Murder at McDonald's: The Killers Next Door

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

On May 7, 1992, Derek Wood, Darren Muise, and Freeman McNeil, over the
course of robbing the Sydney River McDonald’s, brutally murdered three
of the restaurant’s employees and left a fourth permanently disabled.
Wood, an employee at the same McDonald’s, had told his partners that
the restaurant’s safe held between $80,000 and $200,000: in fact, the
killers made off with a paltry $2000. “Less than two hours after
cutting an innocent man’s throat,” the author writes, “Darren
Muise was feeding a video-gambling machine with the money taken in the
commission of that grisly act.”

Reporter Phonse Jessome, a native of Sydney, Nova Scotia, covered the
murders for a local television station. Murder at McDonald’s is a
meticulous account of the police investigation (it began badly, with a
handful of false arrests) and the courtroom proceedings. The killers,
who let their lawyers do the talking at their trials, remain shadowy
figures throughout. Beyond references to the standard socioeconomic
factors, the author can offer no compelling reason for their instigation
of the May 7 bloodbath. The real subject of his book is not the killers
and their motivations, but rather the devastating impact their savage
acts had on the tight-knit Cape Breton community. As the trials draw to
a close, it is not the defendants but the victims’ families who take
centre stage, venting their grief, frustration, and rage at what they
have come to view as a criminal justice system that serves the
perpetrators of crime at the expense of its victims.

Marring this otherwise competent book are the author’s attempts to
convey the inner thoughts of individuals (including, incredibly, those
of the victims during the murders). This technique was masterfully
employed in In Cold Blood. Unfortunately, Jessome—like so many other
imitators who have gone before him—is no Truman Capote.