 Chris Little (centre) has been found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his estranged wife, Julie Crocker (right), and Paula Menendez (left). (HO)
|
There could be no more appropriate day for Chris Little to be found guilty of murdering his estranged wife and another woman.
Yesterday marked the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and what better time for a Newmarket jury to send a message to the 38-year-old spurned and jealous husband who thought he could get away with murder?
A message that should also be heard by the expensive defence lawyer who thought that maligning and vilifying the dead women were his best bet to winning his client an acquittal.
Thankfully, the jury saw through it all.
Little was a husband angry and humiliated. His 33-year-old wife, Julie Crocker, had the better education, she had the university degree, he did not. She was a high-powered account manager at a radio station pulling in $275,000 a year, he was a fibreglass salesman lucky to earn $75,000. He thought he had built a dream life in Markham with his suburban home and his pretty wife and their two adorable daughters -- a fitting portrait for a man who hailed from one of the town's most prominent families.
WANTED OUT
It was a charade, though, that his wife no longer wanted to play. Crocker had met someone else. She wanted out of their 10-year marriage. She thought they could part amicably, sharing custody, divvying up their assets
But Little wasn't man enough to let her go.
It is a scenario seen time and time again -- from all walks of life, in all strata of society -- the enraged husband who decides that if he can't have her, nobody can.
One in five homicides in Canada involves the killing of an intimate partner. In 2008, three of Toronto's 70 homicides were domestic, in '07, there were 11 victims of domestic violence in the city's 84 homicides.
Experts have always warned that the most dangerous time for the woman is when she is trying to leave, or has just left, a relationship.
Little took the life of not just one innocent woman but of two. He kidnapped and strangled Paula Menendez, 34, the estranged wife of Rick Ralph, Crocker's new boyfriend. The physiotherapist was just a life easily expended to further his scheme of staging a mock murder-suicide -- hoping people would believe that Menendez was so consumed by jealousy and anger at the breakup of her marriage that she would kill her "rival" and then herself.
And the cuckold's rage knew no bounds -- not at slaying a woman who had nothing to do with his disintegrating home life.
And not at killing his wife while their two young daughters slept just a few bedrooms away.
So add violence against little women to his rap sheet as well.
Crocker knew her husband was stalking her -- he had planted a GPS on her car and had tracked her down to a hotel room she was sharing with Ralph in downtown Toronto, she had told him to stop reading her mail.
She might have also known that he had gone to a spy store to buy a product that would detect semen on her clothes. That he had once planted a digital recorder in her car.
Did she also know that Little had concealed a pinhole camera and video recorder in their ceiling, which captured him sexually assaulting her after she'd been drugged?
He was a textbook stalker whose anger turned to murder, a script of domestic violence that plays out over and over in this country. But he didn't have the courage to then kill himself. Instead, the coward tried to pin the murders on one of his victims.
Killing them was not enough. Little then did everything possible to tarnish and taint their memory.
He went on the stand and described the mother of his children as a wild philanderer, laying the blame for the breakdown of their marriage at her feet.
SHAMEFUL
But what he attempted to do to Menendez's reputation -- whom he didn't even know -- was even more shameful. With the help of lawyer John Rosen, she was portrayed as the suicidal murderess who had orchestrated the grisly deaths.
"Despite Chris' and Mr. Rosen's deplorable efforts in spinning stories and attempts at obscuring the truth with lies, the jury was able to see past it, use their common sense and help bring some closure to our families," her sister, Claudia Johnston, said after the verdict.
"It was extremely difficult to hear these past few months, what was essentially a very public character assassination on Paula. Those that knew Paula, those whose lives were touched by Paula in any way, knew that what was being said and implied could not be further from the truth."
This verdict finally vindicates these women and puts their killer where he belongs -- behind bars for at least the next 25 years.
Click here to read how the marriage fell apart
