open. He was certain he'd be able to sleep at last.
He prepared himself by taking off his underwear and socks,
putting his track pants and jersey back on. He sweats so much in
his sleep that Karen insists he wear something to sop it up so as
not to stain the sheets. It was about a quarter to eleven, and he
was trying in vain to relax enough to sleep when he heard the car
in the driveway.

When Karen came in, he stood up and went to the door to hug her
as she was kicking off her shoes.

"Hi, there," he said, bending to kiss her. They hadn't been
physically close for a long time, and the embrace felt good. Then
they went to the kitchen and talked idly for a while as she drank
a cup of tea. The mood between them was the best it had been for
months. Karen suggested Ken come to bed with her, but he said
that he would wait until she could trust him again. Besides, he
was feeling very awake, his mind churning again.

"Okay then," she said. "I'm going up to bed. I love you." He
said, "I love you too."

As she left he called after her, "I'll get up with Melissa
tomorrow. You sleep in."

After she was gone, he found he couldn't sleep. He hated the
prospect of telling his grandmothers he had stolen money from his
employer and his wife and gambled it away like a fool. The
thought of facing Denis and Barbara was even worse. His
grandmothers would be distressed but they would forgive. He
wasn't so sure about Denis.

He buried himself in the television. _Saturday _Night _Live was
almost over and it was pretty funny.
His next memory was of Barbara's face, pleading with him.
...


CHAPTER NINE

What Is It?


Marlys Edwardh began to construct the case for the defence. A
medical and psychiatric investigation was indicated, but her
instincts suggested strongly that she was dealing with a very
peculiar situation. Ken Parks was not a wilful killer. He seemed
to her a sane, perfectly normal, lucid person. The psychiatrist
at Sunnybrook, Ron Billings, had that same opinion after seeing
Ken for only a few minutes.

The lawyer has seen many people with a glint of craziness in
their eyes, and many sly and charming ones who are skilled in
deception, but Ken Parks fell into neither camp. To her he was a
pleasant, intellectually average, thoroughly conventional young
man with a strong commitment to family values.

That left her to grapple with the mystery of a completely sane
person who suddenly behaved insanely without the ability to
remember what he did. She knew of nothing like this situation,
and every specialist she consulted was just as baffled. Her
client had committed a brutal killing with no apparent motive and
couldn't remember doing it.

Marlys is a logical person. A strong adherent of rational
thought, she believes that there are always explanations:
whatever _is is knowable. She was certain from the beginning that
a perfectly reasonable explanation existed for this strange case;
all she had to do was find it.

She never saw Ken Parks as a fabricated person, pleasant on the
exterior but with depths inhabited by homicidal demons. When she
learned about his gambling and the fraud charges, she was
startled but unshaken.

"The Ken Parks who went to the race track was not
the Ken Parks I saw in jail," she comments. "Never saw that.
Never saw a part of Ken that related at all to a man flashing
money around at the track."

She analyses his disastrous gambling spree as evidence of two
elements in Ken's personality. One of these is his naivety; there
is much in Ken's nature that is gullible; he is credulous rather
than cynical, and easily impressed. The other aspect of his
nature is his strong need to demonstrate to himself, to Karen's
family, and most of all to Karen that he is capable of tremendous
accomplishment. Like many people living unremarkable
lives, he had strong longings to accomplish something that would
set him apart from the crowd.

The lawyer isn't convinced that Ken really is a compulsive
gambler, a view shared by psychiatrists who testified at his
trial. He descended rapidly into fraud and forgery because he's
an innocent who came to believe sincerely, as many older and
wiser people have, that he was uniquely gifted at picking horses.
The temptation for a man anxious to shine was irresistible. When
his horse won the Queen's Plate on that festive and fateful day
at the track, Ken felt a rush of omnipotence. As his
losses mounted, he could see no way to rescue himself from debt
except to continue betting until he won enough to pay everything
back.

"Ken had taken on many responsibilities at an early age," Marlys
comments. "You have to remember that. He was only twenty-two,
twentythree, with a wife, child, and mortgages. And he is a man
with an incredible need to please others, especially to please
Karen.
When he got into trouble, he found it hard to confront the
reality. He went on hoping to make it right."

The lawyer's most pressing concern when she accepted the case was
that Ken would kill himself. This was a realistic fear. Very
often people who have killed go through a period immediately
afterwards when they wish to end their own lives. A good many
succeed in doing so: murder commonly is followed by suicide.
Marlys turned to the help nearest at hand, the psychologist to
whom she is married, Dr. Graham Turrall. At her urgent request he
went immediately to the Don Jail to determine if Ken was a
suicide risk.

Graham Turrall spent two hours with Ken and came away as
confident as one can be in the troubled waters of human
predictability that the young man was not likely to commit
suicide. He added that he agreed with the opinion of the
psychiatrist, Ron Billings, that Ken Parks was absolutely sane.

"I found him a co-operative and gentle man," he advised Marlys.
"It's hard to understand what happened. I think you'll need to do
a complete neurological work-up on the condition of his brain."

Marlys nodded. "That's next," she said.

"When you start a homicide case," she explains wryly, "you always
have a whole range of fanciful possibilities you can work with."

The first to investigate was that of damage to the brain,
possibly from a fast-growing tumour. If that wasn't the
explanation, she could start looking at insanity, which
was where the Crown and police were expecting the defence to make
its case. On the other hand, perhaps Ken had been fully conscious
when he killed but had repressed all memory. Extreme horror can
produce a kind of selective amnesia. She also speculated that Ken
might have suffered a blow to the head in the rugby game on the
morning before the killing.

Ken assured her that he hadn't been injured in the game, but she
wanted to be certain. She tracked down several players and
interviewed them separately. All confirmed that Ken hadn't
suffered a blow to his head or a hard fall that might have caused
a concussion.

"Was there any moment when he seemed out of touch, when he might
even have lost consciousness briefly?" she asked.

Most positively, they stated that Ken had been fully conscious
and alert, but that at the end of playing the full sixty minutes
he had seemed wiped out.

She next needed the results of the electroencephalogram (EEG) and
brain scans that Ron Billings had ordered in Sunnybrook. If Ken
had a neurological disorder, her case was a simple one: not
guilty by reason of a brain tumour, or whatever. The medical
order for those tests had been signed by Billings in Sunnybrook
and went with Ken to the Don Jail. The difficult feat the lawyer
set for herself was to have those tests done at Sunnybrook,
rather than within the prison system. Unless she moved quickly,
the Crown would insist that the neurological and psychiatric
testing be done at Oak Ridge at Penetanguishene, the institution
where the criminally insane are confined. Marlys viewed that
eventuality as a disaster.

"If Ken had been taken to Penetang for the
tests," she explains, "we'd have lost the opportunity to do the
slow and thorough sifting that was necessary in this case. The
tests would have been of a different character. At Penetang
someone would see him for half an hour and if he was lucky he'd
get a CAT scan, and that would be it. As it was, we got a full
neurological work-up in a first-class teaching hospital and lots
of detailed analysis." Furthermore, the results of those tests
would be available to Marlys, with Ken's consent, and not readily
to the Crown.

Marlys proceeded as if it were unassailable logic that a man
accused of murder could be sent to a general hospital for such
tests. Bureaucracy rarely is logical, however, and her request
was most unusual. She was prepared to argue that the state has a
right to detain an accused person in custody, but it has no right
to interfere with an accused person's access to medical and
psychiatric examination. She put this view to Dr. Paul Humphries,
head of medical services for all provincial jails. A
persuasive detail was on her side. The tests had been _ordered
while Ken was in Sunnybrook Hospital and would have been
completed there if Ken had not been delivered prematurely to the
Don Jail. Dr. Edmeads, the neurologist, had arranged the
appointments. Why couldn't Ken be taken to Sunnybrook under guard
to have the work done?

Humphries thought her request was a reasonable one. He granted
it.

One of the peculiarities of the year that Ken spent in prison
awaiting his trial was that the Crown showed little interest in
Ken's mental state. Police homicide officers saw the Parks case
as one of the easiest of their lives. Apart from the puzzling
detail of the accused's claim to remember nothing, it was a
classic open-and-shut case. They had a confession even before
they had a body. The Crown seemed to share the feeling of
comfort. An argument for not guilty by reason of insanity could
be expected, but the Crown made no move of its own to examine
Ken's mental state.

A degree of complacency seemed to prevail, perhaps because Crown
lawyers at that period were notoriously overworked, underpaid,
and deserting the ship. If Crown officials were aware of the
doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists who shuttled in and out
of the prison to examine Ken at his lawyer's request, they showed
no interest. A search warrant, executed to obtain Ken's earliest
tests at Sunnybrook Hospital, was not repeated.

Ron Billings had two visits with Ken in the Don Jail, one on June
4 and the second a week later, for a total of three hours. He
found his patient depressed, but only to a degree appropriate for
a man in his dire situation. The psychiatrist could detect no
evidence of delusional thinking or paranoia. When Ken spoke of
his in-laws, for instance, he didn't present them as unfriendly
or hostile to him in any way, as a paranoid person might.

The doctor ruled out psychosis; Ken Parks was a sane man. In the
second interview, the doctor concentrated on the possibility of
an antisocial personality disorder, a state he describes as
affecting people who have not developed a conscience. Such
people, sometimes called sociopaths, have no remorse about
exploiting others for their own good.

Ken didn't fit the pattern. Billings commented at the trial, "He
attempted to please other people, to do things for other people,
and did not put himself first. Someone with an antisocial
personality has evidence of a conduct disorder from childhood.
There was no evidence of that, other than the fact that he had
skipped school sometimes in the early years, which many of
us I think have, and he had one episode where he stole."

He concluded, "There is just nothing to support a diagnosis of
antisocial personality."

The doctor had another promising option. A condition known as
temporal lobe epilepsy doesn't produce the typical seizures of
epilepsy, but it can cause curious, impulsive, out-of-control
behaviour. Billings would need the results of the brain work-ups
to be sure, but he stalked the diagnosis by asking some pointed
questions about Ken's experience with dissociative states such as
black-outs, memory loss, and amnesia. Ken reported that there
were none.

"Had you been drinking before this happened?" the doctor asked.

Ken grinned. "No, if you mean alcohol. Only Kool-Aid."

Billings saw Ken Parks five times for lengthy periods and came to
like the young man. He testified a year later that he was
impressed. "I felt that Ken was a very honest person," the
psychiatrist told the jury. "He was not attempting to minimize.
He was admitting everything he could remember. He was
cooperative. I had no sense that he was not telling the truth.
Never have I found that anything he has told me has contradicted
anything before."

When she received Billings' report Marlys was stumped. If he
wasn't crazy and he didn't have a personality disorder, she could
only return to the original surmise that Ken somehow had managed
to push the memory of the killing out of his head. She asked
Billings, "Could this be psychogenic repression?"

Billings shook his head. "No. He doesn't repress the whole event.
He remembers perhaps the most frightening part of the event."

"What is that?"

"Seeing his mother-in-law on the floor and the look on her face."

On June 16, 1987, Ken Parks was taken to Sunnybrook for brain
tests to be conducted under the eye of Dr. John Edmeads. The
neurologist began with a detailed medical history. He asked if
Ken had any pains in his head, if he was subject to dizziness or
loss of balance, if he had ever had a seizure, if he had any
experience of numbness, or weakness, or paralysis? No, to
everything.

Edmeads thought, "Well, nothing there to show neurological
disease. But it's got to be something."

The physical examination started with Ken's eye movement,
visual acuity, and motor responses. With a pin--"sharp end or
dull?"--the neurologist checked for sensory awareness. He found
nothing wrong with the young man except for the lack of sensation
in his fingertips, the result of the cuts to his hands.

Edmeads moved to the CAT scan, a photographic X-ray capable of
detecting shrinkage of brain tissue indicating trauma or various
kinds of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. If Ken had a
brain tumour or brain abscess or a clot on his brain, the CAT
scan would pick it up.

The scan, however, showed a completely healthy, intact brain.

The EEG, which charts brain function, produced the same results.
Edmeads looked for a pattern in the electrical activity of Ken's
brain that would show epilepsy and, particularly, the temporal
lobe epilepsy that Ron Billings had wondered about. There was
none. As he was to testify at the trial, he found Ken Parks
"neurologically normal".

Marlys Edwardh, studying the results, thought, "Now what?"


Ken's first impression when he was admitted to the Don Jail was
one of filth, of enormous numbers of people jammed into
insufficient space, and of the callousness that mass confinement
inspires. The medical range is dismal, but he was to discover
that it is relatively luxurious when compared to the overcrowded
cells elsewhere in that harsh building.

A prison doctor examined him cursorily and then he was left to
himself in a bed in a cell with a door open to a barred enclosure
that serves as a common room. His lunch was brought. A soft diet
had been ordered, but no one offered to feed him. He struggled to
hold a spoon between his bandaged hands but couldn't get a grip.
His dinner came, the food cut in small pieces for his
convenience, and he tried again but couldn't hold the spoon. This
meal too was taken away untouched.

The next day another prisoner came to his rescue. If someone
jammed the spoon handle between Ken's left thumb and the mound of
bandage, he found he could hold it. It was awkward and unsteady,
but he managed to get some food to his mouth.

Sam Ferracci, a kindly fraud artist in and out of prisons for
some forty years, adopted Ken a few days later.

"Look kid," Sam said amiably. "You don't seem to know much about
being in prison, am I right? Let me tell you some things. One is,
don't whistle."

"Don't whistle?" Ken asked, not certain he'd heard right.

"Right," Ferracci nodded. "It sounds happy. There's something
screwy about a guy who's happy in jail. The other guys will think
you're crazy or something."

"What else?" Ken inquired.

"Never ask anyone what he's in for, not ever. You do that and
you'll get beat up in the showers. I happen to know you're in for
murder, but I would never ask you about it."

His new friend went on: "Don't get friendly with the guards. Guys
will think you're ratting on them. Being a rat is about the
worst, except for a rape hound or someone who molests kids. Those
guys go into PC. ..."

"What's that?" Ken interrupted.

"Protective custody," Sam explained patiently. "If they get in
the general population, they could be killed."

Ken discovered that except for sex offenders prison society takes
an egalitarian view of crime. While guards were noticeably wary
around him, knowing the young giant was accused of a particularly
savage killing, his status as a murderer who faced a life
sentence cut no ice with other inmates.

He learned the language.

"A fan's coming," Sam hissed one day.

"A fan?"

"Yeah, they're gonna do strip searches and toss the cells."

Ken underwent his first strip search, which means what it says
and includes requiring the person to bend over to expose the
anus. Having no other place of concealment, prisoners the world
over wrap drugs or money in plastic and stow it deep inside their
rectums. In the Canadian prison system the practice is called
"suitcasing".

"You get drugs," Sam told Ken with a shrug, "you suitcase it."

Ken was revolted but politely concealed it.

"That's important to remember when you go down
below," Sam continued. In answer to Ken's inquiring look, he
explained, "Below means the federal prison. If you get more than
two years, you go to Kingston or someplace like that. You want to
take money with you so you can buy things, drugs, a
hamburger, or maybe a TV."

Sam amiably went on with the lesson in "Prison 101". "Now, what's
the worst thing you can call another con?"

Ken considered. Several crude possibilities occurred to him.

"I'll tell you," Sam informed him. "A goof. You call someone a
goof, that means you want to fight."

Sam had other valuable tips. "Never touch another guy's stuff,"
he warned Ken. "If you steal from another guy in here, you're a
box thief. In a federal pen, a box thief can get killed."

When he showered, Ken wore plastic bags secured with elastics on
his hands to protect them, and another prisoner shampooed his
hair. Other prisoners helped feed him and assisted him to the
toilet. Ken was touched by the kindness and civility he
encountered. To his surprise, prison society is full of such
gestures. One time he watched inmates befriend a Korean-Canadian,
a man of eighty-nine who spoke no English, and another time he
saw great consideration for a ChineseCanadian man of seventy-six.
Inmates looked after the old men, making sure they had lawyers
and learned how to roll cigarettes.

"You'd think it would be everyone for himself," Karen marvelled
when he told her about it.

He nodded. "You'd think so, but it isn't that way. People here
help one another."

"In a lot of ways," she commented thoughtfully, "they're better
than regular society. They aren't judging you. They aren't
convicting you."

Marlys meanwhile was baffled. The Sunnybrook tests showed that
Ken didn't have a life-threatening brain tumour, which was the
good news, but left her with no explanation for what had
happened. How could Ken have forgotten driving fourteen miles to
Scarborough from Pickering, killing his mother-in-law with a
knife and tire-iron, and stabbing his father-in-law almost to
death?

She studied the records of her interviews with Ken. It was
heartening to her, thinking ahead to how he might conduct himself
in the witness-box, that Ken's story never changed. Indeed, his
consistency was a remarkable feature of her notebooks, given the
great stress he was enduring. His calmer recollection of the
fragments in his memory never varied from the story he gave
police while he was in a state of wild confusion and horror. Ken
became more coherent as time passed, but no detail of what
he remembered ever altered.

Marlys marvelled at the uniformity. Something else also struck
her as curious. In every interview Ken described the moment of
seeing his mother-in-law's tormented face the same way: "I woke
up and saw my mother-in-law's face." _Woke up? Could he have been
asleep? Was he sleepwalking? It was such a wild idea that she put
it to one side.

She wondered if Karen Parks had some insight into Ken's
situation. Perhaps there was a pattern of memory loss. Marlys
noted that Karen was visiting Ken regularly, which was
encouraging from the defence point of view, but it was ominous
that Karen was frosty and distant whenever Marlys spoke to her.

"I had a low opinion of defence lawyers," Karen confesses. "That
they weren't nice people. I thought Marlys would ask me if I
intended to testify for the Crown, and I didn't know the answer.
I believed Ken and I supported him, but I wanted to stay neutral.
I wasn't inclined to help the
Crown, but I didn't want to help her either."

Marlys telephoned and asked if Karen would see her.

"No," Karen said coldly. "I don't think I want to do that."

Marlys was very careful.

"There are a few things I'd like to know that would help me, and
perhaps you have some questions too."

Karen was silent. "All right," she agreed, "but only if Ken is
there too."

She was asking something almost impossible. Prisons allow only
people who have business with prisoners to have open contact. The
category includes lawyers, social workers, doctors, and
psychologists and is not usually extended to relatives. Somehow
Marlys, a polite woman who gets on well with administrators,
managed to surmount this obstacle. A few weeks after Ken was
placed in the Don Jail, the lawyer was seated with Karen and Ken
in an open area monitored by guards where they talked for almost
two hours.

Marlys opened the discussion by detailing the results of the
tests that showed Ken had no sign of brain disorder.

Karen had a burning question to put. A debate on capital
punishment was raging in the country, with the House of Commons
about to hold a free vote to decide on the reinstatement of the
death penalty. Was it possible, she asked Marlys, that Ken could
be executed? Marlys assured her that even if the
abolitionists lost the free vote and even if Ken was convicted of
first-degree murder, he would not be hanged. The death penalty
would not be retroactive; it would apply only to murders
committed after it was enacted.

That information flashed through Ken's family. Lil Hodge had been
having nightmares in which she saw her grandson executed. A
ten-year-old cousin, Phillip Hodge, Glen's son, had written a
letter to Ken full of his fears that Ken would be killed.

"If he isn't going to be killed," Karen asked, "then what is the
penalty for first-degree murder?"

Marlys looked at Ken, who was staring into the distance. "A life
sentence with no right to parole before twenty-five years," she
answered. As Karen stiffened, Marlys added quickly, "But the
charge is almost certain to be reduced to second degree, which
allows lighter penalties. The Crown doesn't have enough evidence
of intent on Ken's part to sustain a first-degree charge."

Karen thought she'd rather be executed than spend twenty-five
years in prison. Ken didn't agree. He'd been full of morbid
thoughts about being hanged. Prison was better than dying, he
reflected, even if it meant twenty-five years in a cell. He'd be
out before he was fifty.

"As for the trial, there are two ways this can go," Marlys
continued. "The Crown probably expects that we'll plead not
guilty by reason of insanity, but maybe there is some other
explanation. We still aren't sure. I'm going to get some people
to examine Ken. One of the things I want them to look at is the
possibility of automatism. It's possible Ken was in some state
beyond his control, like sleepwalking."

Marlys expected Karen to be skeptical and was intrigued that she
wasn't in the least.

"That's what I think," she said firmly. "That's the only thing
that makes sense."

"Well, we'll certainly look into it, but it's a long shot,"
Marlys warned them. "I've never heard of sleepwalking being used
successfully as a defence in a murder charge. I'll have to look
around and see if I can find any precedents. In any
case, I'm not sure what that would get you if we did prove
sleepwalking. It might not result in an acquittal, I just don't
know. I'll have to search the law to find that out. Maybe
sleepwalking is equated with insanity."

Karen said, "I still think that could be it."
In fact, Karen also had noted that Ken always said, "I
_woke up and saw your mother's face." The attack had occurred in
the middle of the night after Ken might have fallen asleep, not
the next day when the visit was planned. Even her friend Connie
Sullivan had thought he might be sleepwalking. Once when each was
making wild guesses about what might have happened, Connie
suddenly said, "Maybe he was sleepwalking. I have a friend who
knows someone who did something really crazy while sleepwalking."

Even Ken's friend at Revere had said when she called, "It is so
unlike Ken to hurt anyone. Do you think he was sleepwalking?"

Karen was warming to Marlys, but she dropped none of her
wariness. When Marlys asked about Ken's relationship to Karen's
parents, she tersely confirmed what Ken had said, that they had
been on the best of terms.

Ken listened almost indifferently to the discussion. He
was showing a remarkable lack of interest in how his defence
would be conducted. What interested him more was finding an
explanation for Barbara's death. He was positive someone else had
done it. His theory was that another person for some reason had
drugged him and taken him to Barbara's house. Once inside the
house, Ken thought he must have started to revive from the drug.
In a semi-conscious state, he had realized that the stranger was
trying to kill Barbara. In the struggle to protect his
mother-in-law, Ken's hands were cut.

He had to admit the scenario had problems. Who would want to do
that? How did the person get into Ken's house to drug the
Kool-Aid? Who was strong enough to carry him to his car, and why?
It was very far-fetched, he thought, but not any more far-fetched
than not being able to remember driving fourteen miles from
Pickering and then attacking Barbara and Denis.

When he tried these conjectures on Marlys she listened
sympathetically, but he could tell from her face that she didn't
think his "other man" theory was feasible.

He longed for a magical resolution. Maybe he had forgotten
driving to Scarborough. Maybe he was so groggy from the drug he
thought he'd been given and two nights without sleep that he had
forgotten that part, but maybe when he got there he had found
someone attacking Barbara and Denis. He would have tried to
defend them. That would explain how he got the cuts on his hands
and arms, but why wouldn't he remember that? The suggestion that
he was sleepwalking, however, caught his attention.

"My grandfather was a sleepwalker," he ventured.

"Really?" said Marlys, sitting up straight. "Really!"


Marlys consulted Graham Turrall again, who agreed that
sleepwalking was a feasible explanation and worth pursuing. She
asked him to use his connections in the field of psychology to
find her North America's top experts on sleep disorders. He
placed a call to the Center for Narcolepsy at Stanford University
in California, where he had done some work.

"I need to consult with someone who is a recognized authority in
the field of sleepwalking," Turrall asked. "Can you direct me to
someone who is the best, the very best?"

The Stanford authority said, "Well, you've got one of the world's
leading experts in sleepwalking right there in Canada. He's in
Ottawa and he's Roger Broughton."

At about the same time, Ron Billings, the Sunnybrook
psychiatrist, said, to Marlys, "I've exhausted every possible
explanation for this. I've gone systematically through a list of
the major psychiatric diagnoses that could apply here. There's
just nothing that fits. I think we should look at sleepwalking."

She grinned. "We are."


The casts on Ken's hands were removed at Sunnybrook Hospital and
were replaced with a plastic brace and splints. He tried to curl
his fingers but found he couldn't. Looking at his mutilated
hands, Ken wondered how he could have sustained such frightful
injuries without knowing who inflicted them.

Doctors at Sunnybrook told Ken that his wounds would have to be
cleaned twice a day to prevent infection. When he mentioned this
to a prison nurse at the Don, she handed him a bar of soap. Ken
protested to Marlys Edwardh, who got in touch with the medical
supervisor again, Dr. Paul Humphries. After that Ken's stitches
were properly sterilized each day by the head nurse.

Karen came twice a week, all the visits he was allowed. Both
found it hard to communicate through the noise around them and
the bad telephone connection, but it was stabilizing for her to
see him looking himself, the good man she had married, the man
she had loved, nothing different about him at all. Except that
she had never seen anyone in such pain. It touched her heart, and
she could see that without her visits he might fall apart
utterly.

Marlys warned them that the visitor phones in the jail were
tapped, so they avoided talking about the case and were too
self-conscious to discuss their feelings in any depth.
Karen's family knew she was visiting Ken, she was sure,
but the subject was never discussed. She appreciated their tact
in allowing her to deal with her turmoil in her own way. She
figured her family was thinking that Ken would be sent away to
prison for a long time, so she was seeing him while he was
nearby. It was a temporary situation: eventually Ken would be
gone and Karen would make a new life for herself and Melissa.

Maybe she would, she thought, but she still didn't know. On the
occasions when Karen was in contact with
Marlys about such matters as Ken's medical needs, she was
friendlier. Still she kept the lawyer at arm's length. Her tone
said plainly, _back _off!

"I wasn't strong at that point," Karen confesses. "I still didn't
know if I would take the stand for Ken. I knew if I did it might
be something my family would never forgive."

For Ken the trips to Sunnybrook for tests and to have the casts
removed were welcome breaks from the tedium and stresses of
staying in his cell all day, alone with his despair. He was not
cheered by the good news that the brain tests were negative. What
did it matter? He had no future anyway.

After six weeks in the Don, he was transferred to the Metro East
Detention Centre, primarily a holding jail where people are kept
to await immigration orders or trial appearances. Inexplicably,
it is built along the lines of a maximum-security prison. Doors
are sheet steel and close with a chilling clang. First offenders,
women, illegal immigrants, and teenagers caged there find it
horrifying. Most inmates are people awaiting trial, technically
innocent and often so found. For most, the crimes for which they
are awaiting trial are minor ones, and those serving sentences
are confined for relatively brief periods such as weeks or a
month.

Almost since Metro East opened it has been crowded beyond
capacity. Cells designed for two people to sleep in bunk beds
often hold three, the hapless extra person assigned to sleep on
the floor with his head near the lidless toilet.

Prisoners are locked in their cells to eat and at other times
spend the day in a common area on each range. The low time of the
day is between eleven and one when they are put in their bleak
cells for the noon meal. The two hours seem endless. The common
area where they congregate is furnished with three metaltopped
picnic tables bolted to the floor. Recreational facilities
and programs are almost unknown, since the premise is that no one
stays very long. Ken Parks, however, spent almost a year in Metro
East. Inmates call it "dead time", since it isn't subtracted from
the sentences that follow trial and conviction.

Ken observed a substantial population of black men in
Metro East awaiting trial. As someone whose closest friends, the
Ramanis, were black, Ken expected to mix easily with inmates of
any colour and was surprised to encounter prison's segregation.
When he attempted to make conversation, black prisoners rejected
him coldly. Many of them seemed to have their own rules, which
conflicted with the traditional prison etiquette of white
inmates. Many, too, talked a rapidfire patter that other
prisoners couldn't understand.

Ken's initiation to "the East", in fact, was a challenge from a
big black man who threw a sucker punch at him. With his bandaged
and tender hands, Ken was helpless to protect himself or
retaliate. He looked to the guards for assistance but encountered
only bemused stares. The attacks continued. Ken's size seemed to
threaten the man, who was the acknowledged leader and bully on
that range. To Ken's alarm, his oppressor was armed with a
"shank", a home-made knife. Ken began to fear for his life, but
he didn't dare step outside the unwritten rules against
complaints to guards. One of them, noting the situation,
suggested that Ken could request a move to another range.

"No," said Ken shortly. "Thanks."

Sam's paternal advice had been, "No matter what happens, don't
ask for a transfer to another range. They'll think you're
chicken."


The man persisted in tormenting Ken, who confided one day in
Karen. She promptly went to the authorities. To Ken's relief he
was moved immediately to another range.

Psychologist Graham Turrall visited Ken almost weekly. His long,
thoughtful, probing interviews were designed to unearth clues
about Ken's behaviour and to detect discrepancies in his account
of his activities. He found only consistency and candour. Marlys,
too, came and went, an oasis of calm and assurance that belied
her growing anxiety. Every avenue she explored to explain Ken's
memory loss either fell apart completely or was shot full of
conflicting detail.

Her mind kept turning to sleepwalking. It fit the situation
better than anything else she had explored, but she hesitated.
Whenever she mentioned it to colleagues, the response was a
variation of "Aw, c'mon! You mean he drove fourteen miles in his
sleep and attacked two people without waking up?" She inquired if
anyone had ever heard of sleepwalking as a defence: none had. A
search of the appellate record showed no sign that it had ever
been used successfully in a Canadian trial. A search of the
annals showed no report of a sleepwalking defence. She couldn't
find a single case in Canada where sleepwalking was used. The
jury was certain to be very suspicious of such a unique and
bizarre defence.

That left her with a defence of not guilty by reason of insanity.

"What are the odds of me going to prison?" Ken asked her one day.

"About thirty-seventy," she replied.

"For whom?" he asked, to make certain he had it right.

"For them," she replied levelly.



CHAPTER TEN

Preliminaries


One of Canada's most eminent criminal lawyers, Arthur Martin,
served with distinction for many years as a high court judge on
the Ontario Court of Appeal. In 1977 he wrote a judgment that has
had considerable impact ever since on trials involving the
defence of insanity. This landmark case, _Regina _very. _Rabey,
concerned a man who was devastated by the break-up of a
relationship. In what was demonstrated in court to be a
distraught state of mind, he attacked and injured someone with a
rock. The defence argued that Rabey had suffered a "psychological
blow" that put him in a dissociative state.

It is a fundamental principle of Canadian criminal law that in
order to obtain a conviction the prosecution must prove beyond a
reasonable doubt that the acts of the accused person were
voluntary. As Marlys Edwardh explains it, "Voluntariness, in this
sense, means that the physical act in question must be a product
of the person's will."

The evidence was compelling that Rabey was incapable of knowing
what he was doing. Accordingly the judge acquitted Rabey on the
grounds that he was in a non-insane state of automatism at the
time and therefore not responsible for his action.

The Crown, alarmed that the decision set a precedent of tolerance
for reprisals by lovesick swains, appealed on a subtle point full
of legal implications. The Court of Appeal was asked to
substitute the lower court's verdict of "not guilty" with the
verdict "not guilty by reason of insanity". The Crown argued that
a dissociative state due to a psychological blow is a ?disease of
the mind" within the legal definition of insanity. The Ontario
Court of Appeal therefore had the unenviable task of drawing a
legal distinction between automatism that is sane and automatism
that is insane.

Mr. Justice Arthur Martin had developed strong views about
insanity pleas. His landmark decision to alter the verdict had a
significant impact on the legal definition of ?disease of the
mind". He expanded the legal definition of disease of the mind so
broadly that very little escapes it.

Marlys Edwardh, along with other criminal lawyers who frequent
such pleas, is no fan of Martin in the _Rabey determination. She
considers his views on insanity as unfortunate for the defence.
"Mr. Justice Martin cast too wide a net," she says tersely. "He
set out far too broadly who gets caught in the insanity net."

However, in two sentences that might even have been an
afterthought, Mr. Justice Martin stated: "Sleepwalking appears to
fall into a separate category. Unconscious behaviour in a state
of somnambulism is non-insane automatism."

Marlys spent a lot of time studying _Rabey as she proceeded to
put together the case for the defence of Kenneth James Parks. She
decided it helped her case--that is, the two sentences about
sleepwalking did--but also helped the Crown because it sternly
put most automatism into the category of insanity. The Crown
might well argue that this particular sleepwalking incident
resulted in behaviour so violent it could only be described as
insane automatism.

Martin began by admitting that "the term disease of the mind is
not capable of precise definition". He went on to say that the
evidence of medical authorities has no bearing on the matter,
although judges can pay attention to such evidence if they are so
disposed. In the end judges are left with the sole responsibility
to fit the situation within a legal definition of mental disease.

That said, Martin decided that Rabey was suffering from a
?disease of the mind" when he struck his victim, and therefore
the judge should have returned a verdict of "not guilty by reason
of insanity" rather than a simple acquittal. Rabey, in short, had
suffered a bout of insane automatism, not non-insane automatism.

_Regina _very. _Rabey was appealed to the Supreme Court of
Canada, which upheld the Ontario Court of Appeal decision. Mr.
Justice Brian Dickson, later chief justice of the Supreme Court
of Canada, wrote a dissent helpful to the Parks case. He noted,
almost offhandedly, "The defence of automatism is successfully
invoked in circumstances of a criminal act committed
unconsciously; and, in the past, has generally covered acts done
_while _sleepwalking or under concussional states following head
injuries" (emphasis added).

Marlys began to lay out her strategy. Speed, she decided, was an
imperative. When Ken appeared in court to hear the two charges,
murder in the first degree and attempted murder, she entered a
plea of "not guilty" to both and asked the judge to set a date
for the preliminary hearing as quickly as possible. The Crown was
astonished. Normally, lawyers preparing for a murder trial prefer
long delays, especially when a complex argument involving
insanity is contemplated.

Marlys, however, was in a hurry to meet the Woods family to take
their measure. Moreover, she wanted their testimony on the
record before grief and anger coloured their recollection of
events. Once their accounts were frozen in a court transcript, it
wouldn't matter so much if bitterness deepened and reshaped their
memories.

"The importance of the preliminary, especially one that occurs
very rapidly after the arrest, is that people's stories haven't
had a chance to change, to develop," Marlys explains. "As months
pass in the slow wait for trial it is natural and very human for
people to alter their views. When that happens at the trial you
need to be able to confront the witness with the statement made
at the preliminary."

Preliminary trials, which are designed to protect citizens
against mischievous or malicious arrest, are an admirable
safeguard in the justice system. The Crown is obliged in a
preliminary trial to show a judge sufficient evidence to obtain
the judge's agreement that the charge is warranted. The advantage
for the defence is the preview of what the Crown will be
presenting in the trial and an opportunity to cross-examine the
Crown's witnesses.

A notable example of the value of the process is the case of
Susan Nelles, the nurse at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children
who was held responsible for the deaths of babies on the cardiac
ward. The evidence produced by the Crown at her preliminary trial
was so weak that the judge ruled that she would not have to
endure a trial.

The judge at Ken's arraignment fixed a date early in August for
the preliminary trial. With that done, Marlys had another
request. She asked for a court order against publication of the
proceedings of the preliminary trial. This was done to ensure the
purity of the trial jury. Preliminary hearings do not present the
defence case and therefore are forums for the Crown. The public,
reading accounts of a preliminary trial, can draw onesided
conclusions. Since the right to a fair trial is the cornerstone
of justice, such requests for media embargo usually are granted
and Marlys obtained the protection for her client that she asked.

She also obtained an arrangement vital to the preparation of the
case for the defence. By acting so swiftly, she reduced the
likelihood that the Crown would move to have Ken remanded to
Penetanguishene's prison for the criminally insane. He could
remain at Metro East Detention Centre until his trial. Marlys
Edwardh had easy access to her client and so did experts she
retained--and their reports went to her, not to the Crown.

The summer passed, a pretty one in Ontario. The Crown office,
short-handed and desperate, protested that the August date
provided too short a time to prepare. The earliest date
that could be fixed was October. The Crown's case was assigned to
Cathy Mocha, then twenty-eight, who had been called to the bar
only a year and a half earlier. Born in Philadelphia and married
to a Canadian engineer who settled in Toronto, Cathy Mocha is
tall and elegantly thin, with sharp classical features, a heavy
mane of reddish blonde hair, and green eyes. She would be trying
her first murder case; in fact, since women lawyers rarely choose
the criminal bar, it was startling that the historic Parks case
would be argued by two women.

Cathy Mocha received the brief and read the facts. She couldn't
guess what the defence would be, but she knew Marlys was not
planning a plea of guilty. That left "not guilty by reason of
insanity", but there was something odd about the statements the
accused was making. Cathy Mocha's first thought was, "This sounds
like a case of automatism of some kind." She started to read the
case law on automatism.

The preliminary opened early in October, and continued for two
days before being adjourned until later in the month for reasons
related to the availability of participants. It continued for one
day late in October and adjourned after that until two days in
November. The hearings finally ended in December.

Karen Parks called the fragmented sessions "a waste of time". She
corrects herself: "I have to say it was a learning time for us.
We didn't know anything about the court system."

The preliminary trial was by no means a waste of time for Marlys
Edwardh and Delmar Doucette, who had their first look at the case
they would be facing. Marlys was particularly curious to see
Denis Woods, who was one of the Crown's first witnesses. Marlys
was as struck by him as she had been by Karen.

"Denis is a remarkable man in the same way that Karen is a
remarkable woman," Marlys says. "Like her, he has total devotion
to truth. I had a strong sense at the preliminary and again at
the trial that he would not allow himself to mis-state anything,
even if it helped Ken. When people reconstruct their
recollections in hindsight, it almost never happens that they
remember it exactly as it was. Denis did that. He has a strong
sense that the way to live in the world is to live in truth."

The Crown's case began with police evidence and some ghastly
exhibits, a knife, a tire-iron, bloody clothes, photographs. The
grisly testimony was followed by a parade of the Woods family. At
Marlys' insistence, all the children testified.

When Pru and Emma spoke of hearing Barbara screaming, Ken was
shocked. He was unprepared for it. Karen had told him very little
of what her sisters had experienced that night.

"I didn't want to make him feel worse," Karen explains, "and I
knew that the visitors' phones are bugged. So Ken heard all that
for the first time at the preliminary trial."

Their account of hearing Ken running up the stairs towards them
was particularly appalling. He cringed as they told of hiding
terrified in the bedroom while he, panting and grunting like an
animal, prowled the upstairs hall. He had only a little memory of
that, but in his recollection he was trying to help them, not to
hurt them.

The low point for him at the preliminary was the testimony of
Samantha Woods, who declared that she and Ken had never been
close. Her denial of their warm association was painful to him,
and he also was shattered when Denis Woods testified that the day
before the killing, when he heard that Ken was still gambling, he
told his wife he didn't want Ken in the house again.

"That really hurt me," Ken says, gripping his hands together and
cracking his knuckles. "I didn't know until then that he felt
that way. And I thought that me and Samantha were really close."

Marlys made careful notes. The evidence given by Pru and Emma
conflicted in several ways, which was understandable in the
horrifying circumstances. One sister spoke of the lights being
on, the other of the lights being off; they didn't agree about
whether one went down the stairs or both remained at the top of
the stairs. As for Denis, he could provide almost no information.

Karen, sitting by herself in the courtroom in order to preserve
her neutrality, listened attentively to the police testimony.
Despite the minor differences in their recall of the hectic
moments after Ken burst into the police station, they painted a
clear picture of a man in a state of utter confusion. She kept
thinking, "That doesn't sound like someone who's just knowingly
committed a crime. It sounds more like a person who has been
sleepwalking, waking up from a bad dream."

On the other hand, she noted pieces of evidence that made
sleepwalking seem unlikely. "Nothing fits absolutely perfectly,"
she sighs. "We need a little bit more information before we can
really put it together but we can't get it. We'll never get it.
The police really didn't do a very good job of taking
fingerprints or analysing blood."

"The police thought they had an open-andshut case," Ken explains.
"They found bloodstains on the doorway
and thought it was mine, but it could have been Karen's mom, or
it could have been anybody's. They didn't have it tested."
For Ken's part, he heard nothing in the preliminary trial
that shook his conviction that another person was in the house
that night and that he had been drugged. The evidence all pointed
that way, he told himself, especially his confusion in the police
station.

At the end Marlys rose to argue that the Crown had not proved the
necessary element of intent to kill and therefore the charge of
first-degree murder couldn't be sustained. She declared that
there was no evidence that Ken Parks planned the murder of
Barbara Woods. No evidence of premeditation had been produced.
The Crown had offered no proof that when Ken drove from Pickering
to Scarborough that night he had murder on his mind.

Intent is a mighty word in law. A premeditated killing is
first-degree murder, punishable by a life sentence with no
possibility of parole for twenty-five years. When it is shown
that the homicide was intentional but there was no planning or
deliberation, that's second-degree murder. The penalty is also a
life sentence, but parole is possible in ten years.

The judge ruled against Marlys Edwardh's request that the charge
be reduced. He committed Ken for trial on a charge of
first-degree murder. Marlys sprang to her feet and civilly
announced that she was moving to appeal his decision.

The appeal to quash the judge's decision at the preliminary was
heard in the Supreme Court of Ontario. Marlys argued there that
the Crown had an obligation to adduce enough evidence to warrant
a committal for trial on the charge of first-degree murder but
had failed to do so. She made a cool, lucid presentation but she
lost. The Supreme Court decided that the Crown had made a
sufficient case for a first-degree charge.

Ken was staggered but Marlys appeared undaunted.

"It was worth the try," she assured him, "but it really doesn't
matter all that much. It doesn't change how the defence will be
presented, and it puts a heavy burden on the Crown to prove
premeditation, which is going to be difficult since everyone
agrees that there was no bad feeling between you and Karen's
parents." In the chill, bleak days of March
1988, Marlys reviewed the Sunnybrook tests exhaustively,
determined to be certain that there was no pathological element
lurking in Ken's brain. The results were analysed over and over
by neurological experts, but every assessment came to the same
conclusion. Kenneth James Parks had a completely normal brain.

"That's how I got on the doorstep of Roger Broughton," Marlys
says. "Sleepwalking fit the circumstances like a glove, and it
had to be looked at carefully."

Dr. Roger Broughton heads the sleep disorders centre at
the Ottawa General Hospital. As the Stanford University professor
had assured Marlys, he is one of the world's most impressive
authorities on sleep disorders. A physician, he holds an M.D.
from Queen's and a Ph.D. in neurology and neurosurgery from
McGill. He has a certificate in neurophysiology from the
University of Marseilles, France. Significantly for the Ken Parks
case, he has considerable expertise in electroencephalography and
epilepsy. At the time of Ken's trial he was a professor of
neurology at the University of Ottawa, a career investigator
awardee with the Medical Research Council of Canada, research
co-ordinator in the division of neurology at the University of
Ottawa, and medical director of the department of clinical
neurophysiology at the Ottawa General Hospital. He also
functioned as head of the Human Neurosciences
Research Unit of the University of Ottawa's Health Sciences
Centre. His expertise in sleep disorders was reflected in his
membership on the Nosology Committee of the American Sleep
Disorders Association, which is an internal commission updating
the classification of sleep disorders. He is also a member of the
Scientific Advisory Board of the Center for Narcolepsy at
Stanford University and the Canadian liaison person to sleep
societies of the American Electroencephalographic Society, the
American society involved in brain wave studies, and he has
honorary memberships in sleep and neurological societies in Cuba,
Czechoslovakia, Brazil, and Latin America. He is a past president
of the international Sleep Research Society and the founding
president of the Canadian Sleep Society and has written more than
two hundred articles on sleep.

Finally, Broughton, along with Professor Henri Gastaut of
Marseilles, France, had performed the original sleep studies in
sleepwalking and was a noted authority on Ken's particular sleep
disorder.

When Marlys Edwardh reviewed his credentials with him at the Ken
Parks murder trial, the recital covered twelve pages of
transcript.

Marlys contacted Roger Broughton and outlined what she knew about
Ken's strange behaviour. She mentioned the repetition of Ken's
constant mental image of _waking to see his mother-in-law's face.

"Could you kill someone while sleepwalking?" she asked.

"Sure," said Broughton. "Sleepwalkers can be violent, especially
when someone attempts to waken them."

"Bingo," Marlys thought.

"The Crown had no idea we were switching from a plea of
insanity," Marlys says with relish. "No one had an inkling what
we were doing. We hadn't asked for a remand. We had gone
into the
provincial court system and set the date so quickly that there
was no Crown around to say, `_Wait _a _minute, we want this guy
sent to Penetang.` We managed to keep all of what we were doing
outside the bailiwick of the Crown. All the Crown knew, if they
bothered to check, was that there was a parade of people going in
and out of East Detention to see Ken."

The silent struggle between Marlys and the Crown was not only
about the case. At the centre of the trial stood the enigma of
Karen Woods Parks and whether she would testify on her husband's
behalf.

"I felt there were very powerful forces pushing her away from
Ken," comments Marlys. "Some of them were her family, some of
them were police."

Karen confirms this. In her family, Samantha was the one most
openly hostile to Ken and the one least likely to observe the
family's code of silence when Karen was around. One day Karen was
hurt to the quick when her brother Jonny lost control and
screamed at her, "I hate you and I hate your husband." She also
noted that the police had a way of dropping comments that
disparaged Ken's family. She was told, for instance, that Ken's
father "hung around with bikers".

Cathy Mocha didn't approach Karen directly to ask what she
planned to do. In fact, Karen says there was no contact with the
Crown attorney at all.

Karen has an inbuilt ability to resist pressure. Something in her
nature flares when she feels herself being pushed in a direction
she's not prepared to take. That quality enabled her to keep a
neutral perspective while visiting Ken twice a week and at the
same time maintaining close contact with her bereaved family.
When she saw Ken her heart twisted inside her. He was clearly in
pain and he was losing weight alarmingly. At least fifty pounds
had dropped from his big frame. He said the food was wretched and
he wasn't sleeping well. He was getting a sedative every night,
he said, and it helped a bit. On the other hand, when Karen was
with her motherless family she saw their great grief and noted
the suffering in her father's eyes.

She had never been so alone. She couldn't ask her family to share
her concern for Ken, or seek comfort from Ken in her sorrow over
losing her mother. She couldn't talk to Ken's family either. They
made friendly advances, but she felt their awkwardness with her.
She still wasn't sure what she felt about the crime. Until she
had an explanation she could trust, she didn't know where she
belonged. She instructed herself sternly to keep an open mind. It
wasn't fair to judge Ken until the facts were known.

In November she marked her twenty-third birthday. Her mother
always pulled together a family party with sandwiches and cake
and, Karen's favourite, meringues. Denis tried to fill the gap,
but meringues were beyond him. The gallant attempt at normalcy
depressed them all.

She seemed to be processing her life, not living it. She plodded
between home and prison, took Melissa for walks, and cooked
dreary meals that she ate alone, always with a sense of being
disconnected from what she was doing. A flyer came to the door
advertising a social event at DunbartonFairport United Church. On
an impulse she called the number and was invited to meet the
assistant minister, who was touched by Karen's plight.

Karen welcomed the kindness and became a regular member of the
congregation.

"It gave me strength and hope," Karen explains. "I also got peace
of mind to think that my mom is somewhere nice. I don't know
actually how to explain it ... she's actually better off?
She's somewhere warmer and nicer than where we are. When the
minister talked, a feeling came over me, a warmth. I felt that
someone was hugging, holding me. A strong, warm feeling, almost
like my mother was there. I've never been that religious before,
but it helped me a lot."

The minister's sermons about forgiveness struck home with great
poignancy.

On Sundays she went to the early service and then donated time in
the nursery during the second service. She went to Bible study
once a week and had Melissa baptized.

"I don't believe you have to go to church to be a good
Christian," Karen says, "but the church meant a lot to me that
year Ken was in prison."

She made a friend in the congregation who sometimes hired Karen
to baby-sit. Karen decided she had an obligation to be honest.
She explained her situation, but the woman didn't withdraw from
her as Karen had feared. So many others suddenly became remote
when they learned about her.

Ken's grandmother Lil Hodge says, "It was a year of hell, but
Karen was strong. She was so strong. She'd break down every now
and then, but mostly she was strong. She knew in her heart that
Ken didn't know what he was doing."

Sometimes Karen's confidence faltered. Tossing at night alone in
the queen-size bed she had shared with Ken, she would wonder if
she really knew him at all. The gambling, the stealing, the lies,
for instance. Were they the real Ken Parks? His younger brothers
were rough men, and Ken played an aggressive game of rugby. Maybe
she was badly mistaken to view him as a gentle and honourable
man.

She reviewed every detail of the few hours that had preceded his
attack on her parents, looking for clues that Ken had planned it.
He had refused to sleep with her that night. Perhaps he wanted to
stay on the living-room couch because he was planning to sneak
out of the house and kill her parents. Maybe that sweet nature
was really a fa‡ade under which there was a man full of homicidal
rage.

Those were the doubts of the night. When she saw Ken, her
confidence in his essential gentleness returned. He was so abject
and tormented it touched her heart. She felt that she knew him
thoroughly. He had killed her mother, but he wasn't a murderer.
She couldn't throw away six years of loving him.

Once Ken said awkwardly, "If I get a sentence of twenty-five
years, I want you to get a divorce right away."

Karen started to protest but he stopped her.

"You can't waste your life waiting for me," he told her steadily.
"Melissa will need a father. You're young, you'll find someone
else. You can't put your life on hold for twenty-five years."

She said stoutly, "Don't even talk like that. Marlys thinks she
can get the charge reduced to second degree. That's ten years.
Ten years isn't so bad."

Ken said, looking bleakly at his prospects, "Yeah. Ten years
isn't so bad."

Her existence revolved around those visits and her flailing
attempts to cope with her grief. Thinking back on that year, she
can recall only bits of it.

"It passed in a blur," she says bleakly. "I don't remember too
much of anything."

Karen's interest in her home had evaporated. She was indifferent
to the dust that piled up in corners, the dirty counters in the
kitchen, the laundry spilling out of the basket. A welfare social
worker took in the situation and provided Karen with a homemaker
who came three times a week to take care of Melissa for
half a day and do such chores as vacuuming.

"It gave me a few hours by myself, so I'd go out," Karen
explains. "I knew I was supposed to be thinking things through
but I couldn't concentrate. I was in a daze."

When she and Melissa were alone together, Karen cared for the
child with as much patience as she could muster, but she was
often distracted and distant. When the child slept, Karen found
she couldn't concentrate enough to read so she paced the floor.
Many afternoons she stared leadenly at the soaps on television
where beautiful people coped with disasters that were improbable
by any standard other than hers. When bills she couldn't pay came
in the mail, she sorted them out: when the Hydro was two months
late with a warning note, she paid it, skipping the telephone
bill; the next month she'd pay the telephone but not the cable
television, and so on.

Often she ran out of food. Her pride hurt, but she went to a food
bank operated by the Dunbarton-Fairport United Church for staples
such as eggs, bread, and milk. The church, guessing her
situation, allowed her food twice a week, or more if she needed
it. She was embarrassed but realistic; she and Melissa had to
eat. Street-Link, an organization that gives
support to families of people in prison, provided her with
clothes, and so did the always dependable Salvation Army.

Her father no longer offered her money, and she didn't ask.

She wished she could stop caring for Ken. If she could stop
visiting, stop thinking about him, her family was waiting to take
her in. Instead the strain was palpable when she went to visit
them. Samantha was particularly withdrawn, and her father, the
wounds on his head and neck plain to see, was kind but distant.
The subject most on their minds, her continuing relationship with
Ken, was something no one broached.

How could she abandon Ken? She put herself in his shoes, imagined
that she went to sleep one night and woke up to find she had
killed someone. She would want Ken to stand by her, and she could
do no less for him.

She expected that she would always be alone. Ken certainly would
be sent to prison for a long time. Despite all the talk about a
sleepwalking defence, it was only realistic to expect the worst
and prepare for it, but she couldn't summon the energy. She
missed her mother. Barbara would have known how to help her.

"This time last year," she would think, "mum and I went to
England." Or "This time last year, mum and Ken were playing cards
at the hospital when Melissa was born."

Ken, twitching with insomnia in his prison bunk at night, tried
to accept that he was a sleepwalker. Dr. Roger Broughton, the
Ottawa specialist in sleep disorders, had told him so. In
October, Marlys Edwardh had arranged for Dr. Broughton to see Ken
in Metro East to make an assessment. She provided the doctor with
a transcript of the taped statement Ken had given police on the
day of the killing.

Broughton asked Ken to describe everything he could remember
about the night and was struck, as Marlys had been, by the
continuing consistency in Ken's statements. Broughton's first
thought on hearing about the bizarre events of that night had
been that Ken Parks was a liar, but he couldn't see how even an
accomplished liar could get the story exactly the same over many
months of questioning. Besides, people fabricate stories in order
to hide motivated behaviour. Ken Parks had no reason to kill
Barbara Woods, none. Broughton told Marlys that he was struck by
Ken's apparent integrity and his
profound remorse and confusion over the events of the tragedy.

Broughton found it puzzling that Barbara's face, as Ken recalled
it looming before him with a piteous expression, bore no wounds.
He knew that when the police had found her Barbara's face was
bloody. Possibly Ken's memory was so distorted he hadn't taken in
Barbara's injuries.

Ken's memory interested him. Ken could not remember getting up
from the couch that night, putting on his jacket, slipping into
his loosely laced track shoes, picking up the car keys, and going
out the door, leaving it standing open behind him, all of which
he must have done.

Was any of that Ken's usual way of behaving? No, Ken said. He
never went without underwear and socks, and he would never leave
the front door open.

Ken had no memory of the twenty-threekilometre drive to
Scarborough, a distance that would take about
fifteen minutes and that involved travelling along the six-lane
401 highway and making six turns before hitting a series of
traffic lights. Had he made that drive many times? the doctor
asked. Ken answered, "A hundred or more."

Ken could recall nothing of the attacks on Denis and Barbara or
of how his hands were cut. After a period of blankness, Ken's
memory became patchy. His first image had been Barbara's face.
The next was of the children screaming and himself running up the
stairs, calling out, "Kids, kids." He didn't remember going down
the stairs and out the door, getting into his car, or putting the
key in the ignition, but he had a piece of memory of being
in the car and seeing the knife. He couldn't recall driving for
the five minutes it would take to reach the police station.
Awakeness didn't occur again until he was inside the police
station.

It made eminent sense to the doctor. As he was to testify,
following the period of no recall that is typical of
sleepwalking-the period covering the assault on Denis and
Barbara--Ken was going in and out of sleep, a phenomenon
sleep-disorder specialists call microsleeps. Ken's spotty
memories only reinforced Broughton's opinion that the entire
episode occurred during sleepwalking, but he was not yet ready to
rule out other explanations. He obtained the results of the
neurological examinations, the EEC and CAT
scan. Like Billings, he was looking for signs of epilepsy,
because aggression can occur during seizures. He found nothing to
indicate that Ken had epilepsy. He agreed with Dr. Edmeads'
assessment: Ken's brain was perfectly normal.

He wondered if Ken had taken drugs that left his brain impaired.
Edmeads had considered that possibility carefully and entered it
into his records. There was no indication of drug toxicity and no
history of drug-taking, not the night of the killing and not for
years previous to that. Ken's fling with drugs in high school had
been brief and the amounts of no great significance.

Broughton next considered the possibility that Ken was in a
psychiatric fugue state, a condition of mental illness
characterized by hysteria and possible memory loss. He saw no
evidence of fugue either, which didn't surprise him. Fugues are
exceedingly rare during sleep.

Like other pioneers in the emerging specialty of sleep disorders,
Roger Broughton was aware of the phenomenon of rapid eye movement
(REM) sleep behaviour disorder in which people get up and perform
complex activities, often with a hostile component. He gave that
possibility careful consideration, but
had to exclude it, since the disorder arises only from brain
lesions or some other form of neurological disease. None of those
was evident in the brain of Ken Parks.

That left sleepwalking.

If Ken Parks was a sleepwalker, his habitual sleep patterns would
be unusual. Broughton wouldn't have been surprised to find a
pattern suggesting that Ken suffered from nocturnal epilepsy. It
was unlikely that Ken would suffer seizures at night without
having them by day as well, but it was necessary to check it out.

Broughton told Marlys Edwardh that he would have to test Ken's
sleep patterns in a sleep laboratory. How could that be done,
with Ken in custody? The lawyer secured a minor miracle.
She made a request, and Metro East Detention Centre authorities
agreed to allow Broughton and his associates to set up a
temporary sleep lab in a parole office. It was far from an ideal
setting. Ken, hooked by electrodes to a polygraph a few feet from
his cot, was obliged to try to sleep with a technician in the
same room watching him. The doctor wasn't happy with the
arrangement, but it was the best that could be managed.

The technician monitored Ken's brain wave channel, eye movements,
muscle tone, and blood oxygen and made a full respiratory
assessment to see if Ken had a problem with loss of breathing
(apnea) during sleep. The results were interesting. Ken's
breathing was within the normal range, but his sleep patterns
were abnormal. Two nights before the tests, at the doctor's
request, Ken had stopped taking his sedative, which had the
effect of suppressing what the specialists call slow-wave sleep,
the deepest sleep. Broughton feared it would interfere with his
ability to get a profile of Ken's normal sleep.

Deprived of the sedative and uneasy in the curious environment,
Ken had more than his usual problem falling asleep. In the first
hour or two after trying to compose himself, Ken was fully awake
with a form of insomnia. After that came a period of an hour or
so of drowsiness and then he descended the levels of sleep and
reached stage four, slow-wave sleep.

The peculiarity in Ken's sleep pattern during the first session
in the sleep lab was that he roused abruptly from stage four
sleep, without any of the slow sliding out of that sleep state
that most people have. Five times that night Ken reached stage
four sleep, the deepest level of sleep, where there are no dreams
and no mental activity, only to shift suddenly to wakefulness
without passing through REM sleep.

Another and very significant finding was that the amount of deep
sleep Ken experienced that night was roughly twice that of most
adults and more closely approached that of a child. Children
spend about 40 per cent of their sleep time in deep, slow-wave
sleep, which is why sleepwalking is so common among children.
Adults, however, spend only about 10 per cent of their sleep in
stage four's deep sleep. Ken Parks, however, registered 20 per
cent.

Otherwise Ken's sleep was normal. He showed no trouble breathing,
he didn't exhibit any abnormal movements of his arms or legs, and
no epileptic discharges were recorded in the brain wave channels.

Taken with the fact that Ken still had in his system the remnants
of a sedative that impairs arousals from sleep, the finding that
he roused so steeply from deep sleep was intriguing. Broughton
was impressed by Ken's pattern of troubled, unstable
sleep, but he wasn't yet ready to form a conclusion.

Four months later, on January 22, 1988, the sleep lab technician
was back in Metro East to repeat the experiment. Again Ken was
unable to sleep for almost two hours, after which he experienced
the fragmented sleep he had displayed before. At one moment he
would be in stage four of deep, slow-wave sleep, and then,
abruptly, he would waken. This happened eight times in the night.
This time Ken's slow-wave sleep amounted to 28 per cent of his
sleep time. Not only was he having much more deep sleep than most
people and an unusual rousal pattern, but his deep sleep was
occurring later than usually happens. Most people have their
deepest sleep soon after falling asleep. Towards morning, Ken was
still having periods of deep sleep.

"Sleep-disorder people call that pattern of repeated brief
awakenings micro-arousals," Broughton told Ken genially. Ken
liked the doctor's friendly, unflappable nature. "You come out of
stage four sleep without stopping at the usual stations of
lighter sleep. Also you have a great deal more deep sleep than we
usually find in people your age."

"What does that mean?" Ken asked.

"Taken with other precipitating factors, such as
exhaustion and stress, you're a candidate for sleepwalking."

Ken's reaction was alarm. If he was a sleepwalker, maybe some
night he would kill Karen and the baby. It meant he wasn't safe
to be at large.

With the trial months away, Marlys was thinking of asking for
bail. When Denis and others in the Woods household heard of it,
they were alarmed. Karen told them not to worry.

"Ken has refused to let Marlys ask for bail," she told them. "He
told her to drop it."

Ken explains: "I wanted to stay in jail, locked up, in case it
happened again. I didn't want to put anyone at risk." He checked
with Roger Broughton, who agreed with him. Ken might experience
more stress and worry outside the detention centre, he thought,
and such stress would increase the probability that sleepwalking
would recur.

The discussion about bail was one of the few times Karen's family
ever mentioned his name to her. With them she had the weird
feeling that her husband didn't exist.

Prison made Ken a reader. He hadn't finished a book in his entire
life, with the exception of those assigned in English classes,
but loneliness and the idle hours in Metro East drove him to
read. He started with westerns and Nick Carter detective stories.
At the end he was reading Stephen King and Sidney Sheldon during
lockup times; during the time when the prisoners were allowed in
the common room, he played Scrabble. Someone taught him bridge,
which he came to enjoy. Often the men pulled together a poker
game, the stakes being "snaps"--losers had to do whatever the
winner suggested. Ken once ordered a loser to pull down his pants
and run around the range quacking like a duck.

Prisoners at Metro East tend to be young. Ken, at twenty-four,
was one of the older men on the range. He listened, fascinated,
to prison shop talk. Men swapped stories of burglaries and how to
rob a drugstore. "You go through the wall," he was instructed.
"That bypasses the alarms."

"Through walls?" asked Ken, incredulous.

"Sure, it's only drywall."

He learned to be a team player when condoms containing drugs were
thrown over the wall while the men were exercising. "If the
buzzer sounds, you know the guards caught the play," Ken
explains. "So everyone goes against the wall and drops their
pants, pretending to stick something up. Maybe only two guys are
really suitcasing, but it looks like everyone is."

To pass the time at the Don Jail, he had attended gatherings of a
Christian movement aimed at self-improvement. He didn't continue
the association in Metro East. Religion brought him no solace. "I
know there's something there," he says, "but nothing's been
proven to me. I have no religion at all."

At Metro East, Ken attended sessions of Gamblers Anonymous. It
provided a diversion, but he didn't think he fit. His behaviour
was that of a compulsive gambler, he had to admit, but he didn't
miss gambling the way the others did. Gambling, prevalent in
prisons, didn't interest him. If it hadn't been for his need to
replace the money he had taken, he doubted that he would have
gone to the track at all.

The cells were bitterly cold, which affected his hands. Some
movement was returning if he worked at it, but blood circulation
was poor. Karen got permission to bring him gloves but, to his
indignation, a guard confiscated them. Karen protested in vain.
He was advised to put socks on his hands.

Ken, friendly and co-operative by nature, came to be a favourite
of the prison guards, who gave him the affectionate name
of "Parksie". The couple noticed that they received more tolerant
treatment than most inmates did. For instance, prisoners were
limited to four photographs on their cell walls, but Ken
decorated the area around his bunk with about twenty pictures of
Karen and Melissa.

"We got to have longer visits, extra visits, stuff like that,"
Karen says appreciatively. "They knew he wasn't a bad person."

"Like, I had respect for them," Ken explains. "I didn't give them
any hassle, so they didn't give me any hassle."

Melissa's birthday came and Karen wept that her mother wasn't
there to see the child's delight in her cake and presents.
Karen's first Christmas without her mother was even rougher. In
the morning she went to the townhouse in Scarborough to exchange
gifts with her family. All of them were depressed. The gift
opening started bravely enough with the usual exclamations of
surprise and gratitude, but by the time the family started to eat
the ritual Christmas brunch, all were weeping.

Karen went straight from her family to see Ken, finding the
transition, as always, a strange one. He reported that Christmas
was a bitter time in prison. "The guys are missing their
families," he explained. "The mood in here is pretty edgy.
They've got us all locked up because they're afraid of a riot.

Karen had Christmas dinner with Ken's family. She didn't feel
strong enough to keep her feelings bottled up through Christmas
dinner with her own family. In Scarborough she had to pretend
that Ken didn't exist. She didn't want to spend all of Christmas
censoring herself. Her relations with Ken's family were warming,
and she found relief in having someone to talk to about Ken and
her fears for his future.

"We included her in everything that year," Lil Hodge says. "We
were feeling so bad that Christmas. We couldn't even give Ken any
presents."

Karen took practical stock of her situation. If Ken went to
prison, she didn't want to continue living on welfare. Even a
fulltime job at the supermarket would not sustain a single mother
very well. Working out the figures in the evening quiet of
her house after Melissa fell asleep, she came to the conclusion
that she needed job skills.

She reviewed her options. Going to university would take too
long, and besides she couldn't afford it. What appealed most to
her, she decided, was nursing. The prospect of making sick people
comfortable and tending people in need appealed to her maternal
nature. Karen discovered a registered nursing course in a
community college, Durham College in Oshawa, and in January she
applied for admission. The registrar told her she would be
notified about acceptance in the spring.

Karen took home forms to apply for a government student loan, so
she would be ready if she was admitted.

The mess Ken had made at Revere Electric remained to be
addressed. Through intermediaries Karen made contact with Revere
and offered a payment of $15,000 against the $32,000 Ken had
stolen. She promised the settlement out of proceeds from selling
their house in Pickering. Revere accepted and the house went on
the market the next week, priced at $123,000. To clear title to
it, Karen had to take back Ken's $10,000 bail on his fraud
charge.

After paying Revere and some to Marlys for the specialists who
were seeing Ken at Metro East, she wouldn't have enough to buy a
new house in the Toronto area's hot housing market. In
anticipation that she would be accepted at the nursing school,
she started looking for something cheap to rent in Oshawa.

The Pickering house had a buyer within a few weeks of going on
the market. The agreed closing was July 31 and Karen had
occupancy until then, which gave her time to find another place
to live.

By the middle of March, Marlys had two fascinating reports from
Dr. Roger Broughton on the results of his tests in the improvised
sleep lab at Metro East prison. The sleep specialist was
confident that the only explanation for Ken's activities and
memory loss was sleepwalking.

"How can you be sure?" Marlys asked.

He told her about the erratic patterns he had found. Moreover,
everything else fit. The details of the episode, the marked
predisposing factors of a past personal and strong family history
of sleepwalking, sleep terrors, bedwetting, and sleep talking,
and the presence of known

precipitating factors such as extreme sleep deprivation and acute
stress, all made the diagnosis very clear. Marlys was cautious.

"Let's pull together a few people and talk about this," she
suggested. "Would you come to Toronto for a meeting with Ron
Billings and Graham Turrall? Maybe we could get someone else
who's good at sleep disorders. Any suggestions?"

"Sure," said Broughton affably. "Ask Rosalind Cartwright. She's
in Chicago and she's good."

Marlys didn't share the doctor's delight in his diagnosis.
It was asking too much of a jury to believe the
twenty-three-kilometre drive, the bludgeoning and stabbing and
strangling, all of it while asleep. Marlys talked to her
colleagues in the big old house on Prince Arthur Street that is
shared by some twelve lawyers in a loose arrangement of
partnerships and solo practices.

"In the Ken Parks case," she said in her crisp, sharply
articulated way, "I'm thinking of a defence of sleepwalking."

She was met everywhere with incredulity. The reaction, phrased
with varying degrees of skepticism and derision, was
discouraging. Everyone echoed her own
concern that it wasn't plausible that a man could remain sound
asleep while he drove a car a great distance, entered a house,
and attacked two people, killing one of them.

The lawyer went back to consideration of a defence of insanity
with some sleepwalking aspects. She didn't like it. The pieces
simply didn't fit together that way. Subject to the round-table
consultations she was trying to arrange, it looked as though she
had no choice but to plead Ken not guilty because of noninsane
automatism--namely, sleepwalking. Sleepwalking was the
only explanation that didn't fall apart on scrutiny.

The lawyer made a call to Dr. Wood Hill, a forensic psychiatrist
with a formidable amount of experience with crimes of violence.
At one stage of his distinguished career he was consultant
psychiatrist to the Don Jail. During a period when he was in the
forensic unit at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto,
he did assessments of some 170 people accused of murder.

Marlys wanted to know if people who ruminate about killing
someone can bury the impulse and then have it pop out while they
are asleep.

He replied much as he did when asked the same
question at the trial. He noted that many murders were committed
at night following a day of wrathful thoughts, but that none was
done after the person had fallen asleep and none without the
perpetrator's having a clear memory of what had happened. He
agreed to see Ken Parks and look at the mass of reports that
Marlys had assembled.

She also contacted Dr. Frank Ervin of McGill University, who is
an internationally recognized authority on the workings of the
brain and has specialized for the last ten years in the study of
people with pathological aggression. The Texas-born psychiatrist
has held important positions in such places as the Massachusetts
General Hospital, Harvard medical school, the University of
California, and the National Institute of Neurology in Mexico. As
a consultant to the U.S. president he also gave advice on
manned space flights and sat on a committee on violence. He too
studied the reports. On April 24 he was at the door of Metro East
Detention Centre to see Ken Parks. At the trial he stated his
opinion that "he [Ken Parks] was in a parasomnia state,
somnambulistic state, and that that parasomnia accounts for his
behaviour."

In plain language, that's sleepwalking. Rosalind Cartwright, the
sleep disorder specialist from Chicago, was sent all the
information, including the sleep lab results. She travelled to
Toronto and interviewed Ken independently, following which she
talked to the family. At the end of the process she declared that
she fully concurred with Broughton's conclusion that the only
reasonable diagnosis was sleepwalking.

The sleepwalking defence was almost as tight as it was ever going
to be. It was time to find out what role Karen Parks intended to
play at the trial.

Marlys had been careful not to put pressure on the young woman.
Karen's situation wrung her heart. She was caught between
conflicting loyalties, and Marlys could appreciate her desperate
attempt to stay neutral. However, time was passing. The trial was
set for May, and the lawyer could wait no longer to discover
whether Karen was willing to risk alienating her family by
testifying for Ken. Marlys had to know if Karen was ready to
commit herself.

Marlys first talked it over with Ken. Was Karen going to testify
for him, or not? Ken said he didn't know and he didn't want to
ask. He wasn't keen on having Marlys ask either. If Karen
couldn't testify for him, he could understand that. He could live
with it.

Karen was a lawyer's dream witness, intelligent and
straightforward, with the added dimension of her poignant
situation. Marlys sensed that Karen still hadn't made up her mind
about Ken and was avoiding the moment when she would have to
decide. That explained her continued unwillingness to sit down
with her husband's lawyer. Except for the unusual meeting in the
Don Jail, Karen had resisted every gentle attempt Marlys had made
to draw her into a discussion of the case.

She decided she would inform Karen that Ken couldn't be held
responsible for the attacks, and let Karen sort it out from
there. Maybe when Karen knew the results of some of the tests,
her confusion would be eased and she would be able to make her
decision. Marlys hoped Karen would choose to support her husband
rather than her family, but the plan might backfire. If Karen
decided to testify for the Crown, she probably would tell the
Crown everything the defence was planning.
Marlys decided she had to gamble. She called Karen and
said it was imperative that they have a talk.
Karen reluctantly agreed to come to her office.

"I was taking a chance that she would go to the prosecution with
whatever I told her," Marlys admits. "There was risk in revealing
to Karen what we were up to. I could see that the Crown was
confident that we were going to enter a plea of insanity, and we
wanted the prosecution to go on thinking that way. I held some
things back in case Karen went to the other side, but for the
most part I decided to level with her."

Karen sat in Marlys' elegant office, stiff and composed, and
accepted a cup of tea. When the women were settled and the
civilities completed, Karen said, "I'm only here to find the
truth."

Marlys found that an astonishingly mature statement. Very
cautiously, she began to tell Karen that she was looking at a
range of explanations for Ken's behaviour just before dawn on May
24, 1987.

"I don't know for certain what we'll be presenting," she said
carefully, "but every possibility that we study tells us that it
isn't fair to hold Ken responsible for what happened."

Karen thought that over while Marlys studied her.
Karen returned the inspection with level dark eyes but said
nothing.

"We want you to know what we're doing and where we're going,"
Marlys continued. "We've been sending in streams of people to
examine Ken, as you know, and the results are very interesting.
All our research points very clearly to a defence that will show
that Ken wasn't responsible, that he truly wasn't aware of what
was happening."

"Was he insane?" Karen asked.

"No," said Marlys. "He wasn't."

The defence lawyer was now out on a limb.


CHAPTER ELEVEN

Putting It Together


"I had to take that chance," Marlys said later. "Once the trial
started, Karen would not be allowed to sit on the sidelines as
she had been. The position she had found halfway between Ken and
her family simply couldn't be maintained. I couldn't go
much farther in putting my case together without getting a sense
of what she would do in that courtroom. Would she stand up
against her family? It was time for her to make up her mind, and
I wanted to give her the information and the tools so she could
do that."

Karen made no commitment, but questions rushed to her mind. How
could Marlys be so sure? She returned to the conjectures that had
been swirling in her imagination.

"I wonder about a lot of things, little things," she said
tentatively, her voice rising at the end of the sentence as it
always does when she's uncertain. "Like, why didn't Ken come to
bed with me that night? Was he planning to sneak out and go to my
parents' house? And when I came in from work and he came over and
kissed me, he took my purse out of my hands. He put it on the
table. Was that so he could get the car keys?"

"Well, Karen," asked Marlys in a reasonable tone, "where do you
usually put the keys?"

Karen's face cleared. "On the table. On that table."

Then she grinned.

Marlys has boundless respect for Karen. "I have been surprised by
Karen Parks since the day I met her," she comments. "In theory
she's a baby, a very young person who doesn't have a lot of
worldly experience. She's had an ordinary, everyday kind of
Canadian upbringing with nothing that would have told you that
this woman was equipped with skills, social and
otherwise, that make other people's skills pale. She's got
determination. She's got a capacity to make decisions, to be
reflective about what she's doing, to stand up for what she
believes in the midst of enormous pressure."

Karen's total commitment, as Marlys discovered, indeed was to
truth. "That's her moral peg," Marlys explains. "She's an
extraordinary person. She wanted to understand what happened,
what truly happened. She would take it from there, whatever the
truth was, and make her decision. She wasn't prepared to come to
Ken's side on an irrational basis. She made it clear she might
work with us, but she wanted the truth. Always the truth."

With a better sense of trust established, Marlys was able to ask
Karen what she knew of that night of terror. Karen had
information that was new to Marlys, details that had not been
part of the testimony at the preliminary. The lawyer learned for
the first time that Pru and Samantha had heard grunting sounds
from the intruder. One of Ken's memory fragments was of running
up the stairs, calling, "Kids, kids." This was significant for a
sleepwalking defence because sleepwalkers frequently utter
unintelligible sounds when they think they are saying words.

The fact that the knife was kept in a sheath in a drawer apart
from the other cutlery was also important. Most helpful was the
information Karen provided that Denis Woods had heard nothing
before he wakened with Ken's hands around his throat--no voice,
no sounds.

"If Ken Parks had walked in and said to his father-in-law, `I've
always hated you, _take _this!` we would have been playing in a
completely different ball park," the lawyer explains. "But the
silence indicated that something inexplicable was going on. When
Karen told me there had been no conversation between Ken and
Denis, then all the pieces started to fall together."

Karen told Marlys about the two-hour interview that police had
taped with her two days after the killing. Marlys knew about it
and had been trying for months to get Cathy Mocha to release a
copy to her. Karen's tape was done while the events leading up to
that night were fresh in her memory, so Marlys wondered if there
was something on it useful to the defence that Karen had since
forgotten. Finally, exasperated by the Crown's lack of
co-operation, Marlys secured a court order and was given a
transcript. It proved a disappointment. After
all that effort, there was nothing in Karen's taped statements
that Marlys didn't already know.

Roger Broughton dropped a comment that caught the lawyer's
attention. He said that scientists have found there is a genetic
predisposition to sleepwalk. Sleepwalking, he told Marlys, seems
to run in families. By the end of March, Marlys and Broughton
were immersed in interviews with Ken's family. They asked each
member the same question: Who sleepwalks?

The detective work paid off handsomely. The lawyer and doctor
were regaled with stories about Hodge adolescents who wet their
beds in their sleep, about the child who left the house in her
sleep and crossed the street, and about the time when, as a boy,
Ken almost dived out the six-storey window in his sleep. Most of
all, and best of all, they heard about Stan Hodge slicing bread
and frying onions while asleep, _making _grunting _sounds.

Marlys met in three lengthy brain-storming sessions with Ron
Billings, the psychiatrist from Sunnybrook, Graham Turrall, Roger
Broughton, and a second expert on sleep disorders, Rosalind
Cartwright, who heads the Sleep Disorder Laboratory at St. Luke's
Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago. The experts had a marvellous
time. Turrall and Billings were fascinated to learn about
sleepwalking, and the sleep-disorder people loved the case they
were addressing, one of the most spectacular and tragic examples
of sleepwalking in medical history.

The experts bounced theories off one another, spinning skeins of
conjecture and hypothesis against the scant store of facts and
Ken's episodic memory of events. They took the same pieces of
information and explained them every way they could invent. The
brick wall they met every time was the inescapable proof that Ken
had a normal brain, not a diseased one, and that he was a sane
person, not a psychotic. A rational, truthful man had partially
dressed himself, got into his car, driven twenty-three kilometres
to Scarborough, gained entry to the Woods house, and committed
violent acts when someone, almost certainly Barbara, tried to
wake him.

Fascinated with the puzzle and stimulated by one another's
company, the experts speculated freely, trying to put the
sprinkling of known facts into a reasonable sequence. The
psychiatric and neurological experts deferred to the sleep
experts. Sleepwalking was almost unknown territory
for them, and they were absorbed in the wonder of a new field.

Marlys participated with a judge's ear and a juror's eye: How
could this happen? Can it happen again? What makes you so sure it
wasn't an epileptic seizure? Since she lives with a psychologist
and practises in the field of insanity pleas, the language was
not foreign to her but she was picking up new phrases: "slowwave
sleep", the deep sleep also known as stage four sleep;
"mentation", the activities of a mind at work directing action.

Frequently she had to haul the group back from fanciful tangents
down which they wandered, entranced with the outer limits of the
new field.

"We'd spend hours discussing where it fit that Ken thought he
heard the noise of a telephone, or where the weapons came from,
and then everyone would go away and think about it. When we met
again we'd start back from scratch. People really struggled
diagnostically with Ken's situation. In his case, there wasn't an
easy category to slot him into."

She pressed them to help her explain to the jury how a
sleep-walker could drive a great distance, presumably stopping at
traffic lights, since he had attracted no attention. That alone
would astound a judge and jury. Most people think of sleepwalkers
as moving around with eyes closed and arms extended. The
specialists assured her that sleepwalkers have their eyes wide
open. Sometimes the eyes seem even to bulge from their sockets,
as was usual in the case of Ken's grandfather. Moreover
sleep-walkers process external stimuli while deeply asleep. They
can find doors and put their hand on the knobs, they navigate
stairs, they open windows. They follow familiar paths.
If the Woods family had moved from Scarborough, Ken
probably could not have found them. As it was, however, he had
been driving exactly that route with great frequency for two
years. As with commuters who drive home from work on automatic
pilot, the path to Scarborough had worn a groove of memory in
Ken's brain.

The other element they explored was Ken's state of anxiety as he
fell asleep on the couch. Worried about the meeting the next day
with Barbara and Denis, his final thoughts would have been about
going to Scarborough. Deep in sleep an hour or two later, he went
through the motions he had imagined: dressing himself, taking the
car keys, getting in the car, driving. ...

Could he be acting on a buried wish to kill Karen's parents?
Marlys asked. That question, indeed, was put many times at Ken's
trial. Cathy Mocha, the Crown attorney, asked it in her
cross-examination of Broughton. She wanted to know if people in a
state of deep sleep release barriers and act on feelings they
normally repress. Broughton replied that that was a disputed
Freudian view. "Freud suggested that barriers present in
wakefulness are removed in sleep," he said, adding with emphasis:
"Other people have said that sleepwalking can come out of a total
mental void."

The trigger, Broughton maintained, was not a subconscious wish to
kill but a prevailing state of high anxiety. Ken was on edge that
night, exhausted and under great stress. He was acting in a
"total mental void".

Marlys expresses it this way. "Even if he did have a fantasy to
kill Denis," she explains, "the real Ken Parks would never
consciously do that. Everyone in a bad situation gets fantasies
of getting out of it. The fantasies might include thoughts of
violence, but people don't act on those fantasies. On the way to
law school thinking I'm not going to do well on an exam, I might
think it would be nice if I broke my leg so I wouldn't have to
write it but I don't throw myself down some stairs."

Broughton told the lawyer that the history of sleepwalking
incidents shows no evidence that people act out of malice in
their sleep. "How it works is from anxiety," Marlys concludes.
"Ken went to sleep in a very anxious state, thinking that he was
going to see Denis the next day. That's how the program got set.
That's what put him in the car."

When she was sure of her ground on that one, she asked her
experts another question she knew the Crown would put at the
trial. It was, "How could Ken stay in deep sleep long enough to
do what he did? He must have been in that state close to half an
hour."

Broughton and Cartwright exchanged glances. "It's not exceedingly
uncommon for people to be in a sleepwalking episode for forty
minutes," Broughton replied. "The average time is about twenty,
twenty-five minutes, but remember that deep sleep can only be
observed under the unnatural conditions of a sleep lab. In a
person's own bed, the episodes could stretch out."

Of all the people who had tried to tell Ken that there was no
"other man" in the Woods house that night, it was Rosalind
Cartwright, the sleep-disturbance expert from Chicago, who was
finally able to convince him. She gave him what amounted to a
classroom lecture on the nature of his sleepwalking, after which
he bowed his head thoughtfully a long time.

"Yeah," he said heavily. "I guess that's it. I guess I did it."

He was still bewildered. He could accept that he had acted out of
habit when he drove to Scarborough from Pickering and parked his
car in a visitor's space, but that didn't explain how he got into
the house. He simply wasn't accustomed to letting himself in with
a key.

"If I rang the doorbell, how come my fatherin-law didn't hear it,
or any of the kids?" he asks. "If the
police had taken fingerprints off the key, we might have known.
I'd never used a key to get into the house, I always rang the
bell. Karen would just put in the key and go in, but I didn't do
that, except twice in all the years I went there. But the police
didn't take the fingerprints so I don't know if I used the key."

If he rang the buzzer, and Barbara came to the door--as seems
likely--he had a tire-iron in his hand. Ken's tire-iron was found
in the bedroom where Denis was almost strangled. It had been in
his car for months, stowed under the passenger seat ever since he
had used it to fix some pot lights, but it wasn't the best weapon
the car contained. In the hatchback he had an axe and two knives
he used for electrical repairs.

"I'd fixed pot lights in a house that was similar to my in-laws'
house," Ken muses. "Maybe I thought I was at that house and I was
going to fix the pot lights again. Or maybe I had the two things
mixed. My in-laws have pot lights in the TV room. Maybe I thought
I was going to fix the pot lights in their basement.

Karen pictures her mother going to the door and seeing Ken there,
looking strange, as sleepwalkers do. She would try to rouse him
but her efforts caused him to become violent. He swung the
tire-iron and hit her a glancing blow on the head. Then he went
into the darkened bedroom where he started to choke Denis.
Barbara recovered from the blow and ran upstairs to the
kitchen, where she seized her sharpest knife in order
to come to her husband's assistance. Ken took the knife from her,
grabbing it by the blade and cutting his hands. Then he stabbed
Barbara. She backed away from him, mortally wounded, into the
television room, where he struck her with the tire-iron and she
died. Maybe he returned to the bedroom and stabbed Denis after
that.

"The kids think he ran up the stairs to kill them and then
noticed that his hands were cut, so that's why he left," Karen
says with dreadful calm. "They want to hate him anyway so it's
easier if they make up a real good reason."

That almost fits the clues, but not quite. Karen says no scenario
really puts the pieces together.

"One thing that's not clear is the phone the kids heard," Karen
comments. "The beep-beep-beep sound a phone makes when it's off
the hook. ..."

Ken interrupts, "Now if I'd taken the phone off the hook there
would have been blood on it from my hands. ..."

"But they didn't take fingerprints from the phone," Karen says,
"and there was no blood on it. So they can't tell who tried to
phone, my mom or Ken. And another question is about the lights."

"One officer says he went in and no lights were
on," Ken continues. "Another officer says the house was lit up,
every room. Two officers came in at the same time. ..."

"The question is," Karen leaps in, "who got the knife? My mom or
Ken? In my opinion I don't think Ken could have got it ..."

"... because I didn't really know where it was kept," he
finishes. "I went in the kitchen for maybe a glass of water, that
would be about it. I didn't open the cutlery drawers."

"Basically he didn't know where the knife was kept," says Karen.
"If my mom got it she wouldn't have intended to use it on Ken.
She would have got it to threaten him, to make him stop choking
my dad."

Ken listens to this quietly, his face sad.

"Yeah," he says. "It could have been like that."

Marlys Edwardh was puzzled about quite another element in the
Parks case. Marlys had expected Cathy Mocha to move for trial in
August, when it was clear that Ken was fit to stand trial, but
Cathy didn't do that and Marlys was unable to reach her to
ascertain when the trial date could be expected.

Letters to her were not answered, and phone messages went
unreturned. Marlys found it curious that
Cathy Mocha didn't ask what the defence would be presenting at
the trial. Marlys was sure that Cathy Mocha was banking on a
defence of not guilty by reason of insanity, despite the unusual
amount of activity that was happening at Metro East.

Marlys likes to play with possibilities, as many as she can
imagine. A possibility that made her blood run cold was that
Cathy Mocha would hear of the sleepwalking defence that was being
constructed, and after investigation would decide that it was
valid. Then she might offer to consent to the defence argument
that Ken was sleepwalking, obviating the need for a trial on the
circumstances of the case, if Ken Parks and Marlys would concede
that sleepwalking was insane automatism rather than non-insane
automatism.

"I think I would have taken the offer," Marlys said later. "Ken
was facing first-degree murder. I don't think I could have
recommended to him other than that he accept. But having to make
that choice was my worst-case scenario."

The offer didn't come.

Finally, the date was chosen for early May.

In late April, with the trial only weeks away, Marlys at last
received a letter from Cathy
Mocha. The prosecutor asked if the defence would be relying on
medical evidence regarding psychiatric issues. Marlys, unwilling
to tip her hand about the sleepwalking, responded cautiously that
she was not raising a defence of insanity. When she received no
response, she wrote a second letter to say she would be calling
psychiatric evidence.

Cathy Mocha asked Marlys for permission to have a Crown-appointed
psychiatrist, Dr. Brian Butler, see Ken. Marlys couldn't refuse
because her lack of co-operation would have made a poor
impression on the jury. Besides, she has great respect for Brian
Butler, who is an experienced forensic psychiatrist. "He's very
thorough," she comments admiringly.

Brian Butler called Marlys to ask, as a professional would, what
was going on with Ken Parks. Marlys told him it was possible that
Ken was sleepwalking during the incident. Brian Butler, highly
skeptical, relayed this information to the Crown. He told Cathy
Mocha, "If this is truly sleepwalking, it has to be very
unusual."

Ken Parks, notified that the Crown was sending a psychiatrist to
see him, was terrified. He has a horror of being seen as insane,
which he regards as a greater stigma than prison.

"Brian Butler is one of the few psychiatrists the Crown could
have chosen who would be able to see sleepwalking as credible,"
Marlys said with relish. "And he did."

Brian Butler examined Ken, heard about the family history of
sleepwalking, checked his own sources, and concluded that Ken
Parks had been sleepwalking. Marlys found out that Butler agreed
it was sleepwalking even before the Crown did. Butler tried to
notify Cathy Mocha first, but she didn't return his call for a
few days.

"I can't see any way to shake a sleepwalking defence," he told
her.

Cathy threw herself into intense cramming about sleepwalking.
Despite a heavy work load in the courts, she assembled and
digested every piece of information she could find on
sleepwalking. She found the slim trail of cases where juries had
acquitted people of murder on the grounds that they were asleep
when the killing occurred. In time she had five boxes of books,
medical papers, law books, magazine articles, and clippings. Her
primary argument would be that the sleepwalking defence stretched
the bounds of credulity, she decided, but as a fallback position
she would try to persuade the court that sleepwalking in the
Parks case fit within the legal definition, as outlined in
_Rabey, of insanity.

"By the time I got to the trial, I was something of an expert on
sleep therapy," she commented with a chuckle.

The problem for Marlys Edwardh and Cathy Mocha was that
sleepwalking had never been used in a Canadian trial, so far as
either could discover. The Parks trial would be cutting new
ground.

"It was terrific fun for that reason," Cathy Mocha stated, her
face lighting up. "It's something that you study in law school as
a theoretical area, and you sit back and think, `Well, this will
never come up.` And here I was, all of a sudden, dealing with it.
It's something lawyers wait a lifetime to get, and I get it two
and a half years after my call to the bar. I can't imagine a
trial that would have an issue that is more novel and more
exciting than the Parks case."


CHAPTER TWELVE

Trial


As the trial approached, Ken's panic increased. He had no
appetite for the jail food, and the weight loss that had been so
pronounced during his incarceration in the Metro East Detention
Centre became alarming. He noted, without caring, that he had
lost about sixty pounds since his arrest.

A man who schooled himself to be agreeable and who detested
confrontation, he appeared placid and goodnatured for most of the
prison experience. In the weeks leading
up to his first appearance in court, however, he grew tense and
edgy. One evening he exploded. Two prisoners were anxiously
waiting to use the common room's only telephone in order to
arrange bail, but a young prisoner chose to tie up the phone
while he enjoyed a reggae concert. The two men begged and pleaded
as Ken watched, but the man kept the receiver blissfully to his
ear and ignored them. Ken's sense of fairness was offended.
Suddenly he rose up in wrath and snatched the telephone receiver
from the startled music lover. A fight broke
out, which guards speedily ended. Ken was left shaking in the
aftermath of his adrenalin rush.

Another time, when he was switching television channels, an irate
prisoner, a newcomer, called him a goof. Ken ignored this most
heinous insult in the prison lexicon, but the man repeated it.
Ken felt obliged to retaliate or lose status, so he hit the man a
few times. Ken was pulled off by prisoners who said they would
take care of the man the next day.

Everyone cooled down until it was time to be locked in the cells.
The next morning, Ken used the seniority he had gained through
his long incarceration. He warned the guards to move the man.

"If you don't," he said, "I'm afraid he'll get hurt." The man was
removed from harm.

Karen was instructed by Marlys not to tell anyone that the
defence would be that Ken was sleepwalking. She was tempted
however to hint at it with her friend Connie Sullivan, because
Connie had thought from the beginning that sleepwalking was a
plausible explanation for Ken's irrational behaviour.

"I think it should be part of the trial that Ken was
sleepwalking," she said casually to Connie. "If he was
sleepwalking, he's really innocent."

She was not prepared for Connie's reaction.

"That would be terrible," she gasped. "That would mean he'd go
free."

"Well, if he's not responsible for what happened, why shouldn't
he go free?" Karen asked.

"He isn't safe," Connie said. "It just isn't safe to let him out.
I'd worry that he'd come after someone else--me for instance."

"What would you want them to do with him?" Karen asked stiffly.

"Well, maybe he shouldn't be locked up," Connie conceded. "But
how do we know it won't happen again?"

Karen said indignantly, "Anything's possible I guess, but it's
also possible that you can walk across the street and get hit by
a car. You could drown in a swimming-pool. There's so many
possibilities in life. The chances of it happening again are so,
so, so slim."

Marlys Edwardh, marshalling her expert witnesses, ran out of
money to pay travel costs and fees. Ken's family, but mostly Lil
Hodge, had provided the funds for the costly psychiatric
examinations of Ken in Metro East. In all,
eight specialists had seen him, and now the money was gone. In
fact, except for the initial retainer of $5,000, she and Delmar
Doucette had not been paid themselves and were acting without a
fee.

Marlys appealed to Lil and Glen Hodge. If she didn't have another
$10,000, she told them, she couldn't bring Ervin, Cartwright, and
Broughton to Toronto, and she couldn't pay witness fees to
Edmeads, Billings, and Hill.

The valiant Lil Hodge went to her bank, secured a loan, and gave
the money to Marlys.

Marlys has boundless admiration for Ken's grandmother. "We
couldn't have done the case without her," she says.

Karen prepared for what Marlys said would be two weeks or more of
trial by arranging with a friend to babysit Melissa, with welfare
compassionately providing the money.
The toddler had grown to be an enterprising, inquisitive,
bright-faced eighteenmonth-old charmer. Karen became a commuter,
catching the GO train every morning to Union Station and walking
the six blocks or so to the courthouse.

The trial of Kenneth James Parks on a charge of the first-degree
murder of Barbara Ann Woods was scheduled to begin on the
morning of May 2, 1988, before a jury. The presiding judge was
the Honourable Mr. Justice David Watt of the Supreme Court of
Ontario, a man rated by lawyers who appear before him as one of
the most intelligent and fair-minded on the high court bench. The
trial took place in the dignified district courthouse on
University Avenue, a relatively new and handsome edifice with a
pleasant courtyard filled with pools and sculpture. The
courtroom, a vast, windowless, wood-panelled cube, the largest
courtroom in the province, is illuminated from the ceiling with
pitiless cold light, and the air is stuffy to breathe.

Ken Parks is subject to eczema in times of stress. During the
weeks before the trial, it had broken out in a pink rash that
ringed his nose and covered his chin. Pale as milk and lightly
sheathed in sweat, he was delivered to the courtroom in handcuffs
each day, wearing his only suit, a light blue herringbone weave
much too large for his gaunt frame.

Marlys Edwardh, thirty-eight at the time of the trial, wore the
black gown and white wing collar required of lawyers appearing in
high court. She gave the appearance of calm as she studied her
notes. Beside her, keeping in order the reference
material she would need, was Delmar Doucette, then thirty-three,
lanky and bearded and excited; his call to the bar had occurred
only two weeks earlier. Cathy Mocha, twenty-nine, austere and
composed, sat at the other end of the table with Staff Sergeant
Bobby Adair of Metro homicide beside her.

To Karen's surprise, her family wasn't notified that the trial
was scheduled. She was the one, in fact, who told them the court
dates and, well schooled by Marlys, explained the arcane ways of
the criminal justice system. She informed them that they were
entitled to have the transcripts of their testimony at the
preliminary hearing. Her father was anxious to prepare himself
for the trial by refreshing his memory, so he tried to contact
Crown lawyer Cathy Mocha to request the transcripts.

A week before the trial, they still had not arrived. Karen told
Marlys, who volunteered to copy her own set of transcripts to
help him.

"The family had been very fair-minded in their testimony at the
preliminary," Marlys explains. "It was in our interest to have
them give their evidence the same way."

Marlys is meticulous in preparing her
witnesses, so Karen had ample explanations for the ritualistic
procedures of a formal court and became the family's legal
consultant. She provided reasons for such matters as why
witnesses had to sit in sad little rooms waiting to be
called when they would rather watch the trial, and why the jury
sometimes was excluded. As the trial unfolded, Denis found it
simpler to ask Del Doucette directly what was happening and what
he could expect next. Though an odd one, the relationship between
the Crown's most compelling witness and the defence lawyer was no
more strange than any of the other tangled relationships in the
extraordinary case.

Karen sat alone. Ken's grandmother Lil Hodge, mother, and
brothers sat together, and Denis Woods sat with his other
children. Karen moved between both groups, on good terms with
everyone but belonging to neither.

"I wanted to make a statement for the jury that I was
independent," she explains. "I didn't sit with Ken's family and I
didn't sit with my family. I sat by myself."

She found it unbearable to look at Ken, so thin and ill-looking.
It was painful to be so close but not to be allowed to touch him.
She hated the handcuffs on his wrists that his escort removed
after he was brought into the courtroom.

There was also the awkward moment when Del Doucette gave Ken a
belt to hold up his toolarge pants, which otherwise would have
fallen. Since Ken was not allowed a belt in the cells, it was a
ritual that Del repeated every morning before the judge arrived.
Every afternoon when the court recessed for the night, Ken
removed the belt and returned it to the lawyer.

Karen watched without expression. She kept her dignity but she
wept inside.

On May 2, the trial started with two pretrial motions presented
by the defence. One was to exclude Ken's
second taped statement to the police, made after he said he
couldn't afford a lawyer, and the other to exclude statements
made to the police by Karen and by Ken's mother, Betty Parks.
That took three days; Marlys succeeded in convincing the judge on
both motions. Judge Watt's decision on the motion that the second
tape was inadmissible found its way to the Supreme Court of
Canada almost two years later, where Mr. Justice Lamer, on behalf
of a unanimous court, ruled that justice is not done when an
accused person isn't informed of the right to be represented by a
publicly funded lawyer when the person is unable to pay for legal
services.

On the afternoon of Thursday, May 5, selection of the jury began
and proceeded briskly. The Crown used its options to exclude such
people as nurses, teachers, and social workers, who might be
expected to have some experience with the bizarre
potentials of human behaviour. Teachers are a favourite of
defence lawyers because they have a reputation for compassion and
comprehension. Marlys, allowed fewer refusals than the Crown, was
obliged to guard her challenges carefully and was so frugal with
them that at the end she had two left over.

"No questions are allowed by either side," Del Doucette explains.
"We had their names, their ages, and their occupations. Beyond
that all we could do was look them in the eye and decide if we
wanted them or not."

Marlys was looking for intelligence and signs of the varied life
experience that would be needed to know that truth often is
stranger than fiction. Since the defence rested on a bedrock of
scientific evidence, Marlys wanted people who would be able to
understand the technical language of the sleep-disorder experts.
She was also looking for mature adults, rather than young
people inexperienced in the complexities of relationships.

Two people were excluded because they knew Ken. One was a friend
of the Hodge family and the other dated a girl he knew.

"You look at the jury and it's scary," says Karen. "You think,
these people are going to decide Ken's life. This whole year that
we've been through comes to these people. What they decide
changes Ken's life, it changes my life, it changes Melissa's
life. It's really scary."

Karen, always keen on what's fair, was indignant to discover that
the Crown was allowed many more refusals of prospective jurors
than the defence. She thought it should be even. "Basically the
Crown gets to pick the jury, because the defence runs out of
refusals."

Cathy Mocha called the first witness, Denis Woods, and to the
horror of the defence asked him about insurance. She wanted to
know if the family had ever talked about taking out insurance,
and he replied that the subject had been discussed.

The Crown left the exchange hanging there while Marlys sat still,
enduring a storm of feeling. "It was one of those horrible
moments for a lawyer," she said later. "It happens every once in
a while. I couldn't get up fast enough to stop the question
because it just popped out. Once it was out, I couldn't protest
because the jury would think that there _was insurance."

The possibility that Denis and Barbara had insurance from which
Ken would benefit was one of the first concerns addressed by
Marlys when she started the case, because such a policy would
establish a motive for the killing. She had learned that no such
arrangement existed. The family had discussed insurance
briefly one time after Melissa's birth, when Ken and Karen
thought of insuring themselves and making Denis and Barbara
beneficiaries to raise their child in the event of their deaths,
but nothing had been done about it.

No mention of insurance had been made at the preliminary hearing.
Cathy Mocha's question planted the suggestion in the jury's mind
that Ken might benefit from the death of Barbara and Denis Woods.
From the defence point of view, the well was poisoned, though
Marlys in her cross-examination of Denis was careful to draw from
him the true facts.

Still, the jury was left with a very damaging innuendo. When
Denis Woods finished testifying, the court adjourned for the day
and Marlys and Del sat down to prepare a motion for mistrial.

The next morning, however, the motion was pre-empted. One of the
jurors asked to be excused on the grounds of hardship to sit on a
trial that was expected to last for three weeks. After a great
deal of discussion it was agreed by all parties to start again
the following Monday with a new jury.

The second jury of twelve, eight men and four women, included a
pilot, a data-entry officer, a bookkeeper, an executive
assistant, a driver, a keyer, an engineer, a supervisor, a
technologist, an expediter, a real-estate agent, and a
consultant. There was a great range of ages. Two were black, both
women. The jury foreman was the expediter and looked the part, a
confident man with a decisive air.

"They were average-looking, everyday people," Karen commented.

Ken felt more comfortable with the second jury. He liked their
looks, all of them intent and serious. Karen, too, studied their
faces, looking for clues as to how they felt, but all developed
masks that she found inscrutable. "I didn't get any feeling
watching them which witnesses they believed and which they
didn't, who they liked and who they didn't like," she sighed.
"They showed no emotion at all."

She liked watching the pilot best. He really slouched in his
chair, which was in the front row, closest to the benches where
the spectators sat, and sometimes he almost disappeared from
sight. "His posture was awful," she comments, grinning.

The trial began again on Monday, May 9, 1988, with prior
agreement from Cathy Mocha that there would be no more mention of
insurance.

The Crown attorney opened with a brief summary for the jury of
what she intended to prove. Kenneth Parks, she said, drove
twenty-three kilometres from his home in Pickering to the
home in Scarborough of his wife's parents, entered through a
basement door, tried to strangle Denis Woods, hit Barbara Woods
with a tire-iron, got a knife from the kitchen, and then stabbed
them both, Barbara Woods fatally. Afterwards he went to a police
station and said he had been sleeping and woke to find a knife in
his hand.

The jury listened impassively. A court reporter yawned: nothing
much to this.

Cathy Mocha then called her first witness, Gregory John
Schofield, a police draftsman. He provided the court with
diagrams of the townhouse at Unit 85, 25 Brimwood
(exhibits 1 and 1A). There was an intake of breath and craning of
heads when she called the next witness: "Denis John Woods."

Denis Woods, then forty-six years old, a reserved, inward man
whose head bore the scars of knife wounds, took the stand calmly.
He answered the attorney's questions with a deliberate,
considered manner and even tone. Before she began the part of her
examination that would deal with Ken's relationship with the
Woods family, Cathy Mocha turned and gave Del Doucette a
significant look. Del twisted around to catch Karen's eye, and
Karen nodded and left the courtroom. At the request of the Crown,
Karen was to be excluded when any of her family testified about
their feelings for Ken.

Denis maintained his composure through a long series of questions
about the family's relationship with Ken Parks.

To one such question he replied, "Well, when he married into the
family, we treated him like a son from that point of time."

"Did your relationship with Mr. Parks change?" asked Cathy Mocha.

"I wouldn't say so, in the sense that we were always on speaking
terms up to, I suppose, when we became aware of Karen's
problems. ... Karen tended to come round just as frequently, but
he wasn't with her."

"Could you describe for the members of the jury how your wife
appeared to get along with the accused?"

Denis answered, "Again, just like a mother to him subsequent to
the marriage, as far as I saw."

"About how often would Karen see your wife?"

"I would think four or five times a week."

Denis was in the stand most of the day. Late in his
testimony, Cathy Mocha showed him a knife sheath and a Wilkinson
stay-sharp knife (exhibits 3 and 4), which he identified as the
one Barbara kept in a kitchen drawer near the stove.

The questions Marlys asked in cross-examination emphasized that
Denis Woods had had no warning that someone was in the room
before he woke in the dark to find someone straddling his body
and trying to choke him. That was done to remind the jury of the
strangeness of the situation.

Her questions about the knife brought out another point. She
established that it was kept in the same drawer with a bread
knife, that it was kept sharpened, and that it was in a sheath
that made it difficult to recognize as a knife. A person seeking
a knife but unfamiliar with the cutlery would be more likely to
seize the naked bread knife than the one in the sheath.

Inference: Ken Parks didn't take the knife out of the drawer.
Barbara Woods did.

She moved to the area of Ken's place in the Woods family.

"From your perspective did you feel he was a positive influence
on Karen?"

"It appeared to settle Karen down, yes," Denis nodded. "She
became a more normal daughter in the household."

"She went back to school? She completed her school?"

"That's correct."

"And you felt during this time that Ken was a hard-working young
man?"

"Yes."

"And, indeed, he and Karen had done quite
well ..."

"Yes, indeed."

"... given their position and how long they had been married?"

"Yes. Yes."

Marlys found it remarkable that Denis was so willing to be fair
to Ken, despite the opportunity he
had to cast doubt on the young man's character. Most people who
suffer great loss as a result of someone's action are not
inclined to frame their views of that person in other than
a nasty light.

Denis was forthcoming even about Barbara's affection for Ken.

"She had a pet name for him, did she not?" Marlys asked.

"She always used to call him the gentle giant," he replied
steadily.

The children testified next, and Karen was shuffled out of the
room by Del just before they spoke about their feelings towards
Ken. Prudence, fifteen years old and nervous, led off, followed
the next day by Emma, twenty, who spoke in such a soft, frail
voice that she had to be cautioned many times to speak up.
Jonathan, seventeen, was next. When he described the marriage of
Ken and Karen Parks, he made the jury smile. "When they came over
they always seemed to be laughing and not too uptight," he said
earnestly.

Samantha, twenty-two, closest in age to Karen, was the last. It
was hurtful to Ken when she said her relationship with him was
"distant".

The testimonies developed a rhythm, the Crown attorney drawing
from the young people the chronology of that night of horror, the
defence attorney concentrating on the good relations Ken had had
with the Woods family. To the jury's puzzlement, both spent
considerable time asking about the parking arrangements for cars
belonging to the Woods family and their visitors.

Marlys and Del were confused by the Crown's fascination with the
subject of parking. They couldn't imagine why it mattered so much
to the prosecution to establish where visitors usually parked.
They concluded that Cathy Mocha was going to argue in summation
that Ken had parked in an unfamiliar slot, thus indicating that
he was conscious when he drove to Scarborough that night, but the
truth was that Ken and Karen often parked behind townhouse 77.
Mystified, but anxious to take nothing for granted, Marlys in
cross-examination also dealt with parking, until the jury was
saturated with information about the guest parking slots at 25
Brimwood.

Similarly, the Crown appeared anxious to establish which lights
were on in the household. Marlys couldn't see where that would
take the prosecution, but she defended against all possibilities
by asking a blizzard of questions herself
about the lights. She succeeded in establishing that no one
agreed which lights were on when the police arrived and which the
police had turned on themselves, reflexively.

"I didn't know what she was trying to do with the lights,"
Marlys explains, "so I set out to confuse everybody. We got so
many versions about the lights, all different, that we nullified
whatever she had been planning to do."

Late on Tuesday morning the parade of police witnesses began,
leading off with Richard Wiszniowski of the Metro Police
identification bureau. He told of following a trail of blood from
the counter in the police station to a red Capri parked outside.
Patrick Sayer of the Durham Police identification section then
brought pictures of the empty garage beside the Parks townhouse
in Pickering and of Ken's cluttered workbench; these solemnly
became exhibits 10 and 11.

Constable Clarence Blake, who drove the route between the Parks
townhouse and the Woods townhouse several times, testified that
the distance was 23.3 kilometres. Sergeant Ian Mann of the Metro
Toronto Police identification bureau brought the
knife sheath, blood-stained sheets, blankets and pillowcases, and
a stack of colour photographs of Ken's car and the interior of
the Woods townhouse. The jury looked with dismay at pictures of
bloodstains on walls, a kitchen drawer sinisterly agape, a
telephone off the hook.

Two photographs were of tire-irons, one found by police behind a
box in the blood-drenched master bedroom and another in the back
of Ken's car. The exhibits now totalled fifty-two.

John Mustard, a forensic engineer in the attorney general's
department, testified next. His job was to establish that the
jack found on a dusty shelf in Ken Parks' garage belonged to a
Chevette, a model of car Ken had once owned. Before he could
begin, Marlys Edwardh protested that she could not see the point
to his testimony.

The jury withdrew while Marlys Edwardh and Cathy Mocha gave their
reasons to the judge with the elaborate politeness required by
courtroom etiquette, though both were actually quite irritated.
The dispute found a simple resolution. Marlys consulted with Ken,
who said the jack indeed belonged to his old Chevette. He had
forgotten to replace it in the trunk when he sold the car.

The character of the early part of the trial was established.
Cathy Mocha, whose style is cool and distant, was taking an
aggressive approach, pushing the Crown's case to the edge of
admissibility at every turn. Marlys Edwardh was playing the role
of a blocker, protesting whenever the Crown strayed from a path
that she thought the evidence supported.

The skirmishes always were conducted with the jury absent and
went more often to the defence than the Crown. For instance,
Marlys was able to exclude ghastly photographs of Denis
Woods' fresh wounds, images that most certainly would have been
seared into the memories of the jury when it came time to discuss
the verdict.

Denis Woods came every day. Sometimes during the recesses he
chatted with Lil Hodge, who staunchly maintained her position
that both families were civilized people who had no cause to be
rude to one another. Many days all the Woods children were there.
Karen talked easily with them in the corridor outside the
courtroom, but they stuck to inconsequentials and avoided
speaking about the trial.

Judge Watt, regarded as one of the brightest and most promising
young judges in the country, showed himself an amiable, relaxed
man. When the jury had been dismissed late Tuesday afternoon, he
asked Cathy Mocha if she could tell him when the case for the
Crown might be completed.

"Yes, my lord," she replied. "The Crown's case is moving along
much more quickly than I anticipated."

"It sometimes does," he replied drily.

She smiled back and said that she hoped to finish by Friday.

He asked Marlys Edwardh when she expected to finish.

"I'm such a terrible estimator," she confessed.

"Well," the judge sighed, "I'll bear that in mind."

She reflected and told him she might finish in five days. The
judge reminded the lawyers that the first long weekend of the
summer was looming. He didn't want to instruct the jury just
before a threeday holiday and oblige them to be isolated from
their families over that period.

When they caught his point, the lawyers promised that they could
not complete their presentations until after the long weekend.

Cathy Mocha began on Wednesday morning, May 11, 1988, with a
General Motors employee, Alick MacLean, who established that the
car jack in the Parks garage and the tire-iron found in Denis
Woods' bedroom came from a Chevette, models 1976 to 1987.

Heidi Turner, the night clerk in the 42 Division police station,
then described Ken's dramatic entrance just before five o'clock
on the morning of May 24, 1987. Though she had been in a
witness-box only once before, at the preliminary, and was
fearful, she provided a graphic glimpse into the chaos of
those moments after Ken's arrival at the station.

Describing the frantic scene as Ken's hands were being crudely
bandaged, she said breathlessly, "I was asking whether I should
call an ambulance, and the phones were ringing, and I was
answering the phones and trying to check out his name on our
computer system and answering our police radio, and I also went
and locked the front door."

For a moment, the scene leaped to life for the jury. Marlys
Edwardh was to use that glimpse into the reality of the chaos to
suggest that none of the police witnesses
could be certain what they heard Ken say and, certainly, it was
unlikely that any one of them had stepped back from the confusion
to take notes, as they solemnly claimed they had.

"It's simply ludicrous to say that they were taking notes,"
Marlys comments. "When Ken stumbled into the station he was
trying to make sense of the pieces of distorted memory he had. He
had the mystery of Barbara's face and the fact that he couldn't
remember Denis. Putting that together with finding a knife in his
hand, he thought he could have killed someone. To say, as he is
reported, `I have killed my mother-in-law and my father-in-law,`
is inconsistent with amnesia. He assumed he had done something,
that something horrible had happened, possibly a killing. Then he
noticed his hands, which hadn't even hurt him to that point, and
he said, `_My _hands,` as one would to see wounds gushing blood."

The police on duty that morning appeared next in the witness-box,
starting with Sergeant Henry Flavelle. The courthouse gossip was
that Flavelle had claimed credit for solving the case on the
grounds that he had heard Ken's confession. When questioned by
the Crown he gave a rather bland picture of his own deportment in
the few minutes after Ken's arrival and suggested that Ken's
behaviour was coherent. Checking her transcript of the
preliminary trial, when Flavelle did not know that sleepwalking
would be the defence, Marlys Edwardh reminded the officer that he
had testified then that Ken's state of mind appeared to be one of
amazement.

"You said," she reminded him, "`The tone of his voice was ... uh
... amazement. Like `I've really done this?` ..."

The sergeant didn't like the direction in which the defence
attorney was taking him. Finally he conceded that he had had an
impression that Ken was full of amazement.

Constable Frederick Palmer came next. He had been in the police
car that followed Sergeant Flavelle to the Woods townhouse, and
he was the officer who had stayed with Denis Woods until the
ambulance arrived. His testimony and that of the officers who
followed him, Larry Webb and Cecil Gerrard, gave slightly
different accounts of the tumultuous minutes when the officers
tried to stanch the flow of blood from Ken's hands and then
abandoned the effort and drove him to the hospital.

Marlys Edwardh, cross-examining each briefly, ensured that the
jury appreciated the heightened excitement of those few minutes
and the unlikelihood that anyone's memory was entirely accurate.

"The jury needed to understand that everyone was getting the gist
of what Ken said," she explains, "but no utterance was faithfully
recorded. Their recollections simply weren't reliable."

That ended Wednesday's witnesses. On Thursday, Cathy Mocha led
off with Sergeant Colin Arthur Ashton. He offered something new.
When he took Ken's arm in the police station, he said, he thought
the man might collapse from the amount of blood he was losing.
When Marlys asked him if he made notes about the moment when he
was holding Ken, the officer said that note-taking was not a
pressing concern at the time.

"The problem being the situation we were faced with," he told her
honestly. "It was out of control."

Constable Brian Penwarden followed. He was there to testify that
when the officers ran out of the station to investigate what had
happened in the Woods townhouse, Ken said to him helpfully,
"They'll need keys to get in." On the front counter next to a
huge pool of blood, Penwarden found bloodstained keys on a
key-chain with a miniature wrench and gave them to Sergeant
Flavelle, who was just about to pull away in a cruiser.

Eric Puusa, the police officer who had stayed by Ken's side for
five hours in the Scarborough Grace hospital emergency room,
presented the notes he had made of Ken's disjointed statements.
Constable Murray Grills, on patrol that night with Puusa,
followed. Ken Parks, he said, was sobbing in great distress.

After lunch, David Montgomery, a forensic scientist, took the
stand to present the blood analysis evidence. He explained in
some detail why the Woods case presented problems for him. Some
samples were blood type AB, which might mean that they came from
a person with blood type AB, a relatively rare type, or that they
were a mixture of the blood of two people, one of them A and the
other B.

Ken's jacket, for instance, was stained with blood from his type,
blood from Denis Woods' type, and blood that belonged to neither
Ken, Denis, or Barbara Woods. The other garments provided the
same confusion. The blood found in the garage and the car,
however, was Ken's. Human blood stains found on the kitchen
drawer didn't belong to Barbara, Denis, or Ken but might have
been a mixture of Barbara's and Ken's blood. The blood on the
telephone, however, seemed to be from Denis Woods.

As his explanations grew more technical, the jury began to look
thoroughly baffled. One part of his evidence, however, stood out.
Ken's blood was found on the bedding in the bedroom. It seemed
that during the second attack on Denis Woods, Ken's hands had
already been cut by the knife.

Next was Dr. Ernest Salmon, the surgeon at Scarborough Grace
hospital who examined the wounds sustained by Denis Woods and Ken
Parks. He was on the stand for more than an hour, after which the
jury knew the details of the injuries to both men: Ken's fingers
had been cut severely, and Denis Woods had numerous knife wounds
to his head and back.

That ended Thursday's testimony. When the jury had filed out,
Judge Watt asked Cathy Mocha if she was proceeding on schedule
and she said she was. She expected to finish the next day. Marlys
Edwardh had given notice that she was going to file
an application to the court in the absence of the jury. As
everyone knew, she intended to ask that the charge be reduced
from first-degree murder to seconddegree murder. That effort had
failed at the preliminary hearing
and failed at the Supreme Court level, but she was undeterred.
She firmly believed that the Crown didn't have any evidence that
Ken had planned and deliberately carried out the killing. She
warned the judge that her application might require the entire
afternoon.

On Friday morning, Cathy Mocha advised Judge Watt that she was
calling additional witnesses. The schedule was about to be
derailed.

After four days of police, doctors, and forensic scientists, the
jury was refreshed to find that the first witness that day was a
youth, Martin Liss, a twenty-year-old York University student who
lives at unit 81 on 25 Brimwood Boulevard and is a neighbour of
the Woods family. For reasons that baffled the jury, he simply
testified that on the night in question he parked his father's
Volkswagen van in the Liss family's space in front of the
basement entrance to their townhouse.

Marlys was stunned by this. What was the Crown doing?
Had she missed something crucial about the parking space?

Then, while perplexity hung in the air, Sergeant Ian Mann was
recalled. Cathy Mocha wanted him to tell the jury about the trail
of blood he had followed from the basement door of unit 85. He
testified that the trail led from unit 85 to a space behind unit
77. A photograph of the location became Exhibit 68.

Marlys thought she understood. Cathy Mocha was preparing to tell
the jury in her summation that Ken had parked in an unfamiliar
place and then ran there directly after the killing, showing that
he was fully aware of what he was doing. Marlys, however,
remembered Karen telling her that the trail of blood went in one
direction and then another, as if Ken hadn't been sure where the
car was.

The defence lawyer was rough with the sergeant. She asked him
sharply if he was trying to follow "a true trail" of
blood-stains. He replied that he was.

"If you were documenting a true trail," she continued implacably,
"in the ordinary course would you not have counted the number of
droplets and measured their consistency, their frequency, and
also exactly where they were?"

The officer looked annoyed. "Perhaps I should have, but I did not
do it in this case."

"You didn't do that," Marlys echoed, to make sure the jury got
the point that police work had been casual in the Parks case.

At the end of a series of questions, she pounced.

"All I would really like to suggest to you, sir, is that,
although it is clear that you may have seen a pattern of drops
going down to unit 77, or in that direction, what you cannot say
to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury is that you measured with
any precision to see whether or not the person, for example, was
moving four or five feet each way or whether the person may have
stopped and turned back for one step and gone forward. That
wasn't the kind of analysis you did?"

Sergeant Mann, thoroughly irritated, replied tersely, "No."

The Crown's next witness that Friday morning was Paul Longo, a
Bell Canada employee. He said that the Woods household had one
Bell telephone in the kitchen and that three phones elsewhere in
the house were connected to the Bell line. He provided the
information that when one phone was off the
hook, none of the phones would be operable. The jury then was
treated to a recording of dial tone, then the familiar loud
beep-beep-beep of a phone off the hook, lasting eighty seconds,
and then a metallic voice pleasantly asking the caller to replace
the receiver.

Marlys thought this was pointless. She assumed that the Crown was
trying to lay the groundwork for saying that Ken had taken the
kitchen receiver off the hook in order to prevent a call
for help. Since police had testified that the kitchen phone was
on the hook when they arrived on the scene, this premise didn't
make sense. Ken would have had to replace the phone after the
killing, in which case there would have been copious amounts of
blood in the kitchen and on the telephone. The logical
explanation for why the phone was off the hook, Marlys thought,
was that the bedroom phone had been knocked off the table during
the struggle and the investigating police had inadvertently put
it back on the hook.

"The police who went to the Woods house that morning weren't
trained to do homicide," Marlys observes. "They were responding
to an emergency in which human life was involved. It was more
important to see to Denis and to look for more victims than to
think about preserving evidence. The only fingerprints found in
the place were those of the police. They handled everything.

John Cowan, a police constable with traffic division, then
described testing the two routes from Ken's house to the Woods
townhouse. Taking Highway 401, as Ken always did, the trip
clocked at 23.3 kilometres and involved making six turns and
observing two stop signs and fourteen traffic lights. Another
route, slightly shorter, included nine turns, two stop signs, and
twenty-nine traffic lights. The time elapsed was about sixteen
minutes.

After a recess that morning and before the jury was recalled,
Marlys Edwardh objected to the next witness Cathy Mocha was
planning to call, a traffic engineer who would testify to the
timing of the traffic lights over the route that Ken drove. The
defence lawyer declared that the evidence would be hearsay. Cathy
Mocha said her witness would only discuss which lights were
operating before dawn on May 24. Marlys Edwardh continued to
protest.

"Well, is this a real big issue or something?" the judge asked.

"Well, it is becoming one," replied Marlys
grimly. "I don't think it would assist the jury at all."

The judge seemed to agree, "Will they really be assisted by an
engineer who might talk in language that some of them will be
unable to understand?" he inquired of the prosecution lawyer.

Cathy Mocha accepted defeat, asking instead that she be allowed
to show the jury a map of the route with the traffic lights
marked.

Looking at Marlys Edwardh, the judge commented drily, "I wouldn't
think you would have much dispute about where roads are in
Metropolitan Toronto."

She said quickly, "There is none."

The road map of Scarborough became Exhibit 72.

Cathy Mocha then called Dr. Emil Orsini, a resident in orthopedic
surgery who had performed the operation on Ken's hands in
Sunnybrook Hospital. The jury learned again that on Ken's right
hand the tendons and nerves of three fingers were severed, with
the little finger cut the deepest. On the left hand, tendons and
nerves were cut on the ring and little fingers. Pictures of Ken's
hands five weeks later showed an extra laceration on the index
finger of the right hand that had been missed by Dr. Orsini
and Dr. Salmon in their preliminary examinations.

Cathy Mocha asked if the injuries were consistent with someone
holding the knife in one hand and accidentally sliding his other
hand along the blade. The doctor said that was possible. If the
injuries were inflicted that way, Marlys Edwardh asked in
cross-examination, wouldn't the doctor expect to see all the
fingers cut instead of only three? The doctor agreed. Marlys then
asked if the injuries were consistent with someone mindlessly
trying to grab a knife away from someone else. Her point was that
no mentally alert person would seize a sharp knife by the blade.

"It's possible, yes," he said.

The next witness for the prosecution was Staff Sergeant Bobby
Burns Adair, the Metro Toronto homicide detective who had headed
the Parks investigation. He gave an account of his inspection of
the Woods townhouse, the appearance of the body of Barbara Woods,
and his meeting with Ken Parks in Sunnybrook. He brought with him
the tape (Exhibit 73) of his interview with Ken. Because Ken's
gasping responses were sometimes difficult to understand, the
Crown provided the jury with a transcript to help them follow
along.

Ken's voice alternated between a breathless monotone and
emotional outbursts as he told police that he could remember
nothing after falling asleep in front of the television after
watching _Saturday _Night _Live.

"All I know, I woke up and I saw her face and her face looked so
sad. I don't know how I got there. I don't remember." Asked on
the tape if he could remember stabbing two people, he replied, "I
just remember seeing her face. I ran." He said he thought he ran
to the telephone in the kitchen to call the police, but he wasn't
sure about that. He talked disjointedly about his marital
problems because of his gambling on the horses.

"I have a gambling problem and my wife. ... It was my fault. I
gambled away all the money .... I lost all the money I saved
after I stopped working there, and I lost all the money we had in
savings."

Ken, sitting in the prisoner's box, bent over and put his hands
over his ears.

When her turn came to cross-examine the witness, Marlys began
aggressively. She wanted to know why police hadn't seized the
screwdrivers, a knife, and a hand hatchet in the hatchback of
Ken's car, since these were potential murder weapons. Adair said
uncomfortably that there might have been "some confusion" because
two investigative teams were working at once.

She asked if he had tested the other keys on the key ring used by
Ken. He had not.

Marlys had been chipping all week at the degree of sloppiness in
the police investigation. She was hoping the jury had not missed
it.

The Crown's final witness for the day and the week was Dr. Hans
Sepp, the forensic pathologist who had performed the autopsy on
Barbara Woods. Marlys was shocked that the Crown hadn't warned
the Woods family that this evidence would be painful to hear. She
dispatched Del Doucette to tell Denis that the testimony would be
grisly. He gravely thanked the defence lawyer and sent his
children out of the courtroom.

Marlys comments, "Pathologists are always detached. They make
death seem meaningless, like a cucumber on a shelf."

With the predicted lack of emotion, Hans Sepp described Barbara
Woods as a forty-one-yearold woman, five feet four and a half
inches in height, weighing one hundred and fifteen pounds. She
had been stabbed five times, once to the heart. This wound had
killed her, but there were four more to her chest and back. In
addition she had been struck on the face and head with a blunt
instrument or, possibly, had come into forceful contact with the
wall. A single blow had broken her nose and skull. The doctor,
shown the tire-iron that was Exhibit 5, agreed that it could have
been the weapon.

Also, some ribs were broken. The doctor thought those injuries
came from the body's being pressed against a hard surface. Marlys
Edwardh elicited from the doctor the startling information that
Barbara Woods could have walked upstairs despite the broken ribs
(to the kitchen, perhaps, for the knife) and would have lived and
been conscious for some twenty minutes after the wound to her
heart. The blow to the head, however, would have caused almost
immediate unconsciousness.

A dreadful picture was being drawn of Barbara screaming
while being stabbed, certainly in the bedroom to judge from the
quantity of blood found there, and then stumbling into the next
room where she was struck on the head and abruptly silenced.

That ended the case for the Crown. Thirty witnesses had testified
to the death of Barbara Woods; seventy-four exhibits had been
entered and a number of admissions. It was mid-afternoon on
Friday, May 13, 1988, and a tired jury left for the weekend. At
three minutes to four, Marlys buckled down to work. She moved for
an acquittal on the charge of first-degree murder. She said, as
she had on two other occasions, that there was no evidence that
the murder of Barbara Ann Woods was planned.

"It has not been shown," she insisted, "that there is any
calculated scheme or design carefully considered by the accused
in advance of his homicidal act. The evidence discloses no
preexisting intention to kill; indeed, it is the very antithesis
of such intention when one considers the nature of the
relationship between the accused and the deceased, more
particularly the lack of enmity or animus. It is acknowledged
that the accused took a tireiron with him, but such circumstance,
whether viewed singly or in combination, affords no evidence of a
pre-existing plan nor its implementation."

Cathy Mocha protested that a jury, properly instructed by the
judge, could find the murder to be planned and deliberate. The
evidence, though circumstantial, could support such a view.

"He took a weapon to the house of the deceased," she argued. "He
had two sets of keys and a flashlight. He was there in the early
hours of the morning on the day there was to be a discussion of
the accused's gambling problem at a family meeting. He drove some
distance to the scene. He didn't simply arise from sleep and
strike out at the first person he met."

Further, she added, the Crown was not required to show a motive
in order to establish that the murder was planned. The apparent
absence of motive was irrelevant.

Judge Watt listened patiently to both lawyers and announced when
they finished half an hour later that he was reserving his
decision.

On Monday, May 16, 1988, in a courtroom still empty of the jury,
he was ready with his ruling. In the suspenseful preamble, Judge
Watt noted that the test for a charge of first-degree murder
included "that the murder which the accused committed was planned
and deliberate". If a reasonable jury could not find such intent,
the accused would have to be found not guilty of first-degree
murder. The judge might even direct the jury to acquit. He quoted
the applicable statutory provision, which
reads: "Murder is firstdegree murder when it is planned and
deliberate."

Citing many legal definitions of deliberate-"not impulsive",
"slow in deciding", "considered" --the judge
ruled that the murder of Barbara Ann Woods did not fall under the
definition of planned and deliberate.

"There is not, in my respectful view," he declared, "any evidence
upon the basis of which a reasonable jury, properly instructed,
could conclude that the accused's murder of the deceased was
planned and deliberate in the sense required by the authorities.
... The application, accordingly, succeeds."

Before the judge could call in the jury, some minor hitches
arose. Ken's trial for fraud was scheduled in a downstairs
courtroom, and Marlys was obliged to hustle there and ask for an
adjournment. Cathy Mocha had a problem of a different kind. She
was trying to find a sleep-disorder expert to counter the
authorities that Marlys would be producing. She hoped to call a
sleep-disorder specialist, but was having trouble getting in
touch with him. She asked the judge to adjourn until after lunch.

"My lord," said Marlys, "with the greatest of respect to my
friend's dilemma, I am really quite speechless at the notion that
her expert has vanished into the night. ... In any trial of this
kind, my lord, a great deal of work gets done, and an enormous
amount of stress rests upon Mr. Parks. He expects us today to do
an opening and then he will proceed, as best he can, to put
before you and the ladies and gentlemen of the jury his position
and understanding of what happened that night. To ask him to
defer is, in my opinion, extremely unfair and almost a little
inhumane."

She continued, "We have a number of experts who are coming in
from different cities. Some of them can only be available at
certain times."

Her anxiety was real. Roger Broughton, her star witness, was
leaving for Italy in two days. To her relief, the judge agreed to
adjourn only until eleven.

With that he called in the jury and explained that his
responsibility as judge was not to infringe on theirs, but he was
obliged to make rulings on points of law. He described the
requirements for firstdegree murder charges to succeed and
informed the jury that he found an absence of proof of "the
essential ingredient", which was planning and deliberation.
Accordingly he was instructing the jury to find Kenneth Parks not
guilty of first-degree murder.


He suggested pleasantly that the jury didn't have to retire to
consider his instructions. The members could discuss it in the
jury box.

The jury foreman said with prompt spunkiness, "We wish to
retire."

A few minutes later the jury returned. With dignity the foreman
announced that the jury found Kenneth Parks not guilty of
first-degree murder. Without being relaid, the charge would stand
as seconddegree murder.

Ken was swept by relief. Instead of twentyfive years in prison,
he was looking at ten years. Ten years wasn't so terrible; Karen
might wait for him. He appreciated that it was still a life
sentence with only the _possibility of parole after ten years,
but he preferred to think of it as only ten years.

Marlys comments, "All it gave him is a little light at the end of
the tunnel. With twenty-five years, there's no light."

Marlys made her opening remarks to the jury, outlining her case.
She began by saying that there was a
warm and loving relationship between Ken Parks and his wife's
parents and, accordingly, that there was a total absence of
motive. She would be calling expert witnesses, forensic
psychiatrists, psychologists, neuro-psychiatrists, and experts in
the field of sleep disorders. The accused man is not mentally ill
and he does not have a disease of the brain, she declared. At the
time of the killing he was in a state of somnambulism, a sleep
state where there is no will and no conscious mind. The defence
would establish the history of sleeping disorders in the Parks
family, she went on, and show that, on the date of the killing,
Kenneth Parks was suffering from severe stress, had been
sleep-deprived for some weeks culminating in two nights without
any sleep, and had exhausted his body with strenuous exercise
that morning--all of which contributed to his state of protracted
deep sleep during which the activities occurred.

The jury showed no emotion, but idle spectators all over the
courtroom sat up in astonishment. Then Marlys called her first
witness: "Kenneth James Parks."

As Ken moved to the witness-box, Karen Parks stood up to leave
the courtroom. She knew she was allowed to stay, but she was
scheduled to testify later and she wanted to make it clear to the
jury that she wasn't parroting Ken's testimony. It had been
Marlys' suggestion that it would be better if her testimony
looked independent, and Karen agreed with the reasoning.
Besides, it would be difficult for her if it happened, as it
often does in marriages, that she and Ken
did not recollect events exactly the same; she'd rather present
her version without having to worry about what he had said.

She made her way out the courtroom door as conspicuously as she
dared. Marlys took Ken through his life story while the jury
studied the huge man. His nervousness was appealing. In the first
few minutes of his testimony Ken said he was "a very trudiant
kid", when he meant "truant". It was apparent that he also had
been a very lonely kid. "I was--I never really confided in
anyone," he explained when Marlys asked about his earliest
relationships. "I was always a self-supportive person."

He stumbled through testimony, sweating and anxious. The
transcript in some places is incoherent. Asked whether Barbara
Woods ever was critical of him, Ken said painfully, "Never. She
never. She never spoke--she never said anything to me or I never
felt anything. She always just gave me support and love."

Marlys probed in that area, asking if Karen's parents ever
criticized him or were angry with him. Ken replied, "No. They
were always supportive of me and I loved them and assumed they
loved me. I knew they loved me and I was like a son to them."

In a typical exchange, when Marlys was asking about his gambling,
she asked about his intentions towards his employer.

He said, "Well, I had intended on--if I got the big win, I was
waiting for the big win and when I got the big win I would pay
them, like pay them back, pay them, like pay my account, pay them
back, pay--just get everything just all straightened out again. I
had my daughter coming."

And again, when Marlys was asking about the effect of stress on
his work at Revere, he said, "My work was--I was having a lot of
pressure at work and my work, like slided. ... I put a lot of
things off, kept putting them off. ... Like work that had to be
done and then there's another work and I would put this one away
and start the other one and the pile would just start building
and building higher and higher."

The sentences weren't perfectly constructed, or
even grammatical, but a portrait emerged. Ken Parks, isolated as
a child, truly loved Karen's parents and for months before the
fatal night was over his head in trouble. He was working twelve
and fourteen hours a day and rushing to the track two or three
times a week to try to get his money back.

Then came a discussion of his deteriorating marriage. The lawyer
asked how his wife accepted his gambling.
"Karen would be quite upset, as expected. She would be
very upset and yell at me."

"What did you do when she yelled?"

"Listen."

Marlys wasn't sure she had heard the answer. "Sorry?"

Ken cleared his throat and tried again. "Listen, because I
deserved it. I deserved being yelled at. Like, I gambled away the
money. I did it of my free will and, like, I just--I deserved it,
so, you know, what could I do? I had to take it. I had to face up
to it."

"Did you ever yell back?"

"No, never."

Sometimes his humour showed, as when Marlys asked
him about rugby. He said the position he played was second row
lock, which he explained as, "I do all the running around chasing
after the guy with the ball, tackling him, and we do all the
dirty work and the backs get all the glory."

Another time when Ken was being cross-examined by the Crown, he
made the jury laugh out loud.

Cathy Mocha asked him to name his medication. When he did, she
asked him to spell it.

Ken considered. To apologize for the slowness of his reply, he
drawled, "It's a two-dollar word and I only have a dollar."

Late Monday afternoon, Ken Parks slowly, heavily, began to tell
the story of the night of the killing. He recited the memory
fragments he had, beginning with Barbara's face, the screams of
children upstairs, starting up the stairs calling, "Kids, kids,
kids," maybe trying to use the phone in the kitchen--and maybe
not--and sitting in his car with a knife in his hand.

He ran into the police station, he said, thinking, "What have I
done? Why am I here? What happened?"

Then he saw his hands gushing blood.

"Have you ever had any memory of hurting or
injuring either Mr. or Mrs. Woods?" Marlys asked.

Ken shook his head adamantly. "No. I would never do that. I loved
them. I would never hurt them. I would never _ever hurt them."

His lawyer's final question to him was, "Did you ever
apply for bail?"

Ken answered, "No, I was scared, scared. I didn't know what I had
done and I was scared of myself and I could feel how my
father-in-law must feel. Like, he was really scared, what was
happening to him. He's scared and I'm scared, just scared. I
didn't want to scare--I didn't want to hurt anyone. What if it
happened again and I hurt someone? I didn't want to hurt anyone."

Ken was on the stand until the adjournment Monday afternoon and
took the stand again Tuesday morning, May 17, for Cathy Mocha to
finish her crossexamination. Though the Crown counsel asked
sharply if Ken could remember using the telephone, or seeing
Denis Woods, or turning on lights, his testimony of what he did
remember didn't vary in the slightest from the previous day.

In one exchange with the Crown attorney he gave a better picture
of his state of mind in the police station than the jury had yet
heard. She asked him, "You thought all this might be a dream?"
and he replied, "Yes."

"Why did you think this might be a dream if you had never
remembered any of your dreams before?"

Ken replied, "Because, why was this happening? What was
happening? I don't know what was happening. I had a knife. Why
would I have a knife? I threw it down in the car. Why? I don't
know. I was just confused. I was trying to sort things out. I was
in shock. I didn't know what's happened and I was trying to piece
everything together, what everyone said. They charged me with
murder, and all the police saying this and this and this, and
hearing them outside the door and, I don't know."

"At the hospital do you remember telling the police you wanted
some help?"

"Yeah," Ken replied. "I wanted to be put out so I could go to
sleep and wake up and everything is over and, like nothing has
happened, wake up back on the couch. I don't know what's
happened. I'm just in a state of confusion. I'm in shock. I'm
shaking and then I'm hot and he's bringing me ice chips and he's
bringing me blankets and I'm just really shaking and I don't know
what's happened."

Karen thought Ken's appearance on the stand was a major asset to
the defence. "The jury saw him, right? They knew who he was and
what he was about," she says. "And they knew he wasn't a
monster."

Karen Woods Parks testified next. Her apprehension about this
moment had been so great that psychologist Graham Turrall
met her that morning over breakfast to help her steady her
nerves. She had made her choice. Between her family and her
husband, she had chosen Ken. The die was cast.

Small, sturdy, quick-witted, and decisive of manner, she went
over the now-familiar ground of Ken's warm relationship with her
parents, his unfamiliarity with the Woods kitchen (Barbara Woods,
it seemed, not only cooked big meals for her family without
assistance but also did the clean-up alone), more detail about
where visitors parked, and a good deal of testimony about Ken's
sleeping habits.

After Melissa was born, she said, "Ken would come to bed with me.
We would get into bed. We would both be tired and he would end up
getting out of bed again half an hour later and just tell me he
couldn't sleep and he would go downstairs. He would go and watch
some TV."

As time went by in the late winter of 1987, "there were more
nights when he couldn't sleep."

Marlys asked, "In the weeks prior to the incident before your
mother died, do you recall where Ken was sleeping most of the
time?"

"On the couch."

Cathy Mocha spent only a brief time on the cross-examination.
Karen Parks wasn't a witness who could be rattled.

After the lunch break, Marlys Edwardh advised the judge that
later that day she might be calling two men confined in the cells
downstairs. She had mentioned them before to the judge because
she was anxious that they remain available to her rather than be
returned to Metro East. The two, Wayne Thompson and Michael
Bellis, were cell-mates of Ken's, and both could testify to
witnessing Ken's disturbed sleep patterns in prison.

"The ones who are at Her Majesty's pleasure?" he asked with a
small smile.

"Yes," she nodded, "but I would ask that they not be brought
through that door in leg-irons and handcuffs."

The judge's smile disappeared. "No," he said emphatically. "They
will be brought through this door without
leg-irons or handcuffs, unless there is some specific security
risk of which I am made aware and of which I am not presently
aware."

"Thank you, my lord," said Marlys. "I appreciate your
consideration."

Her concern was not entirely for the dignity of her witnesses.
Marlys was anxious to show the jury that Ken's sleep problems,
particularly his difficulty in falling asleep and later his
sleeptalking, were normal to him. She was expecting that Cathy
Mocha would challenge Ken's family, who were soon to testify that
Ken had a history of sleep disorders, and she wanted some extra
money in the bank.

At the same time she worried about the prison context that she
would be putting around Ken. The jury, seeing his two cell-mates,
might unconsciously see Ken in a different light, as someone who
associates with criminals. "The connection with them was
accidental and would never have happened in Ken's normal life,"
Marlys was thinking, "but still it might colour Ken."

That kind of shift in perception is deadly when a jury is finely
balanced between conflicting views of an accused person's
credibility. Marlys couldn't
make up her mind whether she needed to risk it, but meanwhile she
wanted her witnesses at hand.

The next witness was Ken's seventy-year-old grandmother, Lilly
Hodge, who had been attending the trial every day, sitting very
erect on the uncomfortable bench provided for spectators. Most of
the time she was in such a state of fright that she couldn't draw
a deep breath. She was trembling as she approached the
witness-box. Throughout her testimony, lawyers and the judge
pleaded with her to speak up, but she couldn't get her voice
above a whisper. Lil Hodge weeps when she recalls the trial.

"It was very devastating. Marlys and Del more or less kept us
together, encouraging us to think that Ken would win. I had great
faith in her, but it was an awful worry. It was terrible to see
him in handcuffs, looking so thin, not able to talk to him."

Her role in the case for the defence was to establish that her
side of the family, the Lokkens, had numerous members who engaged
in sleepwalking and sleeptalking. The Hodge side of Ken's
heritage had even more examples. All the males, it seems, were
bed-wetters well into their teens and most of them had incidents
of walking around in their sleep. She then described the bizarre
somnambulistic cooking episodes that Ken's maternal grandfather,
Stanley Hodge, often engaged in.

"He had lots of difficulties when he was asleep," Lil Hodge
whispered. "He used to wake up, sit up in bed and jump around,
his arms and that, and sweat a lot, and he would get up through
the night and walk around through the house in his undershorts
and he always had--his eyes were very stary, very bulgy, his
eyes, and he used to get up through the night often, and
he would go different places to the bathroom except to the
washroom."

And then came a critical bit of testimony.

Marlys asked, "And at times on those occasions, did you endeavour
to try and comfort him or console him in any way?"

"I used to try to get him to lie down and go back to sleep."

"And when you would do that, at the very beginning of your
efforts to do that, were they effective? Could you console him?"

Lil shook her head. "No. He was always--just nudging me away. He
wouldn't answer or anything. He would just try and push me away."

When Cathy Mocha questioned Lil Hodge,
Marlys was relieved that the prosecutor didn't attack on what she
feared was a vulnerable front, the fact that it isn't readily
apparent to others when a person is moving around at night
whether the activities are done in sleep or wakefulness. Marlys
was braced for such questions in cross-examination as, "How do
you know your husband was asleep when he went to the kitchen to
cook? How do you know he wasn't awake? You're not an expert on
sleep disorders." That didn't happen with Lil Hodge or with any
of Ken's family, all of whom went neatly into the witness-box and
came away unscathed.

Diane Hodge, Glen's wife, testified next and provided the jury
with a change of pace. Delmar Doucette, who had been sitting
quietly beside Marlys for a week and a half, making notes and
keeping an eye on the transcript of the preliminary trial,
conducted that examination. He had been called to the bar only
two weeks before, and this was his first time on his feet in a
courtroom as a full-fledged lawyer.

Questioned by Del Doucette, all business and concentrating
fiercely on his responsibility, Diane Hodge described the
sleepwalking and bed-wetting of her male children, her husband's
habit of being difficult to rouse in the morning, and her
observations of Stan Hodge's sleepwalking at the Balsam Lake
trailer park where he and Lilly spent the summer.

Del Doucette asked her what she did to wake her sons.

"I usually shake them," she replied. "I find with my oldest boy
as he got a little older, he occasionally would kind of fling his
arm or kind of strike out at you and he would just roll over and
go back to sleep again."

Her husband, Glen, is also difficult to rouse, she
explained, but she doesn't shake him. "I've got wise and stood
beside the bed and just called out to him and just hoped, you
know, that he would wake up."

"What do you mean, you've got wise?" asked Del.

"I've had a couple of occasions where he's actually struck out,
you know, and doesn't even recall doing it when he's woken up."

Marlys then questioned Betty Parks. In contrast to other members
of the family, Ken's mother spoke in a voice that was loud and
uninflected. As tactfully as she could, Marlys obtained from the
witness a promise that she would not pretend to hear what she
couldn't follow. The most dramatic part of Betty's testimony was
the description of Ken, at age eleven, almost going through a
six-storey bedroom window while completely asleep. All her sons
were like that, she said, bed-wetters until their teens and
almost impossible to wake in the morning.

Glen Hodge followed with much the same testimony. Court adjourned
until the next day, Wednesday, May 18.

Marlys and Del went straight to her office where they made
coffee, laid out their notes on a low table, and crouched around
it trying to reconstruct what had happened on the night of the
sleepwalking. They needed a hypothesis that she could present to
witnesses for their response. Around midnight, groaning, Marlys
left Del to finish and went home, where she worked on the pattern
of questions she would put to Roger Broughton the next day.
Around four in the morning, Del completed the hypothesis and
drove wearily home to bed. A secretary came at six that morning
to type it and make copies for the court.

Later it was entered into the record. It began:


__Shortly after falling asleep at between one and
two in the morning, Ken rose from the couch. He was already
wearing track pants and a T-shirt that he had put on to sleep in,
but had no underwear or socks on. He put on a windbreaker and a
pair of running shoes, which he could slip into because they were
not fully laced. He put on neither underwear nor socks, which was
quite unusual since he had never before left the house without
them. He picked up a set of keys from an end table, one of the
usual places keys were placed, and walked out the front door of
his townhouse, leaving it open, which was unusual since he always
closed and locked it when leaving the house. Ken opened the
garage and got into his car. He then drove twenty-three
kilometres to his parentsin-law's house. It was Ken's custom to
drive the route to the Woods' residence via the 401, a large
highway. This route involves making six turns. Upon leaving the
401 or exiting the 401, the route proceeds directly up a street
on which there are some eight traffic lights, and he may well
have encountered at least two or three red lights. The total
travelling time for the route customarily took him ten to fifteen
minutes in light traffic. Upon arrival at his parents-inlaw's
townhouse, he drove into the underground parking
lot, the normal route of entry into their home, and parked in a
space he had previously used. He took with him from his car a
tire-iron, which was with a variety of tools that he kept in his
car for part-time electrical work. Among those tools were also a
hatchet and two knives.

Ken entered the townhouse using a key. In order to enter he would
have to ascend three or four stairs which were immediately inside
the door. He went to the master bedroom, which is on the basement
level of the townhouse. Some time thereafter he ended up on the
bed on top of Mr. Woods, who awoke to find someone strangling
him. Mr. Woods was rendered unconscious within five to ten
seconds. Some time after, Mr. Woods sustained lacerations to the
head and upper back area. These lacerations were consistent with
cuts from a sharp knife. All but one of them was in the head. At
some point Mrs. Woods sustained a variety of serious injuries:

1. five stab wounds, one to the chest and four to the back, the
first of which entered her heart and was found to be the cause of
death, for which a kitchen knife from the Woods' kitchen was the
weapon, or was consistent with being the weapon;

2. a skull fracture, with associated injury to the brain,
consistent with a blow from a tire-iron or, as well, with hitting
the corner of a wall;

3. other blunt injuries to the head, consistent with one or more
additional blows beyond that causing the skull to fracture; and

4. pressure fractures to several ribs, not consistent with a blow
but consistent with steady, heavy pressure.

As well, at some point Ken received severe lacerations to both of
his hands; the flexor tendons and nerves were cut in three of the
fingers of his right hand and two of the fingers of his left
hand. Ken's first recollection after having fallen asleep on the
couch was of being in his parents-in-law's house and seeing his
mother-in-law's face. Her eyes and mouth were open and she had a
"help me" look on her face. She looked frightened. Although she
had sustained serious injuries to her head and face, Ken recalls
seeing no marks or blood on her face.

At this time he heard the family children yelling from upstairs.
He began to run upstairs calling, "Kids, kids." The children who
were upstairs did not hear the words articulated but
merely heard "animal grunting sounds or noises" from Ken. He does
not
remember running up the stairs to the upper level of the
townhouse where the children were, but he does remember being on
the landing at the top of the stairs and bracing himself.

The children heard Ken wander around on the landing for a short
period of time. He was making some grunting noises, which
eventually became quieter and then ceased. Ken never entered
beyond the threshold of any of the rooms on that floor.

He vaguely remembers having tried the telephone, needing to get
help but having a sense that the telephone was dead. The
telephone may not have been used by him at all, but a phone was
off the hook and a beeping sound could be heard from the phone
during the time when the children were screaming out to their
mother from the landing, or perhaps shortly prior.

Ken then ran out of the house and to his car, which was parked in
the underground parking lot of the townhouse. He does not
actually recall if he started his car or if it was already
running. He then drove to the local police station, very near by,
but he does not recall which of the two possible routes he took
in order to get _there.


Their star witness, Dr. Roger Broughton, arrived by plane from
Ottawa and met them at seven-thirty that morning to go over his
testimony. It had been decided that it
would take the form of a lecture. Broughton explained to Marlys
that the jury wouldn't be able to make an informed decision about
sleepwalking without some understanding of the basics. He
suggested a non-interruptible format in order to give him the
room he needed to put Ken's strange episode of sleepwalking into
the context of the body of knowledge in that field.

Marlys realized as well that the psychiatrist would be more
comfortable giving a seamless classroom lecture. She could
accommodate him--she would simply set up the courtroom like a
lecture hall.

"Lecture was the style he knew best," she says. "He was at his
most relaxed and compelling when teaching. So that's what he
got."

Michael Code, a partner of Marlys and Clay Ruby, volunteered to
coach Broughton through some questions he might encounter on
cross-examination. Throughout the rehearsal, the neurologist
remained composed. He wasn't accustomed to testifying in a
courtroom, but he appeared at ease with challenges.

When Judge Watt arrived in the big courtroom, he was startled to
find a slide projector and screen in place.

He commented affably, "Who has the popcorn concession?"

Roger Broughton, a dapper, grey-bearded man, proved an engaging
figure. Marlys had expected that his testimony would take only
the morning, but Broughton was not prepared to be brief on a
subject that has absorbed him professionally for twenty years and
that he finds endlessly fascinating. For almost two hours,
everyone in the courtroom received a lecture on sleep and its
disorders that would equip them to be parlour authorities for the
rest of their days.

He began by explaining how he became interested in sleep
disorders. He was working in France in the early 1960's with
Professor Henri Gastaut, an international authority on epilepsy,
he said, and they were studying epileptic children who were also
enuretic --that is, bed-wetters. The doctors reasoned that either
the children were wetting their beds because they were having
nocturnal seizures, or they had co-existent non-epileptic
enuresis. The distinction was important for a proper diagnosis
and treatment.

In order to determine if the children were having small seizures
in their sleep, the doctors attached electrodes to monitor brain
patterns while the children slept. They found, to their
astonishment, that the children had normal brain patterns. The
bedwetting was occurring most frequently during their periods of
deepest slow-wave sleep, the period in which sleepwalking also
occurs.

Over the next few years medical papers poured out of Roger
Broughton on the subject of sleepwalking, sleep terrors, and
confusional arousals. With electroencephalogram graphs, he could
read the physiology of sleep, and he began to explore what
happens in people's minds when they sleep.

Then he launched into the familiar ground of a university-level
lecture.

"Sleep," he said, "is a behavioural state of relative inactivity
and relative withdrawal from environmental stimuli. Sleepers do
not totally cut themselves off from environmental stimuli. They
can waken with noises and, indeed, the nature of the stimuli is
important. The cry of a baby or calling one's name will awaken
people more often, more rapidly, than non-significant stimuli
like a simple buzz.

"Sleep is controlled by the brain. It is not a sort of passive
phenomenon that occurs when you withdraw from wakefulness
and go into a quiet place. There are actually structures in the
brain that actively cause sleep. In animal studies, if you damage
those centres so that the normal mechanisms to induce sleep are
missing, then there will be no sleep.

"We have known for many years that there are two different types
of sleep. Sleep is not just a single phenomenon that just varies
in depth. The two types of sleep are qualitatively different, as
different from each other as either is from wakefulness.

"One is called, as I'm sure you're all aware, rapid-eye-movement
sleep (REM), and the other one is usually referred to as
non-rapid-eyemovement sleep."

The first slide appeared, showing six squares full of zigzags.
"On these six small chartlets," Broughton continued, "you will
see the top two lines in each are eye movement, the next one is
muscle tone, and the bottom three are brain wave recordings from
different sites of the skull. This"--he pointed to the first
one--"shows a segment of wakefulness. There are eye movements
because the person was looking about with eyes open. There is no
waking alpha rhythm. When the eyes are closed, or during
quiescence or wakefulness, there is usually a very abundant
rhythmic activity in the back of the head referred to as an alpha
rhythm.

"The measurements are taken by electrodes fastened to the scalp
for brain reading, and near the eyes to catch eye movement, and
under the chin for muscle tone. The messages go through a machine
that amplifies the signals, increases their voltage and causes a
paper write-out. The part of brain activity which is recorded is
in the cortex, the outer rind of the brain.

"Most of the higher functions of the brain and of the mind are
related to cortical activity. What the cortex can accomplish
depends a lot upon how activated it is, how aroused it is as an
organ, and the controlling influences of that mainly come from
structures in the base of the brain that regulate sleep and
wakefulness.

"These charts I'm showing you are twenty-second samples showing
different sleep stages that are chosen from a whole night of
sleep. Approximately one thousand pages of paper go into the
average overnight sleep study, so these are just samples of
different things that occur in the night.

"As a person falls asleep, rapid eye movements disappear. There
are often slow-rolling eye movements, and you have a transitional
EEG, as you see in these three channels, and then as sleep
deepens you get these brief transients, which are called
K-complexes, and the beginning of isolated slow waves, lasting a
second or two in duration. These become more and more abundant as
sleep deepens and one progresses through these deeper stages of
sleep that, because of the abundance of slow waves, are often
called slow-wave sleep. So these four stages are all different
levels of non-rapideye-movement or non-REM sleep, that is, the
type of sleep that the brain does other than the REM sleep.

"The deepest level of sleep in which the threshold of wakening is
the highest--that is, it's hardest to waken people because the
ability to return rapidly to wakefulness is most impaired--is the
deep three and four stages of sleep. People rouse more easily
from the other stages of non-REM sleep, which are often called
light non-REM sleep.

"And then from time to time, this sleep state disappears
during the night and the body goes into what is called
rapid-eye-movement sleep. The brain waves get lower in amplitude
and get faster and muscle tone is suppressed. There is normally a
body paralysis during the rapid-eye-movement sleep state. The
highest incidence of reported dreams occur after awakening from
rapid-eye-movement sleep. On average, between eighty and ninety
per cent of REM awakenings will be followed by a report of a
dream. The incidence is substantially lower in the non-REM sleep
stages, and generally, in most studies but not all, the lowest in
slow-wave-sleep.

"These are the two types of sleep. Animal physiology,
biochemistry, and endocrinology studies--and indeed almost all
approaches to study them--indicate that they are very different
states of the body. They are seen in man at all ages and, in
fact, in all mammals.

"Normally there is an alternation--non-REM sleep and then some
REM sleep, non-REM sleep and REM sleep, a periodic recyclic event
with each cycle lasting about a hundred minutes in young adults.
Individuals at all ages show most of the deep slow-wave sleep in
the first part of the night. In young adults this is more or less
concentrated in the first two cycles of sleep. Significant
amounts of either stage three or stage four deep slow waves are
really quite rare in the second half of the night.

"Young children have sleep patterns that differ from adults'.
Their sleep cycles are much shorter, averaging about forty-five
minutes in comparison with an adult's ninety or one hundred
minutes. Young children also have much more slow-wave sleep and
are deeper sleepers than adults. Young children might spend as
much as forty per cent of their sleep in deep, slowwave sleep.

"In young adults, for whom an average full night's sleep
is between six and a half and seven and a half hours, the amount
of slow-wave or deep sleep rarely exceeds twelve to fifteen
percent. This normally occurs in the first three hours of sleep.
Wakenings in the first couple of cycles are relatively rare,
normally. The two or three awakenings in the night tend to occur
as sleep lightens later in the night, usually happening during
REM sleep. Spontaneous awakening from slowwave sleep in the first
part of the night in young normal adults is quite rare.

"There is natural ageing in sleep. At about fifty-five to sixty
years of age, there is very little slow-wave sleep and usually
more frequent awakenings.

"If you waken people in REM sleep or in the light sleep stages of
one and two, particularly in the latter part of the night when
lighter sleep stages are more abundant, people tend not only to
awaken easily but they are quite clear in their mentation. They
know where they are and they are not confused. When you waken
people from slow-wave, deep sleep, they may be quite confused and
occasionally are disoriented. They may do inappropriate things.
They are still half asleep in a way. This particular carryover
effect is often called sleep drunkenness. The person is sort of
drunk with pressure to remain in sleep or to go back to sleep.

"These different effects between awakenings in the two sleep
stages have been the basis of a number of studies trying to see
what the brain's responses are like, particularly during this
confusional state. I'm going to show three slides and three
studies to show that people are in a very different state usually
when they are awakened from slow-wave sleep as opposed to REM
sleep."

A new slide appeared. "The first slide," Broughton explained, "is
what happens if you look at the brain's response to strobe
flashes. We show subjects the strobe flashes before they fall
asleep, and then we wake them both in REM sleep and in deep
slowwave sleep. During the next few minutes after they are roused
and put on their feet, they are told to look at the flash.

"You can see the brain's response in this dotted curve. In the
thousandths of a second after the flash occurs after REM sleep
you see that the curve is essentially the same as in the
pre-sleep waking period. In the awakening from stage four, deep
sleep, you see that each one of the deflections is occurring much
later in time. The response is much later and it's much lower in
amplitude. The brain is sluggish. It isn't fully awake."

The next slide appeared. "This chart shows the pre-sleep wave
form in different individuals. Here we have the potentials two
minutes after arousal and five minutes after arousal. You
can see the brain is still not responding normally after two
minutes. It responds in a partially asleep manner. These effects
can linger for a number of minutes in normal people. After REM
sleep, however, the awakenings immediately show a wave form
similar to wakefulness.

"The second slide shows the ability of subjects to do a
performance test when they are wakened from either REM sleep or
from slow-wave sleep as compared to wakefulness. In this test
they had to respond to either a blue or a white flash as quickly
as possible by pressing a key. They not only had to respond to
the flash but they had to decide which was the right stimulus to
respond to. It's called the decision time, or DT. If they respond
either not at all to a flash or extremely late--that is, after
over a second--that particular response is called gaps.

"By this test the reaction time in wakefulness, prior to going to
sleep, was 400 milliseconds. When people wakened from REM sleep
they were at 440 milliseconds, only 40 milliseconds later, which
is not statistically different. When they wakened from slow-wave
deep sleep the reaction gap was half a second, and there was a
doubling of the number of gaps.

"We know now that people cannot perform as quickly after nonREM
sleep awakenings. Rousing from deep sleep, people either
respond exceedingly late or not at all."

The light in the darkened courtroom flickered as the next slide
dropped into place. "The third slide comes from a study on memory
function in the two states. Normal subjects were wakened either
from REM sleep or non-REM sleep and were given lists of words as
a memory test. They were tested several minutes after for their
ability to recall the words and again the following morning. They
also were tested at the same times during a night when they
didn't sleep at all.

"The figures, as you can see, are essentially identical between
REM sleep and no sleep. After REM awakenings, subjects function
much as they do in full wakefulness. After non-REM sleep,
however, subjects recalled many fewer words. They showed
significant impairment of memory.

"These findings are significant for understanding sleepwalking.
In all the studies we have done, sleepwalking begins in deep,
slow-wave sleep. It is in fact a disorder of arousal from sleep.
The evidence in sleepwalking is that there is a very durable,
very intense confusional state during which quite elaborate
automatic behaviour can occur. When the sleepwalking episode is
over, sleepwalkers normally can't recall anything that happened."

Dr. Broughton pressed the button and a new chart slid into place.

"I prepared some slides," he said, "that show when sleepwalking
occurs and what happens during the sleepwalking episode.
Sleepwalking is not a rare condition. Something like two to two
and a half percent of normal adults will have one or more
sleepwalking incidents. Only very few of these will regularly
sleepwalk several times a week. In children the incidence of
sleepwalking is higher: one to six per cent of children of the
ages from six to twelve have sleepwalked. It is, in fact, quite
common in children.

"Essentially, sleepwalking always occurs in the first two or
three hours of sleep, generally from slow-wave or deep sleep. It
almost never occurs in the latter part of a night's sleep. Quite
complex acts can occur during sleepwalking. People can drive
vehicles. They can go from one area of a house to another, open
kitchen cupboards, take out a frying pan, put things in a frying
pan, etcetera. They are all fully asleep and have no recall
later. They can do any variety of quite elaborate acts. In
habitual sleepwalkers, these acts are often repeated. That is, if
someone does the cooking routine that I mentioned, many of the
sleepwalking episodes, but not all, will involve cooking.

"A child who is sleepwalking may wander around and end up going
into the parents' bed or something like that. Sleepwalking is
almost a universal phenomenon in young childhood. Virtually all
young mothers have seen sleepwalking episodes they have induced,
most typically arousing their young children to go to the toilet
before they themselves go to bed. The child walks over to the
toilet, sits on it, uses it, and is essentially totally asleep.

"The ability to control what one does in the sleepwalking
episode, however, despite its apparent complexity, is severely
limited. There is really no evidence that people can consciously
change their behaviour. In fact, they seem to respond poorly and
sometimes even aggressively to efforts from people who try to
stop them, for instance, from going into the kitchen.

"It is as though there is a preset program of behaviour that the
sleepwalker wants to carry out in an automatic way rather like a
robot or automaton. The behaviour may involve aggression. There
are a significant number of cases of aggression during
sleepwalking, well documented in medical literature, and even
cases of homicides that occurred during sleepwalking.

"Sleepwalking can terminate in various ways. Some sleepwalkers
simply go back to bed. They sometimes abort spontaneously. That
is, the persons wake up, wonder why they are where they are, and
don't remember how they got there. They can be wakened,
sometimes by calling their name, though they usually don't
appreciate being wakened from the outside.

"Most sleepwalking episodes last between ten and forty minutes,
but there are well-documented cases that last much longer.
Medical literature on sleepwalking contains reports of
sleepwalking that lasted an hour and a half.

"When wakened the sleepwalker has no recall and no explanation
for what happened. Occasionally you get a fragment of a visual
image that is like a single snapshot, but these form only about
five per cent of the episodes. There are no descriptions, really,
of the elaborate dream activity that can occur. The rule is,
there is no recall.

"Unique to sleepwalkers are episodes in which subjects sit up in
bed and look around with their eyes open. To an observer, it
looks like wakefulness, but when you try to communicate with them
you find they are deeply asleep. The important thing is that the
behaviour looks like wakefulness but in fact it isn't.

"There are three predisposing factors in sleepwalking. One is
family history. People who have a family history of sleepwalking
have a much higher probability of sleepwalking than the average
person in society. The second is a personal history of sleep
disorders other than sleepwalking. The third has to do with the
nature of the person's habitual sleep.

"When you get a family history of sleepwalking in brothers,
sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandfathers, and so on, the
likelihood of sleepwalking occurring in the individual is greatly
increased.

"There is a second phenomenon called night terrors or sleep
terrors, which also occur in deep slow-wave sleep, in which the
person sits up, screams out, is confused and inconsolable, but
has no recall of an organized dream. They are more common in the
family members of sleepwalkers. Sleeptalking, as well, is more
common in the family members of a sleepwalker. Also
involuntary bed-wetting. These are all episodic behavioural
disturbances that can occur in deep sleep.

"Bed-wetting usually ceases at four years of age when full
control of the bladder is attained. Once a child reaches the age
of between four and six and is still a bed-wetter, the family
becomes concerned and goes to a doctor for an explanation. When
it isn't successfully treated, bed-wetting is a great problem for
children and adolescents, usually males, who want to go to summer
camp or sleep over with friends.

"Because of the tendency for families of bed-wetting
children to consult physicians, we have a great deal of material
about them in medical literature. The important thing is that it
is widely accepted that there is a genetic family predisposition
to bedwetting. If two or more members of the family, and
certainly if three or more, had sleepwalking or sleep terrors or
bed-wetting, you can safely say the family is predisposed to
sleepwalking and children will quite likely be bed-wetters.

"Sleepwalking occurs in people who come from families in whom the
majority of the members are deep sleepers, hard to waken, and
show confusional episodes.

"The second factor that correlates with sleepwalking is the
person's own sleep pattern. Individuals who have episodes of
sitting up and screaming or bed-wetting or talking in their sleep
have a higher probability than normal of being a sleepwalker. In
recent years we have been finding a high correlation as well of
sleepwalking and headaches, particularly migraine headaches.

"Sleepwalking, remember, is a _disorder _of _arousal, a disorder
of incomplete awakening, and not strictly speaking a sleep
disorder. The group of phenomena which includes sleepwalking,
sleep terrors, and confusional sleep-drunken episodes occurs
exclusively during abrupt arousals from deep slow-wave sleep. It
is not a disease. It is considered a disruption or an abnormality
of sleep itself.

"It has no connection to mental illness. Sleepwalkers are totally
normal in daytime. There is no necessary correlation either with
mental illness or any specific mental illness. Also, there is no
evidence that sleepwalkers have brain damage. It is not a form of
epilepsy.

"In addition to these predisposing factors there
are triggering or precipitating factors that will deepen sleep.
Among the triggers that deepen sleep and impair the ability to
awaken alertly, the most important is sleep deprivation. Very
frequently, individuals who have sleepwalking episodes do them
after they haven't slept well for a few nights.

"As well, sleep is much deeper after excessive exercise, except
late-night exercise. When people exercise late at night, their
hearts are still racing when they want to go to sleep. But people
who exercise in the daytime tend to sleep more deeply that night.

"Drugs that depress the brain also make it difficult to awaken,
especially sleeping pills, drugs called tricyclic
antidepressants, alcohol, certain toxins; fever and head injury
also make arousal more difficult. All may increase the need for
deeper sleep.

"The important aspect is to note that deep sleep by itself does
not give rise to sleepwalking. The person has to be aroused to
trigger sleepwalking, and the factor which arouses them very
frequently is stress. Children, for instance, often sleepwalk the
night when there has been a fight in the schoolyard or the
night before an examination.

"Stress is the most common triggering factor of arousal, though
noises can also do it. When a door is slammed, the child who is a
habitual sleepwalker may immediately get up and go through a
confusional sleepwalking episode.

"In a normal person the factors of stress, excessive exercise,
and sleep deprivation would be unlikely to trigger a sleepwalking
episode. In someone with a family or personal history of such
incidents, they can be significant precipitants. It is
characteristic of sleepwalkers to have sleep fragmentation.

"As we can see, there are both internal and external arousals
that precipitate sleepwalking.

"The brain waves of sleepwalkers when they rouse are not those of
an awake person. Here's a chart of a person in a sleepwalking
episode who was monitored by a forty-five-foot cable attached to
a recording machine. It shows a sleepwalking episode of two
minutes or so during which the person got up in slow-wave sleep,
wandered around, got to the end of the electrode cable, yanked
it, went back to bed, and remained in non-REM sleep. You can see
that in the brain waves."


A new slide. "Here's the brain waves of a six-year-old
sleepwalker child who was aroused and stood on his feet. He had
to be held partially erect at first because he didn't have
sufficient muscle control to stand on his own. About ten seconds
later he's able to stand erect without any help. He is
questioned, `What are you doing? What is your name?` and he
doesn't answer. Then in a minute the child left the bedroom in
the sleep lab, went down the stairs, wandered about in a large
room, turned around on his own, came up the stairs, still did not
answer queries, and then went to bed. The researcher persisted in
trying to communicate with him, and the child eventually
responded, `Jus' go away. I'm sleepy.`

"The important thing is that the brain waves are never those of
wakefulness, even when the child responded. You don't get the
alpha rhythm that occurs when awake with eyes open."

Another slide. "Here's another study of brain waves and eye
movements of a young girl who was a habitual sleepwalker. Fifty
minutes after she fell asleep she starts moving in bed. She sits
up, looking to both sides as she's sitting up in bed.
She's gazing around the room, eyes open, seemingly fully awake,
and she lies down again. The duration of the behaviour is about
twentyfive seconds. She's in stage four sleep throughout. The
brain is asleep. When she is wakened, she remembers nothing of
this.

"We have limitations on what we know about sleepwalking because
of the lack of memory of sleepwalkers for their episodes.
Nevertheless we're aware of a number of important features. It is
impossible, for instance, that a person could formulate a plan
before falling asleep and then carry it out while sleepwalking.
The most striking feature of what we know of what goes on in the
mind during sleep is that it's very independent of waking
mentation. We cannot direct our minds in sleep as we do in
wakefulness. In the waking state we voluntarily plan things--what
we call volition--but there is no evidence that volition occurs
in sleepwalking.

"In wakefulness people are always responding to what is happening
around them. In sleepwalking there's a great impairment of
ability to know what is going on. Sleepwalking persons usually
are very unresponsive to efforts to get their attention or to
alter their behaviour. It's as though they have a preset program
that has to run out. The activity
is quite mechanical and we describe it medically as automatic
behaviour or as an automatism.

"In wakefulness much of our activity is directed to satisfying
our needs and interests, whereas in sleepwalking there is no
evidence that there is motivation toward a specific goal. In
fact, often the behaviour is unrewarding. People may hurt
themselves and cut themselves from windows, or may hurt other
people.

"In daytime people's behaviour is fairly consistent. They may be
quiet or they may be extroverted and outgoing, but there is a
style of personality. In sleepwalking people can do things which
are entirely inappropriate and which they would never do during
wakefulness. The brain is not awake during sleepwalking.

"From the point of view of memory, we can remember most of our
behaviour if we pay attention to it while we are awake. The
sleepwalker, in contrast, however complex the behaviour, has
absolutely no recall of what happened. Volitional control is not
available to sleepwalkers. They do not have awareness or control
of what they are doing while they are doing it.

"We used to believe that during sleepwalking episodes people were
acting out their dreams. When we started recording brain-wave
patterns we were very very surprised to find that sleepwalking
occurs when there is the least amount of dreaming or
mental activity."



Trial


Lights in the courtroom snapped on, momentarily blinding
everyone, and Marlys returned to questions about Ken Parks.

She took pains to establish for the jury that Broughton had
looked at every possible explanation for Ken's behaviour and
absence of memory before he came to the conclusion that it was
sleepwalking. Accordingly she asked the doctor to restate his
findings about the condition of Ken's brain and asked
particularly about nocturnal epilepsy. Roger Broughton,
comfortably in his element, repeated that the brain was
completely normal. She asked about mental illness.

"In the straightforward interview situation," he replied, "the
things you normally look for in diagnosis of mental illness are
inappropriate behaviour, poor contact with reality, hallucinatory
behaviour, and so on. I observed no such features."

He worked through a list of Ken's activities that
were consistent with sleepwalking: the time of the event, a few
hours after falling asleep; Ken's belief that he was calling,
"Kids, kids, kids," when actually he was making grunting sounds;
the snapshots of fragmented memory; the stress, sleep
deprivation, and heavy exercise, all of which were potential
precipitating factors that had preceded his sleep that night; the
family pattern of sleepwalking; Ken's own experiences of
sleepwalking and difficulty with waking; his strange,
disoriented, hyper state at the police station and hospital.

The doctor pointed out that Ken's horrified comments in the
hospital emergency room were jumbled. He said at one point, "I
killed two people," and at another, "I don't know if I killed
anybody."

"I would think that Mr. Parks was trying to synthesize what he
felt must have happened," Roger Broughton observed. "He was very
uncertain about it, and the comments he made changed from moment
to moment because, in fact, he didn't know."

The lawyer asked how a sleepwalker would respond when Barbara
Woods, armed with her sharpest knife, attempted to interfere as
Ken was assaulting Denis Woods.

The specialist replied, "The response would have been one
of aggression, that is, fighting back."

Roger Broughton's testimony concluded with more slides, these
showing the results of Ken's two nights in the improvised sleep
lab in Metro East Detention Centre. One of the moments of high
drama in the trial came when Roger Broughton, having prepared the
judge and jury adequately with a two-hour lecture on
sleepwalking, pointed out that Ken Parks spent an abnormal amount
of time in deep sleep, a state in which his mental activity was
near zero.

Marlys Edwardh asked a series of short sharp questions.

"Is there any evidence that mental activity in any way correlates
to sleepwalking?"

"No, not to my knowledge."

"In your opinion, would Mr. Parks have intended to kill Barbara
Ann Woods?"

"No, I don't think there's any suggestion of motive or intent."

"Assuming he was sleepwalking at the time, would he have the
capacity to intend to kill Barbara Ann Woods?"

"No."

"Would he have appreciated what he was doing?"

"No, he would not."

"Would he have understood the consequences of what he was doing?"

"No, he would not."

"Would he have been able to stop what he was doing?"

"No, I do not believe he would. I think it would all have been
unconscious activity, uncontrolled and unmeditated."

"Do you know of instances of serious aggression that has taken
place while people were in a state of somnambulism?"

"Yes. There are some thirty or thirty-five well-documented cases
of homicide during sleepwalking episodes."

"In Canada?"

"No, no. It's well documented in reports from other countries,
England, France, Australia, and so forth."

Next came more crucial questions.

Marlys asked, "Have you heard or read about or from your own
clinical observations seen any situation where there was a
recurrence of an aggressive or homicidal event during
sleepwalking?"

"No," said the doctor with emphasis. "I went through the best
bibliographic source of information on that over a large number
of years. There are no reported cases. The probability of it
occurring is not statistically significant. It is just absolutely
improbable."

His testimony ended with his explanation of what he termed "sleep
hygiene", a program to prevent a recurrence. It included:
avoidance of the precipitating factors of stress and sleep
deprivation, maintenance of regular bedtimes, obtaining
sufficient exercise to tire the body but not exhaust it, and
avoidance of obesity and alcohol. As well, he said medication was
available to ensure that a subject would not become sleep
deprived.

Finally, he stated firmly, "I am absolutely convinced in my own
mind that the sleepwalking event occurred with homicide and there
is no other medically acceptable interpretation."

As she faced the defence's most formidable witness, Cathy Mocha,
the Crown attorney, seemed confident and not in the least
intimidated by his astounding credentials or the esoteric
lecture. Indeed, in recent weeks she had been poring over his
medical papers and she was certain that his testimony
contradicted some of the articles he had written on sleepwalking.
The proposition she needed to wring from Roger Broughton was that
sleepwalking was a dissociative state. With that as a starting
place, she was on her way to nudge sleepwalking into the category
of mental illness.

"A person who is sleepwalking is not able, as you indicated, to
control his actions?" she asked politely.

"Mm-mm," said the doctor.

"And that would also be true of a person who was in a psychotic
state?"

The doctor replied unhelpfully, "And also somebody who is just
drunk."

To a subsequent line of questions about his personal experience
with aggression during sleepwalking, Broughton answered that in
the last five years he had known only three cases. None involved
homicide, but in one case a man caused great harm to his wife
asleep beside him, and in another the subject eat his
hands on the wall with such force that he suffered injuries.

The prosecutor hammered his credibility. Had he ever personally
witnessed a sleepwalker in an aggressive state? No, people who
sleepwalk regularly have a much lower incidence of sleepwalking
in a sleep lab. The chance of observing sleepwalking under such
conditions was minimal.

"Is it possible that some part of the mind or personality
operates during a sleepwalking episode?"

"I don't see how."

"Isn't it true that, in fact, in some of the literature it
indicates that sleepwalking can be an indication of some
underlying conflict?"

"Many people have conflicts, and sleepwalking is relatively rare.
..."

"What I asked, though," Cathy Mocha said impatiently, "I still
don't think I have an answer."

Dr. Broughton was growing irritated. "I'm sorry," he said coolly.
"I am trying to answer your question."

"I don't know that it needs anything more than a yes or no. Can
sleepwalking be an indication of underlying conflict?"

"It could be, it could be. Yes."

The relationship deteriorated. Marlys Edwardh, appalled,
appreciated what was happening. Her star witness found it
incomprehensible that he was being questioned in
a way that obliged him to give replies that would leave a
misleading impression.

"He was deeply troubled to be exposed to a style of questions
which undermined the truth," she explains. "He couldn't control
his responses because yes and no answers weren't real answers. I
simply hadn't prepared him well enough. The preparation I gave
him wasn't what he needed."

At one point Cathy Mocha snapped, "Doctor, when I ask my
questions I realize that there are a number of possibilities.
That's why when I phrase my question I say, `Is it possible`."

He said grudgingly, "Yes, it's possible."

Thoroughly out of sorts, the Crown attorney said, "If you could
simply just answer my question when I ask, `Is it possible,` it
may save us some time."

"If I feel that it's really misleading," protested Broughton,
"then I have a right to. ..."

"I'm sure my friend," with a curt nod in the direction of Marlys
Edwardh, "will be happy to clarify that if I in any way mislead
you."

The doctor said, equally miffed, "When you are quoting from my
articles, I do recall what I wrote."

Marlys was making a damage-control estimation. Cathy Mocha was
scoring points, she thought, and her star witness was being
rattled, but she didn't think the situation was seriously
impaired for the defence. The jury, which had been impressed with
Broughton and his credentials, was still solid, she thought.
Marlys suspected that the Crown attorney's belligerence and icy
tone were alienating some jurors.

"I don't think she got the jury's sympathy," Marlys comments. "I
think they could see that Broughton was struggling because he
didn't want her to put words in his mouth."

Still, Marlys jumped in shock when Judge Watt, normally a
scrupulously neutral person in the courtroom, leaned forward and
shouted at Roger Broughton to answer the question.

Later, when the cross-examination had subsided to a calmer level,
Cathy Mocha asked, "Is it fair to say that the brain doesn't
generally turn off? It just perhaps becomes less active?"

"It goes into a different state," Broughton corrected her, his
stiff tone that of an affronted man. "That is the way I think
most people would describe it."

"Can a person perform virtually any sort of act in his sleep?"

"I'm not sure," replied Broughton. "It depends what you mean by
acts. There are lots of higher nervous function activities of
discrimination or planning and so forth which are quite
improbable during sleep."

"Is it fair to say that in a sleepwalking stage one generally has
poor co-ordination?"

The doctor answered, "No. People can at times have quite
co-ordinated motor activity. People have been found sleepwalking
who have gotten up on rooftops and kept their balance and walked
along and been totally asleep."

"Are you saying," she asked, setting a trap, "that
sleepwalkers have perfectly functioning and properly functioning
co-ordination?"

"I did not say that," he snapped. "You asked me whether they had
major problems of co-ordination and I said, no, they did not."

"I don't believe the word I used was `major`."

"I'm sorry," he said angrily.

"Poor?"

"No, I don't think they show poor, what I consider poor
co--ordination."

"Perhaps lower co-ordination then?" she continued relentlessly,
her own temper showing. A great deal hung on this exchange for
the Crown's case. Ken Parks' long drive from Pickering to
Scarborough undeniably required considerable co-ordination.

The doctor was equally stubborn. "They may and they may not," he
replied.

"Is it true that sleepwalkers are unlikely to have precision of
aiming at something?"

"Well, I think it's unusual in watching a sleepwalker to see what
I think you mean in any activity. Usually they get up and do
rather trivial things, like wash dishes or dust the table, or
whatever, which I would not consider aiming as part of it."

"All right," she said. "Well, perhaps I can ask you this. If
there were a sleepwalker who had an object in his hand, would you
expect that sleepwalking person to be able to go over to an
object and strike that object and pick it out of a number of
other objects and strike it?"

"He could," said the doctor. "Yes. Or she could."

"And the object was moving?" asked Cathy Mocha, her voice rising
in incredulity.

"Mm-mm," murmured the doctor.

"Are you indicating that sleepwalkers are able to pursue
something?"

The doctor plainly was uncomfortable. "That sleepwalkers are able
to pursue things? I didn't mean to imply that."

"All right. I take it they would not be able to do that?"
Broughton was getting rattled. "No, I don't believe
....was he began. Then he said, "I believe that they could, yes."

Later, when the Crown lawyer asked about Ken's inability to
remember the attacks, there was another burst of fireworks.

It began when she said, "Again, what I asked was, are you
indicating there's no possibility then that he actually recalled
stabbing them and choking them?"

"I have no evidence that he recalled that."

"All right," she said with a hard look. "So in your opinion there
is no possibility of that?"

"I did not say there is no possibility of it."

"That was my question, Doctor."

"I have no evidence that he did. The possibility, if it exists,
in my mind it's extremely rare. If I might elaborate on that
...."

"If you could just answer my question, Doctor," she interrupted
coldly.

"Yes," he said wearily.

"We might be able to finish sooner."

"I'm sorry," he told her, steaming.

"Perhaps I can put this hypothetically to you," she went on,
"that the accused when he went into the bedroom attacked both the
mother--and father-in-law. He then left the room and somehow the
mother-in-law managed to get to the television room. The accused
then went up the stairs to the kitchen, took the knife, and at
that point took the receiver of the phone in the kitchen off the
hook, went back downstairs to the television room, where he went
over to Mrs. Woods, the deceased, and proceeded to stab her. Is
that consistent with someone who is in a sleepwalking state?"

The doctor held his ground. "It could occur. It's consistent, yes
.... But I personally do not think that scenario could possibly
have occurred."

The lawyer said, "Doctor, I'm not asking you whether or not you
think that scenario was correct. Would a sleepwalker be capable
of that sort of purposeful act?"

He said steadily, "The sleepwalker would be capable of doing
that."

Towards the end of what must have seemed to Roger
Broughton an extremely long day, an important exchange occurred,
one that Marlys Edwardh was to quote in her summary to the jury.

Cathy Mocha was asking the specialist about the possibility of
recurrence. He gave a different answer than he had given the
defence attorney. He said it was unlikely, "based on the
frequency of sleepwalking in the past of the accused and the fact
that he is getting older. It's also based on the assumption that
this wouldn't have happened if he had received appropriate
treatment." When she received the transcript, Marlys Edwardh
underlined that last sentence.

Broughton stepped down from the stand at four-thirty that
afternoon after a gruelling day he would not soon forget. After
the jury had left the room, the judge fixed Marlys with a
quizzical look.

"What about the time estimate?" he asked with pointed politeness.
"I think I'd better take the fifth, my lord," she said ruefully,
"but I'm actually still hopeful we will conclude the defence by
Friday ... with your lordship's assistance and the hours
we are sitting. I think we are doing very well."

"All right," he sighed, "but I don't take full credit for it. We
wouldn't do it without the jurors' permission. They don't mind,
so ninethirty tomorrow morning." He looked up sharply. "Accused
removed."

Ken stood up and was led out, his shoulders slouched in despair.
Marlys and Del were depressed as they drove back to her office.
Marlys blamed herself for not preparing Broughton for the kind of
questions Cathy Mocha had put to him. They tried to assess
whether the jury had lost confidence in his testimony. They
assured one another that the main body of Broughton's testimony
was solid and undented, but neither could be sure.

Broughton went to the airport, as Marlys and Del met with two
psychiatrists, Wood Hill and Ron Billings, to go over their
evidence for the next day. Then they took Frank Ervin to dinner
at the Park Plaza hotel next door to their office and lingered
with him until nearly midnight, preparing him for his testimony.

Del Doucette, driving home later, was so tired he had to force
himself to concentrate on steering straight.

Both were up at dawn to meet John Edmeads, the neurologist, to
discuss his evidence. Two wan attorneys then pulled on their
gowns and braced themselves for another day of expert witnesses.

The trial resumed that morning, Thursday, May 19, 1988,
somewhat later than the judge expected. The spacious courtroom
was booked for a host of lawyers to set the dates for cases
proceeding to trial in the Supreme Court of Ontario. Some time
after ten, the room was clear for the Parks case to proceed.

Marlys Edwardh began, as she did with all her expert witnesses,
by referring to the lengthy hypothesis of what happened on the
night Barbara Woods was killed. She felt it put a platform of
facts on which testimony could comfortably stand. Marlys checked
that all relevant people in the court had copies of it and then
called Dr. John Edmeads, the Sunnybrook hospital neurologist.
John Edmeads stated unequivocally that Ken did not suffer from
neurological disease and had a healthy brain.

Keeping in mind that Cathy Mocha was attempting to establish that
Ken's sleepwalking was in the category of mental illness, Marlys
put a key question: "From the perspective of your discipline, is
sleepwalking a disease, sir?"

The neurologist promptly replied, "No, it is not."

Cathy Mocha began with what she hoped would be a promising line
of questions that would show that Ken Parks was taking a
medication, Chlorazepam, which is prescribed for epilepsy. From
that, the inference might be that doctors saw in him the
possibility of epilepsy. The effort proved an embarrassment. It
developed that she understandably had confused Chlorazepam with
Chlonazepam. When that was sorted out, she had little more to
say. The evidence presented by John Edmeads was seen by all sides
to be clear and unassailable.

Dr. Ron Billings, Ken's psychiatrist, followed Edmeads into the
witness-box. Marlys in her examination-in-chief established what
she needed to have before the jury: Ken Parks was wholly sane,
there was no evidence of temporal lobe epilepsy, and he did not
suffer from hysterical amnesia or hallucinations.

After seeing Ken, he said, "this case was on my mind and it
bothered me that I couldn't come to a conclusion. I was really
thinking a lot about it. In the course of my psychotherapy
practice patients told me of incidents that had occurred during
sleepwalking. One patient particularly told about very
complicated behaviour she had done. I began to wonder if this
could be sleepwalking."

He read the literature, he continued, and learned that aggression
could be associated with sleepwalking. He came to the conclusion
that Ken had been sleepwalking when Barbara Woods was killed.

"Was there any other diagnosis that was left in your mind as a
competing diagnosis?" Marlys Edwardh asked.

"Not at that point, no. To my satisfaction, I had ruled the
others out."

"And today?"

"I still feel that way."

Ron Billings also offered some insight into Ken's gambling. "It
is very important for Mr. Parks to do well and to be approved by
people," the psychiatrist commenced. "He had been married for
three years at that time and had bought a house, and I think had
paid off the mortgage, paid off the loan. He had with his wife
savings of $5,000 in the bank. To do this, he was working hard.

"He had his regular job, which he had been promoted in, and he
was working on part-time work with friends as well to earn extra
money. The house was very important to the family, particularly
to his wife, and he wanted to help get that paid off more
quickly. He wanted to be able to buy things for his wife that he
knew she wanted, and he didn't earn a lot of money at his job. He
had an idea he would like her to be able to take a trip to
Australia, where she came from."

Ken was not a compulsive gambler, Ron Billings said, as the term
is used in diagnosing a pathological addiction to gambling.
Instead he was a youth with poor judgement and very high hopes.

"He always recognized it as being wrong," the doctor said.
"Gambling wasn't something he was doing for excitement. It was
something he was doing to get money to achieve the things he
wanted, to continue to be thought of as having done well."

He said it was significant that Ken didn't gamble in jail, though
gambling is rife in prisons.

In the morning recess, Marlys drew Frank Ervin aside for a final
briefing. He looked at her and read the exhaustion.

"Marlys," he said firmly. "Carbohydrates."

She stared, uncomprehending.

Taking her by the arm and steering her to the escalator, he told
her, "It is more important to this case that you eat than that
you talk to me."

In the basement cafeteria, she obediently ate a sandwich.

Karen and her father fell into conversation during that recess.
Denis Woods made a comment that Karen can't forget.

Looking long and sadly at his daughter, he said, "I don't know
what to think. If he's convicted, I'll always think that there is
a possibility that he's really innocent. And if they find him
innocent, I'll always think there's a possibility that he's
guilty. I don't want to see him acquitted, but if what the doctor
says is true, he shouldn't go to prison."

Karen gave his arm a loving squeeze.

When Karen repeated that to Marlys, the lawyer was moved. "Denis
Woods came to the trial with the expectation that if he sat there
every day and listened carefully, he would discover exactly what
happened and why," she commented. "He came to realize that he
would never know. For him there would never be closure.
Even the verdict wouldn't end the mystery. I found what he said
incredibly insightful."

After the morning recess, it was Cathy Mocha's turn to question
Ron Billings. Using DSM III-R, an edition of the Diagnostic
Statistical Manual physicians use to assist them in diagnosis of
disorders and diseases, she noted a category labelled
somnambulism.

"It is listed, I take it, as a disorder, is it not?" she asked.

Ron Billings replied, "The chapter is called `Disorders of
Sleep`, and the second part of it is parasomnias. These are
behaviour that can occur during sleep. Do you want me to mention
what those are?"

"Yes," she said patiently.

"The first that is mentioned is night terrors and enuresis, and
then sleepwalking and sleeptalking. ..."

"Right," the lawyer nodded. "And DSM III is a diagnostic manual,
is it not?"

"Yes, basically it's ..."

She interrupted firmly, "It's a diagnostic manual?"

"It is a diagnostic manual," Billings protested, "but it is
expanded in order to help physicians, not just psychiatrists, to
diagnose conditions from the clinical picture."

"All right," Cathy Mocha said heavily. "And the word `diagnose`
you used, I take it implies disorder or treatment, does it not?"
"No, it's not a textbook of treatment."

"I _know it's not a textbook. I said the word `diagnose` ..."

Billings continued through her interjection. "... it does not
imply a treatment."

The lawyer was incredulous. "Does not imply it?"

"No."

"The fact that there is a disorder which responds to treatment?"

"The response to treatment can help you with your diagnosis, but
diagnosis in itself does not imply treatment."

There ensued a half hour of tense exchange during which the Crown
attorney attempted to extract from Ron Billings agreement with
her position that Ken's return to gambling after his arrest for
embezzlement was evidence that he was a compulsive gambler.
Billings insisted that it was not.

"If the accused were to resume gambling again tomorrow or some
short period down the road, would you then have to reassess your
opinion as to whether or not he was a pathological gambler?"

"It would depend on the type of gambling," Billings replied, "and
if it was similar I would have to reassess, yes."

The lawyer moved to Ken's state of mind in the months that
followed the tragedy. Billings had stated when questioned by
Marlys Edwardh that Ken's depression was so severe Billings had
prescribed a strong antidepressant for some two months. He called
Ken's state "adjustment depression". Cathy Mocha, looking for an
opening to assist her in identifying Ken's sleepwalking as a form
of insanity, wanted to know how that differed from mental
disease.

"It doesn't meet the criteria for a major affective disorder,"
the doctor replied.

She asked him to outline the criteria. When he finished she
jumped on what he had described as adjustment depression, which
Ken had suffered following the incident. She asked, "Would that
form of depression, adjustment depression, be considered a
disorder of sorts?"

"Yes," said the doctor.

Next the lawyer asked if hypnosis had been used to determine if
Ken was suppressing memories of the killing. Billings said he was
not a hypnotist.

"Would you agree with me," Mocha asked, "that with respect
to seeing his mother-in-law's face, it appears that the accused
certainly repressed the blood and injuries that were evident on
her face?"

"No," answered Billings. "When a person is coming around from
sleepwalking, they are in a confused state and their memory is
not consistent and clear. It's patchy. What he saw, what he
remembers he saw, may not have been what his eyes took in."

Mocha asked sharply, "Is it possible that there can be in
psychogenic repression, repression of portions of events?"

Ron Billings replied shortly, "Yes."

Dr. Wood Hill, a forensic psychiatrist, took the stand next.
While Wood Hill was quick to say he wasn't an expert on
sleep-disorder problems, he knows his way around the legal
definition of insanity as well as anyone in the country. Among
the titles of his numerous medical papers and academic
presentations are __The Borderline of _Insanity and __The
Psychiatrist's Contribution in Mental Disorder and Criminal
_Responsibility.

Wood Hill reported on his examination of Ken Parks and said he
had come to the conclusion that the man was sleepwalking. "No
other explanation, in my mind, is at all appropriate and/or can
be legitimately sustained, at least from a psychiatric point of
view, to explain how these two events, falling asleep, waking up
and seeing his mother-in-law, could have occurred."

In other murders of his experience, "individuals give much more
information and they don't fall asleep."

After the lunch break when the Wood Hill testimony resumed,
Marlys took some time asking the psychiatrist why he believed
that Ken Parks was telling the truth. He joked about giving away
"tricks of the trade", and then presented some techniques for
exposing fabrication. Ken Parks, he said, met every test for
truthfulness.

"In terms of his character structure, in terms of his ethical
stance on general issues, in terms of his concept of morality and
right and wrong, I was comfortable that I wasn't dealing with an
individual who has major defects in his moral attitude towards
life, his perspective of what is right and wrong."

The defence lawyer asked the psychiatrist how it could be
possible that Ken Parks remembered nothing of the attacks and yet
in the police station and hospital made such statements as, "I
stabbed ..." or "I beat ..." or "I choked. ..."

Wood Hill replied, "It does not reflect memory which was
laid down while the behaviour of violence was being undertaken.
It represents an individual who does have some information. He
did not leave the premises immediately, so there would be some
information going into his brain--among other things, the blood,
the apparent awareness or recollection that he had a knife in his
hand .... Those are horrendous pieces of information to face one
out of the blue with no context, and it is instinctive that one
will try to make some sense of it .... You go over it and try to
find some meaning which can help you reduce the pain you are
feeling."

He also testified that he found Ken Parks "consistently
non-aggressive". He continued, "He is not a violent individual,
and violence is not an active way of handling stresses for him."

As for the profile of a compulsive gambler, Wood Hill said that
Ken didn't fit the diagnostic criteria. "He does not fit the
personality style of such individuals."

Later he was asked what was emerging as the crucial question:

"Is sleepwalking itself a mental disorder?"

"No. We don't consider it a mental illness."

"Is it viewed as a neurological disease?"

"The answer is no."

"And in your perspective, Dr. Hill, do you consider it, sir, a
disease of the mind?"

"No, I do not."

Cathy Mocha tried a fresh approach with her opening questions.
She noted that Ken maintained control of his emotions and kept
his feelings to himself. Sometimes, she suggested, that kind of
control conceals a violent nature.

That can happen, the psychiatrist agreed.

Leaving that hanging in the air, the lawyer moved quickly to
compulsive gambling. The period of Ken's gambling extended over
eight months, ending just before he was arrested, but was it not
possible that if he had not been put in prison his gambling would
have continued and it would be clear that he was a compulsive
gambler?

Wood Hill shook his head. "He's a different bird. He would have
become more and more panicky. It would have become increasingly
an anxiety-provoking exercise for him and increasingly seen as a
dead-end street for him.
That's not gamblers. They, unfortunately, don't see it as a
dead-end street. He wouldn't have slipped into that style."

A few minutes later she skipped to the ground she was building to
argue that Ken was repressing his memory of the event.

She asked, "Is it possible that psychogenic repression could
explain that situation of lack of recall?"

He replied, "Well, I think it always has to be considered. It's
very possible that there is some degree of forgetfulness based on
what we would call psychogenic repression. Psychogenic repression
goes on in all of us to some degree after very frightening
horrendous events."

Cathy Mocha said gratefully and with emphasis, "That's right.
Thank you very much, doctor."

Marlys Edwardh rose to her feet to attack the tantalizing
suggestion laid down early in the cross-examination that Ken
might be at heart an aggressive person who usually held himself
under control.

When asked about that, Wood Hill said he didn't think so. For one
thing, Ken could watch television and forget his troubles,
something not easily done by obsessive personalities. "The
overcontrolled individual is a different bird. They are very
clearly on edge and to an outside observer they are a button
waiting to be pushed. No, I don't think Ken Parks is
over-controlled at all."

Wood Hill was followed to the stand by McGill psychiatrist Dr.
Frank Ervin, an authority on people with pathological
aggressions. When his name was called and he rose from the
spectators' section to move to the witness-box, he was the last
person anyone in the courtroom would have expected to be Frank
Ervin. Dressed in rumpled clothes, his hair and beard long and
grey, he has the look of a dishevelled biblical patriarch.

He spoke in a voice that rolled like thunder. Judge Watt, a man
of erudition, looked entranced. Frank Ervin reported that he had
examined Ken Parks for almost two hours, studied the neurological
work-up, talked to Ken's mother and grandmother, and reviewed the
sleep recordings.

"And what is your opinion, sir, of the state he was in at the
time of the death of Barbara Woods?"

Frank Ervin replied at once, "My opinion is that he was in
fact in a parasomnia state, somnambulistic state, and that that
parasomnia accounts for his behaviour."

He gave three reasons for his conclusion. One was that Ken was in
a dissociative state during the incident--his behaviour was not
characteristic and there was no evidence of rational thinking.
This happens in homicide, he offered as an aside, but usually
drugs or alcohol are involved. In this case, blood analysis
showed no evidence of either in Ken's system.

The next two reasons were that Ken had no brain disorder and no
psychiatric disorder. By the process of elimination, Dr. Ervin
said, it could only be sleepwalking.

"We have heard evidence the last few days that sleepwalking is
not a neurological disease," said Marlys. "We have heard evidence
that it is not a mental disease. First of all, do you agree with
that?"

"Sure."

"And we have also heard evidence that it's not causally
related to a mental illness."

"Right."

"Nor is it part of a mental illness."

"Right."

"Do you agree with that?"

"Sure."

With that spike in the Crown's wheel, Marlys asked the expert to
explain what happens in the human brain when the subject is
sleepwalking.

"Okay," he responded cheerfully and told the courtroom how the
brain works. It is an interconnected masterpiece, he said,
constantly full of interplay. In a fully alert smoothly working
brain, two levels constantly interact, the logical, rational
brain and the non-verbal survival brain, which dictates such
survival messages as hunger. The neocortical, thinking brain
clamps down on the primitive brain, which is inclined to take
furious action against slights.

In the REM state of sleep, when dreams occur, the doctor
continued, the brain is very busy. "It is during that period that
we have dreams that we remember. Problem-solving activities go
on, old memories come up. Exactly why the brain wants to do that
is not entirely clear, but it serves an important function
because every animal from man down to the laboratory cat gets
very disturbed if you disrupt REM sleep. It is an essential
component of the day's housekeeping for the brain."

In slow-wave sleep, the brain is also busy, but differently. The
growth hormone is released during deep sleep, for instance.
Children whose deep sleep is constantly interrupted may suffer
from dwarfism. Ken Parks, he said, has a genetic vulnerability to
shift into deep sleep.

What Frank Ervin said next came to be a major part of the defence
argument. In deep sleep, he told the courtroom, the thinking
brain--the cortex--is essentially in a coma.

"It is very slow. It looks like ocean waves rolling along,
suggesting that all those nerve cells are no longer doing their
busy, integrated work. They are cut off. They are not working."

What is left? he asked rhetorically. "What is left are those deep
structures evolved some time back, evolved very competently in
lower animals." In short, the primitive brain, the fossil brain,
the site where rage dwells.

Frank Ervin said he was particularly intrigued
by studies of the brains of sleepwalkers because he was one
himself until the age of twenty-one. "It's a universal capacity
that seems to diminish in most of the population," he explained.
"It occurs in about twopoint-five per cent of the population.

"The rest of the brain is turned off but moving about, responding
to familiar patterns, and is perfectly intact and ready to go as
if everything is nicely put together."

He likened it to putting a new program in a computer. "You take
out disc A and put in disc B."

Cathy Mocha opened cross-examination of the brain specialist with
an important question.

"Are there any neurological differences in the sleepwalker who
may commit a violent act in his or her sleep, assuming that there
is no physical interference with the sleepwalker?"

"A very reasonable question," the doctor nodded, "and I don't
know the answer. You're suggesting that in a dissociated state
there are still drives that come out of the experience of the
individual .... It's certainly not clear to me, and I don't know
colleagues who have stated ways to make it clear."

When the Crown's cross-examination was finished, Marlys Edwardh
went after that part of Ervin's testimony.

"Just so we understand your position, Dr. Ervin," she asked, "is
the behaviour in sleepwalking an unconscious working out of
feelings that you have?"

He was taken aback. "No. I didn't mean to imply that."

"To be more specific, is there any known connection between
earlier thought and the specific behaviour engaged in by the
sleepwalker, or earlier feelings and the specific behaviour, so
that one could say that what one thought about or felt just prior
to going into deep sleep had any relationship to the behaviour in
the sleepwalker?"

Said Frank Ervin, "I don't think there's strong evidence of that
kind. What you are both asking, obviously, is whether Ken was
acting out an unconscious desire to kill his mother-in-law. Even
though he didn't do it consciously and wittingly, now that his
frontal lobe is turned off and his limbic system is turned on in
his brain, with a mind of its own so to speak, was he free to go
about doing that?"

The jury waited tensely for him to continue. "I don't think
that's true. I don't think that's true for a couple of reasons.
One, I haven't found a shred of evidence, and I'm sure I've
looked as hard as anybody except maybe the prosecutor, for a good
motive for him to do this. It just doesn't wash at the
motivational level.

"When we move to the more theoretical level that says, `Would it
be possible ever for someone to have a kind of motive that is
expressed in a sleepwalking episode?` I can't say no to that. I'm
sure that's likely to happen sometimes, but I don't think this is
borne out by it."

That ended the testimony for Thursday. Marlys Edwardh again
assured the judge that she thought she could complete the case
for the defence in about three hours the next day, Friday. Mr.
Justice Watt informed the jury that it would take about a day for
both lawyers to deliver their summations. That being so, he was
reluctant to give instruction to the jury at that time. He
preferred to hold it over until after the holiday weekend so that
he could end in the morning rather than late in the day. The jury
therefore would have an early start for its deliberations.

The next morning the account of the trial in the _Globe _and
_Mail, written by Thomas Claridge, began with a paragraph that
caught the attention of readers across the country: "Four
psychiatrists lent support yesterday to the finding of an expert
in sleep disorders that a Pickering man was sleepwalking when he
stabbed his mother-in-law to death."


Marlys and Del were elated as they drove back to the office. It
had been a perfect day for the defence. "Mocha didn't lay a glove
on us," Del beamed.

Marlys was thinking ahead. "I wonder if we need Rosalind
Cartwright after all."

She climbed the narrow carpeted stairs to her office and stuck
her head in the adjoining room where Clay Ruby works. She pulled
up a chair.

"I'm thinking that I won't call Rosalind Cartwright tomorrow,"
she said. "Tell me what you think."

She went over the reasons that she had been turning over in her
mind. She had planned to bracket her expert witnesses with the
sleep-disorder specialists, Broughton leading off and Cartwright
closing. Now she wasn't so sure. Cathy Mocha hadn't yet been
damaging to the defence, except for rattling Broughton, but she
had two days to bone up on sleepwalking and get a better focus.

Michael Code, a partner of Clay and Marlys, joined them, and the
four lawyers went over the ground carefully.

"We've called all our expert witnesses except for Cartwright,"
Marlys explained. "The Crown doesn't have anything like our
expert testimony to present. I don't think Mocha is going to use
her sleep-disorder expert. He doesn't outweigh Broughton. And she
can't use her own psychiatrist, Brian Butler, because Brian
thinks Ken was sleepwalking."

Marlys had considered called Brian to the stand as a defence
witness but dismissed the idea. It was overclever, she decided,
and Brian Butler was new to the field of
sleep disorder. Cathy Mocha in cross-examination might hurt the
case.

"Rosalind Cartwright is absolutely convinced that Ken was
sleepwalking," Marlys went on. "There's no question of that. But
her research on sleep disorders has led to some conclusions that
are slightly different from those of Roger Broughton. If Mocha
spots any discrepancies in the testimony of our two main
witnesses, she could go to town."

"It wouldn't matter that the differences were irrelevant to the
diagnosis," Clay nodded.

"The jury would be confused."

"A really brilliant cross-examination would try to pit the
experts against one another and nullify them both," Marlys
observed. "I have a sense that our case is in good shape
just as it stands. I called Broughton for an entire day. I called
Ervin, I called Wood Hill, I called Billings, I called Edmeads.
The case has been clearly put. I ask myself, do I need her? I
think, no, I don't. I think Cartwright would be overkill."

Her colleagues agreed. The conference broke up, and Del went to
the telephone to call Rosalind Cartwright in Chicago. Dr.
Cartwright, he was informed, was on her way to Toronto.

Marlys left a message at the doctor's Toronto hotel. When she
slumped back from the phone, she announced, "I don't think I'm
going to call Ken's cell-mates either. We don't require any more
evidence that he has sleep disturbances, because the family's
testimony wasn't challenged. And I don't like leaving the jury
with the impression that Ken hangs out with criminals. It's a red
herring. We don't need red herrings at this stage."

Rosalind Cartwright picked up her message an hour later and
called Marlys, who went to see her. Cartwright was disappointed
to learn that she had made the trip unnecessarily, but was
understanding. "I'm sure you know what you're doing," she told
Marlys. "You have to decide what's the most effective way of
handling your witnesses."

There was still time to catch the last flight that night for
Chicago. Marlys put Rosalind Cartwright in a taxi and sent her
off, with her thanks. Then she went back to the office: work to
do. She had one more witness to think about, and she had to work
on her arguments to the judge about his charge to the jury and
develop her own summary to the jury.

The next morning Marlys Edwardh informed Judge Watt with a smile,
"I've got good news, not bad news. I don't expect to be more than
half an hour."

The judge wondered what that did to the schedule. The next step
was the arguments of both counsel on the judge's charge to the
jury. Cathy Mocha estimated that the two submissions would take
half a day. That would be done in the absence of the jury. When
the jury was present, the lawyers would deliver their
summations and the judge his instructions. After that the case
was in the hands of the jury.

Judge Watt asked Cathy Mocha how long her address to the jury
might be.

"My address may be an hour to an hour and a half at the most,"
she replied.

"Ms. Edwardh?"

"I'm notoriously bad at estimates," Marlys admitted, "but
I would hope that it would be within an hour or an hour and a
half."

The judge considered. "So we would be able to get both addresses
in before the lunch break, if we were to start at something like
nine in the morning?"

Both lawyers agreed.

"Well, it may be that I'll instruct the jury on Wednesday," the
judge said. Everyone was relieved that the long holiday weekend
would not find the jury sequestered in hotel rooms.

As soon as the jury was seated, Marlys called her last witness,
David Loucks, a team-mate of Ken's on the Ajax Wanderers rugby
team. David Loucks, when he stood up, proved to be the only man
in the courtroom as big as Ken Parks. Indeed it turned out that
he played the same position, lock forward, on the Wanderers.
Moreover, he was--every massive, handsome inch of him--a well
turned out, well-spoken representative of the middle class.

"Rugby, after all, is a private-school sport," Marlys noted with
a grin. "The jury might have been thinking it was a violent
sport, a game for roughnecks, but our witness belied that. He
showed it as a gentleman's sport. Since he was Ken's colleague,
his presence enhanced Ken's position before he even said a word."

Loucks testified that the position Ken played, lock forward, was
a strenuous one that requires the athlete to do a lot of pushing
in the scrum. On a scale of exertion, he rated it almost at the
top--"nine out of ten".

He said that on Saturday, May 23, 1987, when Ken played with the
Wanderers, the weather was hot and humid. Ken played the entire
sixty minutes, though he appeared to be out of shape, and at the
end he looked very tired.

The judge asked, "Cross-examination, Ms. Mocha?"

"I have no questions, my lord," she said.

"Next witness?" Judge Watt inquired.

"My lord," said Marlys, "that completes the evidence for the
defence."

It was Friday morning, May 20, 1988. The judge gave the jury a
four-day recess until Wednesday, straddling summer's first long
weekend with an extra day, Tuesday, thrown in. In the absence of
the jury on Tuesday morning, he would hear submissions from the
two lawyers. The jury foreman asked politely for assurances that
the lawyers' addresses and the judge's charge to the jury
would be completed in two days. The judge was startled but gave
the requested assurance.

"It was a very uneventful ending, considering that I had planned
to bring in Cartwright and the two cellmates," Marlys muses.

What remained was for her to persuade the judge that the jury
should be informed that it could return a simple verdict of not
guilty because the situation was one of non-insane automatism.
The prosecution, she expected, would be arguing that the jury
should be instructed to choose between a verdict of guilty of
seconddegree murder or not guilty by reason of insanity. Marlys
didn't think the issue of wilful murder should even arise, since
there had been no evidence to support that view, not a shred.

The jury box was eerily empty as Ken was brought
from the cells on Tuesday morning to listen to the submissions.
Both lawyers gave the judge thick case-books bristling with tabs
to mark the precedents they would be citing. Then Cathy Mocha led
off for the Crown.

"It seems clear to me," she told the judge, "that there is no
agreement as to what a state of somnambulism is in law." The
matter of whether to classify sleepwalking as insane or sane was
in the judge's hands and she urged him to consider the Arthur
Martin decision in _Regina _very. _Rabey. She conceded that in
every known case involving sleepwalking, courts had deemed
sleepwalking to be non-insane automatism rather than a form of
insanity.

"I can't dispute the fact that all the authorities have indicated
somnambulism is a situation of non-insane automatism," she
admitted, but she declared that the cases occurred when
sleepwalking was regarded as something supernatural.

"In fact," she commented, "it was believed that the person's soul
actually left his body during sleep and that was why it was felt
a sleepwalker could not be accountable for what he did."

She continued: "The abnormality that we are dealing
with in this case is an abnormality of the sleep mechanism which,
in my submission, is a functional disorder." Further, she said,
the dissociative state that Ken was in should be characterized as
a ?disease of the mind" within the legal meaning of insanity.

"There is certainly leeway for you to take the position that,
using the rationale set out in _Rabey, that should be viewed as a
situation of insane automatism."

She cited a decision written by Denning in the _Bratty
case, heard by the House of Lords in London, in which the English
peer observed that "any mental disorder which has manifested
itself in violence and is prone to recur is a disease of the
mind".

When she finished Judge Watt inquired if there were any other
issues that she wished him to canvas with the jury.

"The only other issue," she replied, "is the issue of
manslaughter, whether or not that should be put to the jury."

"What is your position on that?" asked the judge.

She answered that she felt that second-degree murder was an
appropriate charge, but the judge might consider changing it to
manslaughter if he was going to advise the jury that the
automatism of sleepwalking fell within the legal meaning of
insanity. When it was her turn, Marlys Edwardh began briskly. "In
this case, my lord, only one defence should be left," she
asserted. "It is the defence of non-insane automatism arising
from the fact that Mr. Parks was sleepwalking at the time.
Neither insanity nor manslaughter should be left."

She reviewed the expert opinions that a sleepwalker's activities
are involuntary and done in an unconscious state, "and thus form
classically part of the definition of automatism .... I concede
for the purposes of this argument that automatism may be of two
varieties, sane and insane, and that automatism resulting from
disease of the mind is insane, but that sleepwalking has always
been, and in my respectful submission is today, clearly viewed as
one of the two phenomena that fall under a claim of non-insane
automatism."

She continued, "This position is consistent not only throughout
the Commonwealth, but with the greatest respect to my friend's
characterization of all that `old law`, it is consistent for over
one hundred and twenty-five years, including a case that was just
recently dealt with in 1986 in England."

Mr. Justice Martin made a distinction in the _Rabey decision, she
said. She read the relevant sentences: "Sleepwalking appears to
fall into a separate category. Unconscious behaviour in a state
of automatism is non-insane automatism."

She said, "I take the view, my lord, that that statement, short
of compelling reasons to the contrary, is one that your lordship
should not in any way deviate from."

The lawyer added, "What the Crown counsel is inviting you to do
is to take sleepwalking and put it _per _se into diseases of the
mind. With the greatest of respect, that is an invitation
to disregard history and tradition and jurisprudence in a way
that is at least unusual."

She dealt at length with an element always pertinent in such
cases, the risk to the public if the accused is released. "What
is before you is evidence that the chance of reoccurrence is
statistically insignificant," she reminded the judge. "There is
no evidence from the examination of the literature that there has
ever been a reoccurrence [of violent behaviour while
sleepwalking]."

In reply, Cathy Mocha protested, "My friend
made a comment that because I submitted that somnambulism should
fall within diseases of the mind I was submitting that all cases
of somnambulism should fall within diseases of the mind. That is
not my position. My submissions were dealing with the accused
before this court."

The presentations occupied more than two hours, but Mr. Justice
Watt made up his mind quickly. As soon as both counsel finished,
he said, "I propose to put the defence of non-insane automatism
to the jury, not the issue of insanity."

Further, he would instruct the jury that if there was any doubt
in their minds that the act was conscious and voluntary, they
should find Ken Parks not guilty of second-degree murder.

He offered to write his reasons, and Marlys Edwardh replied that
she would appreciate that. Judge Watt reflected, "I'm not sure
that I can provide any clear insight, but it is a novel case."

Marlys Edwardh observes admiringly of David Watt, "He doesn't
hijack the jury's deliberations. He's a judge who truly listens
and he's very interested in legal theory and jurisprudence."

On the last day of the trial, Wednesday, May 25, 1988, the heavy
scent of flowers on the spring air outdoors made the courtroom
seem stuffy and unpleasant. Ken Parks was delivered to the
witness-box with some extra baggage. Curled in plastic wrap in
his rectum was three hundred dollars, a gift from inmates at
Metro East Detention Centre against the possibility that he would
be taken from the courtroom to a federal penitentiary and would
need cash to purchase small comforts in the prison canteen.

The backbone of Marlys' address to the jury was that Ken had been
sleepwalking when Barbara Woods was killed. Therefore, she
emphasized, the necessary element for conviction--that it was a
"voluntary and conscious" act--was missing. Also, sleepwalking
was not a disease of the mind. "The prosecution has failed to
produce any evidence, not a shred, to discredit the sleepwalking
thesis." She skirted carefully around an arresting point: the
Crown's psychiatrist who examined Ken Parks sat in the
courtroom but had not been called to testify for the prosecution.
Reason, by inference: he agreed that Ken was sleepwalking.

All the statements Ken gave the police were
consistent with the experts' descriptions of the type of amnesia
suffered by sleepwalkers while in a state of somnambulism. All
the doctors-_all the doctors--who had examined Ken were initially
skeptical, but all ultimately concluded that sleepwalking was the
only explanation that made sense.

When Marlys finished, Karen Parks slipped out of the courtroom.
She didn't want to hear what Cathy Mocha said about Ken. Ken's
old friend Richmond Ramani joined her. He didn't want to hear it
either.

"That's another thing that isn't fair," Karen comments. "The
defence should get to go last."

The Crown lawyer showed high scorn for Ken's statement that he
didn't know what had happened, in view of his statement, "I
killed two people."

"He knew that he had choked them," she said to the jury. She
emphasized that some of the expert witnesses had agreed that, if
Ken Parks wasn't sleepwalking, it was possible he was repressing
the memory. She saw in Ken's reluctance to join his wife in bed a
desire to avoid detection when he left the premises later. The
sleepwalking defence, she said, was "simply ludicrous". She
outlined Ken's complex movements--turning off the television,
putting on his jacket and shoes, picking up the keys, opening the
garage door, finding the ignition key, starting the car, putting
on the glasses that he kept in the car for driving, driving
twentythree kilometres, parking in a cramped space, arming
himself with a tire-iron, selecting the key to the basement door
of the townhouse, entering a darkened bedroom to strangle Denis
Woods, getting a knife from the kitchen to kill Barbara Woods,
returning to the bedroom to stab Denis Woods repeatedly.

Other members of the family of Ken Parks went through
ritualistic, repetitive behaviour when they engaged in
sleepwalking, she pointed out, while the activities of Ken Parks
were so exceedingly complex they could only indicate a
functioning brain.

"I appeal to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," she said,
"to rely on your common sense."

She declared: "Permitting the accused to leave the court a free
man would be an affront to the community's sense of justice."

The Crown counsel also commented disapprovingly on Ken's
behaviour in the witness stand. He was, she said, "joking
around". Ken thought that was unfair. He
smiles when he is uneasy and only once, when he couldn't spell
the name of his medication, did he make a small joke. "She made
me out a monster," Ken comments gloomily.

Marlys noted that Cathy Mocha's customary cool and formal
approach was maintained to the end. "She didn't try to convey the
pain of the Woods family and invite the jury to enter that," the
defence lawyer observed. "I thought she might, but she didn't."

In jury trials, the judge has the final word. At one-thirty,
after the lunch break, Mr. Justice Watt began what turned out to
be a very lengthy charge to the jury. He began ponderously, in a
manner suited to the gravity of the situation: "Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, it shall shortly fall to you to commence
the final aspect of your sworn duty to well and truly and a true
deliverance make between our sovereign lady, the Queen, and the
accused whom you have in your charge, Kenneth James Parks. It is
now my privilege and duty to instruct you as to the principles of
law applicable in this case, to refresh your individual and
collective recollections of certain features of the evidence
which has been here introduced, and to endeavour
to demonstrate for you how to relate the applicable legal
principles to the facts as you may find them to be, so that you
may render a just and proper verdict. ...

"The duty in which you are presently engaged is the most
important civilian duty a Canadian citizen can be called upon to
perform. You occupy a position in the administration of criminal
justice which is the equivalent of my job as a judge of this
court .... You are legal guardians of the rights of your
community .... You are equally the legal guardians of the rights
of the accused. ...

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, considerations, sympathies,
prejudices, or emotions should not be permitted to influence you
to the slightest degree in your decision as jurors in this case.
If such matters should influence you, justice will not be done.
... I expect from you a judgment resting upon the evidence, law,
good reason, and common sense, and unaffected by considerations
of compassion or vindictiveness."

That introduction to the solemnity of their responsibility
completed, the judge instructed the jurors on the legal
principles involved in a charge of second-degree murder. The
fundamental one, he declared, was the right of the accused to be
presumed
innocent until the Crown proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
"If the Crown should fail to prove guilt in respect of a
particular crime beyond a reasonable doubt, then you _must
find the accused not guilty."

He explained what reasonable meant in that context and the
difference between direct evidence and circumstantial evidence,
and how to weigh the testimony of expert witnesses.

"Although the evidence of the eminent doctors who speak with
authority bred of their great experience is important, and should
be weighed carefully, you are not bound, without consideration,
to it. You are not a rubber stamp. Secondly, the decision whether
the acts of the accused were conscious and voluntary or
unconscious and involuntary is a matter for you alone."

He then recited the chronology of events as they had unfolded in
the courtroom during the two weeks of testimony.

He paused and offered the jury a break, which invitation was
accepted. In the jury's absence Marlys Edwardh made a submission
to the judge that in her address to the jury Cathy Mocha had made
some statements that weren't true--for instance, the comment, "He
knew that he had choked them." Marlys
protested that the jury would have the "clear impression that
some of Barbara Woods' injuries involved choking. There is no
evidence."

Citing some other remarks she thought were at variance with the
testimony, she asked the judge to rectify the errors during his
charge to the jury. He made a non-committal response, after which
the jury returned. He then listed the three questions it was to
decide: Did Kenneth Parks cause the death of Barbara Woods? If he
did, has the Crown proved beyond reasonable doubt that the acts
causing the death were conscious and voluntary? And if the acts
were not conscious and voluntary, what crime has the accused
committed?

Around three-thirty that afternoon, the judge adjourned until the
following morning. People filed out of the courtroom in a
suspenseful state of mind. Ken Parks, putting his hands behind
him for the handcuffs, found it difficult to draw a natural
breath. He was panting, his back wet with sweat.

The judge resumed the next morning.

"He spelled it right out," Karen recalls admiringly, "that there
should be no question in the jury's mind. If they thought this,
then it had to be this, and if they thought that, it had to be
that. He repeated things _five _times, in different ways, so
everyone would understand. He was really good."

A telling point came late in the charge when he said, "Before an
accused can be held criminally responsible for conduct
which constitutes a crime, he or she must be proven by the
prosecution to have had, at the revelant time, the ability to
control his or her conduct. ... We describe unconscious
involuntary behaviour as `automatism` and hold those whose
conduct falls within such a state to be not criminally
responsible and not guilty, however enormous the consequences of
their behaviour might be."

At the end of the morning, Mr. Justice Watt presented the jury
with two alternatives. One was to find that Ken Parks was
conscious of what he did when Barbara Woods was killed and
therefore guilty. The other was to find Ken Parks not guilty,
since the evidence did not support findings of not guilty by
reason of insanity or guilty of the lesser charge of
manslaughter.

Among the most significant statements he made in the course of
the long charge were, "One cannot plan to sleepwalk. One can't
plan whilst awake and carry it out during sleep, as sleep is
independent of waking mentation and there is no control over it
.... Volitional control is not available in a sleepwalking state.
There is neither awareness of, nor control over, what a
sleepwalker does."

"I heard," observed Karen Parks thoughtfully, "that the judge has
a daughter who sleepwalks. That didn't hurt."

At thirty-two minutes past twelve that day, Thursday, May 26,
1988, the jury left the courtroom with sombre faces. The judge
thoughtfully promised to notify the lawyers when the jury went
out to eat, since this would release them to have a bite as well.

Karen's family waited for the verdict huddled together in one of
the small rooms reserved for witnesses. Ken's family was in
another. The strain was showing on every face. The civilities
observed earlier in the trial were dropped. When they met in the
corridors or washrooms, they nodded curtly or, in many cases, not
at all.

Karen had no reason to remain alone. Her testimony had put her in
Ken's camp, so she sat with Betty Parks and Lil Hodge. Her father
and her sisters and brothers sat in another room. That
evening, when word came that the jury had gone to a restaurant,
there was an awkward moment when the two families almost collided
as they went for dinner themselves.

Ken paced in a holding cell, watched sympathetically by a few
others from his range at Metro East who were still awaiting
transportation back to the jail. Around four o'clock these men
were collected by guards to be returned to their cells. The large
holding area was empty except for Ken and one other prisoner, a
man also waiting for a jury to come in. Neither asked the
other what charge he was facing. Around six the other man was
taken to hear his verdict and didn't return. Ken was left alone.

He counted floor tiles to keep his terror at bay. He did push-ups
and sit-ups, rested, paced again, did more push-ups. He was
sweating so heavily that he took off his clothes to protect them.
At dinner time, the guards brought him a club sandwich purchased
from a nearby restaurant. Ken wolfed it down. He remembers it
fondly as the best meal he had eaten for a year. As the evening
wore on, a kindly guard gave Ken a book, and he tried to read it.
He doesn't remember what it was about.

Darkness fell, a soft and lovely spring night, and the jury was
still deliberating. In the harsh light of a witness-room, Ken's
family sat playing cards. Karen paced. Marlys popped in and out
to assure them that it was a good sign that the jury was taking
so long.

"If they decided to convict him of seconddegree murder, this
would have been over quite quickly," she
explained. "The delay shows they're really wrestling with this,
which means they're looking at the sleepwalking defence."

Diane Hodge wasn't convinced. "I just know he's going to be
convicted," she wailed.

"If he's found guilty, don't think it's all over," Marlys said
soothingly. "I have the papers ready, and we'll file a notice of
appeal at once."

"We all had lots of confidence in Marlys," Betty Parks says
gratefully. "She knew what she was doing."

Often Marlys and Del sat by themselves. "You need to be alone,"
she says. "You give all you can, and then giving more is really
hard."

Once, strolling in the corridor to have a cigarette, Marlys
encountered Cathy Mocha. She
used the opportunity to ask a question that had been on her mind.

"If he's convicted of second-degree murder," she said, "are you
going to ask for more than ten years?"

Cathy Mocha gasped. "Do you think he'll be convicted?"

Marlys was taken aback. Cathy Mocha had seemed, throughout the
trial, supremely confident. In fact, however, Cathy had felt her
case lost when Judge Watt disallowed the element of insanity.

"I don't have a position on that," replied Marlys discreetly,
"but I'm considering all the possibilities."

Marlys' colleagues gathered--lawyers from her building and
others, such as criminal lawyer Diane Martin, with whom she has
worked. Marlys was touched by their support and the spirit of
camaraderie that brought them there. Clay Ruby came, exuding
affection for her. He had stored champagne in the trunk of his
car, to be handy in the event of a victory.

The jury had been out for more than nine hours. It was ten
minutes to ten when the weary judge convened court again. He
intended to ask the foreman if the jurors were close to a
decision or whether they would like

to be dismissed to resume in the morning.

A court officer popped his head in the door. "We got one!" he
called. Karen started to pray.

Guards left hurriedly to bring Ken into the courtroom. They found
him in his shorts doing situps. He dressed himself with fumbling
hands. He felt strangely calm; the ordeal was about to end. One
way or another, in the next five minutes the suspense would be
over. As he was led to the prisoner's box, he looked around at a
packed courtroom for friendly faces but was feeling so
disoriented he could focus on no one.

He waited to have the handcuffs removed, but the guards stepped
back and left him with his wrists pinned together behind his
back. If he was found guilty, they wanted control. The court
usher, by curious coincidence a man also named Kenneth Parks,
looked up sharply.

"Take those handcuffs off," he ordered.

Ken was accustomed to being guarded by two men, one on either
side of the prisoner's box, but this time there were four, and
all were tense.

Karen looked over at the area reserved for reporters and noted
that it was full. Throughout the trial there had never been more
than two people there, and usually only one. The Toronto papers
had shown little interest in the Ken Parks trial, assuming it was
a simple domestic crime, but word of the sleepwalking defence had
electrified newsrooms, and people with notebooks overflowed into
the spectators' area.

As the jury filed in, Ken couldn't look at them. He fastened his
attention on the floor. Karen tried to read the jury's faces, but
their expressions were closed. Ken shot a quick look at the
judge, but he looked perfectly composed and unfathomable.

Ken was asked to stand. He got to his feet, swaying. His
head felt detached from his body, swimming somewhere in a hollow,
echoing space. He thought he might be sick. His mother, sitting
next to Tyrone, was trembling. "Everything seemed to be in slow
motion," she said.

But Karen was stunned by how quickly it was done. The judge said,
"May we have the verdict."

The registrar asked formally, "Members of the jury, have you
agreed upon your verdict?"

The jury foreman replied, "We have agreed on a verdict. We find
him not guilty."

An audible gasp swept the courtroom and reporters ran from the
room to contact their editors.

Ken's eyes filled with tears.

The registrar intoned, "Members of the jury, hearken to your
verdict as the court hath recorded it. You say the accused at the
bar is not guilty as within charged. So say you all?"

The jurors, almost as one voice, said, "Yes."

The judge's aplomb was unshaken at the drama. He thanked the
jury, wished them well, and discharged them.

Cathy Mocha concealed her disappointment under a professional's
mask. Later she was to say, "Frankly, I can't say that the jury
was incorrect in the decision, with what they had before them. I
like to think, though, that if they had the issue of insanity
before them, that there may well have been a different outcome."

When the jury had left, Marlys said she would be asking the judge
to set bail so that Ken could be released pending his trial on a
second charge, the attempted murder of Denis Woods. Marlys
Edwardh had her course of action planned. She would challenge the
legality of a second trial, since the circumstances in both
charges were identical. Cathy Mocha protested that it was all too
fast.

"I do not want to leave my client in custody
any more than is necessary," Marlys conceded, "but I certainly
understand that Crown counsel needs to at least assess the
situation."

In truth, Marlys knew that it would be impossible to release Ken
immediately. His bail on the fraud charge had been revoked when
Karen needed to clear title so she could put the Pickering house
up for sale. In any case, arrangements still hadn't been
completed for a place for him to stay. Karen, she knew, was not
ready to take him back immediately. The young wife wanted
to keep her distance for a time. It seemed most likely that Ken
would stay with Lil Hodge, but that wasn't yet certain.

"Ms. Mocha," Mr. Justice Watt inquired, "how long do you require
to assess the situation?"

She replied that she thought she would be ready early Monday.

"She just said that to stall things," Karen comments bitterly.

"Does your client agree to that, Ms. Edwardh?" asked the judge.

Marlys stepped back from the table where the lawyers sit and
raised an inquiring eyebrow to Ken. He saw what was happening: he
would be kept in custody

over the weekend. He supposed he could protest, but Marlys seemed
to be signalling him to accept the situation. He nodded. After a
year in prison, a few days more didn't matter much.

Out of consideration for her family, sitting stricken and weeping
on their side of the courtroom, Karen was struggling not to look
delighted. Samantha and Emma were sobbing loudly, and the whole
family clung to one another in a tight circle and then suddenly
broke and strode through the door with set faces. Karen made no
move to join them. She kept her head down, her eyes squeezed
shut, and said silently to herself, "Yes, yes, yes, _yes."

She approached Ken and saw that he was crying. A guard glared at
her, so she stepped back.

Outside on the sidewalk she saw members of the jury waiting for
taxis. She had to control herself to keep from running to them
with her thanks.

Lil Hodge, Betty and Tyrone, Glen and Diane, Richmond Ramani and
his girl-friend, and Karen went to the bar of a nearby hotel, the
Downtown Holiday Inn, and had a drink to celebrate. Then, "We
telephoned the good news to everyone we knew," Betty recalls
blissfully. "We were so happy."


Marlys Edwardh's friends followed her home for the victory
celebration. They gathered in her hot tub, sipping Clay Ruby's
champagne. Clay lifted his glass to Del Doucette, who had been a
lawyer for less than a month. He said, "Del, hang up your robe.
This is the pinnacle of your career. This is as good as it gets."


CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After the Trial
Ken, pale and tense, was released at the courthouse on June 1,
1988. His grandmother, Lil Hodge, posted bail twice, for $2,000
on the fraud charge and for $10,000 on the charge of attempted
murder, both sums secured with liens on her house. Marlys warned
Ken and Karen that a horde of reporters and photographers was
waiting on the sidewalk outside the courthouse.

"It's a scrum," she told them. "They want to get pictures of you
and ask some questions. My advice is to let them do that and get
it over. Otherwise they'll only keep after you."

Karen was taken aback by the number of microphones and cameras
that surrounded them as they came through the court-room door.
She and Ken posed awkwardly, trying to look pleasant but feeling
acutely uneasy. Reporters asked Ken some questions about how he
was feeling and what he planned to do, but words didn't come to
him. He spotted Marlys in her car, waiting for them, and hurried
Karen into it.

They drove to Marlys Edwardh's office for a discussion of his
impending legal situation. Ken faced two more charges, one of the
attempted murder of Denis Woods and the other of the fraud
against his former employer, Revere Electric. Marlys said neither
should give concern. Either the judge would rule that the second
charge should be dropped in view of the first acquittal, or there
would be a trial before Judge Watt that would consist of nothing
but the lawyers' submissions.

Marlys had arranged to have the fraud charge heard on the same
day. Ken would plead guilty, saving the courts the cost of a
tedious trial. Since this was a first offence for him, and Karen
had arranged to make restitution, the Crown would not ask for a
prison term. Cathy Mocha had agreed to recommend that the judge
grant a suspended sentence and parole.

The only danger on the horizon, Marlys
told them, was that the Crown might appeal the jury's acquittal.

"Sleepwalking has never been used before as a defence in Canada,"
Marlys explained. "At least not successfully, so far as we have
been able to discover. The Crown might not like the precedent."

"Can you appeal a jury decision?" asked Karen, confused. "Only in
Canada," Marlys told her. "Ever since Magna Carta, in every
country which bases its jurisprudence on English common law, the
jury has the final word. Once the jury speaks, that's it. But in
Canada we allow appeals of jury decisions. The appeal judges
could order a new trial."

Ken and Karen looked stunned.

"Don't worry," Marlys advised them. "The Crown has only a
month to make up its mind what it will do. After that, it's
over."

Marlys shrinks from painting too rosy a picture for her clients,
but she had reason to be confident that the Crown would not
appeal. That morning in the _Globe _and _Mail, Thomas Claridge
had written: "A Crown appeal is considered unlikely against the
acquittal of a Pickering man who fatally stabbed his
mother-in-law but was found not guilty because of doubts that he
was awake at the time.

"An Ontario Supreme Court jury of eight men and four women
deliberated about nine hours Thursday before acquitting Kenneth
James Parks of second degree murder in the death of Barbara Ann
Woods, 41.

"The verdict represented the first recorded instance of a
Canadian successfully using a somnambulism (sleepwalking) defence
in a murder charge. ...

"To reach a conclusion of guilty, the jury would have to accept
the Crown's call to reject a defence theory that won unqualified
support from five psychiatrists and went unchallenged by a Crown
witness.

"Any Crown appeal of the acquittal would have to be based on
alleged legal errors by Judge Watt, himself a former Crown who,
in two and a half years on the bench, is considered one of the
brightest minds in the Supreme Court .... Judge Watt's long
charge to the jury was accepted as fair by both sides. One lawyer
called it `impeccable`."

In fact, Cathy Mocha already had put a equest to appeal to the
office of the attorney general and was waiting a decision. She
had decided that the important precedent of Ken's sleepwalking
being ruled to be non-insane automatism, rather than insane
automatism, should be subjected to judicial review.

Ken and Karen left their lawyer's office and took the subway to a
restaurant, Mr. Greenjeans, for lunch. Hamburgers.

The next stop was to pick up Melissa. A friend had been caring
for the eighteen-month-old child throughout the trial. Melissa
was dressed in party clothes for the occasion, complete with
frilly socks. When Ken stooped to talk to the little girl, she
ran crying to her mother.

"That's your daddy," Karen told the toddler. "You remember, you
talked to daddy on the telephone?"

Melissa hid her face and cried harder. Ken looked at his
daughter helplessly. He hadn't touched her for a year, not since
Karen had put Melissa on his chest in the hospital. It was to be
several days before she would let him near her.

Karen and Ken had agreed on the wisdom of giving themselves some
space before resuming their marriage. Lil Hodge invited Ken to
live with her in Scarborough in the interim. It would give the
young couple time to adjust.

"I'd been on my own for a year," Karen explains, "and there was a
lot to sort out. Feelings about his gambling, about what happened
to my mom .... I needed to know I could trust him again before I
could even think about going on with the marriage. I had to get
the trust back before we could share a bed together."

She and Ken spent every day together in Pickering, and at night
he caught the last GO train back to Scarborough.

In mid-June Ken nervously went to court to face the twinned
trials. Because Marlys Edwardh couldn't attend, he was
represented by Clay Ruby, who got a postponement.

On June 28, the last day on which an appeal could be filed, the
Crown went to the Ontario Court of Appeal to declare that Judge
Watt "erred in law" in ruling that Ken's state of somnambulism
"was not a disease of the mind within the meaning of the Criminal
Code".

Cathy Mocha explained: "As I understand the delay, the Crown was
waiting for Justice Watt to write his reasons. My request was put
in right away after the trial to the Crown's criminal appeal
division and I was advised almost immediately that the Crown
would be appealing. The difficulty was that the Crown didn't want
to appeal something without having read the judge's reasons.
Finally they decided to appeal it blind just on the basis of what
I had indicated in my notes of what the judge said. His reasons
at the time were very brief, so it was difficult for the Crown to
make that decision. The fact is that the point is so novel, and
it never has been decided by a high court, and this finally swung
the decision to appeal."

The Crown asked that the acquittal be set aside and a verdict of
not guilty by reason of insanity be substituted. As an
alternative, the Crown suggested, there could be a new trial.

Ken and Karen were aghast. Marlys Edwardh consoled them as best
she could. All the psychiatric evidence made it clear that
sleepwalking was not a form of insanity, she said, and everyone
who had examined Ken agreed he was not insane. When the appeal
court read the testimony and the reasons that Mr. Justice
Watt promised to write, chances were very good that the appeal
would be denied.

The issue to be tested was not whether Ken was in a
state of automatism when the attacks occurred--that was conceded
by all sides--but whether sleepwalking should be considered a
form of insanity that should have resulted in Ken Parks'
committal to a locked hospital for the criminally insane until
the lieutenant-governor's Board of Review certified that it was
safe for him to be free.

On July 14, 1988, Ken Parks was before Judge Watt again to face
the charge of attempted murder. This time there would be no jury
or witnesses: the judge had heard all the evidence that either
side wished to produce at the previous trial. Cathy Mocha
reminded the judge that the wounds to Denis Woods were
superficial in comparison to those sustained by Barbara Woods.
The explanation, she said, was that Ken Parks cut his hands while
attacking Barbara Woods and subsequently, when attacking Denis
Woods, was unable to grip the knife tightly enough to inflict
fatal injuries. Her argument was that he was feeling pain in his
hands, which meant he was awake for the attack on Denis.

The prosecutor told the judge, "In my submission it is open to
you to find at that point when he attacked Mr. Woods he was no
longer in a sleep state but was awake."

Marlys Edwardh protested. "Given the nature of the evidence of
somnambulism," she said, "your lordship ought not to engage in
speculative ventures to find a different verdict. The verdict of
the jury in relation to this case or in relation to the murder,
because the evidence is identical, ought to be the same."

She argued that the sequence of the assaults is a mystery and
will so remain. "To take a splice of one assault and invite a
different verdict is nothing short of inviting your lordship to
bring in a verdict which is inconsistent with the first verdict."

Further, she added, the wounds to Denis Woods were far from
superficial: some were to the bone. No conclusion could be drawn
about whether Ken had stabbed Denis before the tendons in his
fingers were severed or afterwards.

The judge retired for exactly thirty minutes.

On his return Judge Watt delivered a surprisingly lengthy
decision, given the time lapse, but one that undoubtedly took
into consideration the Crown's protest about his handling of the
first trial. Towards the end of his remarks, he observed, "It is
incumbent upon the prosecution to establish, beyond a reasonable
doubt, that the assault [on Denis Woods] must have occurred at a
time when the accused was not in a somnambulistic state, hence
acting consciously and voluntarily .... Ms. Mocha submits that
the evidence establishes that the accused awakened in the
television room after stabbing the deceased to death and
thereafter returned to the bedroom, there to attempt to murder
the complainant."

After stating the points of law involved, the judge continued,
"It would be the height of speculation to conclude that such an
event in fact occurred. It does not lie proven in the evidence of
Denis Woods, the statements or the testimony of the accused, nor
in any combination thereof."

He concluded, "I find the accused not guilty. Mr. Parks, you're
free to go."

It was over just before eleven o'clock that morning.

Ten minutes later Ken stood in a courtroom downstairs from the
first one. District Court Judge Ted Wren listened as the same
Crown lawyer read the charge of fraud. To this Ken said,
"Guilty."

The judge gave Cathy Mocha an inquiring look and she jumped up.
"Your Honour, the Crown is suggesting a suspended sentence in
this case." She explained the circumstances and then sat down.
The judge considered while Ken held his breath.

"All right," he said. He then pronounced a three-year suspended
sentence and required that Ken Parks attend meetings of Gamblers
Anonymous and continue taking medication for his sleep disorder.


The comment current after the Parks acquittal was, "It opens the
floodgates."

Marlys fumed. "I keep hearing about floodgates. People seem to
think that everyone will claim to have been sleepwalking. That's
nonsense. Sleepwalking is one of the hardest defences in the
world to prove. It all has to fit. The jury brings an amount of
suspicion to a sleepwalking defence. You have to produce an
enormous body of evidence and expert testimony in order to win
with it."

Indeed, almost a year later a sleepwalking defence was attempted
and failed. William Wade, 58, a man from Brampton, Ontario,
bashed his wife's head repeatedly on the curb outside their home.
The attack was witnessed by many neighbours, despite the
hour--four in the morning-because of the woman's screams. At the
trial in the fall of 1989, the defence case rested on the
evidence of a sleep-disorder specialist from
Toronto Western Hospital who testified to William Wade's
family and personal history of sleepwalking. The accused said he
had no memory of the attack, had never struck his wife before,
and loved her dearly.

"The only thing I can recall after going to bed was waking up in
the Metro West Detention Centre," he testified.

The jury didn't believe him. He was convicted of second-degree
murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, with no eligibility
for parole for ten years.

On the other hand, there was the case of a sleepwalker in
Brampton, Ontario, a nightshift worker who strolled naked out of
his house one afternoon while masturbating. Neighbours summoned a
police officer, who questioned the man and charged him with
performing an indecent act. He was defended successfully by a
young criminal lawyer, Tom Carey, who produced an affidavit from
a neurologist who gave his opinion that the man was sleepwalking.


After a year behind bars, Ken was slow to shake his jail habits.
He had looked forward to being able
to walk outdoors whenever he liked, in any direction, but he
found it made him nervous to be in the open. He preferred to stay
inside in a small room. Crowds made him uneasy; like all prison
inmates, he had a custom of watching his back. He found it
difficult to concentrate. When he accompanied Karen to hunt for
housing, he couldn't get as engrossed as she was in the project.
In fact, it was hard to get interested in anything.

It was almost two months after his release before the couple felt
they were ready to live together again. Ken moved back into the
Pickering townhouse, and they renewed conjugal relations by
courtship stages, beginning by holding hands and hugging, then
progressing to kisses.

"He had to get to know me, he had to get to know Melissa," Karen
says, taking a deep breath. "He had missed a lot of time." Karen
and Ken resumed sexual relations in July and Karen became
pregnant at once.

"It wasn't planned that way. I had the pills and everything, but
I get pregnant so easy it's ridiculous." She grinned. "Like my
mum."

It was most untimely. Ken was unemployed and Karen was waiting to
hear if she was accepted in nursing school. They discussed
abortion. Ken said it would be all right with him if that's what
Karen wanted. Karen gave it only brief consideration.

"I can't do that," she decided. "Considering the
circumstances, that we were married and everything, I don't think
I have a right to do that just because it was inconvenient for
me. That's my view anyway. I can't make up my mind what I think
about abortion, but right now I can't have one."

"Okay with me," he replied.

Ken agreed that Oshawa was a good place for them to move. He saw
the need to get away from the Pickering-Ajax area where they were
known and shunned. The presence of General Motors, the colossus
that generates most of the jobs in Oshawa, raised Ken's chances
of finding employment. Besides, his mother and Tyrone lived
there--Ken's family, and now Karen's family, her only family. In
July they had an additional reason to go to Oshawa: Karen was
accepted at Durham College's registered nursing school.

Their financial situation was desperate. Because of Ken's fraud
charge, the couple had no credit rating, Ken didn't have a job,
and Karen was living on welfare.

Rough estimates of their legal costs to date were in the dizzying
neighbourhood of $180,000, although Marlys Edwardh had reduced
her fee from her normal $250 an hour to $150 an hour and waived
collecting any of it. The money Ken's family had given her went
to the experts whose testimony had formed the bulwark of the
defence case. Grandma Hodge had paid a substantial amount-about
$50,000, she estimates--by selling stock from her
investments, and Ken's uncle, Glen Hodge, unhesitatingly put in a
few thousand of his own savings. Others in the family contributed
what they could. Even with this level of loyalty and generosity,
Ken and Karen would owe Marlys close to $90,000 after they gave
her some of the house sale money. They also had to return money
to Revere.

To add to their woes, Gary McNeely, the lawyer Ken had retained
on his fraud charge, sued them in small claims court for his fee.
The judge ruled against Karen and Ken and ordered them to pay
McNeely and court costs as well. That came out of the house sale
money too.

The cash they received from the sale of their Pickering house was
about $66,000. All Ken's half, approximately $33,000, went to
Marlys, and Karen paid the $15,000 Ken owed Revere out of her
half. Another $5,000 went to settle with the finance company from
which Ken had borrowed against the household appliances and to
his Visa creditor, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

The amount that was left was so small it wouldn't be sufficient
for them to buy another house, even if someone would give them a
mortgage. They looked for something to rent, but Oshawa was in a
boom period and rents were horrendously high. Finding
nothing they could afford, they turned desperately to the
real-estate market, looking for a break on their mortgage
qualifications. The situation was reaching the point of crisis.
If they didn't find a house by August 1, they would have to move
in with Ken's family.

Luck was with them. A house at 311 Athol Street in Oshawa had
been illegally subdivided to make it a triplex, and the
real-estate agent who owned it was anxious to unload. He would
take a small sum down on an agreement of sale, with the deal to
be consummated in a year when the couple might have built up a
credit rating sufficient to allow them to obtain a mortgage. All
he asked was a co-signer on the agreement.

"He wanted to get rid of the property, and he
wanted the money we had," Karen explains. "So we were lucky. But
he wasn't taking a big risk, because he still held the
mortgages."

For the necessary co-signer Ken turned to his brother Rob Parks,
who had a good job at General Motors. He invited Rob to move into
the triplex and share the mortgage payments of $1,400 a month.
While Rob had no cash to put into a down payment or the legal
costs of the purchase, he was earning a steady income and could
manage the payments.

Over a two-year period, Rob would pay Karen and Ken $200 a month
to cover his half of the down payment and legal costs, all of
which they had provided, and at that point he would be fully the
coowner. Rob would have one apartment, Karen, Ken, and Melissa
another, and the bachelor apartment on the third floor would be
rented.

After the trial, Karen waited a few days to call her father. Out
of respect for his situation, she wanted to give him time for the
shock of Ken's acquittal to abate. She had no doubt that the
conversation would be friendly.

"In his eyes I'm his daughter," she explains simply, "and that's
that."

Her assumption that Denis would not reject her is a reflection of
her own views about family loyalty. Karen's attitude towards Ken
is, essentially, "He's my husband, and that's that."

She had not misjudged the situation. Denis said, in his
fairminded way, that he could understand the verdict. "I don't
think the police did a very good job and I wasn't impressed by
the Crown but, that aside, it is easy to see why the jury decided
the way it did."

She thought that was an uncommonly generous remark, but
what she said was, "Thanks, dad."

"I'm only concerned that it could happen again," he said slowly.
"Your brothers and sisters are quite frightened that Ken will
come back."

"He's taking medication so he won't sleep so deeply, you know,"
Karen reminded him. "That episode was associated with a lot of
stress and sleeplessness. The doctors say that it was a fluke, a
once-in-a-lifetime thing."

"I hope so," her father said quietly.

"Your brothers and sisters are having a hard time with the
verdict," he went on. "They can't understand it at all. I think
it will be a while before they get over feeling angry."

"I understand," Karen said, realizing with a sinking heart that
he was telling her that they didn't want to see her. "I can
appreciate how they feel."

Denis paused. "We'll keep in touch, of course," he told his
daughter, "but I don't want to see Ken and I don't want to even
talk to him on the telephone. If I call you, I'll let it ring
twice and then I'll hang up and dial again. If Ken's there,
please ask him to not pick up the phone when I call back."

"That's a good plan," Karen said, her voice under control.


Her friend Connie Sullivan dropped out of her life. "She's
scared," Karen explains. "She has this big issue about Ken doing
it again."


Ken started job-hunting immediately after the two trials on June
27, but the results were disheartening.

"I didn't know whether to tell the truth on the application or
not," he confesses.

"At first you did," Karen reminds him.

"Yeah," he drawls. "They ask where you've
worked and I had this missing year, the one when I was in jail.
For a while I didn't lie about it, but that meant no one would
interview me. Then I started to lie and I got interviews."

Even so, no one would hire him. Some told him that he'd be
getting a call, but the call didn't come. Ken applied for
unemployment insurance. After a grim wait, his application
was accepted. Even with that income, they were living seriously
below the poverty line; sometimes the household was scant on
food. Once, welfare helped with an emergency cheque.

As months wore on, Ken's discouragement was profound. He
continued to search for work, but the unrelenting rejections were
hard on his always shaky confidence. Karen meanwhile obtained an
Ontario government student loan and started classes at Durham
College, at the same time working on Saturdays at the
supermarket. She bubbled with enthusiasm about what she was
learning. Nursing was _wonderful, she told Ken. Though she found
little time to concentrate on study, her marks were consistently
in the nineties.

In November, almost five months after his release, Ken finally
got employment. He was jubilant. He told his employer the truth
about his past, but the man gave him a job anyway.

The company, Canadian Protective Products, produced salt and
chemicals to spread on roads and sidewalks in winter. The pay,
however, was $8.50 an hour, which left the family still pinched
for money. Two months later Ken quit for something better, $11.05
an hour with Lear Siegler, supplier of car seats for General
Motors.

A week after he started he had a phone call.

"Don't come in," he was told. "You're fired. We found out about
your record and the guys on the line are afraid of you."

"How can you do that?" Ken protested.

"Easy," he was told. "You didn't tell us the truth on your
application, so you were hired under false pretences."

Frantic, Ken counted himself fortunate to land a temporary job
with a plastics company at $8.00 an hour. A few weeks later, he
found a permanent job, at $9.75 an hour, with Greif Containers,
makers of giant cardboard cores.



After the Trial


For about five months, Ken went regularly to Gamblers Anonymous.
The group in Toronto, he found, was a vast improvement over the
one in prison but not different in style and content. He gained
understanding of the nature of compulsive gambling but saw
himself as somewhat different from the others. For him, gambling
had never been a thrill. Asked why he gambled, his answer was,
"So I could buy my wife a trip to Australia." Like the others,
though, he had dreamed of the big win; like them he had stolen
money; like them he lied to people he loved.

"You become a compulsive liar because you always want to look
good," Ken explained. "The big-shot attitude is the main thing
with compulsive gamblers. I had that. I wanted everyone to like
me."

"He was _just like that," Karen interposed. "When we went out to
dinner with my parents, Ken always wanted to get the cheque. He
always wanted to pay for everything. All the time, not just once
in a while. I used to try and hold him back. I didn't think
we should pay for everyone's meal every time we went out, but
that's what Ken wanted to do. When my mom wanted to buy him a
drink he wouldn't let her. He wouldn't take anything from
anyone."

Ken listened to Karen in a manner that suggested he wasn't taking
her comments personally. She was talking about a person they both
knew a long time ago, someone who isn't around any more.

Nevertheless Karen wasn't willing to take a chance that he
wouldn't gamble again. They talked about her concerns and he
agreed to the restrictions she asked.

"I don't carry any money, not more than I need for little
expenses," he explained. "Anyway, I have no urge to go back to
the track."

"I protect myself from him," Karen commented calmly. "I keep the
accounts. We have just one bank account in both our names. I
question any Visa things that I don't recognize. I still haven't
got back the trust in him that I once had. I don't think he's
going to start gambling, but I keep an eye on him just in case.
He's become a good liar and I can't always tell when he's lying,
so I question him a lot and try to catch his slips."

"Not lately," Ken protested.

She gave him a quick look. "No, not now. But I did for a long
time."

Ken wanted the subject changed.

"Your cooking is better," he grinned winningly.

She laughed with delight. "That's true."

"She's getting a lot better," he beamed.

"Why don't _you learn to cook?" he was asked.

"I don't have to," Ken replied, deadpan. "I'm a man."

Laughter pealed from Karen. "He's teasing," she said, her face
full of delight. "That's what he used to do with my mom all the
time. My dad's the same way, a tease."


One night shortly before Melissa's second birthday Karen woke in
the night to go to the bathroom. As always when she's up, she
checked on Melissa, but the child wasn't in her bed.

Frightened, Karen searched the house. Turning on the lights
downstairs, she found the child in the livingroom, placidly
sitting on the couch with her doll.

"What are you doing here, Melissa?" Karen asked. The toddler
looked at her with a dazed expression.

Getting back into bed later, Karen said to Ken, "Guess what. Your
daughter sleepwalks."


The relationship with Rob Parks started to break down almost
immediately after the move to 311 Athol. Each brother was
supposed to put $850 a month into a joint bank account, out of
which the mortgage and utilities were to be paid, but Karen
discovered that Rob wasn't keen to make his deposit. Each month
she had to chase him and patiently endure his procrastination. He
progressed from refusing to pay for the utilities to lateness in
making the mortgage payments. In November he was only a few days
late, but he missed the December mortgage payment entirely. The
household was in trouble.

"I'll pay it next week," he promised, but didn't. Karen fumed.
Rob, who earned twice as much as she and Ken combined, was
blowing his wages at the race track.

Though it left Ken and Karen in a serious financial
situation, they made up the entire December mortgage themselves
to avoid the risk of losing the house.

Karen did not expect to receive Christmas gifts from her sisters
and brothers but she resolutely shopped for gifts for everyone in
her family anyway. She was determined not to lose contact with
them. She went regularly to see her father, taking Melissa with
her, and always by an appointment made well in advance. She was
careful not to arrive early. Warned, her sisters and brothers
would absent themselves. Always, Denis was alone in the house.
Karen asked no questions and he offered no apology.

In December she gave notice as usual and said she planned to
deliver the Christmas gifts. To her surprise Jonny and Nicky were
at home. Karen had not seen her brothers for seven months, not
since the emotional scene in the courtroom when Ken was
acquitted. She noted that Nicky, the baby of the family, had
grown. He greeted her shyly but Jonny turned his back and
wouldn't speak. Karen, disconcerted and hurt, made the visit a
brief one.

"Nicky has totally forgiven me," she said that spring. "He
doesn't hold anything against me, but Jonny was slow to come
around. Now he'll say `Hi,` and `How are you, Karen?` My sisters
still feel very strongly. They just clear out when they know I'm
coming."

"It's strange," Ken commented tersely. "Instead of blaming me,
they're blaming Karen."

She flashed to their defence. "They can't blame
Ken," she said, "because the court says he can't be blamed. So
they have no one left to blame but me."


The problems with Ken's unruly brother Rob continued. Though Rob
eventually repaid them his share of the December mortgage, he
then missed the January payment. Though her pregnancy already was
making her weary, Karen stolidly attended nursing school and
worked Saturdays at the supermarket. Ken's salary wouldn't
stretch to carry the house alone, even when his sister, Tammy,
moved in for a few months.

The real-estate agent called about Rob's missed payment and
demanded a certified cheque immediately for the missing $704. By
stripping their savings, Ken and Karen managed to put the money
together.

"We can't go on this way," Karen said firmly. It was agreed that
Ken would tell Rob that he had to move out so they could rent his
apartment. Rob protested that he would make it good. By the end
of the month he had repaid them, but in February he missed
the mortgage payment again.

The argument between the brothers was heated. Karen stayed out of
it, believing that families should resolve their
problems internally. Rob finally agreed to leave but by that time
Ken and Karen had realized that they couldn't afford to stay
either, even with someone dependable in the house. Karen started
to look for cheap rented space. She was more familiar with Oshawa
by this time, so it was easier. She quickly located a
three-bedroom townhouse renting for $675.

Karen was seven months pregnant when they moved in the middle of
March to a townhouse located in a row that overlooks a bleak,
littered parking lot. Access from the busy street, one of
Oshawa's main arteries, is obtained by a rutted driveway between
an animal hospital and a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. The
townhouses sit in the midst of a dejected strip of automotive and
fast-food outlets.

Ken and Karen made a decision to rent the triplex on Athol until
they could manage to unload it. The agreement of sale with the
realestate agent would lapse at the end of August, and both were
anxious to be free of the arrangement with Rob. The house needed
work to prepare it for tenants. Fortunately, April was
approaching, and Karen and Ken could expect refunds from the
income tax deducted from their pay. When the money came,
$500, it was spent on repairs.

The house on Athol went on the market in the middle of March,
just as Karen finished the secondterm examinations for her first
year at Durham College. Her
average was 90 per cent, even though she'd had to study for the
exams on the same weekend that the family moved from the triplex
into the rented townhouse.

Their new tenants moved into the triplex. The upstairs rooms were
rented to three tenants, the bachelor apartment to Ken's half
sister, Tammy, and the downstairs to a fifth tenant. Ken and
Karen felt no confidence in the arrangement but hoped it would
tide them over, and that the triplex could be sold quickly.

No one would meet their first price, $175,900, so they became
less ambitious. Tenant problems were driving them crazy. A month
later they had an offer of $163,000. The real-estate agent, as
anxious as they to get new owners, urged them to accept and
sweetened the deal by offering to take a reduced commission--5
per cent instead of 6. They accepted. When the dust settled, they
found they made their money back, plus $1,700 profit. To Karen's
disgust, Rob Parks also got $1,000.

It was a bad time for Karen. Trying to study and at the same time
cope with the pressure of the move, their complex financial
situation, her pregnancy and the dispute with Rob had a
disastrous effect on her health. Her blood pressure rose
dangerously, and her obstetrician ordered her to bed. That put an
end to nursing school for a while. Ken was also undergoing
stress. The conditions of sale were that they were to get the
tenants out, move an abandoned car, and clean up the place, which
had been left a shambles. All of this fell to Ken, since Karen
was confined to her bed and Rob Parks wasn't interested in
helping. On top of caring for Melissa and working at his fulltime
job, Ken undertook the chores of collecting rents from the
tenants and easing them out, changing locks, and making repairs.

His psychiatrist, Ron Billings, advised him to have a check-up at
the sleep laboratory in Sunnybrook Hospital. An appointment was
made for May 1, but Karen asked Ken to cancel. The date was
uncomfortably close to the new baby's arrival and she didn't want
to be alone overnight.

Karen pined for her mother, who would have swooped in and
taken her troubles away. Her pregnancy opened up fresh wells of
grief. Every day stirred tormenting memories of her first
pregnancy, when she and her mother had drawn so close. As the new
baby's birth approached, Karen swam in pain. Her thoughts dwelt
on her mother's sweetness and laughter, on the good times
together when they went to England, and on how protected and safe
she felt in her mother's love. When Ken was away, she wept; she
felt it unkind to cry for her mother in front of him.

All she says of that period is, "My pregnancy was a very
depressed time."

She longed for her father, but recognized that it wasn't fair for
her to lean on him. Denis had shown no pleasure at the news that
she was having another baby but he seemed aware of her isolation
and saddened by it. Neither ever referred to Barbara. Karen would
have liked to see him more often, but he proffered no
invitations. He did promise, however, to visit her in hospital
after the baby was born.

The baby arrived on May 4, a girl. When no one was around to see,
Karen wept with loneliness for her mother.

Her father's promise to visit her in hospital
assumed enormous proportions. She realized that he wouldn't want
to encounter Ken or Ken's family, so she constructed a visiting
schedule to avoid an encounter that would distress him. She asked
Ken and his family to stay away, or to visit her only at those
times when she could be sure her father would not appear.
Denis, however, wasn't aware of the elaborate precautions
on his behalf. He was travelling and arrived back the day after
Karen left the hospital.

Karen picked the new baby's name, Brittany Barbara Parks. Both
names are in honour of her mother, the Brittany because Barbara
loved England. "I know she would approve," Karen said. "I haven't
even told my father. I don't know how he would react. If we'd
called her Barbara, a lot of people would see that in the wrong
way."

"We didn't want to call her Barbara," Ken said quietly, his voice
morose. "It wouldn't be good for the family constantly to be
reminded because of her name."

"Brittany Barbara sounds good," Karen agreed wistfully. "It hurts
to think that my mother will never know my kids and they have
missed knowing her."

Watching her children grow, Karen often wonders how
she's going to tell them what happened. She thinks she'll start
gradually and perhaps give them the whole story when they reach
their teens.

"If we tell them sooner they might tell their friends," Karen
explains. "You know, kids confide in their friends. I used to. It
might affect the way their friends treat them. People might not
let their children play with Melissa, and that kind of stuff."

She drew a ragged breath. "In the meantime we'll just answer
questions truthfully as much as will satisfy her curiosity. We
can't hide it from her. I don't think we have the right to hide
it from her." Ken nodded agreement. "But right now we won't say
more than we have to."

If Melissa asks why Ken never sees her grandfather, for instance,
the plan is to tell her there has been a family disagreement.
"And I hope as time goes by my brothers and sisters will come
around. You can't hate someone for ever, at least I don't think
you can. That's not the way we've been brought up to behave.
Meanwhile, it hurts."

She received no gifts for Brittany from her brothers and sisters.
She wept with pleasure when her grandmother in England sent a
money order for twenty pounds for the baby. "She still cares,"
Karen says gratefully.

Karen, depressed and stubborn, would not push for reconciliation
with her sisters and brothers, though Ken urged her to pay a
surprise visit and open up relations. "They just need to get over
the first awkwardness," he told her. "After that, they'll be all
right."

Karen wouldn't do that. She counted on time being on her side.
Routinely, she arranged with her father to visit with the
children; routinely, he was the only one at home.

"I'm not going to let them keep me away from my dad, or my kids
away from their grandfather," she said. "You have to make tough
decisions in life, and you have to do what you think is right.
And that's what I'm doing. This is the way I want to be. I don't
want to be in a fight with them. I couldn't live with myself.
I'll continue to think of their birthdays and their Christmases.
I'll continue to ask dad about them. I'm still their sister no
matter what. I'm going to make it as hard as possible for them to
go on hating me."

She paused. "The one important value my mom always put on us was
that the family should stick together, no matter what. I live by
that. This is my family," she continued, with a wave of her hand
that included Ken and the toys scattered in the living-room, "and
I have to stick with them."

She has no recent pictures of her father or siblings. Old ones
are mounted in a photograph album, along with her wedding
pictures. Of the eleven photographs in her living-room, all are
of Ken and Melissa and Brittany.


Karen took Brittany home from the hospital, devastated that no
one from her family had come to see the baby. Heartsick for the
baby's sake, she decided to drop in unexpectedly, bringing
Brittany. Jonny, Nicky, and Emma were there. Karen and Emma
hadn't seen one another for a year. Emma gave Karen a startled,
blistering look and ran up the stairs to her room, slamming the
door. Clearing her throat, Karen said, "How've you been, Nicky?"

He grinned at her. "Fine, Karen. And you?"

A few minutes later Pru came in the door. Karen tensed. Pru was
disconcerted to see Karen, but her behaviour was polite. She was
pleasant and even held the baby. Denis took his tiny grandchild
in his arms and studied her small face. Brittany
has her father's colouring.

"She's lovely," he said, handing her back to Karen. "What's her
name?"

Karen hesitated, but decided her decision was the right one. She
would not to tell him that the second name was Barbara.
"Brittany," she told him. "Just Brittany."

Her heart is heavy when she thinks of her brothers and
sisters. She isn't invited to graduations. She doesn't expect to
be asked to a wedding either. She misses those family occasions
intensely; she misses being _in her family. She's bitter only
when she considers that her children, too, are deprived of a
family: grandfather, uncles, and aunts.

Of her relationship with her father she says: "He's my dad and I
love him, but I know he isn't the same with me as with the other
kids. He's very good to me and he's concerned, but we can't ever
be as close as we used to be. He's scared that Ken might come
back again. ..."

Ken looks at her, his face soft and vulnerable, but says nothing.

"I was really hurt when my family ignored Melissa's birthday,"
she adds. "She's innocent in all of this. She had nothing to do
with all this. She didn't ask for this. It isn't fair."


The closing date for the sale of their house was June 15. Ken was
frantic when the tenants were slow to move. He spent every spare
minute in the triplex cleaning up the mess as they reluctantly
departed, one at a time.

Karen, up through the night with the infant Brittany, noticed
that Ken was muttering in his sleep. He seemed to be dreaming
about work. Most of what he said was unintelligible, but
sometimes she picked out a word or a phrase.

"Could you turn the machine off," he said pleasantly one night.

"Pardon me?" asked Karen. Then she realized he was asleep. One
night in May 1989, Ken suddenly sat almost upright in bed beside
Karen and called out, "Melissa, no!" Then he clenched his fists
and said loudly, "Melissa, _no!"

Remembering her instructions not to touch him, Karen called out
his name until Ken awoke. Ken was baffled when she told him what
he had said. He had no memory of dreaming about Melissa, or
anything else.

"That scared me," Karen relates with a puckered forehead.
"Sleeptalking is related to sleepwalking. So I called Marlys."

The lawyer urged Karen to call Dr. Billings. His first questions
were about stress and the amount of sleep Ken was getting. "Sleep
deprivation by itself can cause sleepwalking or sleeptalking," he
reminded her. Karen described the ordeal of selling the house and
how the new baby kept them awake. Ken was exhausted, she said.
The doctor thought the solution might be to see that Ken
got more rest.

For a few weeks Ken rationed his time in the house as best he
could and tried to get to bed early. It seemed that Ron Billings
was right. Ken sometimes muttered in his sleep, but the sharp
movements didn't happen again.

He went to the sleep specialist at Sunnybrook, but didn't like
him. He found him too cautious and thought the doctor seemed
uncomfortable at having him for a patient. When Ken mentioned
that Karen had overheard him talking in his sleep, the doctor,
apparently horrified, said, "She sleeps with you?"

Ken decided he preferred Roger Broughton. If he had any more
sleeptalking, he thought he'd talk to the specialist in Ottawa
instead.

The last tenant left the Athol triplex at midnight on June 15,
the date of closure. Ken had been wild with worry that the deal
would collapse. He was feeling pulled from all sides, with
Brittany keeping them both awake nights and Melissa, two and a
half, demanding attention. Karen was still very weak, needing
Ken's assistance, and his boss at work was criticizing him
mercilessly. Despite Ken's best intentions, he realized that he
was getting no more than five hours' sleep a night.

The night, June 15, when the last tenant was out and the house
sale was finalized, both felt enormous relief. Karen was
breast-feeding Brittany at about four-thirty that morning when
she heard the sound of a car being revved outside the open
bedroom window. Ken, who was sleeping soundly beside her,
suddenly sprang up and walked rapidly to the window.

He put his hands on the window-sill and leaned out, his body
tense. "I thought there was a car," he said loudly. Then he went
briskly back to bed, covered himself up, and resumed sleeping.

"It was kind of weird how he did it," she relates. "Sort of wound
up and tense, almost as if he was scared. I wondered if a car
outside had wakened him, but he wouldn't have been so energetic.
It would have taken him a while to go to the window and look
out." In fact, Ken always is lethargic and slow when he first
wakens.

The next morning when she told him about it, he had no
recollection of the incident. They looked at each other with fear
in their eyes.

"I'd better call Dr. Broughton," he said quietly.

"Are you under stress?" Roger Broughton asked. "Have you been
missing sleep?"

"Well, yes," he answered. "Both things."

"You'd better come to Ottawa and we'll put you in the sleep lab,"
the specialist said. Meanwhile he increased Ken's medication,
Rivotril, upping the dose from one to two pills.

"That should help," he said. "We'll make an appointment for you
right away."

Ken anxiously queried Karen every morning. "Did I talk last
night?" She assured him that the strengthened medicine was
working: he had been silent.

Both of them like Roger Broughton very much.
They're awed by his credentials, which Karen described as "taking
a half hour to read in court", and grateful that the doctor is
soft-spoken and not intimidating.

Ken had a week's vacation in July, so the couple planned to spend
part of it in a rented cottage on Shadow Lake. After that, they
would drive to Ottawa. They returned one lovely Saturday
afternoon from their time at the cottage to prepare for the trip
to Ottawa on Monday. They were appalled to discover that in their
absence they had been robbed. Their furniture was pushed out of
place, showing signs of a rapid search, and their television and
VCR were unplugged, as if someone had considered removing them
and then rejected the idea. Something better had come along. The
thief or thieves had found one thousand dollars in cash hidden in
the box of a board game. Karen had been hoarding it for their
Ottawa expenses.

"It's typical of the way things go for us," Karen said flatly,
shrugging.

On Monday, Ken and Karen packed up their children and drove to
Ottawa, where they checked into a cheap motel. That night Ken met
Roger Broughton at the sleep lab in the Ottawa General
Hospital. He undressed to his underwear and stretched out on a
cot. A mesh cover was spread on his chest, and technicians
attached to it a transmitter to magnify the weak signals from ten
electrodes glued at various places to his face, scalp, chest, and
leg.

He was placed in a room so dark that he couldn't see his hand in
front of his face. He knew that he was being watched and
photographed by ultra-wave camera and observers behind glass. He
composed himself for sleep but found the situation too unnatural.
By morning he had slept so little that the results were not
helpful. He was asked to schedule more appointments for the
following Thursday.

This time the procedures went better. Ken was more relaxed
and dropped off to sleep without difficulty. Through the night
the electrodes sent their messages about Ken's level of sleep and
counted the number of arousals. The troubling results found in
the sleep test done in Metro East Detention Centre were still
present. Even with the slow-wave-sleep-suppressing medication,
Ken still had more deep sleep and more abrupt arousal from such
sleep than are found in the normal adult person. Broughton
re-emphasized with him the necessity to avoid sleep deprivation
and unnecessary stress and continued the medication.

Karen was curiously serene about the return of Ken's
sleepwalking. "We didn't know that he had a sleepwalking problem
two years ago, so it escalated to the point where it was
disastrous. It's different now, we're aware of it. I think we can
keep a handle on it."

Ken wasn't so sanguine. "It scares me," he admitted, "when I
sleeptalk and start wandering. I'm scared something will happen
when I can't control it. The doctors assure me it won't happen,
but still I'm scared."

"The doctors said it was a good sign that when he sleepwalked
there was no violence in it at all," Karen added.

"A few people are violent every time they sleepwalk," Ken
continued. "I don't mean they attack people, but they throw their
arms around a lot. Apparently that isn't the kind of sleepwalker
I am."

Karen and Ken had many talks with Dr. Broughton and with the
Chicago expert, Dr. Rosalind Cartwright, about the nature of
sleepwalking. Karen feels more confident than Ken does, but both
are aware that whatever problems might arise will occur
only if Ken is disturbed while sleepwalking.

"I've been instructed not to try to wake him, just to get out of
his way and let him go," Karen said calmly.

In the silence that fell, she seemed concerned at the direction
the conversation had taken.

"Basically," she said briskly, "he's over it. In the year he's
been out of prison, he's only sleepwalked one time. He's done
some sleeptalking, but very little. I don't think anything will
happen again."

His face showed that he wished he could believe that too. The
couple began to experience difficulties in their relationship.
Karen sometimes was impatient with Ken, and sometimes he woke in
a grumpy state, nagging her about the way she made Brittany's
formula or how the living-room looked.

Karen dismisses the clashes as "typical married stuff". None the
less, they started to talk about seeing a marriage counsellor.

On August 17, 1989, Ken suddenly quit his job--simply walked out.
His boss was an erratic man, caustic and fault-finding in the
mornings, though pleasant and smooth in the afternoons.
Ken was amused at first by the midday switch in personality, but
he began to find the mornings hard to take. The man was
particularly difficult when Ken worked nights. The next morning
the boss would complain that he had done nothing, that he was a
lazy bum. Ken, stung, showed him on production records that he
really had done the work, sometimes even more than his quota, but
his boss angrily brushed aside his protests.

Ken's fragile self-esteem withered under the rain of criticism.
He began to fear that he might lose control and hit the man. He
went to work with growing reluctance, dreading what lay ahead.
The Thursday night he quit, two others who were equally affronted
went with him. Later they reconsidered and returned.

"I'll give Ken his due," says Karen stoutly. "The first thing
Friday morning he went out job-hunting and he registered with the
unemployment office."

In a burst of bitterness that is rare in her, she added, "But if
he was really a responsible person he would have looked for work
before he quit. It's not good for us, money-wise."

A few days later, he had a new job as
shipper in a warehouse that handles two-ton motors. The pay, $11
an hour, was slightly better than the job he had left, but it
still scarcely met the needs of a family of four.

Always thrifty when they shop, they became almost fanatical in
their search for bargains. Karen grinned, "Ken is always taking
things out of my shopping cart. `Why do we need this?` he says.
He's become worse than I am about spending."


In the summer of 1989, after a delay of more than a year, Marlys
Edwardh advised them that the appeal would be heard in October.
They had been waiting for the report of the trial judge, she
explained.

"David Watt is one of the best judges on the bench," she told
Ken, "so this is unusual. For some reason or other he still
hasn't written his reasons for not putting insanity to the jury.
Those reasons probably will help us at the appeal and I don't
want to proceed until we get them. But he promised to have them
ready soon, and we're pretty sure of the October date."
"The more delay, the better," Ken told her.

"We're hoping the trial will be put over until winter," Karen
explained. "Then people aren't around as
much. It would give us a few months to be by ourselves while the
neighbours got used to it. Maybe by spring, when children start
to go out to play, the situation will have calmed down."

Ken and Karen didn't like to think of the consequences of losing
the appeal. In both their minds was the spectre of police
arriving at the door to take him away in handcuffs. If the appeal
court ordered a new trial and removed sleepwalking as a defence,
Ken might be convicted, or he might be found innocent by reason
of insanity. Either way, he could face years in prison or the
mental institution at Penetanguishene.

They shuddered to think of the costs. The family simply wouldn't
be able to pay for the same expert witnesses again. Lil Hodge
regretfully gave Ken notice that she could pay no more.

"It isn't fair to my other grandchildren," she explained, "if I
spend everything I have on Kenneth. If there is a new trial,
where is that money going to come from?"

She cries to think of it. She isn't at all sure that, without the
weight of five psychiatrists testifying, a jury would again find
Ken innocent. "I feel very bothered by all this. I'm so worried
about the appeal."

The prospects were too sickening to contemplate. Instead the
couple worried about something more immediate. They fretted that
the appeal would draw media attention, exposing Ken's identity to
the neighbours and his employer. Ken expected to be fired, and
Karen shuddered to think what would happen if the neighbours
became unpleasant.

The October date for the appeal came and went. Judge Watt still
had not written his reasons. They were released on January 5,
1990. Obviously, the judge had laboured hard. "Supplementary
reasons _re instructions to the jury on defence of non-insane
automatism" came to 112 pages.

Mr. Justice Watt opened by reviewing the trial. He noted that the
Crown counsel had adduced no evidence to contradict the defence
case of sleepwalking.

"The authorities," he wrote, "understandably without analysis, as
none was compelled by the evidence adduced at the trial, have
viewed somnambulism as paradigmatic of non-insane automatism."

In other words, the judge relied on the expertise of the five
doctors. Further, he stated, he viewed somnambulism as an
exception to the states of mind classified in legal precedents as
insane or "a disease of the mind" within the statutes of the
Criminal Code.

"Crown counsel," he repeated, "adduced no evidence to the
contrary, although a well-known forensic psychiatrist and, it
would appear, a sleep-disorder expert, were seated at the counsel
table during the testimony of the defence experts."

He concluded: "It would seem passing strange to a reasonable
person that one who committed what otherwise would be a crime in
a somnambulistic state should be stigmatized as insane and
subjected, theoretically at least, to indefinite confinement in a
psychiatric institution, there to receive instruction in good
sleep hygiene. ...

"For these reasons the jury will be instructed on the defence of
non-insane automatism and not insanity or insane automatism."


CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Appeal


The Ontario Court of Appeal sits in great dignity in one of the
most beautiful buildings in Canada, the imposing and graceful
Osgoode Hall, which looks down the gullet of Toronto's York
Street from a landscaped garden protected for almost two
centuries by wrought-iron cow-gates. Begun in 1829, Osgoode Hall
was described by the late architect and archivist Eric Arthur as
the finest building in Toronto, "a scholarly piece of classic
architecture" whose spirit, he wrote, will never be dominated by
the soaring glass towers that have sprung up around it.

On Monday morning, March 12, 1990, with a false spring delighting
grateful Canadians, Ken Parks sat alone in one of the courtrooms,
wiping his palms on his blue herring-bone suit to keep them dry.
It was the same suit he had worn almost two years earlier for his
trial; he has no other. Eczema, always a sign of stress in him,
could be seen on his face, though partially concealed by a new
beard, a surprising shade of bright orange in contrast to his
blond hair.

Karen was writing a nursing examination and would join him later.

To get time off work, Ken had no option but to explain to his
employer that he was the sleepwalker who had been acquitted of
killing his mother-in-law. To his relief, the woman's response
was sympathetic.

"If I didn't know you, that story would be hard to swallow," she
told Ken. "But knowing you, I can believe it. If you need someone
to testify for you, I'll come."

"Appeals aren't like that," Ken explained. "It's all, like, law."

The law to be argued that day, the next, and part of a third was
new ground that puzzled even the judges. They were not certain
whether they could replace a simple acquittal by another kind of
acquittal --not guilty by reason of insanity--or whether, if they
didn't like the idea of homicidal sleepwalkers, they should order
a new trial.

The actors assembled. Marlys Edwardh and Delmar Doucette, dressed
in flowing black robes and the traditional white winged collars
of lawyers appearing before a high court, sat at a long polished
table on the left side of the courtroom. The Crown's two lawyers,
similarly gowned, were on the right. In front, beside, and behind
them were piled red-covered transcripts, case-books bristling
with tabs, Judge Watt's reasons bound in beige, and the factum
each of them had prepared. While they waited for the judges, the
counsel chatted easily together. Opposing lawyers do that.

Three judges swept in to a cry of "All rise!" and took their
places behind an elevated desk on which could be seen the same
transcripts, case-books, reasons, and factums. They proved to be
three of the appeal court's best: John Brooke, a man with a quick
mind and a neatly turned down mouth; Horace Krever, who has a
lugubrious mien and is noted for his expertise on legal issues
related to health and insanity; and sunny, white-haired Patrick
Galligan, who contented himself in the main with droll asides.

The Crown, as the appellate, had the floor. He was Gary Trotter,
a young man with thinning sandy hair and a pale peaked face. Not
long out of law school, he had a firm manner despite his relative
inexperience. His argument rested on a recital of all the
sleepwalking trials known in English common-law courts, every one
of which-without exception--viewed sleepwalking as noninsane
automatism and therefore granted the accused a simple
acquittal. The Crown's choice of ground was a curious one,
seemingly self-defeating, but he persisted. The point he intended
to make was that every previous judge and jury had erred because
scientific knowledge about sleepwalking was lacking when those
cases were tried.

"Are you saying," asked Mr. Justice Brooke, leaning his head on
his hand and closing his eyes, "that the judge [in Parks] should
have instructed the jury that sleepwalking is a disease of the
mind?"

Gary Trotter wasn't disturbed by the judge's challenge. "If it
was sleepwalking, then the jury must return a verdict that it is
a disease of the mind."

"Schizophrenia is a disease of the mind," observed Mr. Justice
Krever patiently. "If you find that the accused was suffering
from schizophrenia, then you find disease of the mind."

"Yes, my lord," said Trotter.

"All the medical evidence goes one way," continued Mr. Justice
Krever, "that sleepwalking is not a disease. The forensic
psychiatrists said that it wasn't a disease of the mind, that it
wasn't within the legal territory of disease of the mind."

"The trial judge was wrong in following what the medical evidence
said," Trotter responded.

"Maybe there are degrees," said Mr. Justice Brooke, sitting up
sharply. This, indeed, seemed to be what the judges wanted
to know. "Maybe there is a state of sleepwalking that is so
extreme it would amount to a disease of the mind, or so mild as
not to." He closed his eyes again. "In this man's case, was his
state such as to amount !disease of the mind?"

"It's not clear in the medical evidence," Trotter admitted. "But
this _is an extreme state of somnambulism."

Mr. Justice Krever raised his heavy brows. "What's the bottom
line?" he inquired. "The result was an acquittal. What you're
seeking is also an acquittal, subject to the
lieutenant-governor's Board of Review. So the Board of Review
would immediately release him, since the man is not suffering a
disease of the mind. What is the practical result?"

Judge Krever sits on the Ontario lieutenant-governor's Board of
Review, so this was ground he knew well.

"Is it that he's a time bomb walking around?" asked Mr. Justice
Galligan.

Reporters in the courtroom bent their heads over notebooks and
simultaneously wrote _time _bomb.

Trotter replied hastily, "I agree that this individual should not
be incarcerated for any length of time, it should be a very short
period of time, but the lieutenant-governor's warrant has power
to monitor. ..."

Mr. Justice Galligan asked, "How are we going to watch him every
night when he goes to bed?"

The Crown counsel, his agenda thoroughly trashed, tried to rally.
He spoke about predisposition to sleepwalk, triggering factors,
and precipitating factors. Ken Parks could be monitored, he said,
"to cut down on the likelihood of this happening again ... it's
reasonable to protect the public."

Ken wiped his hands on his trousers again. He was sitting very
still.

Mr. Justice Krever asked with an edge of irritation, "What is the
point of putting this man in hospital?"

Trotter said hastily, "I agree that's not appropriate. I didn't
say that. I did say that given the gravity of the conduct in this
case, to have a regime of monitoring is not overintrusive. ... We
have in _Rabey a definition of disease of the
mind. This is a _legal question. Whether expert witnesses thought
it was not a disease of the mind is of no moment."

"No moment!" commented Mr. Justice Krever in mock astonishment.

"Are there cases of comparable violence associated with
somnambulism?" asked Mr. Justice Brooke.

That put Trotter back on schedule. "Yes, m'lords," he said
gratefully. With some interruptions from the impatient judges, he
went solemnly through them. The first mention of sleepwalking in
legal history occurred in 1878 in Scotland when a man named
Fraser caused the death of his baby son while sleeping. The jury
decided that the man wasn't conscious at the time of the death.
Fraser was discharged with the requirement that he never again
sleep with someone else in the room.

In Australia, Trotter continued, a man
sleeping in the same room as a two-year-old child picked up the
child and killed her by swinging her like a club against walls
and floor. The man was acquitted of non-insane automatism.

"But he didn't drive miles and miles in a car," Trotter said.
"The case is very different. He dreamed he was being attacked by
a wild beast."

Mr. Justice Galligan was reminded of his amazement to read in the
trial transcript that Ken was sleepwalking while he drove
twenty-three kilometres. "He's stopping at stop streets, he's
putting his foot on the brake, he's accelerating from a stopped
position. ..."

Hunching his shoulders like an eagle on the nest, the lanky Judge
Krever leaned forward. "Memory _must be working. It's not all
automation. It's difficult for a lay person to accept this."

The Crown lawyer couldn't agree more. The next example concerned
an American case in 1879 when the accused fell asleep in a hotel
lobby. When a porter tried to rouse him, the man shot the porter
several times and killed him. The defence of sleepwalking was not
allowed by the trial judge, but the case was appealed to the
state Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial. This time the man
was freed on the grounds that "somnambulism is more or less an
unconscious state".

The sound of clicking high heels was heard on the echoing tile
floor in the corridor outside the courtroom. Ken murmured,
"There's Karen." A moment later, she slipped into the seat beside
him.

In the court recess, Marlys Edwardh and Del Doucette stepped into
the corridor where Marlys produced cigarettes and lit one.
Taking long grateful puffs, she asked Karen, "How did the exam
go?"

Ken responded for his wife with a slow smile, "She always gets
nineties."

"It was okay," said Karen, with a nervous laugh.

Marlys turned to Del. "The Crown missed it," she said, as Ken and
Karen listened quietly. "The judges were inviting him to argue
that this is a degree of somnambulism which raises issues that
wouldn't be found in most sleepwalking. He missed it, and now the
bench is resigned to let him present his case his own way."

This proved an accurate reading. The interruptions dropped
markedly as Gary Trotter proceeded through his litany of
sleepwalking cases. From time to time, as the issue of recurrence
loomed, the judges rained questions on him. At one point they
digressed to mull over whether an abnormality of sleep is an
abnormality of mind, hence a disease of the mind. Getting no
comfort from the Crown, they turned to Marlys Edwardh, who rose
and answered promptly.

"M'lords, for one hundred and twenty-five years sleepwalking has
been regarded as automatism of a non-psychotic state. It is a
disorder of sleep, not a disorder of the mind."

Trotter, leafing hurriedly through a document in front of him and
then abandoning the search, insisted that there were "pockets of
doubt".

Soon after, the judges recessed for lunch.

The defence lawyers lunched with Ken and Karen Parks in the great
dining-hall of Osgoode Hall at a long table rainbowed with
sunlight falling through stained-glass windows. Marlys discussed
her strategy. Her first objective in the appeal was to have the
simple acquittal upheld. Failing that, she hoped that the judges
would not change the jury's unadorned "not guilty" to "not guilty
by reason of insanity". If that happened, she planned to appeal
the decision at once to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the
court could not deny her right to be heard.

If the judges ordered a new trial, she intended to ask that the
trial be restricted to an examination of whether somnambulism can
be, in some degree, insane. She would fight to avoid putting Ken
through another complete trial. Expense was not mentioned as a
compelling reason, though she knew the Parks family could give
little more help. Pinched resources might limit the number of
expert witnesses she could call. What she stressed instead was
that she wanted to avoid giving the Crown "another bite at
the same apple".

She ordered a salad plate and explained, "If it goes back for a
new trial we want to confine it to the issue of whether
somnambulism can be described as a disease of the mind."

Ken, scarcely touching his food, asked, "Would that mean I would
have to wait a year in Penetang before the case is heard?"

"Absolutely not," Marlys assured him quickly. "You won't even go
to Penetang. We can expedite your release in two weeks."

Karen was silent, abiding by a promise to Ken that she would not
talk about the case, but her face was stricken.

Catching her expression, Marlys said, "What you're facing is
minimal compared to a new trial and the possibility of a new
verdict."

Ken stopped eating altogether.

"If he goes back into custody," Karen asked slowly, "what will
happen? Will the police come to the door to arrest him? That
would freak out Melissa."

"That would freak out everyone," Marlys said. "That won't happen,
never will happen."

Walking back to the courtroom, Karen looked miserable. "It brings
it all back," she said unhappily. "Usually I blot it out, but
this brings it all back. People talking about us as if we aren't
there, as if we aren't even real."

That afternoon Gary Trotter continued with his accounts of
acquittals relating to sleepwalking. He reached the case in
Kentucky of Tibbs, who fell asleep in a whorehouse in a drunken
state and stabbed someone in the eye. The Crown said, his voice
trailing off, "but the court thought it was drunkenness rather
than somnambulism".

"That doesn't help us very much, does it?" said Judge Brooke with
an ominous edge to his voice.

"Ah, well no," agreed Trotter, moving
to another American case of a man named Bradley, who, fearful of
being attacked, kept a gun under his pillow and woke up to find
he had shot the woman beside him. Bradley also was acquitted,
because sleepwalking was found to be non-insane automatism.

The judges were growing irritated. Said Judge Brooke, "_Bradley
is not recognized in English courts or in our own courts or in
the medical jurisprudence here. I don't know how this case
helps you, Mr. Trotter."

"You need evidence of the medical component of the legal
definition of insanity," Mr. Justice Krever explained in the
exasperated tone of one teaching simple addition for the tenth
time. "And you don't have it."

This indeed proved to be the insurmountable problem. In the trial
of Kenneth James Parks, the Crown didn't ask any of the expert
witnesses the clear question: Is there an extreme degree of
sleepwalking that falls into the category of insanity? The answer
might be no--Marlys Edwardh is convinced it would have been--but
the problem for the Ontario Court of Appeal was that the question
had not been asked.

Gary Trotter struggled on before three monumentally restive
judges. "In the House of Lords in _Regina _very. _Sullivan," he
said, "Lord Diplock commented that in the future sleepwalking
might find itself in the category of insanity." The context was
that epilepsy, the situation in the Sullivan case, might fit into
the legal definition of a ?disease of the mind" if Parliament so
decided.

Said Mr. Justice Krever gruffly, "What you're suggesting, Mr.
Trotter, is something more appropriate for the legislature than
the courts."

Gary Trotter gamely produced the comments of Canadian judges who
have attempted to pin down the elusive legal definition of
insanity. Chief Justice Dickson, in _Regina _very. _Cooper,
observed that in the legal sense disease of the mind "embraces
any illness, disorder or abnormal condition which impairs the
human mind and its functioning", but he excluded transitory
states such as hysteria or concussion and said that "somnambulism
_may be unaccompanied by any abnormality of the mind", and, also,
that "the defence of automatism ... in the past has generally
covered acts done while sleepwalking", leaving the matter
maddeningly unresolved.

The courtroom was uncomfortably warm and the pitchers of
ice-water placed on tables for the lawyers were nearly empty.
Gary Trotter continued to parade through acquittals for
sleepwalking, all of which described it as non-insane automatism.
Sensing he was losing his audience, he declared that he wouldn't
bother mentioning the South African and Zimbabwean cases
referenced in his factum.

The judges were ready to adjourn for the day.

"How long will you be tomorrow, Ms. Edwardee?" asked Mr. Justice
Brooke. He always pronounces her name that way.
"About three or four hours, m'lord," she replied.

In the corridor outside, Ken Parks observed with a bemused smile,
"I don't know which lawyer I should be paying."

The next morning had the feel of an interminable theatre
performance that had been interrupted by an intermission. The
only noticeable change from the end of the first act was that the
pitchers of ice-water had been freshened and Ken Parks was
wearing a different tie. Gary Trotter, for the Crown, picked up
his narrative with a flurry of some English
jurisprudence that consistently found somnambulism to be
non-insane.

Mr. Justice Brooke glared at him. "Why should we escalate
sleepwalking into insanity here if England doesn't do that?" he
asked.

"In _Sullivan," Mr. Justice Krever pointed out, "that was a
prediction which hasn't been borne out. In the English courts
somnambulism has been consistently classed as non-insane
automatism. I have not yet been persuaded that the medical
evidence in this case supports a notion of a pathological
condition. Doesn't your whole argument depend on our being
persuaded that there is medical evidence for deciding this is a
disease of the mind?"

"Well, yes," said Gary Trotter, sounding winded.

"The whole case turns on that," Mr. Justice Krever continued
relentlessly. "All the rest is secondary. The principal interest
is that one."

Krever and Brooke teamed to worry through the matter of whether
sleepwalking in Ken Parks' case indicated an underlying emotional
state that might be described as a disease of the mind by
judicial extrapolation. Commented Judge Brooke, as though musing
aloud, "If this man responded to a certain set of circumstances
that caused him to respond, then is there something the matter
with his psychological and social make-up, the same as in
_Rabey?"

Ken began cracking his knuckles, working methodically across the
fingers of his left hand and then his right. His face was shining
with sweat. Karen, sitting erect beside him, fixed a hard glare
on Mr. Justice Brooke.

"But then this is a sleep disorder," Mr. Justice Brooke
continued, closing his eyes. "It doesn't have anything to do with
his mind. Medical people who testified didn't put it in that
category. Unless you want to say that somnambulism generally is a
disease of the mind, I would have thought that you would show
that in this specific case it is."

"The law has been applied in a certain way for a long time," Mr.
Justice Krever reminded the unhappy Crown lawyer. "Clearly the
legislature finds it satisfactory."

"It might not be easy for the court to turn its back on a long
line of authority," Trotter began bravely, "but. ..."

The court recessed at a quarter to twelve. Karen Parks had a copy
of the _Toronto _Star article about the previous day's hearing.
"It mentions the fraud," she said bitterly. "There goes Ken's
job. He told them about the sleepwalking but he didn't mention
the embezzlement."

"Maybe it will be all right," Ken consoled her.

"Why don't you call them right now?" she asked.

"Later," he assured her. "Later, I will."

At two minutes after twelve, the hearing resumed and it was the
turn of the respondent, Marlys Edwardh. Delmar Doucette, sitting
beside her, found the references she needed in the stack of
transcripts and had them ready to her hand as she moved through
her arguments.

She had been hoping from the tone of the judges' reactions to the
appellant lawyer that the court might even dismiss the appeal
without asking her to present her case for the respondent. This
proved overly optimistic. She was to have no easier ride than
Gary Trotter.

Marlys first wanted to knock out the argument that an underlying
pathological state contributed to Ken's sleepwalking. To this
end, she took the judges through Roger Broughton's testimony.
Then she addressed the Martin decision in _Rabey.

"Martin says that sleepwalking is a separate category, it is _not
insane," she said, her voice crackling with energy and her
diction sharp. "The Dickson dissent is clear on this point, that
sleepwalking is non-insane automatism. Chief Justice Dickson was
concerned that Martin went too far, that it went beyond the
category of what properly can be called disease of the mind.
Let's not forget that's what we are talking about here."

The judges were not so sure. "What's a disorder in relation to an
illness?" Mr. Justice Brooke asked her, looking pensively into
the distance.

Marlys replied at some length, emphasizing that in sleepwalking
the cerebral cortex, the thinking brain, is in a coma.
"It's _not _there."

Mr. Justice Brooke protested. "His body did a series of acts
directed by something. ... What directs a body to stop at a red
light? This involves a long series of body activities that are
directed. I think the psychiatrists should have been
cross-examined on that."

A small silence fell. The judges longed for a crack at the expert
witnesses themselves.

"The point, my lords," said Marlys softly, "is that they were
not."

"I know that," Mr. Justice Brooke said testily.

"There is nothing abnormal about sleep," Marlys declared. Later,
the matter still on his mind, Mr. Justice Brooke returned to the
same bone. "What _directs the body to do these acts?" "We have no
answer," Marlys told him. "There is no evidence that it is driven
by any impulse."

"So it doesn't fall into impairment of the mind," Mr. Justice
Brooke sighed. "But what _is directing his body? Something
internal is directing the activities of driving the car, for
instance. The only thing internal that could be directing him is
his mind. Is he functioning while impaired or is it that he
doesn't have any mind at all?"

"Nothing is directing his mind," Marlys replied. "All the
evidence shows that is not the case. Parts of the brain are
functioning, but the mind is not functioning."

Mr. Justice Krever looked perplexed. "We need a definition of the
mind. What is the mind?"

"Reason, memory, and understanding," said Marlys promptly.

"It's like a computer," Mr. Justice Brooke said with a bitter
smile. "Only this time someone stuck the wrong program in it."

"Sleepwalking is truly automatic behaviour," Marlys insisted. "It
represents the possibilities of the human brain. ..."

"Let's have lunch," said Mr. Justice Brooke.

In the clatter of the Osgoode Hall dininghall, Del and Marlys
conferred. Both were worried.

"They cannot understand how someone can do something
automatically that's complex," Del said, looking up from
the menu he was studying. "Brooke's difficulty isn't that someone
does something that's automatic, but that it goes from the simple
to the complex. While most somnambulistic episodes will be
simple, ah, you can go along a continuum from sitting up in bed,
to peeing in the corner, to cooking. There's nothing to suggest
that anything is different along that continuum, that the mind
ever engages."

Marlys listened intently, buttering a roll.

"What has to be pounded into him is that things can be done
automatically. We have no explanation, except that the behaviour
is something familiar to the subject. For instance, it would be
quite different if Ken had never driven that route before, if his
inlaws had just moved and he found his way to their new house."

"I don't want to suggest that there are residual thoughts
directing the sleeper," Marlys protested, "because that gets you
into underlying psychological disturbance. The fact is, you can't
plan to do something when you're awake and then carry it out in
your sleep."

"Driving over to your parents-in-law when you've driven there
many, many times before is not totally random," Del insisted.

Ken was feeling better. He ordered grilled breast of chicken and
ate it all.

"The brain does not function in deep sleep and sleepwalking," Del
continued, sipping his milk. "So that's why there is no mind.
None of those attributes of thinking that come from the cortex,
the attributes that _Sullivan defines, they aren't there. You can
do routine things like cooking, like driving to a place you've
been before. ..."

Marlys interrupted. "You can't get around the fact that the
sleepwalker is different from the sleeper. Not in terms of the
human cortex, but in terms of those functions of the brain that
permit motor action."

Karen and Ken continued to eat stoically. Karen's face bore an
expression of deep sadness.

"Both the shift and the state are nonpathological," Del agreed.
"Non-disease. Not abnormal. Just one of the potentials that the
brain can go into."

"I've gone as far as I can by indicating that the shift in the
brain is not pathological," Marlys said vehemently.
A silence fell. Del said, "Well, I just feel it's
something we shouldn't have to overcome. It's not a legal issue.
Brooke has it in his mind that there must be some mind function
to drive that route. I think that has to be addressed."

"The problem is, if you say there is brain function, then are you
necessarily saying there is mind function?" Marlys wondered.

More silence. "The answer is no," said Del. "You've read him the
passage from Ervin's testimony. That explains how it could
happen."

She nodded. "I've read them that. I'd rather go on and then come
back to it when he comes back at me. They're having a visceral,
gut reaction."

"We've somehow got to get the aura of those
expert witnesses into the Court of Appeal," Del said with a grin.

"The judges are troubled," Marlys observed sympathetically.
"They're saying he was sleepwalking, but they don't want to give
it full force and effect. They would have got the answer they
want from our expert witnesses that the mind is not engaged.
There is no malfunction of the mind. It isn't there."

"Isn't the answer, in part, that the automatic behaviour is no
more explainable after a concussion than it is in sleepwalking?"
observed Doucette. "To say that the behaviour looks directed and
therefore we should make it a disease of the mind would mean that
_all non-insane automatism would disappear. It would swallow the
whole thing."

Court resumed promptly at two-thirty. Marlys was on her feet
again, drawing the judges' attention to a page in Judge Watt's
reasons where he declared that "the authorities viewed
somnambulism as paradigmatic of non-insane automatism."

She said, "It is the position of the respondent that there are no
reasons in law, science, or common sense which warrant
reclassifying the respondent's
somnambulistic state as a disease of the mind. Jurisprudentially,
somnambulism was and still is paradigmatic of the defence of
non-insane automatism. The body of jurisprudence dealing with
somnambulism, which stretches back decades and continues into the
present day, cannot be characterized in the manner the appellant
seeks as ill-considered, non-persuasive, and of mere historical
interest."

She referred to the Martin decision in _Rabey, in which he said
that "sleepwalking appears to fall into a separate category". She
reminded the appeal judges that Martin's principles had been
upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.
"We shouldn't widen the net so broad as to include those
who do not suffer disease of the mind," she declared, "or those
from whom there is no need to protect the community."

Judge Krever looked at her severely. "There _is a need to protect
the community," he said. "A lieutenant-governor's warrant could
exercise some control."

Marlys replied quickly, "The possibility of recurrence is
improbable. There have been no examples of a recurrence. There is
no history of anybody doing it twice. And how can we monitor
sleepwalking? ... I don't mean to undercut the behaviour, but no
one knows a medical difference between benign sleepwalking and
the aggressive sleepwalker."

Judge Krever said something about treatment.

"When we talk about treatment for sleepwalking we're talking
about good health," Marlys responded. "It's a matter of not
getting sleep deprived, of getting appropriate exercise, and so
on. There's no fit with medical treatment as we know it."

The lawyer was concerned. The drift of questions, especially
those from Mr. Justice Krever, suggested the judges were looking
fondly on changing the verdict to insanity in order to get some
kind of a handle on Ken Parks. She pointed out that such a
decision would result in a period of incarceration in
Penetanguishene.

"The system isn't designed to get people immediately out," she
observed. "It would take six months to a year."

Judge Krever considered this. "Didn't Martin say that it is
unthinkable to have any deprivation of liberty in these cases?"

Marlys nodded. "There is no statutory
mechanism to do anything but commit him after an acquittal for
reasons of insanity. You have to convene the Board of Review, for
one thing, and this doesn't happen in a day."

Krever, who sits on the Ontario Board of Review, corrected her.
"It _hasn't happened in one day," he said. "It should."

"Indeed it should," she concurred.

A sense of weariness hung in the courtroom. It was almost time to
adjourn, and Marlys had not finished her presentation. Clearly
the case would have to resume the following day, pushing back a
number of other appeals scheduled to be heard.

Marlys was nearing her conclusion. "Therefore it is respectfully
submitted that the respondent's somnanibulistic episode cannot be
classified as a disease of the mind through the
application of general principle. We don't have a disease. ...We
don't have a problem of recurrence. ... The mind is asleep.
...The precipitating factors largely were external: the factors
of stress, over-exertion earlier that day, and sleep
deprivation."

"We'll adjourn," said Judge Brooke, "until ten-thirty tomorrow
morning."

In the corridor outside the courtroom, Marlys hurriedly lit a
cigarette and had a murmured conversation with Doucette, who was
leaving by taxi to catch a flight to Florida, where he planned to
do some bird-watching.

Karen, looking depressed, said, "I think a lot of the public
would feel better about it if Ken was said to be insane. A lot of
people are uncomfortable that he was just set free. From the
public point of view, I can see what the Crown is trying to do."

"But Marlys says I'm likely to be released right away, two weeks
or a month," Ken points out. "The public probably wouldn't think
that's enough. I don't know what's enough."

Marlys caught the end of that. "They'll likely reserve judgment,"
she told Ken. "Later on when they're ready with it, I'll be
warned if it goes against us. I'll go with you to the police
station when you give yourself up and I'll start bail proceedings
right away. You'll maybe be in custody twentyfour hours."

Southern Ontario continued to enjoy a March heat wave, proclaimed
in the media as record breaking, and deeply appreciated by
Torontonians strolling the sidewalks in shirt-sleeves. Ken
arrived in the courtoom Wednesday, March 14, in
a T-shirt and work pants. The courtroom was boiling with
black-gowned lawyers, resigned to wait until the Parks appeal ran
its course.

Marlys finished and asked the court to dismiss the appeal. Then
she raised the matter of critical importance. If the appeal court
decided to send Parks back for a new trial, she wanted the
process confined to the issue of somnambulism and mental illness.
The judges weren't sure they could do that.

"I'm concerned with what you ask us to do here," commented Judge
Brooke. "_Can we limit the issue to be tried?"

"You're entitled to make any order that justice requires," Marlys
reminded him.

"Shouldn't we be able to ask the jury to reconsider the whole
case and allow the Crown to lead fresh evidence on this
issue?" Marlys protested. "You can't put someone who has been
acquitted in a worse position. Justice in this unique
circumstance would be done by a restraining order."

"It might run into an entirely new case," Mr. Justice Brooke
warned her, "on the question of whether this amounted to a
disease of the mind."

She agreed. That could happen. To her relief, Gary Trotter rose
to say he saw no reason why a second trial should address
anything other than the issue of sleepwalking and insanity. He
was willing to accept, he said, that it was appropriate in this
situation.

Marlys, knowing the repercussions, then made herself unpopular
with all three judges. She entered a motion to have the appeal
struck down on the grounds of delay. Because Judge Watt had taken
more than a year to write his reasons, there had been a delay of
eighteen and a half months.

The judges were incensed at the implied criticism of their
colleague. Mr. Justice Galligan fumed openly. "He wrote the
reasons at the request of counsel," he said indignantly. "His
ruling at the trial was very clear. If the parties wanted his
reasons, they could have taken what they got at the trial. ... He
couldn't stop everything he was doing and produce a
onehundred-and-ten-page document."

Marlys weathered the storm, which she had expected. If the
decision went against Ken Parks, one of the arguments she
intended to put to the Supreme Court of Canada was unreasonable
delay. She couldn't introduce the issue of delay unless it was
part of the appeal court proceedings. Despite the ruffled
feelings, she had to get her protest on the record.

Gary Trotter rose to present his formal motion that the court
substitute a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity for the
original verdict, a simple "not guilty". He repeated some of the
arguments he had made for a day and a half.

Judge Krever leaned his head on his hand. "If the premise is that
it was a completely unconscious act, how could we?"

Trotter suggested that a new trial could be ordered.

"What is there to re-try?" asked Mr. Justice Brooke.

"Whether somnambulism is sane or insane," explained the Crown
lawyer.

Judge Krever wanted to know, "If this court concludes that
sleepwalking is insane automatism, would the trial judge have to
direct the jury to find insanity?"

"Yes," said Trotter firmly.

Mr. Justice Brooke closed his eyes. "If we send it back for a new
trial without any limitation, it would be wide open. Where do we
go from there? You're really asking us to try the issue on the
basis of the evidence."

"We would be asking the trial judge to do what we can't do," said
Judge Krever, enlarging on his colleague's comments.

"Do we have the power to instruct a trial judge to direct a
jury?" Judge Brooke wondered, opening his eyes.

The proceedings ended abruptly. As Marlys predicted, the decision
was reserved.

"How long will they take?" Ken asked as Marlys packed the
transcripts in a moving company's heavy cardboard box.

"Can't tell," she replied. "It could be a month, it could be six
months. You never know."

"You never know," said Karen, looking up at Ken's tall, hunched
figure. "That's how it always is. You never know."


CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Decision


The decision of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of
Ontario on the matter of the acquittal of Kenneth James Parks was
rendered suddenly and unanimously on June 1, 1990. As Marlys
Edwardh was leaving the office that Friday afternoon, she was
notified that the appeal had been dismissed. Unless the Crown
chose to appeal the dismissal to the Supreme Court of Canada, the
strange case of the sleepwalker homicide was over.

The trial judge, David Watt, had ruled that the jury could not
consider sleepwalking to be a form of legal insanity. The sole
issue before the appeal court, therefore, was the correctness of
that ruling.

"After reading all of the testimony of the medical experts,"
wrote Mr. Justice Galligan, "it seems clear to me that while
sleepwalking, a person's mind is functioning very abnormally in
that the mind's ability to be aware of reality and to exercise
voluntary control over physical acts is acutely impaired.
However, it seems obvious in this case that the mind must have
been functioning in some respects."

How to sort it out? The judges looked to the factor of mental
impairment that Brian Dickson in the Supreme Court of Canada
declared must exist for behaviour to be considered insanity in
the legal sense. Such impairment must arise from illness,
disorder, or abnormal condition--and sleepwalking was none of
those.

"The thesis of the medical evidence was that the impairment of
the respondent's faculties of reason, memory, and understanding
was caused not by any disorder or abnormal condition but by a
natural, normal condition--sleep," he wrote. "When asleep, no one
reasons, remembers or understands. Medical experts do not
understand exactly why those faculties do not function during
sleep but it is accepted that they do not. In a very real sense,
sleep impairs the human mind and its functioning. Sleep, however,
can hardly be called an illness, disorder or abnormal condition.
It is a perfectly normal condition."

The decision continues with the firm statement, "There was,
therefore, no basis upon which the defence of insanity could have
been left with the jury. The evidence required that the defence
of sleepwalking, as a category of non-insane automatism, be left
with it."

Mr. Justice Galligan added, "This case is extremely
troubling. The facts are so extreme that it stretches credulity
to think that a person could perform all of those apparently
deliberate acts over such an extended period of time without
volition or consciousness. [B] the wisdom of the jury's verdict
cannot be the subject of review in this court."

Mr. Justice Brooke, in concurring with his colleague, added, "If
the respondent's acts were not proved to be voluntary, he was not
guilty. He is presumed to be sane and not suffering from a
disease of the mind. Somnambulism is a disorder of sleep. It is
not regarded medically as a disorder of the mind or a disease of
the mind."

Marlys called Ken and Karen Parks at once. Karen said, "It's such
a relief that it's over. To have the Supreme Court of Ontario
agree with you makes this whole thing so much better. But I can't
help worrying that the Crown will appeal to the Supreme Court of
Canada. Where does that leave us? We're people. We aren't `the
Parks case`. We are two real people who have two children."

Her first year in nursing school had just ended and she was
awaiting the results. "She always gets ninety," Ken observed,
grinning at her. After two more years of school, she would be a
registered nurse. When that happened, they thought they would
move out of the province.

"I don't think it would be fair to either of them to have my dad
and Ken meet," she explains. "It's better that we go away."

Karen no longer expected to be reconciled with her brothers and
sisters--especially not with her sisters. In the spring, however,
she began having healing times with her father. On a warm day a
few weeks before the appeal court verdict, she and Denis went
together with the children to the Metro Toronto Zoo, where he
romped with Melissa and Brittany. She values a picture she took
of him there with Melissa. The scars from the knife wounds are
almost hidden by his hair, which has turned white prematurely.
There is sadness in his eyes, but he holds the child lovingly and
she's laughing.

"He's getting on with his life," Karen said quietly. "He and I
can talk now about how much we both miss mum. You can't be angry
for ever. He looks at her death now the same as I do. It was
an accident. She could just as well have been killed crossing the
street."

He was out of the country at the time of the appeal hearing, but
she thought he might have read about the decision in the
newspapers. "He would be glad for my sake," Karen said earnestly.
"He knows how hard this is for me."

Ken looked at Karen, a lot going on in his face, but he
said nothing. There was really nothing to say.


In the middle of June 1990, Ken and Karen had a double dose of
bad news. The Crown appealed the decision of the Ontario Court of
Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The reasoning seemed to be
that the degree of violence that accompanied Ken's sleepwalking
required something more than a simple acquittal. The country's
highest court would be asked to think about _Rabey again, and
think about Ken Parks.

The Parks marriage abruptly fell apart. Karen asked Ken to leave
while they tried to sort out their problems with a marriage
counsellor and a psychologist. In the anguish of the parting he
made an admission torn from his heart.

"There's never a day goes by," he said, "that I don't think about
your mother. I feel so bad."

As the summer wore on, with Karen on welfare again and waiting to
return to nursing school, they waited for the Supreme Court to
decide whether it would allow the appeal or not. Most evenings
Ken went back to the townhouse to help Karen put the children to
bed. He promised he'd be there to babysit when she needed to
study.

There is sadness and weariness between them, but the caring
continues too. "I don't know what will happen," Karen commented.
"Our situation is really difficult, you know?"


THE END