At about 8:30 on the evening of Thursday, June 10, 1982, Dale Burgess, 18, heard screams coming from Room 20 of a rooming house at 81 Charles Street East. Visitors were leaving his own room at the time. The screams were high-pitched, he testified, and mixed with them were words like “no,” “stop” and “help.”
Burgess and a man known as Cody went to the door. Cody knocked and asked, “Is everything all right?” Someone inside answered, “Everything is cool.” Cody went downstairs. Bradley VanSickle testified that Cody told him a fight was taking place on the second floor. VanSickle told him to “check it out,” and Cody came back about five minutes later to say there appeared to be a fight going on.
VanSickle and Steven Deeks went up. Janice Kubilinski, the superintendent, was standing near the door with other tenants. She knocked and said, “Kenny, are you all right?” A voice she had not heard before answered, “We’re busy.” She testified that it was “sort of muffled, very controlled, and very low.” Kenneth Jones, she said, had a high-pitched voice.
VanSickle told Deeks it was not Jones’s voice and asked him to kick in the door. Deeks did. Inside they found Jones nude on the floor, and Deeks pulled a rag from his mouth. Pierre Valley sat just inside the doorway with his head on his knees. VanSickle described him as “shaking like a leaf.” Valley said Jones had tried to sexually assault him. VanSickle called him a liar.
Constable Alex Poole arrived at 9 p.m. He testified that Valley was huddled against a wall in the fetal position. When police helped him up, Valley said, “I didn’t mean to do it. I guess I went too far. He tried to rape me.” Police arrested him. A long knife in a beige sheath lay on the bed, partly under a cushion, and Valley acknowledged it was the one he used. In his pockets were $10.25 and $348. The $348 had traces of blood on it.
Jones, 27, was taken to Wellesley Hospital and could not be revived. The Toronto Star reported on June 11 that he was Metro’s 22nd homicide victim of 1982 and that Valley, 26, of no fixed address, was charged with second-degree murder. Kubilinski told the paper that Jones was an unemployed waiter who lived on welfare and had once been superintendent of the building. She said he “kept pretty much to himself” and was “a perfect tenant.”
Police searched the room. A suitcase and a gym bag held 14 ounces of marijuana worth about $1,500. A bottle in Jones’s jeans held LSD. The refrigerator held four boxes of nandrolone decanoate, a sex hormone, and the freezer held two bottles of isobutyl nitrite, an inhalant of the kind known as poppers. The suitcase also held a locker pass for a steam bath used by homosexuals and magazines, two of which defence counsel later described as almost exclusively concerned with “sadomasochistic homosexual sexual activity.” An attaché case held handcuffs like those police use.
Dr. Hans Sepp, the pathologist, found a stab wound on the right side of Jones’s neck that severed the main artery and caused his death. A second wound, in the lower right chest, penetrated the liver. There was a wound on the left forearm, and there were cuts to the fingers and right thumb that Sepp called defensive-type. Jones wore a black leather belt with metal studs buckled around his genitals. The Star reported at least six stab wounds when the trial opened and eight when it ended.
At 10:06 that night, Staff Sergeant Jackson and Sergeant Dicks of the homicide squad interviewed Valley. He told them he and Jones had gone to Jones’s room and smoked marijuana, and that Jones then took off his clothes and grabbed him in the crotch. Jackson asked whether Jones had been trying to harm him physically. “No, he kept making a pass at me,” Valley said. Jackson asked, “Are you a homosexual, Pierre?” Valley said, “Yes I am.” Jackson asked whether he knew Jones was one. “Yes.” Jackson then asked, “Why did you object to him making a pass?” Valley did not reply.
In a typed statement, Valley said he had been panhandling on Yonge Street and knew Jones hung around the Parkside Tavern. Jones told him to wait until he had sold “six more dimes,” which Valley explained meant six ten-dollar bags of marijuana. Valley said he took Jones’s money from his jeans “just before I tried to go through the door.”
Valley’s trial opened in Ontario Supreme Court in January 1984 before Mr. Justice Douglas Carruthers and a jury. Valley, 28, pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder. Assistant Crown attorney Todd Archibald said Valley met Jones at a Yonge Street bar, that both men were known to be homosexuals, and that Jones had been selling $10 bags of marijuana there. The Crown’s position was that Valley tried to steal money and possibly marijuana from Jones and killed him when Jones resisted. The Star’s report of the first day of testimony carried a headline that called Jones a “drug dealer” who “tried to rape him” and called Valley a “drifter.” In its text, the Star called the rooming house a “flop house.”
Jackson, who led the investigation, saw no sign of a struggle in the room, the Court of Appeal recorded. Bottles and glasses on a table near the blood on the floor had not been overturned. No officer noticed an injury on Valley. A sergeant who photographed him at about 3 a.m. saw slight reddening below the throat and a scratch or bruise about three inches long across the ribs.
Dianne Martin defended Valley, arguing self-defence and provocation. She put to Sepp that Jones might have been taking sex hormones or steroids. Sepp said there was no sign of it.
Valley testified on Monday, January 16. He said he met Jones at the Parkside Tavern in March 1982 and bought marijuana from him. He had been to Jones’s room two or three times to smoke it. There had been no sexual relationship. On June 10, he said, Jones gave him $10 and invited him back. In the room they smoked marijuana. Jones said he had an appointment, undressed, put a towel around himself and went to wash. When he returned, Valley said, he grabbed Valley’s crotch, called him names and kept saying, “I want your ass.” Valley took that to mean rape.
Jones blocked the door and punched him in the ribs. “He wanted to rape me. I was getting madder, I was scared,” Valley told the jury. He fell onto the bed and Jones jumped on him. They rolled onto the floor. Jones looked toward the refrigerator, where the knife was, and Valley reached it first. He told Jones to stay back, and Jones lunged. “The next thing I remember I was standing over him with the knife and he was lying on the floor.” Valley said he wiped the knife, took off his shirt to try to stop the bleeding, put on Jones’s shirt and took the money from Jones’s jeans, meaning to run. He said the rag in Jones’s mouth was his own shirt sleeve, put there to keep Jones from “gagging on his blood.” He could not explain how blood got on the bed.
Archibald asked Valley about his sexuality. Valley said he was bisexual and had had sexual relationships with other men, never with Jones.
Dr. Fred Jensen, a psychiatrist at the Clarke Institute, testified on January 18 that Valley had no mental illness or personality disorder but still harboured anger over his foster father forcing him to perform oral sex when he was 12. Jensen said a person with that history would be antagonistic toward any enforced sexual activity and would “fall back on primitive defence.”
The defence also put Jones’s sexual life before the jury. Edmund Armstrong testified that Jones engaged in sadomasochistic role-playing and fantasy, though he was not heavily involved, and that Jones had once worn a gold earring through a nipple. Armstrong said he often dropped Jones off on a street with a bath house for men in the “leather scene.” He said Jones used nitrites and did not become aggressive or violent on them, and that Jones was well liked and non-violent. Dr. Sun, a toxicologist, testified that nitrites were used by homosexual men to “get high.”
The judge would not let Jensen give an opinion on whether Jones was a sadomasochist, since Jensen had never examined him. He admitted only photographs of the magazine covers and the handcuffs. Archibald had argued that the jury would find it hard to overcome the “repugnance” the magazines aroused. The judge ruled, in the Court of Appeal’s summary, that the magazines were “merely probative that the deceased was a homosexual” and that a jury could only misuse them.
On Thursday, January 19, the jury deliberated almost five hours and found Valley guilty of second-degree murder. Asked whether it wished to recommend a period before parole eligibility, it recommended “leniency at your Lordship’s discretion.”
On Friday, January 27, Carruthers sentenced Valley to life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years, the minimum. The Star’s headline read “Man gets life in knifing death of homosexual.” The paper reported that Carruthers told Valley, “Your coming to Toronto started you on a downward trend.” Valley had come from rural Quebec and had never been in trouble with the law. The judge said the jury “obviously did not accept your versions of the events,” and added, “We shall never know what in fact occurred. We only know the very disastrous results.” Archibald called it a “ruthless, cold-blooded and heinous killing.” Martin said Valley would need counselling.
Clayton Ruby appealed the conviction. On February 10, 1986, the Ontario Court of Appeal quashed it and ordered a new trial. The court held that the magazines were relevant to provocation and should have been admitted. Only photographs of their covers had gone to the jury, and the covers appeared to be those of bodybuilding magazines. Inside, the court wrote, more than one picture showed a sadomasochistic scene. It held that the handcuffs also should have been admitted, and that Martin should have been allowed to ask Poole whether he saw any sign that Valley was insincere. It found that the judge’s rebukes of Martin, some made in front of the jury, went further than necessary and contributed “to an unsatisfactory trial.”
The court said a jury would have had no difficulty rejecting self-defence, since the two men were about the same size, 5’7″ and 140 pounds, and Jones was unarmed. Provocation was a “substantial defence.” The trial judge had told the jury there was no evidence Jones died during a robbery. With that theory rejected, the court wrote, a jury could find that Jones’s nudity, the studded belt, Valley’s emotional condition, his words at the scene and the fact that he was clothed tended to support his story. The defence had argued the jury should have been told to consider an ordinary male homosexual. The court said Valley suffered no prejudice from the lack of that instruction. It did not think Valley’s being homosexual would make the provocation graver, and it wrote that a jury might conclude the opposite.
The Crown sought leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Leave was refused on April 22, 1986.
Valley was released on bail to live with a farm family in Durham Region while he waited for the new trial. On Thursday, July 10, 1986, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter before Mr. Justice Gregory Evans. In jail and on bail he had raised his schooling from Grade 6 to Grade 11, with some Grade 12 subjects. Psychiatrists described him as a shy, friendly person who was no danger to society or himself and said the stabbing was out of character. Martin told the court that Valley was sexually assaulted by his foster father at 12 and had worked briefly as a male stripper in a Montreal gay bar. Archibald said there was no evidence Jones was going to attack Valley, although Valley might have believed it. Evans said, “This really is an unusual case,” and told Valley he was making the sentence lenient because “you’ve come a long way.” He added 12 months to the 25 Valley had already served.
Vital statistics
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Kenneth Albert Jones |
| Age | 27 |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Unemployed waiter, living on welfare; sold marijuana |
| Date of death | June 10, 1982 |
| Manner of death | Stab wounds (neck and chest) |
| Location | Room 20, 81 Charles Street East, a rooming house just east of Church Street, Toronto |
| Accused | Pierre Valley, 26 (28 at trial), of no fixed address |
| Charge | Second-degree murder |
| Defence counsel | Dianne Martin (trial; spelled “Diane” in some Star reports); Clayton C. Ruby (appeal) |
| Crown counsel | Todd Archibald, assistant Crown attorney (trial); John C. Pearson (appeal) |
| Judge | Mr. Justice Douglas Carruthers (trial, 1984); Martin, Goodman and Finlayson JJ.A. (Court of Appeal, 1986); Mr. Justice Gregory Evans (plea, 1986) |
| Verdict | Guilty of second-degree murder, January 19, 1984; conviction quashed on appeal, February 10, 1986; guilty plea to manslaughter, July 10, 1986 |
| Sentence | Life, no parole eligibility for 10 years (January 27, 1984); 12 months added to 25 months already served (July 10, 1986) |
Sources
- Toronto Star, June 11, 1982, p. A7
- Toronto Star, January 11, 1984, p. C14
- Toronto Star, January 17, 1984, p. D16
- Toronto Star, January 19, 1984, p. D22
- Toronto Star, January 20, 1984, p. A7
- Toronto Star, January 28, 1984, p. A13
- Toronto Star, July 11, 1986, p. F16
- R. v. Valley, Ontario Court of Appeal, February 10, 1986 (1986 CanLII 110 (ON CA); 26 C.C.C. (3d) 207; 13 O.A.C. 89)
- Supreme Court of Canada, leave to appeal refused, April 22, 1986 (67 N.R. 159)
- Oscar Quine, “Poppers: how gay culture bottled a formula that has broken down boundaries,” The Independent, January 22, 2016
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