By Kenyon Wallace and Elspeth Lodge

Jurors wept Monday as they convicted a Barrie, Ont., mother of two counts of first-degree murder for drowning her two little girls in the family bathtub four years ago.

Elaine Campione, 35, wept, too, as she learned how she will likely spend the next 25 years of her life: behind bars.
Looking pale, thin and exhausted, Campione hunched forward as she cried, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders onto her baby-blue collared shirt.

“The circumstances of this case are undeniably and inordinately tragic,” Judge Alfred Stong told the crowded courtroom. “One can only hope that they do not reflect, even at their most extreme, a direction of our society.”

A few women on the jury wiped tears from their eyes as Justice Stong read the verdict after nearly seven days of deliberations, while Ms. Campione’s parents, sitting in the front row, were visibly shaken at the news. They have been by their daughter’s side the whole trial, forming a close relationship with her defenders, waiting patiently to hear what fate awaited their child.

Defence lawyer Mary Cremer described her client, who had been treated for depression, as a person “ravaged by mental illness.”

“This was an illness that she never asked to get,” she told reporters after the verdict. “It was an illness that unfortunately overtook her to the point where she just became sicker and sicker and sicker.”

In the year before she killed 3-year-old Serena and 19-month-old Sophia, Campione had been hospitalized three times for various psychiatric breakdowns. She tried to kill herself. She believed she was being followed by men who wanted to kill her. She thought aliens were visiting earth. She believed red symbolized blood and forbade Serena from touching anything of that colour.

During the trial, the jury heard how Campione wrote in a journal that she was sexually abused as a child in her native New Brunswick by a man who owned a farm where she did chores.

“It is more than disconcerting to think that if Campione had not been so abused, so used and discarded as a person, her two daughters could still be alive,” Judge Stong said.

The jury put the most stock in the Crown’s submission blaming Campione’s intense hatred for her estranged and allegedly abusive husband, Leo Campione. The drownings came shortly before she was to head to family court for a custody hearing.

She held them under the water in the bathtub of her Coulter Street apartment in Barrie. She then dressed them in pajamas, lay them down on her bed and wove rosary beads through their cold, lifeless hands. She called police two days later.

A home video, which Campione filmed the night she killed her children, shows a vindictive, angry woman. The footage begins with baby Sophia playing in the bathtub, laughing, smiling. Cut to an hour later, and the children are dead.
“Are you happy now?” Campione spews at the camera in a message intended for her husband. “You can visit them in their caskets.”

Campione will be formally sentenced on Wednesday, when her husband is expected to read a victim impact statement to the court. The judge said the Ministry of the Attorney General will be responsible for covering the cost of any counselling jury members need after the two-month trial.

Rosemary Gartner, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, Monday likened the verdict to others in similar murder cases.

“In cases of mothers killing their kids, juries tend to have extreme emotional reactions. One reaction is that anybody who does something like this is obviously a bit crazy and deserves sympathy. The other side says, well, this is clearly the devil,” said Prof. Gartner.

The former reaction is a legal phenomenon known as “jury nullification,” where a jury will take into account mitigating factors, such as mental illness, or will even take pity on a young mother, and hand out a reduced sentence, as in the case of Andrea Yates, a Houston, Texas, mother who drowned her five children in her home’s bathtub in June 2001.

Ms. Yates was originally convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison, but a jury overturned the verdict on appeal in 2006, ruling she was not guilty by reason of insanity.

In 2008, an Ontario Superior Court jury found Xuan Linda Peng guilty of second-degree murder for drowning her 4-year-old daughter Scarlett in the bathtub of her family’s Toronto home four years earlier. She had originally been charged with first-degree murder.

BARRIE — The jury deliberating the fate of a Barrie woman who drowned her two young daughters will continue their deliberations for a fifth day today.

Elaine Campione, 35, is on trial in Ontario Superior Court, on two counts of first-degree murder. Her lawyer has admitted the 35-year-old woman caused the death of her children, three-year-old Serena Campione and her 19-month-old sister Sophia, in October 2006, but argues Ms. Campione is not criminally responsible by reason of a mental disorder.

Yesterday, the jury asked for a definition of ‘‘morally wrong,” a phrase Justice Alfred Stong had used in his instructions before their deliberations. He read them the Canadian Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘‘moral.’’

The jury also asked for a definition and review of ‘‘balance of probabilities,’’ another phrase from his instructions. He repeated what he had told them earlier, that the defence needs to prove Ms. Campione was not criminally responsible on a simple ‘‘balance of probabilities,’’ rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Ms. Campione looked pale and solemn, her eyes cast downward, almost closed, as the judge and lawyers spoke yesterday. She wore a pink-collared shirt and black coat, sitting nearly still.

Her parents and sister-in-law have been waiting calmly outside the courtroom with no news for three days now.

In the morning, Ms. Campione’s mother was asked, ‘‘Do you think there will be a verdict today?”

She shook her head, and said simply: ‘‘I don’t know.’’

Ms. Campione was 31 when she called 911 early in the morning to say she had drowned her two daughters in the bathtub of her low-rent apartment.

Ms. Campione and her former husband, Leonardo Campione, had been locked in a bitter custody battle over their daughters. Their four-year relationship ended with Ms. Campione accusing her husband of years of abuse and threatening to flee with the girls to her native New Brunswick. The two were set to appear in family court a day after Ms. Campione phoned to say she had killed her daughters.

Her lawyer, Mary Cremer, argued that her client was a loving mother who struggled with mental illness.

The Crown worked to paint Ms. Campione as a woman consumed with hatred for her former husband, who drowned her children as a final act of revenge.

A two-hour videotape of the girls, allegedly filmed by their mother on the day they died, was played in court earlier in the trial. The girls were seen in frilly clothing and then again in a bubble bath. Ms. Campione was heard at one point talking about the cleanliness of her apartment.

The camera was shut off. When the videotape resumed, the jury saw Ms. Campione crying and stating that her daughters were now in heaven. She was also heard making critical comments about her former husband, calling him “evil” and blaming him for not permitting her to leave Ontario with the children.

National Post

Police have laid 260 firearm-related charges against a 35-year-old Toronto man after uncovering a stash of guns and ammunition believed to be destined for “drug dealers and gangsters.”

Officers from the firearm and gang task force and from the 14 Division major crime unit arrested Eric Reid on Thursday on outstanding warrants. Police say he was in possession of three replica handguns at the time.

The following day police searched a storage facility in the Greensboro Drive and Kipling Avenue area, where they recovered 13 long guns, 22 handguns, three extra-capacity magazines and 5,581 rounds of ammunition.

Another raid on Saturday produced two handguns and 181 rounds of ammunition at a home in Richmond Hill.

Police believe that all of the guns were obtained during two break-and-enters in the Durham region between Oct. 26 and Oct., 27. One of the victims has been charged by Durham Regional Police with careless storage of firearms, which were left in a Port Perry storage unit.

Six handguns reported stolen have yet to be recovered, though police believe they are on the streets of Toronto.

Among the charges laid against Mr. Reid are: possession of a prohibited firearm with ammunition, possession of a firearm knowing its possession is unauthorized, trafficking in firearms, unauthorized possession of a prohibited device and possession of firearm obtained by the commission of an offence.

He is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday, at 2201 Finch Avenue West, at 10 a.m.

National Post