Toope killers all reoffended after release
One testifies about grisly 1995 case for first time at conditional release hearing
All three of the youths convicted of the 1995 murders of Frank and Jocelyn Toope later reoffended as adults, The Gazette has learned.
On Thursday, one of the men convicted as a youth in the brutal double-murder of the elderly couple, Ryan Patrick Mcphee, 32, testified about his role in the slayings for the first time in adult court. He did so while he and his lawyer, Stephan Beaudin, successfully argued for his conditional release in a new case where Mcphee is charged with impaired driving causing the death of Derek Pion, 38. Pion was a friend of Mcphee’s who was a passenger in his vehicle when it crashed into a parked tractor-trailer on Labatt Ave. in Lasalle on Dec. 1, 2010.
According to evidence heard at Mcphee’s release hearing, he had consumed six beers before driving the car during a rainstorm. The windshield wipers on the car were held together by a makeshift repair. Witnesses to the aftermath of the accident saw Mcphee crying uncontrollably as he realized the extent of Pion’s fatal injuries. He is also charged with refusing to undergo a Breathalyzer test at the scene.
Quebec Court Judge Linda Despots granted Mcphee a release on the condition he undergo a six-month therapy program while residing at a centre in Lavaltrie. The impaired driving case returns to court in January 2013.
Mcphee’s criminal record since he was sentenced in 1996 for second-degree murder was discussed at length during his release hearing Thursday. He had served a six-month prison term for assaulting someone in 2005, and has been convicted of other crimes.
Court records show he was not the only one of the three youths convicted of killing the Toopes to later reoffend as adults.
The three youths – aged 13, 14 and 15 at the time – broke into the elderly couple’s home in Beaconsfield on April 2, 1995, and the victims were beaten to death.
The youngest of the three – the one Mcphee singled out in his testimony on Thursday as the person who actually killed the Toopes – made a statement during a youth court hearing in 1999 to set conditions for his release.
At the time, he was preparing to leave a detention centre and the youth, who was 16 at that point, took the unusual step of thanking the prosecutor in the case, Louis Miville-deschênes, for the sentence he received – three years of closed custody and two years probation. He claimed it had made him a better person.
“Because of what you did, it changed my life from what I was before and what I am now,” the youth told Miville-Deschênes in March 1999.
A year later, the same youth was charged with violating his probation. Then, in November 2000, he was caught by the Montreal police while in possession of cocaine.
In 2002 he was charged with being in possession of property obtained through crime.
He merged the two cases and, in April 2002, entered a guilty plea that saw him fined $1,250 and sentenced to two years of unsupervised probation.
The third youth involved in the Toope murders, who was 14 at the time, took part in a mugging in downtown Montreal in 1999, when he and four other young men robbed a man on Peel St.
He was still serving the probation part of the sentence he received for the Toope murders when he mugged the victim. On April 11, 2001, he was sentenced to a 30-month prison term.