Duane Edward Taylor has spent most of the past 32 and a half years in prison.
Loose on the streets of Kingston for 11 days in 1981, he raped and murdered a two-year-old girl.
Now 49, he wants out of prison again.
“I don’t have any skills but I like animals,” Taylor told two National Parole Board members at a hearing last week in Saskatoon, Sask., as he appealed for freedom.
Taylor said he should be released to a group home.
He confessed he has no employment plans, no family support and no offer of a placement at any group home.
In prison, he works as a cleaner and gofer, delivering mop heads to different areas of the penitentiary.
He showed no emotion as he acknowledged the murder would have hurt the victim’s family.
He expressed no regret.
Taylor revealed that he was gripped by deviant compulsions as a teenager. He would hunt young girls and boys at parks and playgrounds and molest them. He molested other residents during a several year stint in training schools that began when he was eight.
In 1978, Taylor was sent to prison for four years, after he tried to rape a four-year-old girl in Cobourg. He was 17 when he arrived at Kingston Penitentiary.
He kept pictures of children in his cell. He pored through catalogues looking for images of young girls and boys.
After serving two thirds of the sentence, he was freed from Kingston Pen on mandatory supervision.
“They had to let him go and at that time I think everybody was afraid, positive that he was going to do something,” recalls Jack McKenna, Kingston’s retired Crown attorney, who would later prosecute Taylor for the evil deed he was about to commit.
Taylor’s release was badly mishandled.
Authorities knew he was deeply troubled, and borderline mentally retarded.
He was desperately in need of psychiatric care, yet he left Kingston Pen Aug. 10 and went to a halfway house in Ottawa.
Officials there decided within days that Taylor could not stay at Horizon House. A plan was made to move him to the Whitby psychiatric hospital, but a bed was not immediately available.
Taylor returned to Kingston on Aug. 12. The Salvation Army provided temporary accommodation, until the psychiatric hospital had room for Taylor.
He stayed first at the Sally Ann’s Harbour Light Centre.
On Aug. 18, he was placed at a rooming house at 179 Montreal St. Taylor’s window overlooked a park across the street.
The man who was under orders not to go anywhere near parks, schools and playgrounds had been deposited in a neighbourhood teeming with children.
Two-year-old April Marie Morrison (inset above as an infant) lived three doors away from Taylor, in a clapboard house with her single mother Gladys and two older brothers.
She had blond hair, cut short, and blue eyes. She was just two feet tall.
April liked Captain Kangaroo, the grandfatherly TV character with big pockets and a bright red jacket.
She also loved to play outside on the swings.
***
In the autumn of 1981, newspapers across Canada were filled with lurid details of an unfolding horror.
A serial sex predator was hunting and killing children in southwest British Columbia.
By late August, eight bodies had been found.
Clifford Olson was in custody by then, charged with one murder. The final tally of his known victims would rise to 11.
Eventually, he would be shipped to Kingston Penitentiary, the limestone fortress infamous as a repository for the country’s most vile criminals.
Olson grew to mythical status. He was the country’s boogeyman.
Kingston already had its own monster.
Taylor, still a baby-faced 20 year old when he left Kingston Pen, lasted just three days in the Montreal Street rooming house, before deviant urges overwhelmed him.
On the evening of Aug. 21, he approached April, who was walking along the street.
By 8:30 p.m., when she had not returned home with her older brothers, Colin and John, her worried mother called a friend. Police were called and a frantic neighbourhood search began, aided by dozens of children on bikes with flashlights.
Const. Wes Harpell got a tip about a man in the neighbourhood who had been friendly with children.
Harpell went to 179 Montreal St. and found men, including Taylor, talking outside of one of the rooms.
Harpell asked Taylor if he had heard about the missing girl. Taylor said no.
Harpell asked if they could go into his room for a few words. Taylor said he didn’t have the key. Harpell noticed the tip of a key sticking out of Taylor’s pocket. The officer grabbed it and said, ‘Let’s go.’
Taylor sat awkwardly, half on the bed and half on a chair beside it.
“I saw little spots of blood on the bedding and asked him why it was there,” Harpell told a Whig-Standard reporter in 1992. “He said that his toes bled.
“There was also a wet spot on one side of the chair he had his rear end on. I asked him to move. He refused. So I pulled out my flashlight and shone it between his legs.”
The beam illuminated a tiny foot.
Harpell handcuffed Taylor and made him stand, revealing April’s body.
She had been dead two hours.
While they waited for other police officers to arrive, Taylor made an admission.
“It’s no big thing, I’ve done it before,” he told Harpell flatly.
Det. Chris Barber was off duty, at home, when he got the call to go the Montreal Street rooming house.
A veteran, no-nonsense cop, Barber knew it was his job to get a statement that would stand up in court.
“My recollection of Taylor was we seemed to hit it off really, really well, he seemed very compliant and quiet and gave a statement,” says Barber, who retired in 1995, after 30 years on the force.
He says he’s not good with names.
“But I remember April Marie Morrison,” he says.
Taylor’s appearance, his demeanour and the vileness of his crime were all irrelevant to Barber.
“I don’t care what you look like, I don’t care if you’ve got four … eyes, I don’t care if you’re fat and ugly, I’ve got a job to do.”
He was focused on getting a statement.
“Did I hate Duane Taylor?” he asks. “No, I was totally indifferent to it … what I think of him means nothing, what matters is that I have to get a rapport with him, however disgusting I think he is.”
***
John Morrison (at left with Larry Kehoe, his and April’s father) has no direct memories of the murder of his little sister.
He was just three and a half years old at the time.
He’d been out playing that night with April and his big brother Colin. When they walked home, the boys didn’t really pay attention to whether their little sister was following.
Over the years, John has acquired the story in bits and pieces, including the troubling revelation that April was snatched by Taylor because she was alone.
“If my brother and I were with her and we hadn’t went ahead, but you were so young,” he says. “That’s always in the back of your mind, what if we didn’t go that far ahead, things could be different today.”
Morrison, now a 32-year-old stepdad with his own family, says just driving along Montreal Street reminds him of events.
“It’s never out of your mind, it’s in your mind every day, you have to live with it every day,” he says, sitting in the living room of his Kingston home.
Gladys Morrison died eight years ago. Colin still lives in Kingston, as does April’s biological father, Larry Kehoe, who sits beside his son.
Kehoe is skimming through the written record of Taylor’s parole hearing last week.
“Just reading that, you’d never ever want him out,” Kehoe says.
Morrison says Taylor should never have been in their neighbourhood.
He wants to do what he can to ensure that no other family has to endure what his has gone through.
In the last year, he has called the National Parole Board and has taken a closer interest in Taylor’s progress through the system
“I want to do everything in my power to make sure that this guy never breathes fresh air on his own and if I can prevent it, I will,” he says.
He is troubled to learn that Taylor has left prison on escorted temporary absences.
“That’s kind of scary,” Morrison says.
“I think anytime he gets out everybody around should be aware of who he is or where he’s going,” he says. “I don’t think he should ever get out. I think he should be locked up forever.”
The Morrison family pulled together after the tragedy.
“It was hard on my mom, and seeing my mom going through what she went through was hard but she did it and she was there for us and she told us that all the time,” he says. “She wanted to be with April but she knew she couldn’t because there were the two boys that she still loved and that’s what kept her going.”
***
Det. Chris Barber’s skill, and his calm detachment, paid off.
Taylor confessed to the Kingston investigator, in grim detail, to what he had done.
“I got a totally voluntary, inculpatory statement, very, very, very unusual for first-degree murder,” Barber (inset) says.
Despite the statement, Taylor pleaded not guilty and, until the last minute, seemed destined to drag everyone through a long and painful trial that had been moved to Newmarket.
Taylor pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on the day the trial was set to begin. He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
He returned to Kingston Penitentiary, where he served a considerable portion of his sentence.
Taylor’s confession is reproduced in the written record of his parole hearing.
“I asked her if she would like to go for a walk. She said yes, so I took her to my house. I took her upstairs to my bed. I had intercourse with her. I put it into her rectum. I put it into her vagina. She started to bleed from her rectum, then her vagina. I tried to kill her by punching her in the throat. I was sitting on top of her, face down on the chair. After that I got off and she stayed there. She woke up after about ten minutes and started crying. I sat back down on her head. I stayed on her for about 20 minutes, when I got up she was dead. That’s it.”
Taylor was denied parole.
He is eligible to apply again at any time for release.
[Note: This story also appears today in the Kingston Whig-Standard]
Parole Record
This is the written, internal record of Taylor’s first and only National Parole Board hearing in 29 years:
Related: Cancrime’s coverage of serial child sex killer Clifford Olson
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