NEWMARKET -- Her poor, poor sisters.
First they lost Paula Menendez in a gruesome double murder and then they had to listen to their late sister being cut and quartered, desecrated and defiled as the lovelorn killer herself.
When it is Chris Little who's supposed to be on trial.
But such is the nature of the accused's right to a full and complete defence. It is his lawyer's job to plant the seeds of reasonable doubt, and yesterday the very able John Rosen was hoeing away, even if every shovel dug cruelly away at the young physiotherapist's memory.
Little, 38, is charged with slashing the throat of his former wife, Julie Crocker, and strangling Menendez at his Markham home on Feb. 12, 2007. The Crown has argued that the former fibreglass salesman killed both women and then staged it to make it look like a murder-suicide.
But in his day-long closing address to the jury yesterday, Rosen insisted Little was innocent and that there is "no smoking gun, there is no witness who said I saw Mr. Little do this or Mr. Little do that."
Instead, he said the circumstantial case could just as easily be used to suggest it was indeed a murder-suicide committed by Menendez. He painted the 34-year-old as a desperately unhappy woman who killed her rival -- Crocker was dating her estranged husband, radio sportscaster Rick Ralph -- and then hanged herself.
"Paula Menendez was in crisis," Rosen said. "She was in turmoil."
He tried to soften his character assassination by saying he did so "with some reluctance and trepidation," knowing how difficult it was for her family.
And then he ploughed right on.
"In the turmoil in her personal life, Paula Menendez had just as much of a motive -- maybe more so -- to go out and confront Julie Crocker, the woman who was going to essentially replace her," Rosen argued, as Menendez's twin, Carolina Stubbs, and older sister, Claudia Johnston, held hands and fought back tears in the first row of the gallery.
"Paula Menendez, for her own motives, taking her own opportunity, by her own means, arrived at the house killing Julie Crocker, then taking her own life as a result of the state of mind she was in," he said. "Christopher Little is not only not guilty but as a fact did not do this."
He made Menendez out to be a desperate woman who had nothing to live for after she split from her husband. She had poured her heart and soul into the three-year marriage, even agreeing to "sacrifice her unborn baby" because he didn't want a child, only to see her philandering husband leave her for Crocker, a married woman with two young daughters.
Her twin sister had testified that while sad, Menendez was excited about moving on with her life, opening her own clinic and dating. But Rosen argued Menendez was only putting on a "happy face" for her confidantes, but was really in a "fragile state of mind."
He turned to her diary, the most personal of possessions, and read from her words, twisting her understandable sadness to suit his argument of an unravelling, suicidal killer.
"I will never hear from him again," she had written of a lover following the breakup of her marriage. "Nobody comes back, especially for me."
To Rosen, that is evidence of a "deteriorating woman," not simple melancholy whispered to oneself in the middle of the night.
"This is a woman going from one tragedy or failure to another and another," the lawyer suggested in a riff of hyperbole. "She's looking for love in all the wrong places and she's getting banged in the head."
Yet the last line in her diary is, "I need to be sad today but I don't want to stay sad. I ... "
It trails off, as she would never get the chance to finish it.
And what of the accused? Rosen argued that Little might have been initially consumed by anger and angst, as the Crown suggested, but only when he first learned that his wife was "back to her old habits" of infidelity. But the couple had recently reached an amicable separation and had spent the day before the murder attending church with their kids, working out financial arrangements and going out to dinner as a family.
"This boiling, roiling cauldron of angst, depression, anger, frustration and humiliation -- where is it? It's nowhere to be seen," Rosen said.
"Maybe I'm delusional; maybe we're talking about somebody totally Machiavellian that you would go through these (financial separation) efforts ... and at the same time be plotting to kill your wife."
Of course, this was the same jealous husband who placed a GPS on his wife's car, confronted her at an afternoon rendezvous with Ralph at a downtown hotel and bought a spray to detect semen on her clothes.
But Little had finally come to terms with his failed marriage, Rosen told the jury. It was Menendez who had not.
So she somehow made her way to the Littles' Markham home in the dead of winter -- her car was found in her Etobicoke driveway, her purse still in her house -- let herself in with a key she somehow found, slashed Crocker's throat, carved "suffer" into Ralph's BMW being stored in the garage and then hanged herself from the rafters.
Or so goes the defence theory. And Menendez can't defend herself, because she's been rendered silent in her grave.
The Crown makes its closing argument today.
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