The Right Thing
With Carl locked away in Barton Street jail, Forgan, Thomas, and Korol met to review the details of Carl’s confession that the informant had provided through the RCMP. Korol read the points aloud to the others: male and female victims; baseball bat weapon; white van outside the apartment; a fridge blocked the apartment door. Carl had to move it out of the way.
Mike Thomas, unique among the three detectives, knew crime scene details from both the McLean and Clark/Del Sordo murders. He spoke up. “Pardon me, what was that about the fridge?” he asked.
He knew that the fridge behind the door had been in the Sandbar apartment, not Charlisa’s place. “It’s the same guy; the killer is mixing details of both homicides into one story,” Thomas said.
They had to find the informant, get his statement on the record, and get him to testify in court. Korol kept pressuring the RCMP: they needed the name. The RCMP officials refused; a confidential informant could not be named. Korol was bitter. It wasn’t just about getting another witness in line. If the informant’s identity remained a secret, the defence would surely point at the tipster as an alternative suspect once the case came to court. The defence would raise the issue of who had intimate knowledge of the double homicide. Was it Carl Hall? Or was it the guy who ratted him out? Maybe the guy assisted in the murders. Maybe he was the killer and was framing Carl. Korol knew that they couldn’t risk that; he knew they had to find the informant.
“A guy like Hall has to confess to someone when he’s at his lowest point,” Korol said.
In his car-ride interview from Penetang, Carl had mentioned attending Holmes House for rehab. On March 28 Forgan, Thomas, and Korol checked out a car and headed to Simcoe. They had a search warrant for the rehab centre, to check records to see if Carl had been treated there. Maybe they could learn who he had confided in — a counsellor, perhaps. Before executing the warrant, they spoke informally with the manager to try and glean some information quickly. The detectives said they were investigating a homicide case involving a man named Carl Hall.
“Carl? I remember him being here,” the manager said. “He admitted to a resident named Shane Mosher that he murdered two people.”
The three cops stood there, stunned at first. There are those rare moments in homicide where you have a Hollywood “x marks the spot” moment, when time seems to stand still. The detectives looked at each other and smiled. The informant. Knew it. Finally, Forgan spoke. “Well, that’s why we’re here,” he said cheerfully.
The knock on the door at a house in Brantford came later that day. A man answered. Slim, dark hair, boyish face.
Shane looked at the three men in suits, all of them clean cut; he could smell their cologne. “I bet you guys are from Hamilton,” Shane said. “I figured you’d show up one day.”
He agreed to come to the Brantford police station for an interview. He told Forgan he had passed along Carl’s confession several months earlier, to an uncle of his named Don Scott, a retired RCMP officer. Shane had asked that his name be kept confidential; his uncle assured him it would.
Forgan asked him if he wished to have a lawyer present for the interview. Shane thought that he would like that at first, then changed his mind. He was now ready to jump in with both feet. And he had sensed from that moment in Holmes House, when he knew he would inform on Carl, that it would go like this. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of having his name out there, but knew it was probably inevitable. Still, while relieved to hear that Carl was in custody, he was fearful, if Carl was released or found not guilty in court, that he’d be coming after Shane and his family. When the detectives told him that Carl had been taken into custody for a charge in Brantford, fear rippled through him. He wondered if Carl had ended up in Brantford looking for him, to exact payback.
Shane told Don Forgan everything Carl had confessed to him. As he spoke the goosebumps returned; Shane shook with the memory of that night. He was going to be an effective witness on the stand, Forgan reflected. The detectives dropped Shane off at his home. Warren Korol turned to Shane’s wife, Shannon. “You should be proud of your husband,” he said. “He did the right thing.”
Forgan now tightened the screws on the case. He found a man living in Toronto named Paul, who had been a previous tenant at 781 King East, Charlisa’s apartment. Carl’s confession to Shane had suggested that Carl killed Pat and Charlisa out of mistaken identity — that he intended to get payback on a drug dealer. The man named Paul admitted he had indeed known Carl and sold him drugs. There had been a dispute between the two.
Was it enough to offer a motive? Perhaps it was, given that Carl was a man prone to anger and violence, and that he was routinely high on crack for days at a time. And Forgan now knew, through Shane, that Carl was feeling anger the weekend of the double murder for not being allowed to see his daughter on Father’s Day.
On April 16, 2002, Carl Hall was charged with the murder of Charlisa Clark and Pat Del Sordo. Before the news was released to the media, Forgan informed the families. When he met with Charlisa’s mother, Sue Ross, she wept, feeling pain and regret. The murders, she now knew, were a random act. Her Char had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She couldn’t help but reflect that if Sue had helped find Char a different apartment than the one on King East, her girl would be alive. Don’t do that to yourself, others told Sue. She could not have known what would happen. Yes, yes, of course, Sue knew all that, the logic of it, but it was no good. She had failed to protect Char. The guilt would not fade; Sue could not stop retracing her steps, as though doing so might retroactively turn back time and alter Charlisa’s fate. Why that apartment, of all the places in the city? For that matter, why did Sue even have to get remarried — if she hadn’t, maybe she would have lived with Char, in a nice house, and she’d still be alive.
A week after the arrest, Forgan came by Sue’s house for Eugene’s fifth birthday party. The boy now knew that the bad man was in jail. He cheered when he heard the news. It was, Eugene thought, the best birthday present ever.