‘He’s gonna give me the death blow’
The victim of three dozen hammer blows recounts the attack at his Saanich house. His assailant had been freed after serving time for violent robberies, and now faces a jury in the case of an inmate’s death four years before.
It was 2 a.m. in late November 1998, when Jeffrey Hearn, 28, an itinerant heavy metal drummer who boasted he could play Slipknot with his feet while peeling an orange, heard a knock on the door of his house in Saanich. He thought it was his friend Bruce, who sometimes came by late. Hearn’s girlfriend Carmen Holmquist, whom he had met in a methadone program, went to answer it. She screamed in terror. It was not Bruce. Hearn ran to her in a confused panic, from the bedroom into the kitchen, in just boxers and a T-shirt.
“As I went through that doorway, he was hiding on the right side, he buried the hammer right above my right eye inside my skull, deep into my brain,” Hearn said. “It was the hammer end. It was pretty bad. It’s actually even worse. I’d rather have taken the claw.”
The man attacking him was strong, hardened by young adulthood in federal prison. He said nothing at first, but a woman was with him, yelling “Kill him! Kill him!” Hearn fell to the floor, stunned. He shook his head and got to his knees.
“I went to get up for some reason. I was shaking my head, and he was on me. He grabbed me by the back of the scruff and he just started lambasting the back of my head,” Hearn said.
“He opened up the back of my head like a pumpkin. … My brains are all over my walls.
“He tells me to lie down on my stomach on my hands, right? And I’m thinking, OK, he’s gonna give me the death blow. I almost did it. I was in shock. I was bleeding to death,” Hearn said. “I heard the voice of God tell me grab that hammer in your hands and don’t let go. So that’s what I did, and he pulled me to my feet, he got scared, right, he pulled me up because I had the hammer handle in my hand, and he had his hands on either edge of it, right?”
On his feet, Hearn started to flail punches with his freshly broken arms and mangled fingers.
“The moon come through the window, and I seen who it was. I seen his curly hair and his baseball hat,” Hearn said. “I see in the moonlight, it’s Brian Riches.”
By the time the attack ended, when Hearn escaped out the front door, he had brain trauma, a fractured jaw and skull, two broken arms, blood loss and organ damage. He had taken something like three dozen hammer blows.
Brian John Spinks, then aged 24, who legally changed his name from Brian James Riches, was drunk and high that night, in violation of release conditions.
This was consistent with his “deeply entrenched criminal values and attitudes,” as noted by the Parole Board of Canada the year before, when he was first released from a prison sentence for a series of gratuitously violent armed robberies.
But there might have been another, even stronger legal reason for Canada to keep Spinks/Riches behind bars, then and now.
Next week in Kingston, Ont., a jury will start to hear the Crown’s case that Spinks/Riches, now aged 43, murdered a fellow inmate — a Vietnamese refugee imprisoned for killing his wife — in Ontario’s notoriously violent Joyceville Institution in 1994, four years before the attack on Hearn.
The unusual charge was only laid in 2014, 20 years after the murder of Phong-Nien Chau, thanks to what police call “technological advances” and a re-examination of evidence, which is likely to mean DNA analysis.
For Hearn, a guilty verdict for Spinks/Riches would be both vindication and torture.
It would prove his belief that his life-altering attack could have been prevented. It might even show that police had physical evidence that Spinks/Riches was a murderer, but failed to realize it for two decades. And it would mean that the cascade of misery he has endured since, including the breakup of his family amid poverty and addiction, was even more senseless than it already seems to him.
In just a few months before the attack, Spinks/Riches repeatedly violated the terms of his statutory release, by missing curfews and committing welfare fraud. He absconded after a positive drug urinalysis, was caught and locked up, but then released again to a halfway house.
It was while on this release that he nearly killed Hearn, for what turned out to be nothing.
The woman shouting during the attack was Spinks/Riches’ girlfriend, Rebecca Anne MacDougal, who was friends with Carmen Holmquist from the rehab program. She had learned Holmquist had received a $10,000 inheritance, and told her boyfriend. This was the target — a bank card and code, easy money.
It was so senseless that the future Justice Minister Peter MacKay, as an MP in 2002, took Hearn’s case to Parliament, wanting to know why Spinks/Riches was let out so poorly supervised, and “why, in the name of heaven, we wouldn’t have had a full investigation into a case as aggravated and as severe as this?”
After the attack, Spinks/Riches left Hearn’s house with MacDougal. Their capture was almost immediate, thanks to a 911 call. An officer spotted them in Topaz Park, a few blocks from Hearn’s house. They made an abrupt turn when they saw the officer and at first ignored his orders to stop, then seemed to briefly converse before approaching the officer, claiming to be out on a long aimless walk, underdressed for the cold. Within minutes, police found a bag nearby, containing clothing and a claw hammer, all wet with Hearn’s blood.
Spinks/Riches was charged with attempted murder, but allowed to plead to aggravated assault with an eight-year prison term. MacDougal was convicted of robbery.
Phong-Nien Chau was born to an ethnic Chinese family in Vietnam in the mid 1950s, just as Ho Chi Minh’s Communists were forcing out the French in the First Indochina War. He worked as a shoemaker in Cholon, a district of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. He married young to Tuyet Ngoc Tran Chau, and they had two daughters by the late 1970s, when the American-led Vietnam War ended, and the country fell into humanitarian crisis.
With thousands of other “boat people,” they escaped to a refugee camp and then to Toronto, sponsored by Jewish families at the city’s Holy Blossom Temple. They knew no English at first, and lived a few months in the basement of lawyer Allan Kaplan’s home, communicating by signing and using a dictionary. When they were settled, Chau asked Kaplan what his family’s religion was, wondering if they should convert from Buddhism as a matter of courtesy or gratitude.
“We had to assure them that wasn’t part of the gig, they could practise anything they wanted,” Kaplan said.
A friend put Chau in touch with a furrier in the downtown fashion district, where his shoemaking skills helped him become a leading employee, working with the best hides, later doing contract work when the family was able to buy a suburban home. A son was born, and the immigrant dream was coming true.
To me, it’s always been the quintessential tragedy
Members of Tuyet Chau’s family opened On The Rocks, a restaurant and club on Front Street downtown, where she worked. Kaplan recalls that she became captivated by Western life, its freedoms and opportunities. This was the context in which their marriage broke down, and Phong-Nien Chau prepared a video that police would later describe as a “will,” detailing financial matters for their children.
On the morning of June 20, 1990, Chau, a small man with a limp from childhood polio, cut his wife’s throat with a utility knife from his workshop. She was 32. A family member called police, which led to a standoff as he tried to cut his own neck as he lay on top of her.
“It was our position that she had driven him to this by having an affair and taunting him and belittling him,” said lawyer John Rosen, who represented him at trial, where a jury convicted on second-degree murder. “He was trying to prevent her from leaving basically.”
Kaplan visited Chau in the hospital, and later in Joyceville Institution. He said it all seems so Shakespearean, with grace and promise spoiled by covetousness and rage.
“To me, it’s always been the quintessential tragedy,” said Kaplan. “I think it does happen from time to time, jealousy and clash of cultures and all that, just very sad, because it should have been otherwise. It could have been otherwise.”
Spinks/Riches got to Joyceville in a different way. He was born in Niagara Falls, Ont., and raised by his mother. He never knew his father. A judge described his “tragic background.” By his late teens he was already a violent criminal, exhibiting what a parole board called “reactive and instrumental violence… gratuitous and vastly excessive to what violence was required to meet (his) objectives.”
In 1992 he was convicted of theft over $1,000 and carrying a concealed weapon. Soon after, he carried out a late-night home invasion in Toronto’s Regent Park in which a 13-year-old was choked unconscious and tied up while his 16-year-old brother was beaten about the head and face. Convicted on four counts of robbery, Spinks/Riches was sent to Joyceville, then famous for its inmate violence.
Chau was discovered strangled to death in his cell around 6 p.m. on Sunday, July 24, 1994. He was 40. The murderer could have been any one of 600 inmates on Joyceville’s Unit 1, B Range, but a month into the investigation police had narrowed their suspect list to four men. That is how it remained for 20 years.
“When the evidence was reexamined, we had produced leads that we had to follow up on, which we were able to do, and that resulted in his arrest,” said Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Kristine Rae in 2014, when the first-degree murder charge was laid.
DNA is the forensic science that has progressed most, technologically, since the early 1990s. It was hardly science fiction back then, but it was slow to catch on as an investigative priority, despite its increasing successes, first in securing rightful convictions, and eventually in overturning wrongful ones.
For example, a few months after Tuyet Chau’s murder in 1990, the serial killer Paul Bernardo gave DNA samples to Toronto police investigating a series of his rapes, but they were not even tested until 1992. That same year, the debunked science of microscopic hair analysis helped wrongfully convict Guy Paul Morin until DNA analysis exonerated him in 1995.
So, in 1994, police investigating a jailhouse murder simply “may not have thought about it,” said Chau’s lawyer John Rosen. Or, perhaps genetic material seized from either Chau or Spinks/Riches was undetectable by 1990s laboratory methods until the more recent “technological advances” that Sgt. Rae said cracked the case.
Michael Mandelcorn, lawyer for Spinks/Riches, declined to comment before evidence is presented at trial. His previous lawyer, Denis Berntsen, has spoken of an informant, whose “hunch” police used to justify arresting and interrogating Spinks/Riches, in what he called an “abuse of process.”
Not long after Chau’s murder, Spinks/Riches was transferred from Joyceville to William Head Institution near Victoria. He dropped out of a violent offender program, and had limited success with psychological counselling focused on his triggers to anger. He said he smoked marijuana to “self-medicate” for anxiety and depression.
Released in 2005 from his sentence for the attack on Hearn, he eventually became involved in the drug trade. In April 2013, a jury acquitted him of marijuana production and possession of more than three kilograms. But in December 2013, he was convicted of heroin trafficking and was facing another serious sentence. These charges were stayed because of the Ontario murder charge.
A few months after the hammer attack, Hearn said people started to see him as a minor celebrity, the man who cheated death. Then he met his future wife Crystal, 18 years old, like a “shiny penny” in a camouflage dress. A year later they had a daughter, Cassidy.
As he tells it, their long involvement with Children’s Aid began soon after, when he was offered $2,000 from B.C.’s compensation program for crime victims, which seemed like nothing compared with his permanent disabilities and lingering pain from the attack. He went wild in his distress, called a crisis line, and was held in a psychiatric hospital.
‘They wanted to play me out like an angry man that’s going to beat his family, even though I was not,” he said.
Children’s Aid arranged for Crystal and Cassidy to fly to Ontario to live with Crystal’s mother, and Hearn followed by bus, but when he arrived, Children’s Aid wanted him out of the picture, which led to a period of living in Toronto shelters, meeting Crystal on the sly, even pawning their rings, as he put it, for baby formula.
He tried to sue Corrections Canada for millions of dollars, but accepted their first settlement offer in a dope-sick haze, against his lawyer’s advice. “Half a million dollars is a lot of money when you got nothing,” he said. That allowed his family to settle together in Hamilton, Ont., but with little other income and addictions that waxed and waned, even that was eventually depleted.
Today, Hearn is 47, and back in Port Alberni, near where he grew up in Tofino, living on social assistance, estranged from Cassidy, who is now a mother herself, and long since split from Crystal. He has trouble with pain, and with accessing care at clinics that are suspicious of drug-seeking behaviour.
Food is a constant focus of his thoughts. He resents his attacker’s prison diet, warm and starchy and dependable. Lately, Hearn can only eat fruit, bananas mainly, and whey powder and ice cream, and even then it hardly stays down.
He thinks this is due to lingering organ damage. His mind races as his emotions well up, but his body is failing.
“These criminals are living a better life than victims,” he said. “It sucks, man.”