Killer likely to win place at boy’s inquest
Murder is not an automatic barrier to standing
TORONTO — Honest to Pete, if the law isn’t a full-time ass, from time to time it certainly takes up residence at that end of the beast.
Consider Elva Bottineau’s appeal to be heard at the Ontario coroner’s inquest now examining the death of the very same little boy she killed.
This prospect first raised its ugly head late last month when Bottineau’s plea on an inmate request form from the federal prison she now calls home, “To put the thruth (truth) out there!” was revealed, but hopes the issue had gone away were premature.
Tuesday, a nice young lawyer named Erin McDermid, working pro bono for the 62-year-old grandmother who is incarcerated at Kitchener, Ont.’s Grand Valley Institution for Women, formally applied for what’s called “standing” for Bottineau at the inquest.
If granted — and a betting man would have to say coroner Dr. Peter Clark will follow the hints dropped by his counsel, Jill Witkin, and do just that — Bottineau will have the right to question witnesses, potentially even testify herself, and make closing submissions to the jurors.
As Witkin put it, stating with fairness a legal principle that is both admirable and absurd, “Simply because an individual has been found responsible for a death is not an automatic bar to standing.”
She was even able to cite several cases where those convicted in other deaths were granted standing at the inquests that probed them.
Five years ago, Bottineau and her common-law husband, Norman Kidman, were convicted of second-degree murder in the Nov. 30, 2002 death of their five-yearold grandson Jeffrey Baldwin and of forcible confinement for their regular locking up of the little boy and his six-year-old sister.
The two youngsters were confined to a fetid, locked, unheated bedroom for hours upon end, and forced to live in their own waste.
The little girl appears to have survived on the strength of the snacks she inhaled at kindergarten; Jeffrey, never sent to school, succumbed to septic shock and pneumonia, the underlying cause of death chronic starvation.
Bottineau had finagled legal custody of Jeffrey and three siblings — the progeny of her daughter, Yvonne Kidman, and her common-law husband Richard Baldwin — through the family courts after waging a covert disinformation campaign against the young parents with the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, whose lead social worker, Margarita Quintana, bought her caring presentation hook, line and sinker.
In fact, Bottineau and Norman Kidman were both already on file in the agency’s own records as convicted child abusers, Bottineau in the 1969 death of her first baby, Kidman for assaulting two of her other children by a former lover.
Bottineau was among those sent a routine notice about the inquest last December.
She qualified as a person who might have what’s called “a substantial and direct interest” in the proceedings.
She claims to have filled out the inmate request form and written letters to coroner’s officials, but there is no evidence she did so.
Yet, however late to the party she is — the inquest has heard from 33 witnesses already — and despite fears she may try to relitigate her conviction, most of the lawyers at the inquest didn’t oppose her getting standing or took no position.
Only Freya Kristjanson, who represents Jeffrey’s surviving siblings, and Suzan Fraser, who represents the Ontario ombudsman for children and youth, argued against it.
Kristjanson sneered at the notion that Bottineau was entitled to “the traditional deference shown by courts to family members,” pointing out that she had deprived herself of any such claim by her criminal conduct.
She quoted former Ontario Superior Court Judge David Watt, the trial judge, who found that Bottineau had “‘profound animus towards Jeffrey.’
“And yet,” Kristjanson snapped, “she appears here and says, ‘I was his primary caregiver and his grandmother.’ ”
And Fraser cautioned that the motto of the coroner’s office is “to speak for the dead to protect the living. Ms. Bottineau has taken Jeffrey’s voice once, and we must guard against her doing it again.”
Dr. Clark said he hoped to issue a ruling Wednesday.