Redrum the Innocent: The Murder of Christine Jessop and the Controversial Conviction of Her Next-Door Neigh- bour, Guy Paul Morin

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Globe and Mail journalist Kirk Makin has exhaustively researched an
extraordinary eight years of Canadian legal history that began October
3, 1984, when 9-year-old Christine Jessop disappeared in Queensville,
north of Toronto, and seemed to end on July 30, 1992, when her next-door
neighbor, Guy Paul Morin, was sentenced to life in prison for her
murder. About these events, including “far and away the longest and
most costly murder trial in Canadian history,” Makin has written what
must be the longest book of the popular true-crime genre in Canadian
literature: a compelling tale containing “no small amount of
ugliness—and precious little nobility.” (The subsequently released
paperback edition contains an additional 15 pages of updated
information, discussing the effect of the original book, and telling how
Morin became, in 1993, the second convicted murderer in Canadian history
to be released from prison on bail, pending further appeals.)

Morin was first acquitted in 1986, but a retrial was ordered because of
“a couple of misbegotten phrases” in the judge’s summation. If the
case was, as Makin writes, “a murder mystery without parallel in this
country,” it resulted in legal proceedings that were also without
parallel. Arguments for a stay of prosecution, estimated by both sides
to take three to six weeks, took a year and a half. The second trial
lasted nine months; one juror’s entire pregnancy was spent in the
courtroom, and she had to be excused during the jury’s eight days of
deliberations to give birth. The jury heard some 1500 hours of evidence,
much of it highly technical. The defence lawyer’s objections to the
judge’s charge lasted eleven hours.

But this book is about much more than the two trials. Makin explores
many aspects of the Canadian legal system, such as the rules (changed
since Jessop’s murder) about disclosure of evidence to the defence by
the Crown. He provides in-depth background on all the major
participants, from the many legal officials and investigators to the two
tragically affected families, who lived beside each other for years in
what he calls “an appalling mockery of the concept of
neighbourliness.” He examines in clinical detail “the human
dynamics” of the investigation, such as the unfortunate rivalries
between police forces. Makin is not impartial. The initial investigation
of the body site, he writes, “stank.” He describes a Crown case
“which was at best, botched, and at worst, a frame-up.” Of the
various pieces of evidence presented, he concludes that “every last
one of them had been tainted or rendered barely credible.” Why, then,
a conviction? In a fascinating conclusion, he discusses 20 factors, some
of them critical not just of this case, but of the system itself. The
Morin case, he writes, “has tested the Canadian justice system in a
way that no previous case has.” A helpful page lists more than 80
characters who appear in the book, but there are, of course, many more
names in the narrative, and it is at times very frustrating that such an
admirable and influential book has no index.