Free-fall into horror

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This article was published 16/07/2011 (5378 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MONTREAL — It was her annual girls’ weekend and Isabelle Gaston had spent the day on the slopes of Le Massif ski resort near Quebec City, shaking off some of the stress accumulated over the past month during the rapid disintegration of her six-year marriage to cardiologist Guy Turcotte.

Just the day before, as she was leaving Prevost, Que., for her weekend escape, the two had a particularly nasty phone conversation in which Turcotte laced into Gaston for changing the locks on the family’s home.

“You want war? You’ll have war!” he shouted.

“Oh my God,” Gaston thought, shocked by the uncharacteristic anger in his voice. “I’ve never heard him so angry.”

She tried calling him back several times to smooth things over but got only his voice mail.

She thought of going to his newly rented home in nearby Piedmont, Que., but realized she didn’t know the address.

As she drove towards Quebec City on the evening of Feb. 20, 2009, she continued to call Turcotte without ever reaching him.

Guy Turcotte had just picked up his children from school and daycare. He shoved a Marie-Mai album into the car’s CD player and let the familiar children’s songs calm his frayed nerves.

His wife had no right to change those locks since he was still part owner of the property, he thought angrily, as he drove toward the Piedmont house he’d rented.

For almost four months, since October 2008, Gaston had been seeing Turcotte’s friend and personal trainer, Martin Huot. Turcotte had learned about the liaison when Huot’s wife discovered romantic emails exchanged between the two and gave them to Turcotte.

How could they? The two couples — Gaston and Turcotte, Huot and Patricia Giroux — used to dine together at least once a week, took trips together and would ski or hike as a group.

Devastated, Turcotte decided not to let the discovery ruin a family vacation to Mexico — a trip planned for the end of January on which the children, Olivier, 5, and Anne-Sophie, 3, had their hearts set.

But while in Cancun, Gaston learned through an email from her lover that Turcotte knew everything. The marriage was over.

The day after the family returned home, Turcotte found a house for rent in Piedmont and moved out the following day, Jan. 26, 2009.

Now, as Turcotte drove there with his children, he thought Huot seemed to be taking his place as father, too.

Huot had gone with the children to the Quebec Winter Carnival — a special event Turcotte remembered fondly from his childhood and had wanted to share with his own children.

Neighbours told him Huot seemed to have moved in the back door as Turcotte left through the front.

Yes, he’d lost his temper once and slugged Huot in the face when he found him in the Prevost home one morning, but did he have to spend so much time at the house so soon after Turcotte had moved out?

And with the separation, he’d lost half the time he spent with his children, who were now strapped in their car seats, cheerfully singing along to their favourite singer.

The two begged their father to stop by the video store on the way home, and Turcotte veered into Video Zone’s parking lot.

A little after 4 p.m., the store’s surveillance camera captured what turned out to be the final image of the children — Olivier and Anne-Sophie, still bundled in their winter coats, snow pants, hats and mittens, waddling like a couple of carefree penguins in the aisles, trying to agree on which film to rent.

Turcotte paid with his credit card, throwing a bag of chips on the counter alongside the movies.

Once home, Turcotte made spaghetti for supper, topping it with tomato sauce from a jar. As they ate, Caillou played in the DVD player.

Turcotte couldn’t hide his tears from the children.

Around 6 p.m., he put them to bed upstairs, then sat down at the dining room table with his laptop and began opening a series of romantic emails Gaston and Huot had sent each other during the family’s Mexican vacation.

“It’s funny, but I often imagine scenarios about our new relationship and what will be completely new for me… a family,” Huot wrote, adding that Gaston was the treasure of his life.

Around 7 p.m., Turcotte started searching the Internet for ways to kill himself.

——

Early next morning, Feb. 21, 2009, a worried and sleep-deprived Marguerite Fournier called her son.

There was no answer.

The night before, she’d phoned Turcotte about 8:30 p.m., worried because he hadn’t been in touch with her that week. The two spoke for about an hour, and Fournier noticed her son’s voice was quiet, his words slurred. He sounded like someone who had been drinking.

Turcotte told his mother he loved her, something he never did. “Tell Dad I love him, too,” he said. He named all five of his siblings and said he loved them as well.

Fournier remembered hearing somewhere that people who want to kill themselves often make a point of telling people they love them. Fear churned her stomach.

No, Guy, she told him. There is always a solution.

He told her he was sorry that a trip they’d taken to Whistler, B.C. the previous summer with Gaston and the children hadn’t gone well — the tension between the couple had been palpable in the cottage they were all sharing.

Turcotte broke down on the phone. He told his mother Gaston had a new boyfriend and that the past years in the marriage had been hell.

“They did it in my house, in my bed,” he told his mother, over and over.

Fournier tried to comfort the third of her six children by telling him to get some rest. In the morning, she said, things would seem better.

But the conversation had left her feeling uneasy.

When her husband, Real Turcotte, got home at 11:30 p.m. she pleaded with him to immediately make the trek from their home in St-Hubert on the South Shore to Piedmont in the Laurentians. At this hour, he said, there was no point. “We’ll call first thing in the morning.”

Early Saturday, the two drove north as a light snow fell. When they arrived at their son’s rented house, there were no tracks in the fresh snow. A light was on in the upstairs bedroom and the living room blinds were closed. They rang the doorbell. No one answered. They knocked but got no response.

Finally, Fournier called 911 and calmly told the dispatcher that her 36-year-old son was in a locked house with his two children.

“He just separated and told me last night he was destroyed,” she said, her voice breaking as she began to cry.

“We need help. Can you please come?”

Quebec provincial police officers Patrick Bigras and Marc-Antoine Bigue responded to the 911 call. They arrived at Turcotte’s Piedmont home just after 11 a.m. They got into the house through a window, then climbed the stairs to the bedroom with their guns drawn, yelling “Police! Police! Is anyone here?”

The scene they discovered forced Bigras, an officer with 12 years’ experience, to take a 21/2-month leave of absence to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Olivier lay on his double bed, his nude torso mutilated with 27 stab wounds. Anne-Sophie, on her single bed in the adjacent bedroom, wore only her panties, her tiny body torn by 19 stab wounds.

——

The group of about a dozen women at Le Massif had enjoyed a pre-dinner drink and were slowly drifting out into the cold night to head to a restaurant.

Around 7 p.m., Gaston, who doesn’t drink and was the group’s designated driver, glanced at her seldom-used cellphone and noticed several missed calls from her sister. Always the calm one in the family, her sister, 19 years her senior, had left frantic messages for Gaston to call her.

“Something has happened,” she told Gaston when they finally spoke.

“Is it Guy?” Gaston asked.

“No. I can’t tell you,” she said. “You have to speak to the police officer.”

Then there was a male voice on the line asking Gaston where she was.

“I’m not telling you unless you tell me what happened,” she replied to the police officer. “Listen, I work in emergency; I know how it works. Tell me.”

Then she asked the one question she didn’t really want an answer to.

“Are my children dead?”

Yes.

Gaston screamed so loud and for so long, her voice was hoarse for days.

——

The weekend after Olivier and Anne-Sophie were killed, family and friends streamed through the Complexe Funeraire des Trembles in Pointe aux Trembles to pay their final respects to the children and to offer their condolences to Gaston.

Dozens of holiday photos, baby shoes, toys and carefully maintained baby books were displayed throughout three rooms of the funeral home.

Gaston spent hours alone there with the children, holding them. She did not want to say goodbye when the time came for their funeral on March 2 and the lids of their caskets were closed for the last time.

While his wife planned their children’s funeral, Turcotte, who was being detained at the Philippe Pinel Institute after being treated at Montreal’s Sacre Coeur Hospital for methanol poisoning, was getting his affairs in order.

He refused to pay for the children’s funeral. He instructed his parents to withdraw the remaining $1,200 from the bank account he shared with Gaston. He drew up a detailed list of items he wanted retrieved from the Piedmont home, including a bag of potatoes. He removed Gaston as beneficiary of his life insurance and from his will.

Turcotte asked his parents to reclaim a gift certificate to a spa and tickets to a Marie-Mai concert he’d given Gaston for Christmas. He said someone in his own family should enjoy them, not her.

Money was Turcotte’s main concern. He needed to pay a team of lawyers for his criminal defence, divorce, dismissal from the College of Physicians and Surgeons and to halt the purchase of the house he bought days before killing his children.

An email Turcotte had sent Gaston Feb. 11 — a little more than a week before the killings — now haunted her.

“My pain is so intense that I can’t stand the thought of Martin (Huot) taking the life that I built and that belongs to me,” he wrote. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want war, but there’s a limit to what I can endure.”

A few months later, on May 17, 2009, a deeply depressed Gaston decided she couldn’t live without her children. She wanted to kill herself, but at the same time she wanted to know one thing: Why had he done it?

Against police advice, Gaston called the Pinel Institute. To her surprise, she was transferred directly to Turcotte.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” Turcotte said when he heard her voice. “What do you want? I’ll give it to you.”

“Guy,” Gaston said. “The children. I love them more than I love myself.”

“Me, too,” Turcotte said, his voice heavy with sadness.

Gaston told him she didn’t want to be separated from the children and was thinking of committing suicide. Turcotte said that when he’d tried to kill himself, he wasn’t able to find the courage to go through with it.

——

Turcotte’s trial ended July 5, two-and-a-half years after the killings, when a jury found him not criminally responsible because of his mental state at the time. He remains locked up at the Philippe Pinel Institute waiting for a psychiatric panel to see him and determine whether he should serve time or be freed.

 

— Montreal Gazette