Convicted at 12, free 10 years later

Killer ‘J.R.’ a poster child for sentencing system

s she was at her trial largely unseen by the public, physically shielded by an unusual high-walled prisoner’s box, so is the young woman known to Canadians only as J.R. soon to disappear altogether, an unknown quantity, from the country’s consciousness.

She appeared Friday in a Medicine Hat courtroom via closed-circuit television for a final Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision (IRCS) review.

It was basically a formal farewell to the IRCS program, the therapeutic sentencing option available through the Youth Criminal Justice Act for those of tender years who are convicted of serious violent crimes, under which auspices J.R. has spent the past decade.

She served the first six years in custody, the last four in the community, which, as curfews and other controls were gradually loosened with the judge’s approval, allowed her to attend university and work part-time.

Considered a great success story and a poster child for the rare IRCS program, she will be a free woman when her sentence expires Saturday.

That freedom extends to her continuing privacy, and, unless she incurs an adult criminal record, all of the records pertaining to her youth convictions will be automatically sealed after five years.

J.R. was just 12 and in Grade 7 when she was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder in the April 2006 slayings of her parents and her little brother in the small southwestern Alberta city.

Her boyfriend, the much older but less sophisticated and intellectually stunted Jeremy Steinke (now known as Jackson May, after a name change made in honour of his late mother), was convicted of the same charges about a year later.

The age difference between them — he’s 11 years older — and the still-pervasive myths about her gender being the gentler one suggested the conventional explanation that he was the one in control and that she was somehow his victim.

This narrative was also the version of events J.R. gave when she testified in her own defence at her trial (which I covered).

She acknowledged only that she had, by her account, egged Steinke on with her raging against her parents and thus had encouraged him, but for heaven’s sake, she never actually meant any of those things and when for instance she stabbed her eight-year-old brother, it was only because she was terrified Steinke would kill her if she didn’t.

The justice system has always struggled to see her as anything other than a victim.

When Medicine Hat Police first arrived at her family’s bloodspattered home, for instance, and found the slashed bodies of her mom and dad and brother, they also spotted family pictures that showed a little girl and immediately assumed that she had been kidnapped and was in danger.

They considered invoking an Amber Alert.

Alas, J.R. had in fact fled with Steinke, promptly had sex with him at a friend’s apartment, inhaled a burger with equanimity that startled some of their friends and then headed toward Leader, Sask., where they were arrested.

The facts showed that it was J.R. who was the driving force and the one calling the shots. She wielded her adolescent sexual power like a pro, alternately saying she wanted to “bang” him and threatening to break up with him if he didn’t soon “do it” (it meaning murder her family), and was the bright and articulate one of the pair.

Steinke, on the other hand, is the product of an alcoholic mother and a series of her abusive partners and is possibly on the fetal alcohol syndrome spectrum. Though he was 23 to her 12 at the time of the slayings, he was the naïf who showered her with illiterate but flowery love notes: He was clearly in her thrall, not the other way around.

Steinke always admitted killing J.R.’s parents — the father suffered 24 wounds, the mother 12 — but claimed it was J.R. who murdered the little boy. She denied that, but admitted she first tried to choke the boy by putting his neck in a half-Nelson and squeezing and then, ostensibly at Steinke’s behest, stabbed him once in the upper body.

An autopsy revealed the boy had been stabbed four times, but that he died of a gash to the throat.

Asked by the prosecutor why, if she was so scared of Steinke and he’d done something she never wanted him to do, she’d accepted his jailhouse marriage proposal just days after the slayings, J.R. coolly replied, “My psychologist said it was post-traumatic stress disorder.”

As I wrote at the time, she was already parroting the mantra the system was teaching her: Why, she’d been involved with a bad man who had exposed her to a bad thing, poor lamb.

It’s not hard to imagine how much more thoroughly she’s absorbed that lesson now, 10 years later.

Steinke, meantime, remains behind bars. As the adult of the pair, he received a life sentence, with no chance of parole for 25 years.

Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Scott Brooker, for the last time reviewing the progress made, told J.R. she has become a person her family would be proud of — if only, you know, she and Steinke hadn’t slaughtered them.