Christie Blatchford,
We thought we would live like a family, go to school, have a better life.
Several months before she was killed, teenager Melonie Biddersingh crawled to the stairwell in her highrise prison and made it to the third step.
“That’s how far she go,” her half- brother Cleon, who found her there, told the murder trial of their father, Everton Biddersingh, on Monday.
About a minute later, describing how shortly after her feeble attempt at escape Everton began chaining her to a wall unit in the small apartment, Cleon tearfully volunteered that sometimes it was he who affixed her chains.
“I told to put the chain on her foot,” he said. “I told to clean her. I know Melonie understand, the way she talk to me, ( she knew) it’s not me doing it — they forcing me.
“I feel guilty,” he cried, his broad brow wrinkling in agony. “I didn’t help my sister. I couldn’t do nothing!”
He then asked Ontario Superior Court Justice Al O’Marra if he could be excused for a minute, and left the courtroom in a rush.
The 41- year- old Cleon, who now lives and works in Alberta, is the only survivor of three children full of hope and excitement who came to Toronto from Jamaica in 1991 to join Everton and his wife, Elaine.
All were fathered by Everton but barely knew him, and were raised by Jamaican mothers, Cleon by one woman, Melonie and her little brother Dwayne by another, Opal Austin.
Cleon, just turned 17, was a talented sprinter and was beside himself at the thought of moving to world- famous Ben Johnson’s adopted country; he dreamed of a track scholarship and the Olympics. Melonie, then 13, wanted to be a nurse; 12- year- old Dwayne wanted to be a singer.
“We were happy on the plane,” Cleon told the jurors. “We thought we would live like a family, go to school, have a better life.”
Instead, none of the three youngsters was ever enrolled in school, and they found themselves living as virtual prisoners of Everton and Elaine, who had two youngsters of their own under five and a new baby on the way.
Dwayne died accidentally on June 15, 1992, about 18 months after landing in Toronto.
Melonie’s body was discovered near a garbage Dumpster in an isolated industrial area north of Toronto; her remains had been stuffed into a suitcase and the suitcase set ablaze.
For 17 years, despite extraordinary police efforts, she wasn’t identified and was known only as “the girl in the burning suitcase.” It was only when Elaine confessed to her pastor that the girl in the suitcase was her husband’s daughter that Melonie, or Mello, was identified.
Elaine Biddersingh, like Everton, is charged with first- degree murder but will be tried separately next spring.
Only Cleon escaped the couple’s clutches — he was allegedly forced to work as a crack cocaine dealer by his father, thus had some exposure to the greater world and was older and more capable — but anyone who imagined he emerged unscathed was not in that downtown Toronto courtroom to hear him testify.
A strapping, handsome man with a shaved head, Cleon, nonetheless, radiates gentleness, shyness and dignity.
His testimony was halting, his voice often choked with tears, as he remembered the excruciating treatment he and Melonie endured, and how, to protect himself, he was sometimes coopted into dishing out punishments to her.
At first, the joint ire of Everton and Elaine seemed to be directed at him, he said. His stepmother was contemptuous of him, openly doubted he was even Everton’s son ( they made him take a DNA test to prove he was), mocked his “n----- hair.”
As he put it once, heartbreakingly, “It just started maybe with the way I look — my nose flat; I don’t look like them.”
He was forced to eat separately from the couple’s own children, had to scrub the bathroom after he used it, lest Everton and Elaine’s precious spawn be exposed to his germs. “I feel like I’m nobody,” he said once.
But the couple had a volatile relationship, and once Elaine fled to her mother’s for a time, leaving Cleon and his father alone in the apartment, taking the other children with her.
Everton would call and ask for her, Cleon said, and often Melonie would answer the phone and say she wasn’t there.
After that, Cleon said, Everton began to consider Melonie as an enemy, and when Elaine and the kids inevitably returned, it was Melonie who began to bear the worst of the treatment. Everton “call her a traitor, he said he wish he drop her as a baby. He think Melonie try to poison him from Elaine.”
Both he and Melonie were starved, forced to sleep on cardboard on the floor, routinely beaten and “stomped” ( perhaps how the girl came to have 21 fractures at the time of her death), made to shower and bathe from pails on the balcony, and kicked when they tied their father’s shoelaces, one of their daily tasks.
Mello would cry when Everton punched her, Cleon said, but “she get used to the beating ... sometimes she just take it.”
Sometimes, he said, when Melonie was locked on the balcony, “I was wondering if they want her to jump or something. That’s what came into my mind.”
Even in the building’s elevator, he said, the kids kept their heads down, lest they somehow offend Everton and Elaine.
“That was like a secret house,” Cleon said. “Like a prison — no freedom.”
They came to Canada as bright, beautiful children. Two are dead. The third is Cleon St. Aubyn Biddersingh, and miracle of miracles, he is nothing like his father.
His testimony continues Tuesday.