‘Some people believe in coincidences. Some do not’
A courtoom sketch of Christopher Fattore and Melissa Merritt during their Brampton murder trial.
Fattore proposed on his birthday in October 2006. Nearing their spring wedding, a problem arose. Merritt was still married to Caleb. “I made a mistake when I thought that after two years of separation that you were automatically divorced,” Merritt later told police. They went ahead with the ceremony at Fantasy Farms banquet hall in Toronto, “but it wasn’t a real wedding,” Merritt said. They would have four children over the next five years, making Merritt a mother of six. Sporadically employed and “horrible at managing money,” Merritt said later, they often relied on social assistance and loans from family.
As Merritt began her second marriage, a judge granted Caleb 50/50 custody. His children would now spend half their time living on Pitch Pine, and the rest with their mom and her new husband, who had moved into a house in Mississauga.
Bill and Bridget relished their roles as Nanna and Poppa and became active in the children’s lives, driving them to school, taking them to activities, helping with homework. Merritt resented their involvement. “If Caleb is not caring for the children no one other than myself should be,” she wrote in an email to the Harrisons that became an exhibit at trial.
Over the next two years, Merritt made five “unsubstantiated” claims that Caleb or his parents had assaulted the children, a Superior Court judge wrote years later in a bail decision. After one claim, investigators “concluded that the children had been coached by Ms. Merritt.”
By December 2008, Merritt wasn’t allowing the Harrisons to see the children. Three days before Christmas, a judge ordered her to stop interfering with Caleb’s access.
In March, Caleb began serving an 18month jail sentence for the drunk-driving death. Bridget and Bill were granted their son’s share of custody while he was in jail. The judge who made the decision said “it is important and in the best interests of the children to maintain the environment they are used to.”
Facing money troubles and unhappy with the custody arrangement, Merritt and Fattore decided to pack up the kids and get out of Mississauga. Without telling the Harrisons or their own parents, they planned a hasty move.
The house was dark when Bridget Harrison pulled into her driveway just before 9 p.m. on April 16, 2009. Returning from a school board meeting, Bridget expected to find her husband at home, but when she stepped into the foyer she heard only the low hum of the television in the living room. A half-eaten takeout meal sat on the coffee table. “Bill?” she said. No answer. Bridget checked the second floor, but Bill was not in bed. Back downstairs, she noticed the powder-room door was closed. “Bill?” she called out again. The door was locked. Bridget picked the lock with a pin and found her husband on the bathroom floor, slumped against the far wall. She called 911.
The operator asked Bridget to check his vital signs. Bill was cold and stiff, and she struggled to move his body.
“He’s not breathing,” Bridget told the operator. “I can tell.” “He’s not breathing?” “He’s not breathing,” she said. “Oh my God.”
Paramedics arrived and confirmed what Bridget already knew. Her husband was dead.
Speaking to police at the scene, Bridget said she found it unusual that the bathroom door, which could be secured from either side, was locked. Why would a man home alone bother to do that? She also found it strange that the house lights were off.
Police are meant to treat all sudden deaths as homicide scenes until otherwise determined. According to a Peel police directive, officers must “vigorously investigate all sudden deaths with a view to establishing the cause and circumstances, and where culpability can be established, to apprehend and charge those responsible.” Among their first tasks is to call a coroner.
Arriving at the Harrison residence at 10:50 p.m., coroner Dr. Reuven Jhirad examined the body and noted abrasions on Bill’s neck — thin red marks across his throat that he believed “may have been due to the victim’s necklace,” a police officer later testified. Jhirad wanted them documented, so officers from Peel’s forensic identification services unit took photographs.
Despite the locked door and neck abrasions, investigators did not consider the death suspicious. It was sudden and unexplained, yes, but such deaths are not unusual. In their final moments, people often feel an urge to go to the bathroom, which makes it a common place to die.
“The death appears to be natural,” the police report said. “The coroner had no further concerns regarding further police investigation.”
The coroner’s statement attributed the same conclusion to police. “The scene was reviewed with the police who felt there were no concerns,” Jhirad, who has since become one of the province’s deputy chief coroners, wrote in his report. But with no clear cause of death, Jhirad ordered an autopsy.
In Ontario, autopsies are performed by pathologists and forensic pathologists, not coroners. Pathologists are experts in the study of disease. Forensic pathologists are experts in disease and injury. Their opinions help coroners determine the cause of death and the manner, which can be natural, accident, suicide, homicide or undetermined.
Pathologist Dr. Timothy Feltis was assigned to perform Bill’s autopsy at Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga. Having heard from the coroner that there were no concerns about foul play, and that police would not attend the autopsy to take photographs, Feltis approached his job with the same understanding. That this was not a suspicious death.
Bill Harrison died at a pivotal time for death investigations in Ontario, a few months after Justice Stephen Goudge released his damning report on pediatric forensic pathology. The Ontario government commissioned the Goudge Inquiry in the wake of revelations about flawed child death investigations by Dr. Charles Smith, once considered a leading expert in his field. Smith gave false and misleading testimony that led to innocent people being wrongly convicted or suspected in the deaths of children.
The inquiry found Smith had little forensic expertise and, in his own words, “woefully inadequate” training. He had reached his status primarily because no one else was willing or able to perform the work. At the time, Canada did not have its own forensic pathology training program and there was a severe shortage of experts in Ontario. The inquiry coincided with the launch of Canada’s first training program at the University of Toronto, and it led to the establishment of the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service.
The Goudge Inquiry made 169 recommendations, key among them a guiding principle that “the forensic pathologist should ‘think truth’ rather than ‘think dirty.’ ” Goudge cautioned against overstating findings, and stressed that evidence must be observed accurately and followed wherever it leads, “even if that is to an undetermined outcome.”
In the pre-Goudge era, non-forensic pathologists routinely performed forensic autopsies. Dr. Timothy Feltis was one. His lack of training and certification was not unusual given that it wasn’t available in Canada. Forensic pathology is a relatively new field that has been evolving with the advancement of science. Goudge underscored the need for an organized evolution.
After Goudge, Dr. Michael Pollanen, Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist, created a registry that matched pathologists to cases appropriate to their level of experience. He also issued an order that all suspicious deaths in the area should be sent to headquarters in downtown Toronto, where he could ensure a topquality autopsy was performed by a forensic pathologist. If pathologists working in community hospitals received a suspicious case, the body was to be restreamed and sent downtown.
The problem was, no one flagged Bill’s death as suspicious.
Examining Bill’s body, Feltis found no evidence of natural death. There were no heart abnormalities, no signs of disease. “No definitive anatomical or toxicological cause of death,” he wrote. What he did find were several injuries, including the neck abrasions, a large scalp bruise and, most concerning, a fractured sternum. Years later, in a preliminary inquiry, Ontario’s chief pathologist would say this was “an astonishing finding” that should have raised red flags.
Speaking with the coroner, Feltis learned Bill had been wearing a thin gold chain, which, he noted in his report, may have caused the abrasions. Seeking an explanation for the broken sternum, Feltis asked if there was a sharp corner Bill might have fallen on, and the coroner said yes, the bathroom vanity. The pathologist was never shown the police photos taken at the scene.
Feltis concluded that the injuries could have been caused by “a sudden collapse as the result of an acute cardiac arrhythmia, with a fall striking the head and chest.” It could have happened the other way around, he added, with a blow to the chest from a fall causing the heart to stop. His final report opined that the cause of death was “acute cardiac arrhythmia.”
This was the kind of conclusion the Goudge Inquiry had cautioned against. There was no evidence to support a heart problem and, as Pollanen would say at trial, acute cardiac arrhythmia is not a cause of death. It means that a person’s heart has stopped, but does not explain why. It was “a bit misleading,” a prosecutor would say at trial.
Bridget did not see the post-mortem report until months later. When she finally read it, she was floored. “The autopsy basically said, here’s a healthy human being,” Blackwell, her brother, said in a police interview. “There was no reason for him to die.”
The day after Bridget discovered her husband’s body, more misfortune awaited the Harrison family. Caleb’s children were missing. It took a few days to confirm what Bridget feared: Merritt had taken off with them.
Bridget went to police, but officers would not take action without an updated family court order. Days passed before she could appear before a judge. On April 23, she gained temporary sole custody of the children, which led police to issue an arrest warrant for Merritt.
Peel Const. Michael Young led the abduction investigation. Sitting in a police interview room on May 6, 2009, Bridget outlined the family history. She told Young that her son was in jail, that she and her husband had been granted his share of custody, that Merritt was unhappy, that her husband had died — “completely unexpected, and so suddenly” — and the children had not been in school the next day. She said the coroner had not yet given a cause of death.
Young pursued the abduction, but never looked into the circumstances of Bill’s death, he later testified. It didn’t occur to him the two events might be related. He worked in the same department as the officers who’d investigated Bill’s death, but none of them ever made the connection, and neither did the coroner’s office. Had police investigated further, they would have learned that Merritt and Fattore left Mississauga on April 16 — the same day Bill died.
Feltis, the pathologist, did not find out about the abduction until years later. Had he known at the time, he said in an interview, he would have considered it a suspicious circumstance and sent the body downtown.
“If I’d had all the information,” Feltis said, “I would have done things differently.”
“The death appears to be natural.” POLICE REPORT INTO THE DEATH OF BILL HARRISON
“Some people believe in coincidences, some do not,” Bridget Harrison wrote on April19, 2010, two days before she was murdered.
She was referring to the timing of her husband’s death and the disappearance of her grandchildren, writing a victim impact statement for a hearing in which Merritt was expected to plead guilty to child abduction. Bridget took her suspicions no further than the allusion to coincidence. Instead, she wrote of the pain she had endured, dealing with her husband’s death and the disappearance of her grandchildren, fearing for their safety and worrying she’d never see them again. “The most desperate seven and a half months of my life,” she wrote.
During those months, Merritt and Fattore had taken the children across the country. They’d driven to Calgary, then travelled east in search of cheaper rent. They settled in Nova Scotia, where Merritt gave birth to her fourth child. Soon after, police were tipped off about their location after Fattore, who’d been using an alias, gave a rent cheque with his real name. In November, Merritt was arrested, charged with child abduction and returned to Ontario in the custody of Peel police.
Bridget flew to Halifax and took her grandchildren home to Pitch Pine. With Caleb released early from jail on good behaviour and the kids back in school, something resembling a normal life resumed for a while, though mother and son continued to suffer Bill’s loss, and without him around to act as a buffer between them, their relationship grew strained.
Merritt was released on bail with the conditions that she not have unsupervised contact with the children or leave her house without authorization. On April 10, Merritt and Fattore drove to Pitch Pine, violating the court order. Merritt stayed in the vehicle, parked down the street, while Fattore went to the door. When Bridget answered, he handed her a letter and photos he said he’d come to deliver to the kids. At the same time, Caleb arrived home with the children and saw Merritt in the van. Spooked, Bridget called police. Merritt was arrested and charged with breaching bail. She spent three days in jail.
On April 21, the day before the abduction hearing, Caleb’s 8-year-old son rode his bicycle home from school, pulled open the front door and saw his Nanna lying at the bottom of the stairs. He ran to a neighbour’s house. For the second time in a year, an ambulance raced to the Harrison residence and police tape stretched around the house, fluttering in the spring breeze.
A fall down the stairs became an early theory in Bridget’s death investigation, but the family didn’t buy it.
“There’s no way anyone falls down the stairs and ends up in that position,” Caleb told his cousin, Nicole Gallant. “It doesn’t look right. It doesn’t make sense.”
Bridget was lying face up, arms at her side, head resting on the bottom stair, her green eyes open and vacant. Years later, her family and friends would see photographs of the scene on a courtroom projector and grip their seats or the hands of their companions, holding back tears because emotion in the public gallery is prohibited.
Arriving at the scene, coroner Dr. Robert Boyko was concerned about abrasions and bruising on Bridget’s chin and neck. Her body was sent downtown for the full forensic autopsy that her husband never received. This was a suspicious death.
In a case conference two days later, forensic pathologists explained to police that the injuries to the front of her neck, combined with petechial hemorrhaging — a smattering of red dots on the skin and eyes, caused when blood vessels break during a pressure buildup — suggested neck compression, meaning she may have been strangled. But she also had broken bones in the back of her neck, not typically seen in neck compression cases, which supported the fall theory. “At this time it is unknown how (she) suffered this combination of injuries,” police wrote after the meeting.
That afternoon, in a second conference at the coroner’s building downtown, the earlier crew was joined by Dr. Michael Pollanen, the chief forensic pathologist. Pollanen had learned this was the second death in the house and was concerned about the similarities. He told police that Bill had died with several unexplained injuries, including the fractured sternum and throat abrasions. Pollanen would say at trial that Feltis, the pathologist, had not performed a layered neck dissection to further investigate the marks on Bill’s throat. Pollanen wanted to exhume the body for a thorough autopsy, but that wasn’t possible. Bill had been cremated.
According to a Peel police policy directive, all cases of homicide or suspected homicide are to be investigated by the homicide bureau. When it’s a suspicious death, the bureau decides whether to take the case or not.
If the fatal flaw in Bill’s case was the failure to send his body downtown for a full forensic autopsy, here was the key mistake in the second investigation: the homicide bureau did not take Bridget’s case. Detectives from the bureau attended the case conferences, but left the investigation to the local division’s criminal investigations bureau. Police would not say who made that decision and why.
From the day Bridget died, the family raised concerns about Merritt and those close to her. Caleb spoke to Const. Robert Boyer on camera hours after her body was discovered. He explained his history with Merritt and said the timing of his mother’s death seemed weird. “I would ask where Melissa and Chris were, personally,” he said.
Boyer, a strapping young cop with dark hair, was a junior officer, six years into his policing career, who had recently joined 11 Division’s criminal investigations bureau. He became the file coordinator. Acting Det. Gregory Amoroso, a 17-year veteran, was the officer in charge.
Early on, police homed in on Caleb, who was known to have a difficult relationship with his mother. His uncle, Doug Blackwell, said that when it turned out Caleb had a solid alibi — he’d been working — the investigation appeared to stall.
Police interviewed Merritt, who said she’d been at home the day Bridget died, caring for a child whose parents had signed up for the home daycare she and Fattore were trying to get started.
Police interviewed Fattore, who said he’d been running errands and working in his backyard. Boyer retrieved surveillance footage from Sobeys, confirming Fattore had been there, but police failed to corroborate a key element of his story. Fattore said he’d gone to Merritt’s grandmother’s house to pick up a drum kit. Police never spoke to the grandmother.
All told, police spent about two weeks investigating Bridget’s death. In early May, Amoroso was reassigned to a spe- cial command team for the G20 summit in Toronto that summer. After that, “I really didn’t have too much more involvement,” he testified. Amoroso could not say who, if anyone, became the new officer in charge. Boyer, the junior guy, testified that he had no involvement in the investigation after the end of April, but he would be the one to close the case months later.
After a final case conference on June 10, pathologists presented their findings to police and explained “possible mechanisms of injury,” the coroner wrote in a report.
Police then presented findings from their own investigation. “No evidence of ‘foul play’ was discovered,” the coroner wrote. “The injuries, however, cannot be explained by a single mechanism.” The coroner classified the death as “undetermined.”
Who concluded there was no evidence of foul play? Years later, Pollanen, the chief pathologist, offered his take in court: “Police are the ones who make investigations regarding foul play, not coroners.”
Dr. Michael Pickup, the forensic pathologist who performed Bridget’s autopsy, wrote “neck injuries” as the cause of death. His final report explained the findings supporting each theory — strangulation vs. a fall down the stairs — but did not explicitly favour one. “This is one of those cases that cannot hinge on the pathology,” he wrote to a colleague.
Experienced detectives have a saying that when your pathologist won’t commit, you’ve got more work to do. That didn’t happen here.
Elizabeth Gallant remembers that Boyer was sympathetic, but told her the family’s suspicions were not enough. Police encouraged them to offer proof. “It made no sense to us to have to provide the police with proof,” Gallant said. “That’s the whole point of an investigation.”
On Sept. 2, 2010, Boyer wrote a final case note. “After an extensive investigation into this matter there has been no evidence to suggest (Bridget) Harrison was the victim of foul play or any other criminal act. The coroner has concluded that the cause of death in this matter is ‘asphyxia’ and the mechanism of death is unknown.”
The case was closed, “pending the receipt of further information.”
With a post-mortem report describing Bridget’s neck injuries, it “should have been clear to the police — but obviously was not — that could have been evidence of foul play,” Crown attorney Eric Taylor said in an objection at trial years later, when a defence lawyer wanted Boyer to read the case-closure statement.
“Suggesting that there was an ‘extensive’ investigation here, I think, is inappropriate,” Taylor continued. “Extensive,” he said, was Boyer’s opinion. “And I think a lot of people would disagree with that.”
There were no search warrants sought, Taylor said. No surveillance. No wiretaps. No production orders for cellphone records. No attempts to collect DNA discard. “All of the things,” Taylor said, “that we ultimately know happened after Caleb Harrison.”
Elizabeth Gallant arrived at Pitch Pine Cres. on the afternoon of her nephew’s death and saw the house wrapped in police tape, looking the same as it had when her brother died, and the same as it had when her sister-in-law died. Three death scenes, and she’d been to all of them. She’d comforted Bridget when they lost Bill. She’d comforted Caleb when they lost Bridget. Now there was no one left. Hands shaking, Gallant dialled a number she’d kept with her for three years. Const. Robert Boyer answered.
“Caleb is dead,” Gallant said. She was sobbing.
As word spread, horrified relatives and friends descended upon Pitch Pine. One shouted at a police officer, “How could you let this happen?” Cruisers lined the streets and detectives began a feverish door-to-door canvass, searching for witnesses and video.
When an autopsy revealed that Caleb appeared to have been strangled, it changed the way police viewed his mother’s death. Finally, the homicide squad took over. Det. Sgt. Randy Cowan, not involved in the earlier investigations, told reporters police were looking into all three deaths to determine if they were connected. “To put things back together when records have been deleted, when video has been rolled over,” Cowan said later, “those kind of things make an investigation like this basically like a cold case.”
Despite the mistakes of Caleb’s past, family and friends described him as a devoted father. “He was all in, completely focused on the kids,” said his cousin, Nicole Gallant. He’d had sole custody since Merritt pleaded guilty to child abduction after his mother’s death. Merritt had access every second weekend. Approaching the summer of 2013, Caleb had agreed to a temporary schedule, where the kids spent every other week with their mother.
Merritt wanted the arrangement to continue. On July 10, she filed an application for shared custody. “I have communicated with Caleb on numerous occasions over the past 12-18 months, in an attempt to reach an agreement with him on the children spending more time with me,” Merritt wrote. “Caleb has been unwilling to entertain any increase in time, contrary to the children’s best interest, unless I agree to his child support demands.”
Caleb did not file a response. He was killed the night before the custody schedule was to change back to limited access for Merritt.
Two weeks after his murder, Merritt filed an application seeking sole custody of the children, explaining that her exhusband had died. “This news was (and is) tragic and very shocking,” she wrote. The application was granted.
Within weeks, she and Fattore were headed for the East Coast again with all six children. This time, police were watching their every move.
On a grey morning in January 2014, half a dozen police vehicles drove down a country road in Nova Scotia and pulled up to a house in the sparse community of Italy Cross, where Merritt and Fattore had been living since November. They were handcuffed and charged with the first-degree murders of Caleb and Bridget. That night, after a 13-hour interview with a Peel detective, Fattore confessed.
Head in hands, Fattore said that in April 2010 he went to the Harrison residence with a note, pretending it was for the children. When Bridget answered, he forced his way in and attacked her. “I hit her a couple of times,” he said. “I then proceeded to squeeze her neck.” Here, he began to cry. “Until she stopped breathing and laid on the floor.”
He said he believed killing Bridget would level the playing field between Merritt and Caleb and give his wife a better chance at custody. He said Merritt had nothing to do with it.
Three years later, Fattore said, he drove to Pitch Pine again under cover of darkness, wearing black gloves, shoes purchased from Walmart and a hoodie with a baseball bat tucked up the sleeve. He let himself in with a key stolen from Caleb’s son, followed the sound of the bedroom fan, stood over his wife’s ex with the bat raised high and struck him in the chest. When Caleb sprang up, surprising him, Fattore threw him into a shelving unit and strangled him. Again, he insisted Merritt knew nothing until later.
“There’s no way anyone falls down the stairs and ends up in that position.” CALEB HARRISON ON THE DEATH OF HIS MOTHER
Days after the confession, police put Merritt and Fattore in a room together at the Halifax airport. Believing they were alone, they began to talk. A recording of their three-hour conversation would be played at trial, along with months of intercepted communications from their home in Italy Cross, where police had installed wiretaps.
A whispered conversation began after police shut the door. “I’m taking the rap for it ... to give you accessory after the fact,” Fattore said.
Merritt told Fattore that his parents had spoken to police. “They called me Karla Homolka,” she said.
In their rush to leave Mississauga after Caleb’s murder, Merritt and Fattore left many of their possessions behind in a trailer too rickety for the road trip. Inside, police found a laptop containing an extensive internet search history — evidence that might have been available to investigators years earlier if they’d sought search warrants after Bridget’s death.
Two months before Bridget was murdered, there was a search for “what if a grandparent has legal custody and they die.” Three weeks before she was murdered: “how long does it take to die from choking” and “how long does it take for a person being strangled to pass out.”
The month before Caleb’s death: “easy ways to kill and get away with it.”
The laptop was a gold mine for police, but there was a problem. Because Merritt and Fattore shared the computer, the searches could not be attributed to one or the other. Police attempted to match the queries with activity in the suspects’ email accounts, to see if they could prove Merritt was using the computer. In doing so, officers made numerous unauthorized searches and seizures of evidence.
In a pre-trial application to exclude the evidence, defence lawyers argued police searched first and sought authorization later, then engaged in “deliberate coverups” to hide the activity. Prosecutors argued the Charter violations were “the product of honest errors made by officers grappling with a large scale and complicated investigation” as laws concerning the seizure of electronic data were evolving.
Superior Court Justice Fletcher Dawson sided with the defence, finding evidence of “disreputable, misleading and negligent police conduct” that in his view magnified the Charter breaches. “I conclude there have been attempts by senior officers to cover up and minimize the nature and extent of the problematic conduct of rank and file investigators,” he wrote.
The internet searches were “reliable data,” Dawson ruled, and the evidence was important to the case against Merritt. “The search queries include, ‘If a grandparent has legal custody and they die, which of the parents gets the kids.’ It might be inferred from this content and the other circumstances of the case that Ms. Merritt is more likely than Mr. Fattore to have authored this query.”
Dawson concluded that ruling the evidence admissible would bring the administration of justice into disrepute. Weeks before trial, the computer searches were thrown out.
On the opening day of her murder trial, Melissa Merritt was almost unrecognizable. Her hair had grown long and dark after four years in jail. A pantsuit hung loose on her small frame. At 37, she appeared to be withering away, half the size she’d been when arrested. Dwarfed by the high Plexiglas walls of the witness box and the hulking figure of Fattore beside her, she held a tissue and cried as she stood to plead not guilty to the charges.
The prosecution’s opening statement on Sept. 27, 2017, connected the dots between the child custody battle and the demise of all three Harrisons in a narrative that made it difficult to imagine how the earlier investigations went nowhere.
Eric Taylor and Brian McGuire, a team of seasoned prosecutors, argued that Merritt and Fattore conspired to murder her ex and his mother, while Fattore alone committed the acts, which made them both guilty of first-degree murder.
“She was not just an accessory after the fact,” Taylor said in an opening statement to the 14-member jury, anticipating the defence argument.
In Bill’s death, Fattore alone faced a third count of second-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty to the murder charges, but attempted to plead guilty to manslaughter in Caleb’s death. The Crown rejected that plea.
Fattore, 40, had shaved his thinning hair and dropped some of the heft he once carried. He wore a tie and thickrimmed eyeglasses and sat hunched forward, rubbing his goatee, at times taking notes. He had a new tattoo of a wedding band on his ring finger.
The custody battle formed the basis of the Crown theory, but prosecutors also argued the couple believed they stood to inherit millions from the Harrison estate.
Police had amassed abundant evidence against Fattore. His DNA was under Caleb’s fingernails. He’d left a pair of gloves containing his and Caleb’s DNA in the garbage at his own home, along with shoes he’d purchased at Walmart hours before the murder.
On the witness stand, Fattore said he falsely confessed out of concern for his family, believing he was making a deal that would see his wife released to be with their children. He denied having anything to do with Bridget’s death and admitted killing Caleb, but said that he only meant to “rough him up,” to buy a few extra days with the children. He said he had nothing to do with Bill’s death, and that of all the Harrisons he liked him best.
Bill’s murder was a tougher case to make, with nothing putting Fattore at the scene. Dr. Michael Pollanen, a key witness for the Crown, testified that he believed Bill was assaulted before he died, taking heavy blows to his head and chest. Pollanen could not reach a conclusion on the cause of death because of the limitations of the autopsy, but said he could not exclude neck compression.
The Crown presented evidence that shortly before Bill died, he learned from a friend that Merritt and Fattore were planning to take off with the kids. Prosecutors argued Bill must have been killed in a confrontation with Fattore about that plan.
Fattore’s defence lawyers called as an expert witness their own forensic pathologist, who testified that the original theory of a natural death best fit the evidence. But the expert’s opinion relied heavily on the assumption that CPR explained the broken sternum, even though the ambulance call report said there’d been no CPR.
The case against Merritt was circumstantial, with nothing directly tying her to the crimes. Her lawyers said the Crown’s case proved that at worst she was an accessory after the fact.
Prosecutors argued that Fattore would not have killed the children’s grandmother and father without Merritt’s support. He needed an alibi in advance and had too much to lose if she found out and didn’t support what he’d done.
Among the key questions for the jury in determining Merritt’s involvement was whether she drove Fattore to Walmart to buy the shoes he wore the night he killed Caleb. Both left Walmart out of their detailed police statements about their activities the night before the murder.
What could be heard in the wiretaps was contested. The defence argued the police transcripts contained errors that changed the meaning of what was said. In the airport intercept, after Fattore told Merritt he’d confessed, Merritt said, “You shouldn’t have said anything to them,” and then, after a muffled comment, “the audiotapes would have f---ed us anyways.”
Prosecutors viewed the statement as an admission of guilt, but Merritt’s lawyers argued the unintelligible comment sounded like “they think.” As in, police think “the audiotapes would have f---ed us anyways.”
In the same airport conversation, Fattore said he’d told police Merritt knew nothing about his crimes until after Caleb was dead. He said he’d confessed to her the week after Caleb’s death, “the day after I did my video statement” with police.
“The day after, you’ve already told me about Bridget and Bill?” Merritt asked. “Bridget and Caleb,” Fattore said. Prosecutors pointed to this excerpt as evidence of Fattore’s involvement in Bill’s death. The defence argued that it was a hurried, confusing conversation, and that nothing could be drawn from the comment.
After three months of testimony and four days of jury deliberations, the verdicts came on a freezing Saturday afternoon in January. The jury foreman delivered them in a whisper, so that everyone in the packed courtroom had to lean forward to hear.
Fattore was guilty of murdering Caleb and Bridget. He was not guilty of murdering Bill.
Merritt was guilty of murdering Caleb. A mistrial was declared on her charge in Bridget’s death after the jury could not reach a verdict, and the Crown issued a stay of proceedings. Both are appealing the verdicts. In an interview after the trial, Dr. Tim- othy Feltis, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Bill, said that years of experience “probably should have twigged me that something wasn’t right” with the broken sternum. Feltis no longer believes that a heart arrhythmia is the most likely cause of Bill’s death, though it remains a possibility in his mind. “Given hindsight,” Feltis said, “I suspect that he was the victim of foul play.
“I could have done things differently, but I can’t change it now. And as far as I’m concerned, given the information I had at the time, I did the best I could.”
From the outside, 3635 Pitch Pine Cres. looks much the same as it did when the Harrisons lived there, but the house has been sold, the inside gutted by new owners and renovated beyond recognition. The surviving Harrisons have lost the people who connected them and the place they considered home.
Twenty-five of them gathered in court for the sentencing hearing in January, a collection of siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and close friends who, united by Bill and Bridget, are an extended family. In victim impact statements, they spoke of losing the essential meaning of their family and the traditions that bound them together. They spoke of trauma, depression, anger, recurring violent nightmares about their loved ones’ final moments, visions of autopsy photos. They spoke of guilt and regret, of wishing they’d demanded more of authorities who failed to take their concerns seriously. Some spoke of fearing for their own safety and fearing that Merritt, from behind bars, would continue to manipulate her children and turn them against the remaining Harrisons.
Over five years, Caleb Harrison’s children lost their Poppa, Nanna and their dad, and watched police arrest their mother and charge her with murder. The children are not with the Harrison side of the family — despite Caleb’s wish, outlined in his will, that his cousin be their legal guardian in the event of his death, and despite his cousin’s efforts to honour that wish. (To protect the children’s privacy, the Star has chosen not to reveal the identities of their guardians.)
Merritt and Fattore received mandatory sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole until 25 years have passed. Two sentences for Fattore, but served concurrently.
On that final day in court, as Merritt and Fattore rose to leave the room one last time, the Harrisons stood together, shoulder to shoulder, and watched as police led them away. The verdicts brought a small measure of justice, but the family remains haunted by what happened to Bill, Bridget and Caleb, and united in their quest to get answers from the authorities that failed them.
“We’re not going to back down because we don’t want this to happen to any other family,” said Doug Blackwell, Bridget’s brother.
In the weeks that followed, their mission would give them a renewed sense of purpose. They would compare trial notes. They would study police and coroners’ reports. They would write letters to authorities, repeating the story of what happened to the Harrisons, and asking, “What action will you take?” They would gather in Mississauga at Elizabeth Gallant’s house, travelling from across the province and abroad to be together — just as they once were on Pitch Pine Crescent.
“My faith in justice has been destroyed.” DOUG BLACKWELL BRIDGET’S ONLY SIBLING