Accused serial killer made for curious character reference
Murder trial: Mark Moore attempted to vouch for himself in Crime Stoppers call
It may rank among the most delicious calls ever made to Crime Stoppers. It was Oct. 21, 2011. Two days earlier, on Oct. 19, Mark Moore had been charged with four counts of first-degree murder in connection with a series of shootings that had happened a year before on the streets of Toronto.
The arrest wasn’t tricky; conveniently, Moore was already in custody at Toronto’s Don Jail on other charges. He’d been identified as the prime suspect in the slayings in August, and that month Toronto police got judicial authorization to tap the phones on his range.
Then they did a “stimulation,” as it’s called, gave Moore a bit of a poke by telling the press they were seeking a blue Honda (like Moore’s) that had been spotted at the scene of the first shooting, hoping it would provoke him to chat. They had no idea the monster they were unleashing; in one 56-day period, Moore made 7,500 calls from the jail.
Now, Moore is cut of suspicious cloth and he was always deeply suspicious that the cops, and if he said this once, he said it a hundred times, were tapping the phones. However, here he was, freshly charged with these four murders, and all his natural paranoia fell away for a brief moment. He did what any guy would do in such dire circumstances — he called Crime Stoppers to swear that why, he knew this Mark guy well, and he was “a really, really nice guy,” “not that type of guy to do something like that.”
He then gave this Mark fellow a near-ringing endorsement: “I know it’s not him and I, like I, I know it’s not him. Like, I ... I could g’... almost put my life on it that it’s not him.”
(What kind of a world is it where, when you phone up Crime Stoppers to vouch for yourself, you can only almost put your life on it?)
“The police been having a vendetta on this guy and they guess they try to throw the murders on him, which is really wrong,” he told the Crime Stoppers call taker.
“You know what I mean? I don’t know why they’d throw these charges on him without any sort of ... ’cause I know there’s no evidence against him about these murders. I don’t know why they’ll pin it on him. “I know he didn’t do them.” As this intercept, with Moore’s now-familiar voice on it identifying himself as one Christopher Parker, was played Monday before Ontario Superior Court Judge Michael Dambrot and a jury, Moore sat in the prisoner’s box, his face turned slightly away from the jurors.
He told Crime Stoppers he’d read a story about the arrest of this Mark for the shootings, but “I know that that person did not do those murders.”
He’d heard from the grapevine, he said, and “I’m hundred and one per cent sure that the ... that guy that they arrested for those murders is not the guy that did the murders.”
He then gave the call taker the nicknames (Slinky and Reds) and generic descriptions of the two who purportedly, according to the grapevine with which he was purportedly in touch, did the shootings.
Curiously, for a fellow who was coming to the defence of “a good friend of mine,” Moore claimed not to remember the guy’s last name.
“I know his first is Mark,” he said. “I don’t remember his last name.”
Miraculously, the call taker stifled his giggles and treated Parker (Moore) with the courtesy Moore clearly believes is due him, in all circumstances. If there’s one thing the jurors have learned from hearing the intercepts, it’s that Moore has a whopping sense of entitlement.
In his alternately raging and/ or sappy conversations with his girlfriend, Tassandra Whyte, it’s evident that Moore had a hearty appreciation for what he called his “charter’s rights” and a fine opinion of his knowledge of the law. As he told Whyte once, “I know the law, eh? I don’t have to be a lawyer to know the law. I have been in law in years and I’m not proud of it.”
If these conversations were difficult — Moore was trying to be careful about what he said to Whyte, but he appeared at the same time keen to give her marching orders — when he spoke to his beloved mother Hyacinth, the two mostly raged against the police.
In cross-examination of Det.Sgt. Hank Idsinga, the officer in charge of the four slayings investigation and the witness through whom the wiretaps were played, Moore’s lawyer, Peter Bawden, attempted to paint the family in a sympathetic light.
Moore, for instance, was himself shot at least four times as a 17-year-old, one bullet permanently disfiguring his jaw. Wasn’t he in fact “at a very young age exposed to an unspeakable act of violence?” Bawden asked.
“I’m not sure I’d characterize it as unspeakable,” Idsinga said in his very mild way. “But an act of violence, yes.”
As well, Moore’s brother, Andre, was murdered on Oct. 14, 2008; the man charged in the slaying, Kenya Smith, was tried, claimed he’d shot in selfdefence, and was acquitted. Hyacinth Moore was attending that trial, and as she told Mark Moore in an Oct. 4, 2011 wiretap, she was convinced “they are trying to make Kenya get away with ... murdering” Andre. “They’re trying to make this guy walk.”
Bawden’s theory is that the Moore family was at least suspicious, if not paranoid, about the Toronto police, the inference that perhaps they had good reason.
Even so, Parker (Moore) believed calling Crime Stoppers, to vouch for his own self as it were, was a grand idea.
The trial continues.