Well, I can’t say that I’m surprised by this. At all.
I may have been a little hesitant at first — and there were plenty of people emailing in to call me on it — but after the early revelations, my mind got changed in a hurry and what we have here now should surprise absolutely no one. I’ve gotten quite a few emails speculating about just how the murders of the Richardson family in Medicine hat were carried out, and most of them shared a common theory: Steinke killed the parents and Jasmine killed her 8-year old brother herself.
MEDICINE HAT, Alta. – A 13-year-old girl accused of killing a Medicine Hat family broke down twice on the witness stand yesterday while admitting to stabbing an eight-year-old boy who was begging for his life.
Speaking in a barely audible voice, she admitted to stabbing eight-year-old Jacob Richardson in the upper part of his body.
“I’m scared, I’m too young to die,” the girl told the court, recalling what the boy said during the April 23, 2006, massacre.
There you have it. Sweet, innocent little Jasmine Richardson stuck a knife in her little brother while he begged for his life. Of course, she’s trying to hang it all on Steinke, but that’s not the way the evidence is piling up:
After three weeks of Crown evidence about the grisly crime scene and a rebellious adolescent who hated her parents and the rules they tried to impose, Tuesday’s testimony was the first time the jury heard full details of the murderous encounter.
She was angry because her parents grounded her and took away her computer privileges in an attempt to cool her relationship with the 23-year-old Steinke. She told the jury she often “vented” to her boyfriend as they talked on the phone late at night after her family had gone to sleep and admitted she’d had several “hypothetical conversations” with him about killing her parents.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, little Jasmine isn’t ever going to be held really accountable, regardless of the verdict. Thanks to the piece-of-shit YCJA that the Shawinigan Strangler saddled us with, she can’t possibly be handed a sentence of more than 10 years. And thanks to other idiocies like statutory release, she won’t do any more than six years inside, likely living with more creature comforts while she’s in there than most of you do out in the working world. Tack onto that the fact that she’s going to get 2-for-1 credit for the “dead time” that she’s served before her final sentencing, and she’ll be back on the streets before she’s old enough to drink.
And here’s the kicker: all the social-worker/hug-a-thug shitheads out there that think the YCJA is so lovely are going to try to tell you that you have no right to know who she is!
That’s right. In the all-too-near future, Jasmine’s going to be out on the same streets as your kids. Maybe, like my boy, your kids are about Jasmine’s age. And those sanctimonious assholes have the gall to try and tell me that I can’t warn him about this future Squeaky Fromme that’s going to be prowling the streets.
Like hell I can’t. My kids and my grandkids (whenever they show up) have a right to know if there’s a murderer in their midst.
Your kids have that right, too.
Oh, yeah; last but not least:
MEDICINE HAT, Alta. – A 13-year-old girl says she showed little emotion after stabbing her terrified little brother – knowing her parents were also dead – because the enormity of the act was “too big to cry about.”
Every time they catch a serial killer, all the same questions get asked: How did they get like this? What makes them like this? And my personal favourite: Why can’t we identify them early on so they can be locked up BEFORE they kill a bunch of innocent people?
So why is it that most of those same people who ask those questions are now, with an embryonic serial killer in the grasp of the system, making nothing but excuses? If there was ever any doubt that Jasmine Richardson is fucked up beyond retrieval, it was banished by the evidence presented today:
MEDICINE HAT, Alta. (CP) – A cartoon showing one person coating three others in gasoline and laughing as they’re burned alive was seized from a girl’s school locker just hours after her family was found stabbed to death, a jury heard Thursday.
Police and school staff discovered the cartoon during a frantic search for the girl after her parents and younger brother were found in their blood-soaked home in April 2006.
The drawing and testimony from the girl’s guidance counsellor came on the fourth day of the girl’s first-degree murder trial. The 13-year-old accused, who was 12 at the time of the deaths, can’t be identified under provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
The 10-frame drawing starts off with four stick figures going for a walk as the sun shines. There are two clearly larger figures, a small third figure and a fourth labelled “Angry.”
The pencil-drawn narrative shows the fourth figure pouring gasoline into a sprinkler system, turning it on and drenching the others. The smallest figure is on a swing when it says, “Oh no, we’re covered in gasoline.”
The fourth figure then lights the gasoline and smiles as the others run around in flames and cry for help as their flesh is burned off.
The sequence ends with one stick figure lying on the ground. A caption reads “The Unimaginable Pain.” Two other smiling stick figures look on. A final frame depicts the fourth figure running off to a vehicle labelled as “Jeremy’s truck.”
The young girl’s co-accused and boyfriend at the time, 24-year-old Jeremy Steinke, faces the same three murder charges, but a date has yet to be set for his trial.
Well, there you have it. We finally caught a future Ted Bundy / Aileen Wuornos before she had the chance to rack up a double-digit body count and what are we told? Never mind who she is. Never mind that she’ll probably be out before she’s old enough to drink. It’s none of your business.
Like hell it isn’t. Ten years is it, and she won’t serve more than six. Then, she’ll be back on the same streets as my son. And she’s about the same age. My son has a right to be warned about this little psycho bitch.
Okay, I can admit it. Maybe I did blow the call. Maybe I did go entirely too easy on her because she’s a girl and would have had an entirely different view of the whole mess if she had been a boy. Maybe, as commentor Debbie on the previous post put it, “You wimped out. You know good and well that if this were a 13 year old boy…”
And now, I’m pretty damned sure that I blew it. Richardson is currently on trial in Medicine Hat, Alberta; charged with the murders of her parents and her 8 year-old brother. Originally, I was reluctant to mention her by name. At the very least, I had decided to keep it to myself until she gets convicted (if). But after what I’ve learned today, I just can’t do that anymore…
Members of the five-woman, seven-man jury listened intently to the evidence of forensic unit Const. Gerald Sadlemyer.
They then sombrely reviewed his booklet of nearly 50 macabre scene photographs, including the bloodied bodies of the three victims.
Among the most gruesome viewed by jurors was a photograph of the accused’s younger brother, lying in his underwear on his side on his blood-stained bed.
The boy’s throat can be seen slashed, his eyes open, mouth agape.
Under the questioning of Crown prosecutor Stephanie Cleary, Sadlemyer detailed his examination of the family home — including the eight-year-old victim’s room.
“There was a lot of blood all over the walls and all over the boy,” said Sadlemyer, of the young victim who can’t be identified under provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
With eyes wide open and surrounded by blood-soaked toys, an eight-year-old boy was found dead in his own bed in April 2006, an Alberta jury learned yesterday.
The body was two floors up from where the boy’s mother and father died in the basement of their home.
And the Chronicle Hearald tells how the parents didn’t go down easy:
Sadlemyer said the mother’s right hand had long hairs in it that were a light sandy colour: “It was as if she was grasping or holding onto it.”
She was clad only in a light nightgown that had been ripped and stained with blood.
In addition to 12 stabbing punctures, the woman also had numerous “defensive wounds” that included cuts to her hands and the tips of her fingers.
Sadlemyer also testified that police found the body of her husband nearby, with stab wounds to nearly every part of his body, indicating signs of a violent struggle.
Blood stains and splatter covered almost everything in the basement, including the roof, the television, an exercise ball and the fireplace.
By all accounts, Jasmine Richardson was a good kid who never got into any trouble before she fell in with Jeremy Steinke. Clean cut, good grades and all that. Not hard to imagine from her picture at the top of this post. It’s from Wikipedia and was originally released to the media on April 23, 2006 (when the police were looking for her, but she was not an official suspect) but was suppressed on April 24 when she became a suspect (and was arrested). The other pics are from her myspace profile. Some progression, huh?
I tried to show restraint; I did. But now, I don’t give a shit how good this kid used to be. I don’t give a shit how old she was at the time. Her name and face were spread across the whole country last year. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. You don’t get to slaughter an entire family — especially your OWN family — and then hide!
That’s what I’ve been getting asked over and over again since I posted the day before yesterday about the 13-year girl from Medicine Hat. Her trial began on three charges of first degree murder for the deaths of her parents and eight year-old brother.
Yeah, that girl.
Everybody was real quick to point out to me that I’ve never had any problem posting the identities of teenage killers in the past whenever it had already been published in the MSM. They also point out that, while I did remove the identities of Peter Whitmore’s victims from the posts that I made in reference to that case, I’ve never bothered tidying up posts on juvenile criminals after they get caught. Well, let’s face it, boys and girls: all the wishful, hug-a-thug, warm, fuzzy thinking in the world isn’t gonna shove the genie back into the bottle. Everybody knows that Todd Cameron Smith was the one that shot up that high school in Taber, hitting three students and killing one. We know this because his mug was on the front page of every paper in Ontario after he escaped from custody in August of 2005.
So why the hell am I going so easy on this kid all of a sudden? And, seemingly the most popular question: would I be so discreet with her identity if she had been a teenage boy??
Alright, I admit it: that one got me thinking. Am I going easy on her because she’s a girl? And why the hell is it that whenever I think about this case, I find myself being more critical of her father (one of the murder victims!) than I am of her!? I think to myself, “This man knew damned well what Jeremy Steinke was, and what the sonofabitch was up to with his daughter. How the hell could he let that God damned child molester anywhere within five miles of his little girl? Didn’t this guy own a shotgun??” Do I really have my head up my ass on this one? Am I allowing myself to be influenced by the fact that I come from the same hometown as Steven Truscott? He has the distinction of being the youngest person in Canadian history to be wrongly convicted of murder. He was only 14 years old when he heard his sentence:
“Steven Murray Truscott,” Judge Ferguson began, “I have not alternative but to pass the following sentence upon you. The jury have found you guilty after a fair trial.
“The sentence of this court upon you is that you be taken from here to the place from whence you came and there be kept in close confinement until Tuesday, the 8th day of December, 1959, and upon that day and date you be taken to the place of execution and that you there be hanged by the neck until you are dead.
“And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”
I’ve been thinking about that for nearly two days now, ever since a friend of mine brought it up about an hour after I put up the post. And after all that, the answer is “no.” I do not have my head up my ass.
There’s just too damned much about this case that I don’t know; too many questions that haven’t been answered to my satisfaction. But that might change. The judge has decided to deny the outright publication ban that the defence was asking for:
Reporters and other members of the public won’t be banned from the courtroom during the first week of a 13-year-old girl’s trial on charges that she murdered her parents and little brother.
Justice Scott Brooker of Court of Queen’s Bench in Medicine Hat says the defence failed to prove that a ban was needed during this week’s hearing, which is being held to determine what evidence should be permitted at the trial itself.
So we will get more information as time passes. Who knows? Maybe she’s innocent, maybe she really is guilty, after all. And yes, her name and photograph may well end up here someday.
Here’s something unusual. It’s not too damned often that I manage to come across something that makes me feel uncomfortable writing about. Disgusted, annoyed, outraged, or just plain old fashioned pissed off; those happen all the time. It’s one of the things about being a grouchy bugger with a net connection: I get to take my opinions and inflict them on the rest of you. And everybody knows that opinions are like arseholes: everybody’s got one and mine don’t stink. So I usually have no problems spouting off without feeling any of that self-doubt crap that the touchy-feely crowd loves so much.
But being uncomfortable about writing/ranting something? That’s a rare one.
Everybody and their dog knows by now that the trial is about to begin in the matter of the Richardson family murders in Medicine Hat…
MEDICINE HAT, ALTA. — A first-degree murder trial begins today for a 13-year-old girl accused of slaughtering her parents and little brother in a case that has stunned this southern Alberta city.
[…]The accused was 12 years old and in Grade 7 when her family members were found dead in their home in April 2006. Her brother was eight. He was buried with his parents in Sudbury, where the family lived before moving to Alberta in the late 1990s.
The girl, who cannot be identified under provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Her co-accused, and boyfriend at the time of the incident, 24-year-old Jeremy Steinke, faces the same murder charges. He will be tried later as an adult.
[…]Steinke told friends he was a 300-year-old werewolf who liked the taste of blood. The two also left an Internet trail, posting pictures and messages on websites such as VampireFreaks.com.
[…]Sanjeev Anand, a criminal law expert at the University of Alberta, says the case is unique for Canada.
“I don’t remember in recent history, a person that young being charged with multiple murders.”
Most people know that I’m no fan of the YCJA, especially when it comes to violent crime. And it’s not like anybody that wants to know the accused girl’s name can’t find it with just a quick google search.
What bothers me about this is how much I don’t know. The cops haven’t even disclosed how the family died. And maybe I’m being naive, or old fashioned, or whatever, but I have a hard time believing that a 12-year old girl, who was never in any trouble before she fell in with a child molester twice her age, just up and takes it into her head to kill her whole family.
Do I know who she is? Yes, I do. I have a hell of a lot of info on her, actually. But until I know more about just what the hell happened, I’ll be keeping it to myself.
I’d like to start off today by thanking both Artur Pawlowski and the Calgary Sun’s Licia Corbella for their help in putting this post together; I couldn’t have done it without ’em. I managed to speak briefly with Mr. Pawlowski from his home in Calgary and I have to tell you, he’s one of the nicest folks I’ve talked to in quite a while.
You might recall from two of my previous posts that Art is the guy who was arrested and jailed in Calgary back in August of last year for reading the Bible and praying in a public park.
Let me say that again: Arrested. And jailed. For praying. In Canada.
I Am Not Making This Upâ„¢.
I said yesterday that I was going to try to find the video footage of Art’s arrest, so I figured “who better to ask than… well, Art?” So, after getting ahold of a number for him, I gave him a call. While he didn’t have the footage in a digital format himself, he was able to direct me to the page for Paul Arthur’s show, Insight, at www.miraclechannel.ca (which you can check out yourself here) where I was able to download one of the shows that features a clip from the footage that Art’s brother shot the day he got busted. It’s a fairly long vid (about an hour) and the footage from the arrest only runs from 8:38 to 9:32 but on the whole, the whole vid is worth watching (you can download it to your hard drive here, if you like)… (more…)
Well, I can’t say that I’m surprised by this. At all.MEDICINE HAT, Alta. – A 13-year-old girl accused of killing a Medicine Hat family broke down twice on the witness stand yesterday while admitting to stabbing an eight-year-old boy who was begging for his life.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, little Jasmine isn’t ever going to be held really accountable, regardless of the verdict. Thanks to the piece-of-shit YCJA that the Shawinigan Strangler saddled us with, she can’t possibly be handed a sentence of more than 10 years. And thanks to other idiocies like statutory release, she won’t do any more than six years inside, likely living with more creature comforts while she’s in there than most of you do out in the working world. Tack onto that the fact that she’s going to get 2-for-1 credit for the “dead time” that she’s served before her final sentencing, and she’ll be back on the streets before she’s old enough to drink.
And here’s the kicker: all the social-worker/hug-a-thug shitheads out there that think the YCJA is so lovely are going to try to tell you that you have no right to know who she is!
I tried to show restraint; I did. But now, I don’t give a shit how good this kid used to be. I don’t give a shit how old she was at the time. Her name and face were spread across the whole country last year. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. You don’t get to slaughter an entire family — especially your OWN family — and then hide!
Did I really wimp out?
“This man knew damned well what Jeremy Steinke was, and what the sonofabitch was up to with his daughter. How the hell could he let that God damned child molester anywhere within five miles of his little girl? Didn’t this guy own a shotgun??” Do I really have my head up my ass on this one? Am I allowing myself to be influenced by the fact that I come from the same hometown as 
I’ve been thinking about that for nearly two days now, ever since a friend of mine brought it up about an hour after I put up the post. And after all that, the answer is “no.” I do not have my head up my ass.
