Fatal Mistakes

Tony Barclay is a retired juvenile corrections probation officer and a
former public-health research associate at the University of Toronto.

Jonathan Yeo was out on bail for a serious crime when he killed Nina de
Villiers and Karen Marquis in New Brunswick. This book is journalist
Kevin Marron’s account of the murders and the subsequent inquiry into
why so many things went wrong. Serious mistakes were made by the police,
the professionals, the mental-health service, and others. Permeating
Marron’s book is an underlying feeling of rage against a
criminal-justice system that could allow such things to happen against
officials, whose first reaction was to dodge responsibility for what
happened.

Fatal Mistakes succeeds better as an account of the tragic story of
Nina and her family than it does in sorting out the complex problems
that were uncovered by the inquiry. Nevertheless, it deserves to be
widely read.