The Lionel Desmond inquiry wraps up

Can we ever really know why Lionel Desmond killed his wife, daughter and mother, and then himself? Does that matter? Don’t we know enough now about all that went wrong in the years and months leading up to the murder-suicide to begin demanding change on all fronts? Was Cpl. Lionel Desmond a victim of a […]

Systemic racism and the Desmond murder-suicide

The inquiry looking into the 2017 murder-suicide of the Desmond family has been examining the roles played by PTSD and domestic violence in those horrific events. Last week, the inquiry heard from a panel of experts about the impact of systemic racism. In the early evening hours of January 3, 2017, in remote Upper Big […]

‘The rest is for the seagulls’

We may never know all the complex factors that led Lionel Desmond to murder his wife and family, and then kill himself. But we’re learning. It’s complicated. On the evening of Jan. 3, 2017, Lionel Desmond, a 32-year-old former Canadian soldier, murdered his 31-year-old wife, Shanna, their 10-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, and his 52-year-old mother, Brenda, […]

Complicated legacies

Was Lionel Desmond a victim of his war demons? Or was he a villain, a perpetrator of domestic violence who murdered his own family? Or both? We may never know. “Speak not ill of the dead man.” Spartacus “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Shakespeare Legacies have always been […]

The Desmond file: belatedly untangling the threads that led to a murder-suicide

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner January 2, 2018. One year ago tomorrow, on January 3, 2017, 33-year-old Lionel Desmond parked his car on a logging road in Upper Big Tracadie, NS, just as the sun was setting. Armed with two rifles, including an SKS semi-automatic Soviet military weapon he’d bought a few days earlier […]

And the victim would be… fairness

In the third last paragraph of his 2010 decision finding Nicole Ryan not guilty of hiring a hit man to kill her abusive husband, Justice David Farrar notes he was “struck” by the fact the husband “did not take the stand to give evidence with respect to any of the assertions that were made against […]