Marnie Rice was instrumental in creating two invaluable tools that help determine the likelihood of violent sex offenders and other criminals reoffending if released.
In 1975, Dr. Marnie Rice responded to a newspaper ad for a job at what was unquestionably one of the most notorious institutions in Canada. The concrete cells and metal bars of the Oak Ridge Division of the Mental Health Centre in Penetanguishene, Ont., housed some of the most dangerous psychopathic sex offenders, serial murderers and pedophiles in Canada.
"They took me down the worst ward with the most psychotic patients. Each patient in each room was instructed to perform an act for me. One would walk around his room on his hands, another would do a dance, another would sing a little song. Part of their intention was to scare me off. It backfired on them," Dr. Rice said. "I decided this needed to change."
She took the job, working as a clinical psychologist and doing behaviour modification. She went on to work as a researcher and eventually became the institution's director of research. For her it was the ideal environment to study psychopathy and aggression in patients, learn how to assess the risk of violence and, in time, devise practical treatments.
Dr. Rice, who died in Midland, Ont., on Aug. 17 at the age of 67, had a distinguished 40-year career. During her tenure at the institution, now known as the Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care, she was instrumental in creating two invaluable tools that help determine the likelihood of violent sex offenders and other criminals reoffending if released. In 1997, her research team won the Amethyst Award for Outstanding Achievement by Ontario Public Servants and in 2003 Dr. Rice became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Marnie Elizabeth McKee was born in Hamilton on Feb. 11, 1948, to David and Marion McKee. She was the eldest of four children and from an early age she was a high achiever. When she was five, the family moved to Burlington, Ont., where she attended Glenview Public School and later Aldershot High School. She was valedictorian at both schools. At Aldershot, young Marnie met Greg Rice, her future husband, and the two became high school sweethearts. Mr. Rice described her as "a bright, well-rounded individual who was well liked and had lots of friends."
The couple married on Oct. 15, 1971, and by that time Dr. Rice had earned an honours BA in psychology from McMaster University and an MA in psychology from the University of Toronto. The following year, she began work on her PhD in clinical psychology from York University.
Mr. Rice, a lawyer, accepted a position with a law firm in Midland, so they moved north and immediately felt at home. Oak Ridge's first research director, Dr. Vernon Quinsey, hired Dr. Rice to work full time at the institution as a clinical psychologist, but he was so impressed with her qualifications and her enthusiasm that by 1980 he had given her a research position.
"She's curious because even though she lives with evil every day, she's relentlessly upbeat," her colleague Dr. Grant Harris said in a 1999 Chatelaine article. He also praised her dedication to the truth, calling it "her signal trait."
It was a daunting task, however, for Dr. Rice to remain positive given the violence that she encountered with alarming regularity. In the 1999 Chatelaine article, she recalled being attacked by one of the patients: "I was with six patients and another, male, clinician. There was one patient there who was very psychotic. He grabbed me around the neck and tried to strangle me, but he was pretty weak. And everybody jumped up to help. It was nothing serious."
The problem of violent attacks on staff by patients, however, spurred Dr. Rice to take action. "Marnie decided to develop and evaluate an intervention to solve this problem despite our recognition of the formidable, even scary, hurdles to be overcome," said Dr. Quinsey. Dr. Rice persevered for 15 years, leading a team to develop a training tool that reduced the incidence of these violent attacks. The psychologists had discovered that assaults on staff members were often prompted by the staff members' attitudes toward patients, so a guide was designed to educate staff on how to moderate their behaviour. The guide was the basis for a training course that was taught at Oak Ridge and other institutions for many years.
In the late 1980s, Dr. Rice's staff also developed tools that would have an enormous impact on the little known sub-field of forensic psychiatry, a specialized branch of psychiatry where medicine and overlaps with the law. Deciding which violent offenders should be released into the community was extremely difficult. The relevant clinical data had been collected, but there was no practical checklist available for determining the likelihood of recidivism in serious offenders. So the researchers at Oak Ridge created the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG) and the Sex Offender Risk Appraisal Guide (SORAG) to address this issue.
The guides were particularly useful in evaluating psychopathic sex offenders, who actually seemed to get worse because of treatment. Dr. Rice was initially baffled by this, but eventually realized that the patients had learned to skew the results of other types of assessment by telling the psychologists what they wanted to hear. The new guides her team developed, however, incorporated diagnostic information from sources that could not be manipulated.
"The research showed us they can be changed. Except that we changed them for the worse. We have to figure out how to change them for the better." Dr. Rice came to the conclusion, however, that psychopathic sex offenders should never be released. "The mixture of psychopathy and deviant sexual preference produces time bombs, extremely high-risk guys."
When Dr. Quinsey left Penetanguishene in 1988 to work at Queen's University, in Kingston, Dr. Rice succeeded him as director of the research department. While she spent her days with psychopaths, her life outside the institution's walls was quite normal.
The Rices had two children, Andrea, born in 1979, and Austin, who was born in 1982. Both recall childhoods filled with adventure. Dr. Rice loved to travel; every trip was an opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about the world and its inhabitants. In 1990, the family took a three-month sabbatical and travelled in the South Pacific. Their ports of call included Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and Thailand, and Dr. Rice discovered she had a talent for photography. Austin remembers his mother's exploits fondly.
"She was a bit of a thrill-seeker, taking some very adventurous canoe and rafting trips on the Nahanni, Alsek and Winisk Rivers. She was a scuba diver, skydiver, bungee jumper, windsurfer … and even tried her hand at snowboarding, rollerblading and kayaking."
Dr. Rice's professional life also flourished. Even after her semi-retirement in 2002, when she stepped down as director of research, she took on the role of research director emerita on a part-time basis as the Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene restyled itself and became the Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care. She was a prolific writer who produced more than 100 scientific publications, including five books, and was working on a sixth one. Her peers in the United States awarded her the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Contribution to Research in Public Policy. Dr. Rice was a full professor with the University of Toronto's Department of Psychiatry, as well as an adjunct professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at McMaster University, and an adjunct professor of psychology at Queen's University.
"She was very passionate about her career and I was often envious of her love for her work," her son, Austin, says. "As she said, she would do it for free and literally did that, spending countless hours at home and on holidays reviewing scientific journals and peer reviewing articles."
One of Dr. Rice's favourite aspects of her career was the opportunity to mentor new scientists. Dr. Zoe Hilton, a senior research scientist at Waypoint, recalls that Dr. Rice usually kept her door open and was happy to answer questions and give encouragement.
"She really led and nurtured her team, and in return, we learned to have very high standards for scientific research and ethics," Dr. Hilton said. "I remember a time she told me she was proud of me – I had just done my first big talk and it went well – she had a look of genuine pleasure and affection on her face, and it meant so much to me."
Dr. Marnie Rice leaves husband, Greg; children, Andrea and Austin; grandchildren, Broderick and Lachlan; mother, Marion McKee; and three siblings, Alex McKee, Jennifer Chadsey and Sharyn McKee.