Defence Up Next in Murder Case Involving Girl, 13, Accused of Slaughtering Family

By JAMES STEVENSON

MEDICINE HAT, Alta. (CP) – A young girl accused of butchering her family finished a burger and joined her much-older boyfriend on a couch to giggle and smooch at roughly the same time her brother’s little playmate peered through a basement window and spied the lifeless bodies of her parents.

That’s one of many haunting images painted during a sensational trial in Medicine Hat, Alta., over the last three weeks.

The girl was 12 at the time, so her identity is protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. But the jury has been hearing plenty about her boyfriend, Jeremy Steinke, who was 23, and about the crimes the pair are alleged to have committed – the first-degree murders of the girl’s mother, father and eight-year-old brother.

The filthy place where the girl and Steinke chose to relax that Sunday afternoon in April last year, surrounded by teenage drunks and angst, was less than one kilometre from her family’s house, where scenes of horror were rapidly unfolding.

First police broke down the front door and found a basement drenched in blood. That carnage – the mother fell when she was knifed in the heart; the father died in a fighting pose with 24 stabs wounds, including one in the eye and another in the groin – could not prepare police for what they would see upstairs.

Several seasoned officers lost composure on the witness stand as they described finding the boy on his bed, his mouth and eyes agape. His short life had been ended by a slash to the throat, and his stuffed animals and a Star Wars light sabre were showered with his blood.

Now, 14 months later, the one surviving member of the family faces the possibility that she could become one of Canada’s youngest convicted multiple killers.

The case against her, which wrapped up last week in front of seven men and five women on the jury, included her DNA on the kitchen knife that’s believed to have killed her brother.

There was also a stick-person cartoon found in her Grade 7 locker. It depicts, in 10 frames, a family of four where the middle-sized member douses the other three, including a small one on a swing, in gasoline. As fire envelops them and they die from “unimaginable pain,” the remaining stick figure runs toward a vehicle labelled “Jeremy’s truck.”

And there was testimony from Steinke’s best friend, who said Steinke was being pressed to spill blood under threat of being dumped by his young girlfriend.

E-mails have hinted at her boiling anger in the weeks before the crimes as her parents grounded her and removed her computer privileges – an effort to cool their daughter’s romance with a man nearly twice her age.

But very little light has been shed on what, according to testimony, triggered the girl to change in a few short months from a quiet, average girl to an angry rebel who likes death-metal music, fishnet stockings and sexual encounters with significantly older men.

When she and Steinke were arrested the day after the killings in Leader, Sask., much was made of their fascination with Goth culture and dark, violent thoughts. That image was fed not only by their penchant for dark clothes and makeup, but by their well-documented Internet chatter, where his alias was “Souleater” and hers “Runawaydevil.”

A year behind bars has changed her again. She is 13 now, and gone is the little girl who posed provocatively for Internet photos while sucking her index finger. She has usually appeared in court wearing conservative dress pants and large sweaters, her hair done up tightly at the back.

Early intrigue over a thriving Goth subculture on the Canadian Prairies has given way to a more garden-variety picture of misspent youth.

The stately courtroom with a high-backed prisoner’s box makes it impossible for curious onlookers to read the girl’s emotions during the proceedings. Sometimes her eyes are red and moist when she’s escorted out under guard, but not often.

Not one word has been spoken in court about her relationship with her little brother.

The jury has been forced to settle for a view of Steinke’s life, even though he is not yet on trial and hasn’t even pleaded to the three first-degree murder charges he’s facing. Testimony at the girl’s trial has come from an exhaustive list of his friends, acquaintances and drug-providers, none of whom can admit to having seen the young girl more than a few times. Many met her the day after the killings. Most can barely remember.

The rare moments of levity have been sparked by the fuzzy memories of witnesses who remember the day in question not because of the horrific triple homicide but because they were so drunk they tried to sell drugs to undercover officers closing in on Steinke and his friends.

The defence will begin its case this week and it’s not expected to take much time. Lawyer Tim Foster said outside court that he would take the long weekend to decide whether to put his young client on the stand to defend herself.