Bottineau’s malevolence calculated
Jeffrey’s aggrieved mother testifies at coroner’s inquest
The english poet Philip Larkin was t al ki ng about one sort of parent — the merely normally flawed — when he wrote a couple of his most famous lines: “They f--- you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
For exhibit A of the other kind, consider elva bottineau, who did the same thing, but on purpose.
bottineau and Norman Kidman are the maternal grandparents of Jeffrey baldwin, the little boy they starved, degraded and abused for months, probably years.
convicted in 2006 of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and of forcible confinement for their regular locking-up of his slightly older sister, who survived the ordeal likely only because of kindergarten snacks, the grandparents are now serving life sentences.
Jeffrey was five when he died of septic shock and pneumonia, the underlying cause chronic starvation. The sister who had been subjected to the same maltreatment and also locked in a dank bedroom was six.
Their mother, yvonne Kidman, is now testifying at the coroner’s inquest examining Jeffrey’s Nov. 30, 2002 death in Toronto.
She was still in her teens, 19, when she had him, her third child. All three, plus another little boy born later, ended up in the legal custody of her parents, bottineau and Kidman.
Ms. Kidman and the children’s father were hapless, inept, careless, true.
They existed right where they’d been raised — on the margins, poor, she on assistance, he on assistance or working at low-end jobs. And they were scrappers. They fought and screamed at one another, often, given the basement apartments that were all they could afford, in front of their kids.
but as Ms. Kidman said Monday, drawing a line in the
Bottineau regularly called the CCAS to undercut the young couple
sand that others might never see, there was “maybe shoving, but not punching each other; none of that.”
There must be thousands of parents just like them. yet it’s pretty simple. It was not in their care that Jeffrey went from “Healthiest baby Possible” — a certificate given out by the city of Toronto public health department, with a picture that shows him as gorgeous and fat-cheeked in his mom’s arms — to a skeletal ruin on an autopsy table.
The searing transformation that saw Jeffrey weigh a pound less on that table than he had weighed as a one-year-old happened while he and his two older siblings were in the custody of their grandparents.
The magnitude of t he change in the little boy became ever more clear Monday, as a total of six new pictures of Jeffrey as he was once were introduced into evidence.
He was beautiful in all of them.
He was wearing a Superman costume in one, on Halloween of 1998, shortly after his grandparents legally snatched him but before they began to starve him.
In another, he was surrounded by easter candy. He is grinning hugely (and must have been chortling) in another, his young mom just behind him.
So then, this is the bottom line: Jeffrey and his sisters and later his brother were taken from their Larkinesque young parents and handed over to their maternal grandparents, who were already convicted child abusers and, it turns out, killers.
There were three separate transfers in family court — one for the older sister; one for Jeffrey and the abused sister together; a third for their little brother.
Their names are protected by court order.
each time, bottineau ap- plied for custody.
each time, the catholic children’s Aid Society of Toronto, which had been involved with the bottineau/ Kidman clan for decades, was either tacitly or overtly supportive of the application. And each time, after botti- neau won custody, the agency closed its file.
As Margarita Quintana, one of the main workers, wrote of the application for the first child, “There is not (sic) protection concerns related to X being in care of her maternal grandparents. Therefore, there is not reason (sic) for ccAS involvement.”
Or, as the same worker inimitably wrote after the grandparents won custody of Jeffrey and his sister, “Mrs. bottineau felt that our involvement is not needed anymore.”
bott i neau, sometimes enlisting support from her husband, for years had been slyly poisoning the ccAS well against her own daughter yvonne and richard baldwin.
The agency’s case notes are filled with comfy references to bottineau confiding to Ms. Quintana that “her worst fear is the fighting between yvonne and richard” or that yvonne’s “denial to the problems … set the children at risk”.
bottineau regularly called the ccAS to undercut the young couple, behind their backs of course.
The strategy succeeded brilliantly, so much so that while the agency was riding the young parents hard, noting every perceived defect (the apartment was messy, or Jeffrey needed his diaper changed), no worker ever checked the agency’s own files or did criminal records checks on bottineau and Kidman.
Had anyone done so, they would have discovered that bottineau was convicted of assault causing bodily harm in the death of her fi rst daughter, Kidman of assault causing bodily harm against two others (they were by another man).
Little wonder that when coroner’s counsel Jill Witkin kicked off her questions Monday by asking yvonne Kidman how she felt when she’d read, for the first time, the extensive ccAS files in preparation for her testimony, she replied, “ripped apart.” Why, Ms. Witkin asked. “ripped apart by my own family,” she said, “who were supposed to be in my corner.”
She’d been kicked out of the house at 16. Another sister was due to move out with her boyfriend. The third, she said, “wanted to go.” And bottineau and Kidman lived in subsidized housing: She needed bodies to fill those rooms and justify hanging onto the house. “She was afraid she was going to lose her home,” Ms. Kidman said.
bodies bottineau wanted; bodies, she got.