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Grandmother accused of murder understood law, trial told
by CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051018/BALDWINMET18/TPNational/Toronto
TORONTO
Elva Bottineau may once have been described as
being in the "mentally defective" range, but she could
converse easily in the language of the law with a
former neighbour.
The 54-year-old grandmother, along with her husband,
Norman Kidman, is accused of first-degree murder
in the starvation death of the couple's grandson, five
year-old Jeffrey Baldwin.
Ontario Superior Court Judge David Watt learned
last week that Ms. Bottineau, herself the product of
a sprawling and violent family, was assessed by a
psychologist as being of only "borderline" intelligence.
The assessment, made in 1970 when Ms. Bottineau
was a teenager, followed her conviction for assault
causing bodily harm in the death of her first child, a
five-month-old daughter. But yesterday, her former
neighbour in east-end Toronto, Michelle Kean, told
Judge Watt that as a legal clerk, "I could speak to her
in legal language and she knew what I was talking
about." Ms. Kean said Ms. Bottineau was "always
taking courses," through the mail she believed, and
knew that she worked for a law firm. "She had a good
knowledge [of the law] and was able to converse"
about various branches of it, whether criminal or
corporate.
The young woman moved onto the Bottineau-Kidman street in the spring of 1998, and
said when she met him, Jeffrey was a beautiful child, with "big beautiful black
curls" and big eyes. "He seemed normal to me, overweight if anything."
This is a far cry from how the little boy, not quite 6 when he died on Nov. 30, 2002,
looked in his autopsy picture: It shows a wasted, stunted boy, all bones and sores
and protruding rib cage, with hair turned reddish -- an effect, experts have said, of
chronic starvation.
Once winter came that year, Ms. Kean said, she almost never saw Jeffrey or his
sister, about a year older, who the court has heard were confined for such long
stretches of time to a fetid, unheated room that they regularly soiled themselves and
lived surrounded by their own waste.
The next time she saw the little girl, Ms. Kean said, was the summer before Jeffrey
died, and she was so changed, "I had to ask" if it was her. That same summer, she
also saw the little boy, being carried to an ice cream truck that was on the street.
"I couldn't believe it was the same child," she said. "He looked sick. Very pale.
Very thin."
A few days after Jeffrey's death, she said Ms. Bottineau came calling, in search of a
letter of support in her fight to regain custody of the little boy's three siblings.
"She walked into my house like nothing had happened," Ms. Kean said. "Sort of, 'How's
it going?' ", complaining how the police who answered the 911 call had "messed up her
house." Only when she asked what had happened, she said, did Ms. Bottineau explain
Jeffrey had died of eating lead paint on the baseboards -- something the autopsy and
forensic tests ruled out.
Ms. Kean was the only witness to testify yesterday; the trial continues today.
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I intend to last long enough to put out of business all *****-suckers
and other beneficiaries of the institutionalized slavery and genocide.
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"The army that will defeat terrorism doesn't wear uniforms, or drive
Humvees, or calls in air-strikes. It doesn't have a high command, or
high security, or a high budget. The army that can defeat terrorism
does battle quietly, clearing minefields and vaccinating children. It
undermines military dictatorships and military lobbyists. It subverts
sweatshops and special interests.Where people feel powerless, it
helps them organize for change, and where people are powerful, it
reminds them of their responsibility." ~~~~ Author Unknown ~~~~
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