‘I didn’t kill Melonie,’ Cleon said. ‘I didn’t hurt Melonie. I never hurt Melonie.’
Christie Blatchford,
It was in its way inevitable: When three adults are present the night a person dies and only two of them end up charged criminally, sure as dusk follows dawn they will blame the third and probably also each other.
So it was Wednesday at the first-degree murder trial of Everton Biddersingh, who is pleading not guilty in the Sept. 1, 1994 homicide of his daughter Melonie.
Everton’s wife, Elaine, is charged with the same offence and will be tried separately next spring.
His lawyer, Jennifer Penman, was winding up her cross-examination of Cleon Biddersingh, Everton’s oldest son and Elaine’s stepson.
In dramatic fashion, Penman first accused Cleon of drowning his half-sister, then suggested perhaps there had been an “accident” and finally asked if he’d watched as Elaine put a piece of red pepper in the girl’s vagina.
To each suggestion, Cleon shook his big head and said “No.”
Penman then said Cleon “can’t admit” his involvement in Melonie’s death at this late date, especially with his “police officer wife” watching from the court.
“I didn’t kill Melonie,” Cleon said. “I didn’t hurt Melonie. I never hurt Melonie.”
He also denied helping dispose of Melonie’s body or setting it on fire. “I wasn’t there,” he insisted. “I’m telling the truth. I wasn’t there.”
Interestingly, Penman also suggested “Everton wasn’t even home that night,” at the Toronto apartment the night the teenager died. Such a question, in the absence of any other evidence to that effect, may mean Everton will take the stand in his own defence.
When Melonie’s battered and burned remains were belatedly identified 17 years after her homicide, all three Biddersinghs were arrested in March of 2012 — Everton and Elaine in Ontario, Cleon in Alberta.
They were, at least on paper, the three adults who had been living in a west-end Toronto highrise apartment at the time of Melonie’s death.
In all the intervening years, none of them had ever reported her missing or gone to police. Authorities were tipped to Melonie’s identity only in late 2011 when Elaine Biddersingh told her pastor that the infamous “girl in the burning suitcase” so long ago was her husband’s daughter.
But while Cleon, who was 20 when Melonie purportedly ran away, was charged with four offences — aggravated assault, forcible confinement, indignity to a human body and criminal negligence causing bodily harm — he was never charged with murder.
He ultimately gave Toronto Police a long statement, implicating Everton and Elaine, and later testified at their separate preliminary hearings.
In January this year, prosecutors stayed all criminal charges against him, though they could be reactivated within a year.
Penman variously accused him of presenting himself as a victim, shading his evidence to minimize his own conduct and trying to please the Crown.
“I’m not doing this for the Crown,” Cleon, now 41, said quietly. “I’m doing this for Melonie.” To this Penman snapped, “The (possibility of a) murder charge has never been taken off the table?”
“There’s nothing off the table,” Cleon said. “I’m here, alive. “Melonie not alive.” Cleon, Melanie and a nowdeceased brother, Dwayne, who died accidentally at the age of 13, were all sent to Canada by their mothers from Jamaica to join Everton, a father they never knew, and his wife, in the hopes of a better life.
But the couple by then had two youngsters of their own and a baby on the way, and Cleon and Melonie were allegedly singled out for maltreatment, Cleon because Elaine doubted he was even Everton’s son, and Melonie because Elaine, who was bizarrely religious, thought she was evil.
The two “outside children,” as they are sometimes called by Jamaicans, were subjected to physical abuse, almost unimaginable degradation (Melonie was sometimes kept chained to the furniture; Elaine complained about Cleon’s “n----- hair” and both were forced to sleep on the floor on pieces of cardboard) and treated like slaves.
They were never enrolled in school, and thus there were no community “eyes” upon either one of them.
At the time of her death, the 17-year-old Melonie weighed only 50 pounds, and had 21 different healing fractures.
In his testimony here before Ontario Superior Court Judge Al O’Marra and a jury, Cleon admitted with tangible shame that sometimes, he’d been the one to chain Melonie and that occasionally, under orders, he’d even hit her.
He appeared a man suffused with regret and sorrow. He spoke often of the tremendous guilt he feels for not having protected Melonie.
And he also admitted that though he never believed in his bones that she’d run away, as he said Everton told him, he didn’t know what had happened to her until he was arrested.
A central part of Cleon’s explanation for his failure to act — either to run away himself, to call the police, or to step in and defend Melonie — is that he was terrified, in fear of his life and those of his Jamaican family. Everton bragged often of his connections with Jamaican gangsters.
“I blame myself,” he said several times. “I should have reported. I feel guilt about that, yes.” On one occasion, he told the jurors, “I do think about my sister getting beaten. I should have defended her; I was scared.”
And he was adamant about one thing: Though he was 17 when he arrived in Toronto and theoretically a grown-up by the time Melonie disappeared, “I didn’t feel like I’m an adult, living in that house, you don’t do anything (without permission).”