In July, 1999, under circumstances as yet unexplained, teenaged drifter Brent Crawford placed a handwritten statement in the hands of an undercover police officer, detailing how he, at just 16, came to murder a woman for $300 and the promise of a motorbike.
In court yesterday, Mr. Crawford, now 19, claimed the note as his own, and explained how he had left it in the vehicle of a man who'd promised him a job, but turned out to be police officer Bill Campbell.
The note lays out a sorry plot; how Cherrylle Dell poisoned her estranged husband with antifreeze in a bottle of wine, how her spurned lover Nancy Fillmore spilled the story to the police, and how, one pot-smoking August afternoon in 1997, Ms. Dell turned to young Mr. Crawford and asked, would he do a job for her?
The job, he writes, was "to take care of" Ms. Fillmore. And that very night, he states in his note, Mr. Crawford had a friend jimmy the lock on Ms. Fillmore's apartment. She was inside, passed out drunk, surrounded by candles. "So instead of cutting her neck," he writes, "I fliped over all the tables with the candels and leave."
But yesterday, testifying in the courtroom where Ms. Dell is now on trial for first-degree murder in the alleged poisoning of her husband, Mr. Crawford would say none of these things.
He has been charged, along with Ms. Dell, for his part in Ms. Fillmore's death -- and facing trial as an adult -- but in court he has denied the entire story.
The prosecution has called Mr. Crawford to the stand as evidence of Ms. Dell's alleged post-offence behaviour -- the theory being that linking her to Ms. Fillmore's fire will demonstrate that she had something to hide in her husband's death in December, 1995.
But on the subject of Ms. Dell, Mr. Crawford was silent -- as he has been, apparently, since his arrest. They were only "acquaintances" he said, nothing intimate -- though the court has already heard from Ms. Dell's cellmate in custody, who recalled her snickering boasts about a boy who "would do anything for me; he'd take care of anything I needed."
On the phone in separate calls to his divorced parents after his arrest in 1999, Mr. Crawford announced he would go to jail for 25 years if he had to, rather than name names to the police. "I'll do the full bit," he tells his weeping mother, "I don't care, I'm not implicating anybody."
The two tapes were played in court yesterday. He said, when pushed, that there was someone else, a person who had paid him to set the fire. Nancy Fillmore, he told his mother, "was gonna testify against someone in court. . . . She was a star witness."
On the stand, he would admit, but with few details, that he knew Ms. Fillmore personally, from volunteering at the community resource centre in the Ottawa Valley village of Killaloe, where they all lived at the time.
Erin Anderssen