Neighbours were blind to Jeffrey’s plight
Never questioned a request to adopt the boy or the belief he was being neglected
“In my family, they all had their favourites.”
JENNIFER NOSEWORTHY, NIEGHBOUR
Acolleague who is also an astute observer of the human condition sent me a note Wednesday in the midst of the Ontario coroner’s inquest into the Nov. 30, 2002, starvation death of Jeffrey Baldwin.
The inquest was hearing from people who once lived next to the house in east-end Toronto where the 5-year-old lived with his grandparents, two of his aunts and their boyfriends, and five other children, including Jeffrey’s two sisters and little brother.
“Is there anyone in this story,” my friend asked, “who can see past their own baggage?”
It was a reference to something one of the neighbours, Jennifer Noseworthy, told the jurors.
Noseworthy, her husband and their son, Zachary, lived across the street from the household run like a prison camp by the grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman. The two were convicted in 2006 of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and of forcible confinement for the way they had regularly kept him and his 7-year-old sister in a locked and fetid room.
Now to be fair, Noseworthy and the other neighbours weren’t privy to the grotesque detail of the cruelty to which those two children were subjected.
But each had noticed a few oddities, and one such for Noseworthy was that early on, she realized Bottineau heavily favoured two of the kids over Jeffrey and his sister. Two wore new clothes and were neat and clean and played in the front yard; Jeffrey and the one sister wore handme-downs and she was told, by Bottineau, that they played in the back, which is why she rarely saw them.
The lawyer then questioning her asked, “Did that (overt favouritism) concern you?” “No,” Noseworthy said. “Why not?” the lawyer asked. Well, she said, in “my family, they all had their favourites.”
It was a milder version of what Jeffrey’s father, Richard Baldwin, said once in his testimony — that, well, his mother hadn’t protected him from his abusive father, had she? — and a reflection of how so manyof theadultsinJeffrey’sworld saw the little boy only through their own suffering.
Among the other clues for Noseworthy was perhaps this. When Jeffrey was just a few months old, still in the care of his young parents, they brought him over to Bottineau for a visit. And Bottineau and Jeffrey’s mother, Yvonne Kidman, had made their way over to the Noseworthy house.
The women weren’t just showing off the gorgeous new baby. They were shopping him about. “She came over and asked if we’d be interested in adopting him,” Noseworthy said.
Bottineau explained that since she already had a couple of her daughter’s kids, she worried it “might be too much” to add another.
At this point in his life Jeffrey was still chubby, blond, utterly adorable, Noseworthy said. “You couldn’t help falling in love with him right away.” She actually discussed the prospect of adopting the baby with her husband.
She said she didn’t find the offer odd — “I don’t know if I’d say it was weird” — but was uneasy about the prospect of trying to raise a child under the noses of his own family.
Another clue could have come in the fact that once she popped in to see Bottineau, who was in the basement. Norman Kidman tried to wave her off, but Noseworthy went downstairs anyway, and saw Bottineau giving Jeffrey and the sister a bath in a laundry tub. Bottineau told her: “You shouldn’t have come down here” and seemed embarrassed.
Her son, Zachary, now 21, also testified.
Bottineau regularly babysat him after school, before his parents got home from work.
He wouldn’t see Jeffrey or the one sister very often, or they’d be sitting underneath the kitchen table, away from the other kids, the toys and the fun.
And when he had to use the bathroom, upstairs, if Bottineau was home, Zachary had to ask her per- mission. On these occasions, he said, several times he heard “whimpering coming from the vent.”
The loathed children’s bedroom was adjacent to the bathroom, the jurors have been told, and shared a vent.
Occasionally, when Bottineau wasn’t home, Zachary would just go up and use the bathroom. Sometimes, it was locked, and he would have to wait; sometimes, he’d go in and find Jeffrey and the sister, naked, standing in the bathtub, no water in it.
But he was just 10, a kid: He had no way of making sense of what he saw. He didn’t mention any of it to his mom.
About two years before Jeffrey died, Zachary stopped being babysat at the house.
It was about that time, it appears, that Jeffrey began to disappear.
Michelle Kean, another former neighbour, saw him a bit when he was just a baby, then not at all for three or four years.
It was in the summer of 2002 Kean finally saw again, the boy she remembered as a chubby toddler.
She saw someone carrying Jeffrey to the ice cream truck: He looked “really sick and small,” she said. She asked one of the aunts or Bottineau about it later, and was told Jeffrey “was completely mentally retarded,” a headbanger, altogether “too difficult” to be taken out in public.
She thought he was neglected, she said, but, as she put it, “kind of shuffled the responsibility (to do something) to the Children’s Aid” and the school Jeffrey’s siblings attended.
For the record, it is the law that every adult citizen who has a suspicion that a child is being harmed, emotionally or physically, or neglected, has a separate duty to report it.