Don’t forget about little Randal Dooley. I can’t
I know Randal Dooley is more than two decades dead.
I know nothing can undo the cruelties that were inflicted on that horrifically abused sevenyear-old boy.
I know criminal justice in Canada is about denunciation, deterrence and rehabilitation.
I know a life sentence doesn’t mean a life sentence, except possibly for those designated dangerous offenders, kept behind bars because they’re likely to reoffend.
Just as I know that what the heart cries out for — vengeance, retribution, lifelong banishment — is not a principle of justice in any humane society.
But child-killer Marcia Dooley sobbing in remorse — what she portrayed as her “shame” at a parole board hearing on Wednesday where her request for day parole and release to a halfway house was denied — leaves me cold.
Because that little boy’s cries, his anguish and pain, never moved Marcia Dooley, his stepmother, to even a shred of pity.
She slapped him, kicked him, stomped on him, thrashed him with a belt and a broom, made him eat his own vomit, whipped him with a bungee cord, dumped him into a tub of ice. And on Sept. 25, 1998, she killed him — the sweet youngster dead from a bleeding brain and pneumonia after months months of unceasing torand ture.
At the end, Randal — described by his teacher as bright and charismatic, a boy who “lit up the classroom” — didn’t even have the strength to cry anymore. He weighed only 41 pounds. An autopsy revealed he had four brain injuries, 13 fractured ribs, and a lacerated liver. The coroner had found a tooth in his stomach and upwards of 80 marks from scars and bruising on his back.
It was his two-years older brother, Teego, who’d lifted Randal from the tub on the final night of his short life, carried him to bed, changed him into pyjamas, and laid down alongside him.
The boys’ father, Tony Dooley, phoned 911 to report his seven-year-old son had committed suicide. Marcia Dooley told detectives the child had fallen out of his bunk-bed and hit his head.
Tony blamed Marcia. Marcia blamed Tony. Both were convicted of second-degree murder in 2002. But it was Marcia — the “wicked stepmother,” said the presiding judge — who’d been the chief tormenter and actual murderer, striking the fatal blow.
Those of us who were in that Toronto courtroom for the three-month trial — Justice Eugene Ewaschuk called it “maybe the worst case of a battered child in Canadian penal history” — were left aghast as the litany of abuse was detailed. Nor have I forgotten the disdain both Dooleys displayed during the proceeding, or how, in Marcia Dooley’s two-hour interview with detectt asserted
layed in court, she she’d never punished Randal harshly. “Why would I bother to discipline someone else’s child?”
At Wednesday’s hearing, Randal’s name was scarcely mentioned. Kevin Corcoran, on the two-member Parole Board of Canada panel, actually said he was trying to avoid using the boy’s name. Because the proceeding — conducted remotely, Marcia Dooley participating from the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener — has nothing to do with a dead boy anymore. It was all about Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, who received glowing reports from her parole officer, who’s worked out her anger control issues while in prison, who’s obtained her high school diploma, who’s completed all her skills training and counselling courses, who wants to move to Barrie to be near her aging father and get a job as an electrician.
Of her case management evolution, 50-year-old Dooley said: “It taught me how to manage my emotions and that was the issue I had.”
Although, at another parole hearing last January — when she was ultimately allowed four five-day unescorted passes for the year, thereafter revoked of COVID-19 — it was revealed Dooley had hostile incidents involving other inmates. This she brushed away on Wednesday, explaining she’d been bullied in prison as a child-killer.
It was startling when Corcoran, early in the proceeding, asked Dooley: “When did you forgive yourself?”
Dooley: “I realized that in order to move on, I needed to forgive myself, in order to have some peace.”
Her father has forgiven her too, and some nieces and nephews who’ve visited over the y siblings, she said.
Not Randal’s biological mother. “She felt that I was evil and she said I was a monster.”
Not Randal’s teacher, who’d rung alarm bells when she noticed the boy’s injuries — even though Marcia kept him home from school whenever those injuries were evident. “She suffered trauma.”
“He meant more to her than he did to you, correct?” asked Corcoran.
“Yes.”
Dooley was asked when she’d first looked in the mirror and admitted to herself: I killed this little boy.
“Ten years ago, maybe five.” Neither Marcia nor Tony Dooley — since divorced — had taken the stand at their trial. Marcia Dooley continued to maintain her innocence through a failed appeal.
Why did she appeal? “Because I was in denial.”
Dooley has been incarcerated for nearly 19 years. Sentenced to mandatory life with no parole eligibility for 18 years, she first became eligible last September; Tony Dooley was parole-eligible after 13 years.
Marcia had a child with Tony not long after Randal and Teego were brought to Canada from Jamaica by their father “for a better life,” the birth mother agreeing. And Marcia Dooley did mostly keep her hands off Teego, the more agreeable child.
Randal, Dooley recalled on Wednesday, had more difficulty adjusting to life here.
“He’s defiant, he doesn’t want to call you mom?” continued Corcoran.
“Yes … The younger child, he was acting out. Whatever he ate, he would vomit.”
She’d been on social assistance, Tony spent much of his time in the U.S. dealing drugs, leaving her with two little boys and a baby. She was angry and frustrated, couldn’t cope. “I was upset with the situation and overwhelmed by what I was going through.”
On the night Randal’s miserable life faded away, yes, she’d hit him in the head. “I was the one that did it.”
Then Marcia Dooley began sobbing. For the dead boy or for herself? Why are you crying, Marcia Dooley? “I’m ashamed.”
Children’s Aid removed the couple’s baby after the parents’ arrest. Marcia Dooley hasn’t seen her son since.
But she’s a changed woman, she insisted.
“I’ve learned not to be so quick to react to a situation, the way I used to react first and think later. To me, anger has meant violence. Over the years, I’ve learned to communicate more.”
Before the panellists stepped away to deliberate their decision, Dooley made a final plea. “I just want you to accept my final application for day parole and to know that I’m ready to
y and be a better person.”
(The Parole Board only allowed journalists to virtually attend the hearing amidst a pandemic following a legal challenge by the Star.)
When the panel returned, Corcoran made quick work of it.
“The board doesn’t have good news for you today. The board is not going to grant you day parole.”
Corcoran and his fellow panel member, Maureen Gauci, had concluded Dooley’s management plan for day parole and residing at a halfway house — which included more counselling and looking for a job — was “very undefined and unclear”; not “substantial enough” to manage her risk in the community.
“Based on our conversations today, we believe that you regret the offence you committed and have genuine remorse for the harm that you have caused,” said Corcoran. “In the course of this hearing, I think at times you engaged in impression management and were so focused on coming across as calm and relaxed that you lost sight of who you really were; that sometimes you do get frustrated and irritated and upset …
“I think you’re on the right path but I think you need to follow the gradual re-integration that was recommended in February.”
Dooley didn’t get what she wanted when she wanted it.
The child-killer can apply for parole again in one year.