I wrote this profile about Runaway Devil after her sentencing for the first-degree murder of her family. I am devastated that an image of the 12-year-old girl falls under a publication ban. The school picture I describe is a chilling show-stopper. I had a copy of it for months and kept it nearby whenever I was writing about J.R. Something in the picture always grabbed me, whether it was her eyes or her smile. But what finally jumped out at me after months of staring into its shadows was the icing on the cake. I emailed a friend of hers and it was confirmed: she was wearing a spiked collar. Nice BDSM accessory for your Grade 7 school photo. The collar spoke volumes about how J.R. was thinking months before she ever met Jeremy Allan Steinke.
This is one of my favourite Runaway Devil features because I finally found a way to write about that damn collar.
Minor’s journey on murderous path; Two divergent faces have emerged of the 12-year-old girl convicted in the slaying of a Medicine Hat family. One is a quiet school girl who liked swimming, music, art and sleepovers. The other is an angry, rebellious preteen temptress who invented online personas masking her average, middle-class life. Is Canada’s youngest multiple murderer simply a little girl who was growing up too fast? Or is she a cold-hearted killer who used sex to manipulate her 23-year-old boyfriend to murder?
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Sherri Zickefoose
Dateline: MEDICINE HAT
Calgary Herald ©
It was one of the first signs that the middle-class suburban preteen was waging war with the rules around her. Seven months after school picture day, a frantic search of her hallway locker revealed the deadly extent of her rebellion.
“May the furry (sic) and flame of all hell come and greet you at deaths (sic) doorstep,” the girl wrote in a spiteful prayer.
“May the hatred and anger built of blazing infernos fill you and overcome you. May the pains of a thousand torchered (sic) souls come upon you like scalding blade and eclipse all other noble feeling. May your hopes, dreams and happiness fall into the swirling pit of despair never to return. May your peace of mind and safety be gone to you to be forever afraid and ailed. May the black overcome you and the pain be never ending. May all your love be stolen and destroyed just out of reach, to never again feel such joys . . .”
“Amen xx”
A guidance counsellor and police officer stood in front of her opened locker, stunned by the discovery.
It was April 23, 2006, a Sunday.
Two hours earlier, a little boy coming over to play discovered the girl’s family dead: her father, 42, her mother, 48 and their eight-year-old son — stabbed to death.
Their suburban home was soaked in blood. Police investigating the disappearance of their 12-year-old daughter — a quiet and smart student who was on the swim team — arrived at her school looking for friends’ phone numbers.
Instead, what they found was a disturbing stick-figure cartoon in her locker. The drawing depicted a family of three being burned alive while two others watched, laughing. In the comic, one stick figure is seen happily running toward “Jeremy’s truck.”
It changed the course of the investigation.
Guidance counsellor Sandra Richard knew what the pencil drawing meant. Jeremy was Jeremy Allan Steinke. She had seen the 23-year-old, who she’d mistaken for a Medicine Hat high school senior, hanging around the Catholic junior high in his grey pickup truck.
Const. Gordon Stull, the school’s resource officer, looked at the drawing and the prayer and made his own conclusion.
The girl was now a murder suspect.
“We did the regular things . . . went to the mall and movies, went swimming and to water parks,” said a dark-haired 14-year-old schoolmate who was called to testify at the girl’s first-degree murder trial this past summer.
“I noticed the change a bit during the end of Grade 6. In Grade 7, after a month or so in, it was more drastic,” the friend told the Herald.
“I remember at the school dances I saw her wearing a black miniskirt, fishnets, tall boots, a black top, and dark lipstick and makeup.”
On the Internet, the girl was creating a new persona and making friends. In elementary school, she said she felt weird and wanted to fit in but didn’t want to be “in the box.” These new friends liked hardcore bands Slipknot and Cradle of Filth. She listed them as her favourites.
Online, the 12-year-old said she was 15. She called herself Runaway Devil and Killer Kitty. She struck poses for webcam pictures wearing dramatic goth-style eyeliner and crimson lipstick. In one picture, she is holding a fake gun.
The girl’s attempts to meld her two worlds were thwarted by the school guidance counsellor.
Leading up to the 2005 Christmas holidays, the girl began ignoring the school dress code by showing up for class in spiked collars with teardrops and stars drawn on her face in eyeliner. Four or five times she was stopped in the hallway and reprimanded. The girl was polite and obedient, according to Richard.
“She actually was quite good and listened. . . . (She) was always a very quiet girl. There wasn’t anything that really stood out about her.”
Once, when pulled aside for wearing a short skirt and fishnets, the girl sheepishly admitted she didn’t feel comfortable wearing the outfit, Richard said.
A week before the 2006 Easter break, the girl was asked to wash off a pentagram and other doodles on her arm. In school hallways and the girls’ washroom, the girl began speaking darkly of her hatred for her family. She said she wanted someone to kill them.
Her morbid talk upset some friends.
“I was angry at her and it just made me mad. It got to the point where I didn’t want to be around her,” said one young friend who used to ride the bus with her.
Someone else was listening raptly to her murderous anger — her 23-year-old boyfriend, Steinke.
A troubled mutual friend introduced the junior high student to Steinke at the local shopping mall.
She was drawn to the dark-dressed, blond Steinke by his looks and his popularity among a group of mall rats, she said. “I thought he was good-looking. A lot of people thought he was,” the girl said on the stand, smiling at her early memories of him.
Despite the disparity of their ages, the 12-year-old and Steinke began commiserating over failed relationships. The girl had been dumped by a 16-year-old because she was growing close to a 21-year-old mall goth who called himself Raven.
As they became close that February, Steinke sent her poems online and sang songs he’d written for her.
Later, they became lovers.
During March and April, the two exchanged private love notes online through Nexopia and MSN. Under the user name Runaway Devil, the girl called Steinke “sex muffin” and wrote “sex sex sex sex and love,” and “I want to bang you.”
Twice, she snuck out to meet Steinke for a late-night rendezvous. They had sex in his mother’s trailer home.
She told friends Steinke was around 17; the relationship was a source of friction and she began outgrowing some of her childhood classmates.
“When she started dating him, I saw a change in her,” said one girlfriend who was starting to feel alienated. “I became closer with other friends.”
Watching the girl wrapped in the arms of a much older man and kissing at the mall arcade prompted one young friend to confront her. “I told her not to be with someone older than her. She said it was her choice,” the friend said.
The girl’s best friend, who told court they “pretty much lived at each other’s houses on weekends,” said she assumed talk about wanting to kill the Richardson family was “just venting.”
In her March 20, 2006, cyber message to Steinke’s Nexopia account, Souleater, the girl wrote: “Rawr. I hate them. So I have this plan. It begins with me killing them and ends with me living with you . . . .”
A week before the April 23, 2006, killings, Steinke confided in his friend Grant Bolt that his Grade 7 girlfriend was threatening to break up with him unless he murdered the Richardsons.
One day at school, just before the Easter break, the girl borrowed a friend’s cellphone to call Steinke. While other girls played chase on the lawn, one friend overheard the girl talking about killing the girl’s family.
The bell rang and the girls ran for class.
An hour-long phone call to Steinke the night of the murders was either an order to activate their plan, according to the Crown, or a “tragic misunderstanding,” according to Foster.
In the middle of the night on April 23, 2006, the family was slaughtered.
The mother was stabbed 12 times and collapsed on the basement floor at the base of a staircase where she bled to death.
The husband, her protector, put up a bearish fight for his life but was stabbed 24 times. His body was found near his wife’s.
Upstairs in his purple bedroom, their eight-year-old son was found lying in his bed with his throat slashed open. His larynx and jugular vein were severed.
The four-foot-four, 68-pound boy also had three other stab wounds to his chest. On the stand, the girl admitted choking the little boy, but said she was trying to “put him to sleep” so he wouldn’t hear the killings of his parents downstairs.
The girl admitted to stabbing the boy once, “not very hard.”
But after her arrest in Leader, Sask., the next day with Steinke and three other girls, she spun several stories about that night to Medicine Hat Det. Chris Sheehan.
In each, she put the blame on her lover. Finally, she said she stabbed the boy but only because Steinke goaded her into it.
Using a tried-and-true detective trick, Sheehan encouraged the lovers to exchange jailhouse letters. It worked. Steinke even proposed marriage. The girl eagerly accepted.
From her jail cell, the girl wrote four letters to Steinke in which she declared her love and encouraged him to stay strong. “If only we ran, yes, but don’t obsess on what could have been.”
She offered advice: “Anything you say . . . can be used against you . . . . Rawr. The world really is against us.”
The seriousness of three counts of first-degree murder was overshadowed by her new-found notoriety.
“My lawyer tells me we’re ledgends (sic). Ha, close to immortality it would seem.” In another, she says “we’ve been in the papers every day apparently. I haven’t seen them but hopefully can Monday.”
Finally, she mocks relatives who were reaching out to her.
“Everything related to me knows that I am in jail and what not, but don’t know anything other than the charges and seemingly doesn’t believe because my aunty says they still love me. Although it was as if I wasn’t alive before.”
During her five-week trial last summer, the girl’s defence lawyer, Tim Foster, said the girl was lovestruck. Hours after the murders, Steinke and the girl had sex in a cocaine dealer’s apartment and were seen kissing and giggling at a party down the road from the death house. The girl described the little boy’s gruesome last gurgling sounds to one of Steinke’s friends.
Foster argued the sexual relationship between the girl and Steinke “cannot be seen other than abusive and manipulative,” given that she was 121/2 at the time.
Psychiatric reports described the girl as “seriously disturbed” and that she suffers from emotional and mental disorders.
Crown prosecutor Stephanie Cleary said the girl was remarkably clearheaded as she stole her mother’s purse and called for a taxi at 5:25 a.m. to meet Steinke after the murders.
On July 9, a seven-man, five-woman jury found the girl guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder.
On Thursday last, the girl, who turned 14 in October, sat in a wooden prisoner’s box in Medicine Hat‘s historic Court of Queen’s Bench. Her long hair was pulled back into a tidy ponytail. This day, just as every day of her six-week trial last summer, she dressed demurely. It was a stark contrast to her once carefully constructed Internet profiles — no spiked collars or makeup. She wore black slacks and a grey and white patterned top.
Weight gained in custody has rounded her cheeks, making her look even younger than a now 9th grader.
Before Justice Scott Brooker sentenced Canada’s youngest multiple killer to a special youth sentence of eight and a half years of intensive rehabilitation Thursday, he asked if there was anything she wanted to say.
Before the killings, her frequent talk of hate and murder horrified friends. Her mostly dry-eyed testimony convinced the Crown she was a remorseless, cold-hearted killer.
On this day, she had nothing to say.
