National Post (National Edition)
‘He opened up the back of my head like a pumpkin’
B.C. MAN BELIEVES SENSELESS ATTACK WAS PREVENTABLE
It was 2 a.m. in late November 1998, when Jeffrey Hearn, 28, an itinerant heavy metal drummer who boasted he could play Slipknot with his feet while peeling an orange, heard a knock on the door of his house in Saanich, BC.
He thought it was his friend Bruce, who sometimes came by late. Hearn’s girlfriend Carmen Holmquist went to answer it. She screamed in terror. It was not Bruce. Hearn ran to her in a confused panic, from the bedroom into the kitchen, in just boxers and a T-shirt.
“As I went through that doorway, he was hiding on the right side, he buried the hammer right above my right eye inside my skull, deep into my brain,” Hearn said. “It was the hammer end. It was pretty bad. It’s actually even worse. I’d rather have taken the claw.”
The man attacking him was strong, hardened in federal prison. He said nothing at first, but a woman was with him, yelling at Carmen to hand over her bank card. Hearn fell to the floor, stunned. He shook his head and got to his knees.
“I went to get up for some reason, I was shaking my head, and he was on me. He grabbed me by the back of the scruff and he just started lambasting the back of my head,” Hearn said. “He opened up the back of my head like a pumpkin ... My brains are all over my walls.”
“He tells me to lie down on my stomach on my hands, right? And I’m thinking, OK, he’s gonna give me the death blow. I almost did it. I was in shock. I was bleeding to death,” Hearn said.
“I heard the voice of God tell me, grab that hammer in your hands and don’t let go. So that’s what I did, and he pulled me to my feet, he got scared, right, he pulled me up ’cause I had the hammer handle in my hand, and he had his hands on either edge of it, right?”
On his feet, Hearn started to flail punches with his freshly broken arms and mangled fingers.
“The moon come through the window, and I seen who it was, I seen his curly hair and his baseball hat,” Hearn said. “I see in the moonlight, it’s Brian Riches.”
By the time the attack ended, when Hearn escaped out the front door, he had brain trauma, a fractured jaw and skull, two broken arms, blood loss and organ damage. He had taken something like three dozen hammer blows.
Brian James Riches, then aged 24, who was also known as Brian John Spinks, was drunk and high that night, in violation of release conditions. This was consistent with his “deeply entrenched criminal values and attitudes,” as noted by the Parole Board of Canada the year before, when he was first released from a prison sentence for a series of gratuitously violent armed robberies.
But there was another, even stronger legal reason for Canada to keep Riches behind bars, then and now.
A jury in Kingston, Ont., on Wednesday night found that Riches, now aged 43, murdered a fellow inmate — a Vietnamese refugee, imprisoned for killing his wife — in Ontario’s notoriously violent Joyceville Institution in 1994, four years before the attack on Hearn.
The unusual first-degree murder charge was only laid in 2014, fully 20 years after the murder of Phong-Nien Chau. Police reopened the case in 2011, found two witnesses to point the finger at Riches, and analyzed DNA samples from Chau’s clothing, fingernails and from the crucifix necklace with which he was strangled.
For Hearn, the guilty verdict is both vindication and torture.
It validates his belief that his life-altering attack could have been prevented. It shows police had physical evidence that pointed to Riches as a murderer, but failed to realize it for two decades. And it means the cascade of misery he has endured since, including the breakup of his family amid poverty and addiction, was even more senseless than it already seems to him.
In just a few months before the attack, Riches repeatedly violated the terms of this statutory release, by missing curfews and committing welfare fraud. He absconded after a positive drug urinalysis, was caught and locked up, but then released again to a halfway house.
It was while on this release that he nearly killed Hearn, for what turned out to be nothing.
The woman shouting during the attack was Riches’ girlfriend Rebecca Anne MacDougal, who was friends with Carmen. She had learned Carmen had received a small amount of money, and told Riches. This was the target, a bank card and code, easy money, but with a $500-a-day withdrawal limit, and probably no chance of getting away with it.
It was so senseless that the future Justice Minister Peter MacKay, as an MP in 2002, took Hearn’s case to Parliament, wanting to know why Riches was let out so poorly supervised, and “why, in the name of heaven, we wouldn’t have had a full investigation into a case as aggravated and as severe as this.”
After the attack, Riches left Hearn’s house with MacDougal. Their capture was almost immediate, thanks to a 911 call. An officer spotted them in Topaz Park, a few blocks from Hearn’s house. They made an abrupt turn when they saw the officer, and at first ignored his orders to stop, then seemed to briefly converse before approaching the officer, claiming to be out on a long aimless walk, underdressed for the cold. Within minutes, police found a bag nearby, containing clothing and a claw hammer, all wet with Hearn’s blood.
Riches was charged with attempted murder, but pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. MacDougal was found guilty of robbery, and went on to briefly marry Riches, divorcing in 2002. At the murder trial last month, she testified Riches once told her he and another man were involved in a prison murder in Ontario.
Phong-Nien Chau was born to an ethnic Chinese family in Vietnam in the mid-1950s, just as Ho Chi Minh’s Communists were forcing out the French in the First Indochina War. He worked a shoemaker in Cholon, a district of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. He married young to Tuyet Ngoc Tran Chau, and they had two daughters by the late 1970s, when the American-led Vietnam War ended, and the country fell into humanitarian crisis.
With thousands of other “boat people” they escaped to a refugee camp and then to Toronto, sponsored by families at the city’s Holy Blossom synagogue. They knew no English at first, and lived a few months in the basement of lawyer Allan Kaplan’s home, communicating by signing and using Chau’s dictionary.
A friend put Chau in touch with a furrier downtown in the fashion district, where his shoemaking skills helped him become a leading employee, working with the best hides, later doing contract work when the family was able to buy a suburban home. A son was born, and the immigrant dream was coming true.
Members of Tuyet Chau’s family opened On The Rocks, a restaurant and club downtown on Front Street, where she worked. Kaplan recalls that she became captivated by Western life, its freedoms and opportunities. This was the context in which their marriage broke down, and Phong-Nien Chau prepared a video that police would later describe as a “will,” detailing financial matters for their children.
On the morning of June 20, 1990, Chau, a small man with a limp from childhood polio, cut his wife’s throat with a utility knife from his workshop. She was 32. A family member called police, which led to a standoff as he tried to cut his own neck as he lay on top of her.
“It was our position that she had driven him to this by having an affair and taunting him and belittling him,” said lawyer John Rosen, who represented him at trial, where a jury convicted on second degree murder. “He was trying to prevent her from leaving, basically.”
Kaplan visited Chau in the hospital, and later in Joyceville Institution. “To me, it’s always been the quintessential tragedy,” said Kaplan. “I think it does happen from time to time, jealousy and clash of cultures and all that, just very sad, because it should have been otherwise. It could have been otherwise.”
Riches got to Joyceville in a different way. He was born in Niagara Falls, Ont., and raised by his mother. He never knew his father. A judge described his “tragic background.” By his late teens he was already a violent criminal, exhibiting what a parole board called “reactive and instrumental violence ... gratuitous and vastly excessive to what violence was required to meet (his) objectives.”
Chau, then aged 40, was discovered beaten and strangled to death in his cell around 6 p.m. Sunday July 24, 1994. He had been left on his blood-soaked bed, covered in a blanket, looking to a guard “almost as if he was asleep.” The murderer could have been any one of 600 inmates. That is how it remained for almost 20 years.
Forensic DNA analysis was hardly science fiction in the early 1990s. But it still had a novel mystique, and was slow to catch on as an investigative priority, despite its increasing successes, first in securing rightful convictions, and eventually in overturning wrongful ones.
For example, a few months after Tuyet Chau’s murder in 1990, the serial killer Paul Bernardo gave DNA samples to Toronto police investigating a series of his rapes, but they were not even tested until 1992. That same year, the debunked science of microscopic hair analysis helped wrongfully convict Guy Paul Morin, until DNA analysis exonerated him in 1995.
Police investigating Chau’s murder in 1994 used DNA to exclude two suspects, but they did not gather samples from all the men on the range, to match against DNA on Chau’s body. That only started when the cold case was reopened in 2011, and was complicated by several deaths and difficulties finding the men after so long. But Riches was easy. Police seized a discarded a cigarette butt, which justified a demand for a more precise test, and his was the only genetic profile that could not be excluded, the jury heard.
As part of the re-investigation, police also interviewed Riches’ lifelong friend John Taylor, who was housed in the cell opposite Riches’ at the time of the murder. He told police he saw Riches punch Chau and drag him into his cell the day of the murder, and later, when Taylor asked why, Riches said, “Somebody had to do it.” Rather than inform investigators at the time, however, Taylor helped Riches obstruct them by falsely claiming he saw two other men attack Chau.
Testifying in his own defence, Riches admitted getting into a fight with Chau a few days before his murder, which could explain the presence of his DNA on Chau’s clothes and the crucifix around his neck. He denied killing him. The jury heard no details of why Chau or Riches were in jail to begin with, or about their vastly different personal histories.
Not long after Chau’s murder, Riches was transferred from Joyceville to William Head Institution near Victoria. He dropped out of a violent offender program, and had limited success with psychological counselling, focused on his triggers to anger. He said he smoked marijuana to “selfmedicate” for anxiety and depression.
Released in 2005 from his sentence for the attack on Hearn, he would eventually become involved in the drug trade. In April 2013, a jury acquitted him of marijuana production and possession of more than three kilograms. But in December 2013, he was found guilty of heroin trafficking and facing another serious sentence, though these charges were stayed because of the Ontario murder charge.
A few months after the hammer attack, Hearn met his future wife Crystal, then 18 years old, like a “shiny penny” in a camouflage dress. A year later they had a daughter.
As he tells it, Hearn was offered $2,000 from B.C.’s compensation program for crime victims, which seemed like nothing compared to his permanent disabilities and lingering pain. He went wild in his distress, called a crisis line, and was held in a psychiatric hospital.
“They wanted to play me out like an angry man that’s going to beat his family, even though I was not,” he said.
After moving with his family to Ontario, he tried to sue Corrections Canada for $9 million, and accepted their first settlement offer in a dope-sick haze, against his lawyer’s advice. “Half a million dollars is a lot of money when you got nothing,” he said. That allowed them to settle in Hamilton, Ont., but with little other income and addictions that waxed and waned, it was eventually depleted.
Today, Hearn is 47, and back in Port Alberni, B.C., near where he grew up in Tofino, living on social assistance, estranged from his daughter, who is now a mother herself, and long since split from Crystal. He has trouble with pain, and with accessing care at clinics that are suspicious of drug-seeking behaviour.
Food is a constant focus of his thoughts. He resents his attacker’s prison diet, warm and starchy and dependable. Lately, Hearn can only eat fruit, bananas mainly, and whey powder and ice cream, and even then it hardly stays down. He thinks this is due to lingering organ damage. His mind races as his emotions well up, but his body is failing.
“These criminals are living a better life than victims,” he said. “It sucks, man.”
IT WAS WHILE ON THIS RELEASE THAT HE NEARLY KILLED HEARN, FOR WHAT TURNED OUT TO BE NOTHING.