BOB MITCHELL
Jun. 15, 2005.
The
nightmare for Joe DiPalma began on Sept.21, 1982.
A daycare worker called to tell him his wife, Lee Marie, hadn't picked up their son from the centre. He knew immediately something terrible had happened.
Lindley Charles McArthur had turned 21 the day he kidnapped Lee Marie and later boasted the killing was a birthday present to himself.
Now, DiPalma is determined that "this sick, sadistic bastard" will spend the rest of his life in prison.
"Nobody will ever be safe if he ever gets out," said DiPalma, 54.
Tomorrow, DiPalma will face the convicted killer of his first wife at Warkworth Penitentiary near Campbellford, Ont., where he will tell the National Parole Board why McArthur, who is seeking early parole, should never be allowed outside of prison.
Lee Marie was just 30 when McArthur abducted her from a Barrie shopping mall, just minutes after she had dropped off her 3-year-old son Anthony at the YMCA daycare.
At McArthur's trial, the jury heard that he dragged Lee Marie, a part-time nurse, into a truck and raped her twice. He strangled her with her purse strap, and then raped her dead body two more times.
It was later learned that McArthur had stalked Lee Marie for about a week before abducting her.
While these horrific details bring back painful memories, DiPalma said the public needs to know the facts that emerged during the trial so they can understand why McArthur should never be let free.
"He drank my wife's blood after he killed her," said DiPalma, who remarried 12 years ago. "After he brutally killed Lee, he went looking for our son to kill him too. ... In his sick mind he thought our 3-year-old child could identify him. He searched for him for two days."
Sentenced to life in prison with no parole for a minimum 25 years after a highly publicized trial in Orangeville in 1984, McArthur, now 43, is making a bid for early parole under the "faint hope" clause of the Canadian criminal code. Under the clause, inmates serving life sentences can, after serving 15 years, apply to reduce the number of additional years they must serve before being eligible to apply for parole.
DiPalma and his son Anthony, now 25, will be at the parole board hearing in person to oppose the application. Others, such as retired OPP officer John Crowe, an investigator who discovered Lee Marie's remains, will submit a written statement to the parole board.
For many years, DiPalma tried to spare Anthony the details of his mother's death. In fact, for a long time, his son thought his mother had died in a car crash. But he discovered the truth when a high school friend showed him a book by crime writer Max Haines that contained a story about his mother's murder.
"Many times I wanted to tell him, but he was such a happy kid growing up," DiPalma said. "I just couldn't find the right time to explain what really happened to his mother."
Lee Marie's body had lain undiscovered for eight months in a wooded conservation area near Mansfield — about 38 kilometres south of Barrie.
"We had hundreds of volunteers, friends and co-workers looking for her, but we never found her," DiPalma said.
Mushroom pickers found Lee Marie's dismembered skeletal remains on May 15, 1983. She was identified through dental records, the jury heard.
McArthur was serving time in a Parry Sound jail for sexually assaulting a young girl when the OPP arrested him in September 1983 after 12 prisoners came forward with information that he had bragged about the slaying when he was being detained at the Metro West Detention Centre in Toronto.
One prisoner testified that McArthur told him "how sweet" her blood tasted when he bit Lee Marie's midsection.
"I don't think he would have been convicted without their testimony because there wasn't DNA testing back then," DiPalma said.
Defence lawyer Noel Bates told the jury that McArthur only told inmates he killed Lee Marie because he didn't want them to know he was a sex offender, the lowest of the low among prisoners.
At McArthur's trial, a forensic expert testified there was no direct evidence linking him to the murder.
But the jury decided that, based on testimony from the jail informants, McArthur knew more than a dozen details about the homicide only the killer could have known. The court heard that her wrists were tied with shoelaces from her running shoes, that a rag was stuffed into her mouth, and that he had stepped on her face after she fought with her attacker inside the truck used for the abduction.
During his trial, McArthur claimed that he had an accomplice and that a Barrie police officer killed Lee Marie.
"He made up the stories," DiPalma said. "It shows the kind of lies that he was capable of telling and is still capable of telling. He's very good at it."
On June 14, 1984, the jury convicted McArthur of first-degree murder. An Ontario Court of Appeal in 1989 upheld his conviction. Another bid for early release in November 2002 was rejected.
"Look, I understand the public outcry over Karla Homolka getting out," said DiPalma, referring to the release next month of the convicted killer. "But there are 100 guys just like McArthur who are trying to get out but who desperately have to remain behind bars.
"Instead of the government spending all kinds of money trying to keep Homolka in check, they should be spending money on making sure guys like McArthur stay right where he is."
A little apprehensive about seeing his wife's killer face to face, Joe DiPalma, who lives in the Toronto area, says it would probably be "tougher" for him not to attend.
"I have a new family now, but I think about what happened to Lee all the time," he said.
"It's always with me."
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