Canada's youngest convicted multiple killer

She isn't old enough to drink alcohol, drive, make her own medical decisions, live on her own, or fight for her country. She can't have a credit card, would need a guardian's signature to open a bank account, and if she had sex with her boyfriend it would be statutory rape. But apparently a 13-year-old can be charged with three counts of first degree murder without anyone batting an eyelash.

And her 24-year-old "boyfriend," the one who committed the murders of this girl's mother, father, and younger brother... he's in a psychiatric institution undergoing evaluation. Because obviously a 13-year-old dating a 23-year-old and possibly participating in the murders of her family is sane, but a 23-year-old murderer who's in love with a child is not.

Please excuse me for a minute... I have to go pound my head against a wall until the world makes sense again....


So for a (relatively unbiased) summary of the facts known to date:

On April 22, 2006, Jeremy Allan Steinke, age 23, "high on cocaine... and riled up by repeated viewings of Oliver Stone's ultra-violent movie "Natural Born Killers"," broke into the Richardsons' home and killed his girlfriend's parents. He then demanded that the girl, age 12, kill her brother. She grabbed him in a choke hold and stabbed him, but could not kill him. So Steinke did.

The two stayed in Medicine Hat overnight, and used Mrs. Richardson's ATM card to get money, stopped at a convenience store for munchies, and visited (at least) one party, at which they were observed to be giggly and affectionate. They went to Saskatchewan the next day, where they were arrested.

Upon their arrest, Miss Richardson was sent to a detention facility, first in Saskatchewan, then in Alberta. Mr. Steinke was sent to a psychiatric institution for evaluation. The prosecution was originally going to request a psych evaluation of Miss Richardson, but they didn't, so it didn't happen. Both were charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Mr. Steinke has not yet entered a plea, and no trial date has been set. Nor has he been charged with statutory rape.

Pertinent to this blog is the following information:

a) prior to the murders, the Richardsons had grounded their daughter in an attempt to keep her from the 23-year-old Steinke. Her friends also did not approve of the relationship.

b) the girl, previously a good student and friendly, reportedly underwent a marked personality change when her relationship with Steinke commenced.

c) Steinke often claimed to be a 300-year-old werewolf and wore a necklace with a vial that he claimed held blood.

d) though her friends didn't take her seriously, the girl had been heard (and read online) to talk about wanting her parents dead, and possibly to joke about she and her boyfriend doing the killing. Blogs reviewed after-the-fact are disturbing and suggest a serious break from reality.

e) after their arrest and before her trial, police ferried letters between the accused, including a marriage proposal from the then-24-year-old Steinke to the then 13-year-old girl, and her giggling acceptance.

f) the prosecuting attorney's argument was that these murders had been planned by both Miss Richardson and Steinke. As evidence, the prosecuting attorney relied primarily on (i) emails, blogs, and reported comments, and (ii) Miss Richardson's lack of an attempt to prevent, stop, or report the murders after-the-fact. In rebuttal, Miss Richardson reported that she hadn't meant for Steinke to take her comments seriously, and that she didn't intervene because she was in shock. She had also just lost all her family and only had Steinke left to cling to.

g) a friend of Steinke's testified that Steinke had approached HIM for assistance with the murders, claiming that Miss Richardson had told Steinke that if he didn't kill her parents, she would stop seeing him.

h) when charging the jury, the judge told them that, "even if Steinke physically stabbed the girl's mother, her father and brother, under Canadian law, an accused can be found guilty if they intentionally help, encourage or persuade another person to commit a crime. The judge also told the jury that to find the accused guilty of first-degree murder, they must agree that the Crown proved there was planning and deliberation involved."

Miss Richardson has been tried and found guilty of three counts of first degree murder. Sentencing will be decided August 23rd. She can get up to 10 years, four of which would be served in the community. But before the sentencing hearing, she is to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

I have had a few concerns throughout this process, and am a bit surprised that I haven't heard anyone else raise them.

1. First, a girl who cannot be held responsible for her own medical, financial, or life decisions is being held responsible for murders committed by an adult, on the grounds that she 'encouraged or persuaded' a man almost twice her age to kill her family.

Maybe she did 'encourage or persuade' him. Steinke's claim to be a werewolf suggests delusion. His heavy pharmaceutical use suggests impaired cognition. His willingness to date/have sex with a child suggests any of a whole whack of psychological issues, including extreme immaturity... impaired reasoning skills... being perverse.... So this is a person who might be manipulated into performing violent acts.

But she is a child. And since when have we held children responsible for the actions of adults? Regardless of how much she may have whined, nagged, pleaded, provoked the man, how is she more responsible for his behaviour than he is for hers? Because before she was dating Steinke, Miss Richardson evidenced no homicidal ideations. Friends and family report drastic personality changes and the development of a much darker (goth) personae after she started dating him. Yes, she could have been attracted to him because of a shift in her personality, but we don't have enough information to make such a distinction.

The Richardsons did everything they could to protect their daughter; it is what got them killed. But where was his family and friends in this? Reportedly his mother understood his relationship because she herself had been in an age-discrepant relationship. Does this mean that his mother was monitoring the relationship and found it was healthy? Or was she not getting her troubled son the help he needed before everything went horribly wrong?

2. The prosecuting attorney argued that Miss Richardson's refusal to intervene during the attack, that she stayed with him after the attack, and that she had ample interaction with other people but chose not to report the murders, indicates that she was part of the planning process. Indeed, the prosecuting attorney presented Miss Richardson as the driving force and Steinke as the tool.

At 12-13, children typically know right from wrong. They know not to steal, they know not to do drugs, and they know not to murder. But they know not to do these things largely because of the consequences. It isn't a case of "don't do this because it's a societal wrong;" it's a "don't do this 'cause you'll get in serious trouble." It would be more a sense of "good girls don't kill their parents" or "don't kill your parents because you don't get anything good out of it, just a lot of trouble." And pre-teens and adolescents, especially those who already have psychological issues of some sort, are susceptible to fantasy and fuzzy/illogical thinking. Because that's another thing to keep in mind about pre-teens and adolescents; their frontal lobe hasn't kicked in yet. They frequently get in trouble for 'not thinking' before they act. They have the cognitive skills to come up with some wonderfully inventive and imagine ideas, but lack the impulse control and reasoning skills to even consider potential risks and negative consequences. Again, murder is an extreme behaviour and multiple murders, as this was, is not likely to have been impulsive. But it is also quite possible that she got swept up in the excitement of some perverse fantasies and lacked the cognitive skills to put a stop before things got out of hand. She may also have thought they were engaging in delightful fantasy and missed his cues indicating that he was taking her seriously. We don't know. But it seems wrong to expect her to reason through the consequences of murder as would an adult. Indeed, children under the age of 14 cannot be given adult sentences for 'adult' crimes because they aren't adults. So the prosecuting attorney's assumption that, because Miss Richardson didn't act as you would expect an innocent adult to, she must not be innocent, is crap, based on faulty premises and insufficient information. So holding a pre-teen responsible for saying she wanted her parents dead... yes, she said some horrible things, and should be held responsible for them. But first degree murder? Saying that just her comments alone were sufficient to coerce an adult into committing murder? Making her as responsible for the crimes as the adult who committed them? It doesn't feel right.

The prosecuting attorney also argued that because Miss Richardson didn't report the crimes after-the-fact and went willingly with her family's murderer, she must have been a partner in the crime. This does not take into account what we know about (a) shock, trauma, and fear; and (b) dysfunctional relationships and adolescents.

Let me spin a little tale here. A pre-teen, who may or may not have self-esteem, anger, family, and/or mental health issues, attracts the attention of an older guy. In the pre-teen/teen world, this is amazing. This is a popularity boost, this is an esteem boost, this is non-caloric-but-great-tasting-chocolate-at-an-all-you-can-eat-chocolate-buffet-after-you-win-the-lottery. Teens are all about drama: they are hard-wired to be. Their hormones are going wonky, parts of their brain are kicking in for the first time, and neuronal connections are getting made and trimmed. There's a darn good reason why Shakespeare depicted Romeo and Juliet as teenagers: adults would have taken the time to check for a pulse. So here is a girl who has attracted the notice of an older guy. And he likes her. Her parents disapprove, as they should. They try to prevent her from seeing him. They cut off her computer access, they monitor (or limit) phone access, and they ground her. They do all they can to keep their daughter safe. She doesn't take this well. It feeds the sense of drama, though; the Romeo-and-Juliet-ishness of the relationship to have her family disapprove, and sadly, the forbidden often becomes more desirable. Her boyfriend comes in and kills her family in front of her. This is terrifying. But he does it, he says, because he loves her. And now he is literally all she has left.

Frighteningly, a girl could very well go with her boyfriend after this. Maybe out of fear; he's just killed her family, so what would he do to her? Maybe she got caught up in the excitement, the whole Bonnie-and-Clyde/National Born Killer-ness. (I mean, come on; if he can claim mitigating circumstances of drug use and too many viewings of NBK, why can't she?) Maybe she just didn't want to be alone. We don't know. We can't know, because no one did a psych evaluation. All we have is her testimony that she was "like a zombie," and friends' observations that they were giggly, amorous, and on drugs. But with all these possible reasons for her to have gone with him after the murders, how could the prosecuting attorney argue the one theory without gathering supporting evidence, as would have happened (or at least been more likely to happen) during a psych evaluation?

3. And that's the third point I have, and the thing that disgusts me the most. A 23-year-old male has a sexual relationship with a child and kills her family, so he is automatically carted off to a psychiatric institution for evaluation. The 12-year-old girl does not. More than anything else, this is what disturbs me. There were too many unanswered questions, such as her mental state prior to the murders, after the murders, how she feels about her family now, how she feels about him, what kind of fantasies she has created. All this information would contribute to our understanding of her input on the planning and execution of this slaughter. And we have none of it.

4. A fourth point is actually more a question than a point: is it not entrapment, or at least a violation of someone's rights for the police to have ferried (and read, obviously, or how else could the contents have become public knowledge) letters between the defendants?

5. Finally, why were letters from her sexual predator permitted? Did anyone discourage her from continuing communication? And again; why was there no psych evaluation?

It is impossible to know the full story from online articles, but what is out there suggests inadequate advocacy. It looks like society was appalled (and rightly so) at the slaughter of a child's family. Needing a scapegoat, society picked the child. She could be considered the fourth victim of a mentally-disturbed sexual predator and to have reduced responsibility due to age, emotional and cognitive development, being victimized by a sexual predator, and being in an unhealthy relationship. Instead, we are holding her to adult standards of responsibility, and, based on who got the psych evaluation and who did not, to higher standards than we are holding the actual murderer.

The best that can be said about this whole fiasco is that it gives us, our society, and the judicial system a chance to learn from our mistakes. But what a cost for a child to pay.

The following sites were visited on July 6-10, 2007 for information used in this blog:

wikipedia....Richardson_family_murders

cbc.ca/...07/09/med-hat.html

cbc.ca/...06/20/trial-medhat.html

cbc.ca/...06/26/medhat-trial.html

cbc.ca/...06/25/medhat-trial.html

ctv.ca...20070627/mh_murder_070627=

ctv.ca...20070629/medicine_hat_070629=

ctv.ca...20070626/medhat_trial_070626=

ctv.ca/...20070710/med_hat_letter_070710

ctv.ca/...20070710

ctv.ca...20070706/medicine_hat_070706

hazel8500.wordpress.com/2006/07/01/

cbc.ca/...med-hat.html

discovervancouver.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=83262

mikeoncrime.com/article/2973/

cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2007/07/10/girl-rehab.html

hazel8500.wordpress.com/2006/05/20/update/

topix.net/ca/medicine-hat-ab

cbc.ca/...trial-medhat.html

topix.net/ca/medicine-hat-ab/2007/06/

ctv.ca...20070629/medicine_hat_070629/20070629?hub=Canada

calsun.canoe.ca/...4302441-sun.html

ca.news.yahoo.com/...crime_family_slain_with_text

calsun.canoe.ca/...4295385.html

cbc.ca/...2007/07/04/medhat-trial.html

cbc.ca/...2007/07/03/medhat-trial.html

cbc.ca/.../2007/06/04/medhat-day1.html

cbc.ca/...2007/06/20/medicinehat-blood.html