Killer draws PM staffer into web
Courts: Harper’s deputy chief of staff opened package at Conservative party headquarters
Warning: Contains graphic content MONTREAL
Luka Magnotta’s curious affinity for the well known or notorious now extends to the quietly powerful.
And, like all the others so far, the new name involuntarily drawn into his orbit had absolutely nothing to do with the killer.
Testifying at his first- degree murder trial Monday was Jenni Byrne, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s deputy chief of staff, and the woman who ran the party’s 2011 national election campaign that gave the Conservatives a majority government.
Byrne’s only connection to the case is that two years ago, she was the director of political operations for the Conservative Party of Canada, a job that apparently entailed sometimes opening the mail.
And in late May that year, Magnotta, as he has acknowledged through his lawyer, Luc Leclair, had not only killed and dismembered a shy Chinese student named Lin Jun, but also had mailed some of his body parts across the country.
One severed hand and foot he sent to two schools in Vancouver. The other hand and foot Magnotta mailed to the Conservative and Liberal party headquarters in Ottawa.
All the body parts were swaddled in pink tissue paper, sat inside black garbage bags, which in turn were stuffed into identical black gift bags. Each bore a note scrawled on pink paper.
On May 29, 2012, Byrne said her assistant brought in a medium- size Canada Post box addressed to the Conservative party. The box arrived half- opened, an experience not entirely unfamiliar to many Canadians.
( Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer and the jurors already have heard that four days earlier, Magnotta bought too- small boxes, which he returned hours later — and demanded a refund in exchange for the correct- sized ones. It was because of this thriftiness that he signed, using his middle name of Rocco, a refund slip for $ 13.16.)
In any case, Byrne opened the box fully, reached in and pulled out the pink tissue, exposing a black garbage bag. She opened up the bag and saw another package that looked like a gift bag for wine.
The bag felt “soft … mushy,” so she asked the assistant to grab some scissors, and when “we clipped the top” of the gift bag, a “very, very bad smell” emerged, Byrne said.
“I had a concern,” she said. “I don’t know what I thought — the smell seemed that something was rotting. I knew just, something was not right.”
She asked the assistant to call 911, and soon enough, the Albert Street office was crawling with police.
Lucky Byrne. She never saw the package again, but as the jurors have heard, it contained one of Lin’s feet.
The Ottawa police called Canada Post, and by late afternoon, postal inspector Genevieve Benoit, using the information from the box’s postal markings, realized two packages had been mailed that day from the same post office and that one was still in transit.
Prosecutor Louis Bouthillier asked how two identical parcels,
I don’t know what I thought — the smell seemed that something was rotting. JENNI BYRNE PRIME MINISTER’S DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF
mailed from the same location the same day, could arrive at the same destination at different times. Benoit cited “volume” as the reason and suggested the parcels might have ended up on different sorting belts.
This one, addressed to the Liberal party HQ on Metcalfe Street, was duly intercepted. It contained Lin’s left hand. The note with it — perhaps revealing a certain political confusion — read, “You need to speak to Laureen Teskey ( Harper’s wife) and her family. Lots to hide!!”
The note to the Conservatives was at least well directed, if that can be said of any of Magnotta’s writings. It read, “Stephen Harper and Lauren Tesky ( Laureen Teskey) know who this is. They f----- up big time.”
The ghostly imprint of yet another name appeared on the notepaper, though it wasn’t written out. Rather, it was as though Magnotta had written the name out on the top sheet of a stack of notepaper and the imprint remained.
This name was Neil Fenton, identified by Ottawa police officer Theresa Kelm as Laureen Harper’s first husband, a New Zealander who is a successful software entrepreneur.
Thus did Byrne and Fenton join the growing list of those who have been sucked into Magnotta’s bizarre web.
Last week, the jurors heard from Logan Valentini, sister of the convicted felon Karla Homolka, and Hubert Chretien, son of the former prime minister Jean Chretien.
Their real names and addresses had been written in the sender’s section of the packages that Magnotta sent to the Vancouver schools; both were upset at being associated with the lurid case.
Similarly, a Renee Bordelais was identified as the sender of the Ottawa packages. Bordelais is the last name of Karla Homolka’s former lawyer and her brother Thierry, who is Homolka’s husband.
The jurors are expected to also hear from the targets of the Vancouver packages. Their vicious messages read, “Die bitch! Soon!” while the other riffed off the old roses- are- red rhyme and ended with “The police will need dental records to identify you.”
Magnotta, while pleading not guilty to first- degree murder and other charges, has admitted the physical part of all the offences, but his lawyer says he was severely mentally ill and should be found not criminally responsible.
Why and how he involved innocent people in his grisly scheme, let alone these particular innocents, appears to speak either to Magnotta’s callousness or his madness. The former is amply in evidence, the latter is alleged.