Hell is too good

By MIKE STROBEL -- For the Toronto Sun - Fri, June 18, 2004

Rot in Hell, you son of a bitch ...

"Guilty!" Michael Briere answers the judge. He is too loud. Like he's proud to get it off his chest.

A sob comes, 15 paces to his right, where Maria Jones sits surrounded by family.

She is wearing a white knit cap, the one Holly wore.

The whole city is here, really, in cavernous room 6-1 at Superior Court on University Ave., at least in spirit.

No case has cut Toronto deeper, even as hardened to violence as we have become.

Michael Briere has decided to be a sport, to spare us more grief, to spare Holly's family.

So, in he walks, hands cuffed behind him, cops around him. A woodchuck of a man, chubby and hunched. His suit is single breasted and olive, his tie blue.

He wears glasses you'd expect on a software programmer, which he is, or was.

The cops unbind him.

He fiddles with his stubby ponytail a while.

He stares at a point between the dock and Justice David Watt.

And we descend into a tale of perversion beyond belief.

Some of it you have known for a year. How Holly Jones, 10, disappeared, walking from a friend's to her home on Sterling Rd. in the west end. The panic. The Amber Alert. The search. Parts of her body found on the lakeshore.

Except her legs. They never found her legs.

Now we know. Michael Briere kept them in the fridge overnight after scattering the rest of her in bags.

It is, I think, the most unsettling chapter in the book of horrors read in court by the Crown yesterday.

It is gruesome, of course, but there is gruesome aplenty. Read some of the accounts elsewhere in our coverage.

Maybe it is that Briere's account of the legs reads so matter of factly. Maybe it is that Maria Jones and George Stonehouse can never bury all of their little girl.

Anyway, we hear how the stress of abducting, assaulting, strangling, cutting up a little girl, then disposing of most of her body makes for a terrible next day at work for Briere.

"I was really shaken by it," Briere will tell police. A co-worker tells him he looks like a ghost. Poor fellow.

Next day was garbage day. "I thought, 'I will just put the legs in the garbage.' " Which he did, after cutting them up.

"And I couldn't fall asleep, and I stayed up until about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, until the garbage truck finally came and picked them up. And then, that was that."

I cannot imagine what Maria Jones is thinking as such details are read out in court.

Holly's dad is not here, unsure whether he could control his anger at first sight of his daughter's killer.

Maria and the family arrive after Briere takes his seat.

So she does not have to look at him. And she never does. She weeps silently, mostly. Once or twice we can hear her.

Just before Briere stands to apologize, she leaves, navy suit and white platforms flashing up an aisle. She returns in 10 minutes, when he is done. She still does not look at him.

The apology is as nauseating as the rest. Briere's voice breaks in all the right places.

"What I did was absolutely wrong." Really?

He says he is sorry, "ashamed beyond belief."

Remorse, remorse. Remorse? You're just sorry you got caught, pal.

"There seems no bottom in the depravity pool, nor any limit to the vulnerability of our children," says Justice Watt.

"Take Mr. Briere away," he says, finally. And that is that.

They might be right, that child pornography led to this. Or that it at least was a trigger. Shrinks and sociologists can debate that. If Holly's death leads to tougher penalties for kiddie porn, no one will complain.

But I look at that creep in the dock and see the kind of malevolence no shrink or sociologist could ever touch.

Yet he looks like any one of us. He could be a nerd, a techie, a coach, the guy at the next desk.

That is what makes your skin crawl. That is what makes him so evil.

... Hell? Hell is too good.