First in a series surrounding the childhood abduction and sexual assault of Kingston’s Kerri Kehoe, who was snatched from the parking lot at the Kingston Centre in the summer of 1990, driven out of town, repeatedly sexually assaulted by Richard Charles Joyce, then dropped off to live with the terror for the rest of her life. WARNING: the content contained within this article deals with violence and is sexual in nature and may be disturbing or triggering to some.
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“She was two,” Kerri Kehoe answered. “Her name was April Morrison.”
Kehoe referred to her two-year-old cousin, who was snatched from her Kingston street on Aug. 21, 1981, by serial sex predator Duane Edward Taylor and violently raped and murdered by Taylor, who had only been free from jail, where he was incarcerated on a four-year sentence for attempting to rape a four-year-old Cobourg girl in 1978, for 11 days.
Just a couple of years older than her slain cousin April, Kehoe recalled that she wasn’t really old enough to understand what had happened, but growing up, she always knew something bad had happened.
“There was a picture of April hanging inside my cousins’ home,” Kehoe said during an interview inside a Kingston coffee shop. Following April’s death, Kehoe and her siblings spent a lot of time with April’s older brothers. She also said she remembers that following April’s murder, the mere mention of her name created sorrow, fighting and arguing among the family.
Though Kehoe didn’t know it at the time, April’s tragic death wouldn’t be the family’s only brush with horror.
In fact, tragedy seemed to haunt the now 45-year-old Kehoe during her childhood.
In the summer of 1990, just nine years after her cousin was slain, April’s brother called Kehoe on a hot summer day, asking her if she wanted to go swimming at the Memorial Centre swimming pool. Indeed, she did. After a short conversation, the two agreed to meet up at the kiosk in the Kingston Centre and walk down together.
Kehoe recalled how she changed into her bathing suit and headed out from the family’s Strathcona Park home, a roughly 10-minute walk to her destination – to meet her cousins.
“I still remember that walk to the mall,” Kehoe said.
It was the last walk that 11-year-old Kerri Kehoe ever took as an innocent, happy, care-free child.
As Kehoe made her way through Strathcona Park and up Princess Street toward the Kingston Centre, she can still recall how she could see her destination that day, the main doors across from the old Sears store at the Kingston Centre mall, which in the 1990s was a U-shaped building that featured a Sears store on its west side.
As she crossed what is now Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard and entered the parking lot between what is now the north end of the Loblaws store and the McDonald’s outlet, Kehoe cut behind the parked cars, the doors she was destined for in clear sight.
But she never made it.
“That’s where he got me,” she said, her eyes welling up.
He is Richard Charles Joyce, then a fresh-faced, buck-toothed 22-year-old who was a complete stranger to Kehoe, who was just 11, half his age and more than twice her size.
As she walked along the parked cars, she could see Joyce, almost as if he was waiting for her. Thinking back, Kehoe said she remembers being frightened at the time.
“He had to have seen me, he had to have been following me,” Kehoe said as she rubbed her hands nervously at the recollection.
Joyce approached her quickly, brandishing a knife, Kehoe said. He forced her into his car by knifepoint with the driver’s side door opened against another car. Kehoe had to climb over the driver’s seat to the passenger’s seat. He bound Kehoe’s wrists and secured her in with the seatbelt. He then drove off.
Thinking back, Kehoe said she can vividly recall that the mall was a bustling hub of activity on that sunny summer day, with cars and buses going in every direction, and busy Princess Street mere feet away. Yet, somehow, no one witnessed the little girl’s abduction.
“That’s a scenario I go through in my mind,” Kehoe said when asked how no one saw her abduction. “It was busy.”
Even now, she can use her mind’s eye to re-live those moments of terror.
“The buses that used to go around Sears in the parking lot, I can see them driving by,” she said.
When Joyce nabbed her, Kehoe said, she was almost paralyzed with fear.
“I didn’t scream,” she said.
Later, she said she would come to know this instinct to be common.
“I call it the gift of fear,” she said. “I talk about this when I’m speaking with police or victim services or the department of justice. I didn’t know what the gift of fear was when it happened, but I was walking through the parking lot and he had to have seen me. He must have anticipated I was going to take that parking lot and I wasn’t watching the cars coming and going.”
Kehoe figures that Joyce spotted her walking in the Strathcona Park area and anticipated her destination. She even recalled how as she neared Joyce that day, her mind did try to warn her.
“I’m not sure what it was, but my brain said pretend like you see somebody, but then I told myself that’s silly, why would I do that?’ But I was still walking, and it happened that fast, where I was like, that’s a weird thought. You know how you talk to yourself?”
Before her brain could convince her to act, Joyce struck, snatching her up and shoving her in his car.
Kehoe said she can still summon her every move from that day, and Joyce’s.
“He caught me at the end of his vehicle, and he had the knife,” she said. “I can see everything, I can see the knife in his left hand. He had opened the door so that when he forced me that way, I couldn’t run. When he took me, he immediately bound my wrists together, buckled me in and I still remember we drove out past Sears and onto Princess Street and started going down Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard. I was scared. I was crying.”
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Joyce’s sadistic abuse began in the car.
“Halfway between Princess Street and what is now John Counter, he handed me the blunt end of the knife and told me to penetrate myself,” Kehoe recalled, her voice cracking.
As an adult, she said, she has often wondered why she didn’t scream in the parking lot that day, or take the knife he handed her in the car and jam it into him.
“You think as an adult, why didn’t you just shut the door and run? Why didn’t you scream? You know what I mean? I’ve had that thought over and over and over again?”
Kehoe said that while she can remember every single traumatizing movement from that day, she cannot for the life of her hear what Joyce said to her that day.
“I still can’t hear what he said,” she said. “I’m not sure why. I can’t hear it, but I know he was angry.”
Joyce drove his blue K car to the outskirts of the city, to McAdoo’s Lane, pulling over in the old drive-in theatre parking lot, Kehoe said, even recalling how he did a U-turn in the lot and positioned the car so that it was facing the road.
Kehoe said she can’t hear Joyce ordering her to perform oral sex on him, but she knows he did.
“He pulled down his pants,” she said. “I’d never seen male anatomy before.”
Kehoe said Joyce quickly became agitated with her.
“My wrists were tied together, it was a little car, so my elbow was digging into my side, and it was hurting. I was crying, there was snot and tears and I knew he was angry.”
Joyce was angry, Kehoe said, that the little girl couldn’t satisfy his need.
“I don’t hear what he said, but when he whipped his pants back up and he buckled me back in, I was apologizing over and over again,” she said.
Joyce then drove the car further down McAdoo’s Lane, toward Montreal Street. Right before he reached Montreal Street, he spun the car around, headed back in the direction they came from and pulled it over. He got out, forced Kehoe out of the vehicle and pushed her forward into the woods on foot.
When they stopped, Joyce ordered her to undress and then tied her to a tree. Joyce left her tied to a tree and walked back towards his vehicle. When he returned, Kehoe noticed that Joyce was carrying a black plastic garbage bag in his hand, which was easily large enough for a body to have been placed in.
At this point, she said, she was sure Joyce planned to kill her. Later, he laid the bag on the ground, laid on it, positioned the 11-year-old to perform oral sex on him and with her head down, gagging and crying, something caught her attention and she looked up and Joyce had raised the knife in his left hand ready to plunge the knife into her back. She was sure she was going to be killed. Kehoe’s screams and the positioning of her shaking hands, Joyce ejaculated.
The terror of that day was never more frightening, Kehoe said and after he ejaculated his demeanour completely changed.
“When that happened, I was like ‘Please don’t kill me,’ ” she recalled. “He had the knife ready and it wasn’t to scare me. I was gagging, crying, doing that again the second time, and then I reached for my shorts and I’m frantically wiping him off because I thought I’d angered him.”
She recalled looking at her abductor for the first time in that moment.
“He was laying on the ground and it was literally euphoria,” Kehoe recalled. “It was evil. There is no other word for it. It’s like the creepiest scene in a movie you’ve ever seen. Me, on my knees, at his genitals, staring at him on the ground, he was smiling.”
Despite her paralyzing fear, Kehoe would note two important things in that moment: she noted Joyce had an appendix scar on his abdomen and she noted his pronounced buck teeth.
“I remember leaning back when I saw his teeth, thinking he was evil,” she said. “I didn’t know what an appendix scar was until I became an adult.”
She also noted his white shirt, grey jogging pants and the garbage bag she feared was destined to be used to conceal her body destined to be left in the woods.
Joyce then instructed the young girl to get dressed and began walking out of the woods. As they walked, Kehoe recalled how she still feared that Joyce was going to plunge that knife into her back.
“The gift of fear said he’s going to put that knife in your back,” she said. “And I walked like this,” she said, looking behind her as if reliving the moment.
“That’s not who I was on the car ride there. On the car ride there, I wasn’t looking, I was doing what he was telling me to do. Even when he walked me into the forest, I walked in front and I didn’t have a sense that he was going to put a knife in my back and even when he tied me to the tree, when he told me to undress and I was tied to the tree half naked, I didn’t get that sense. But after he raised the knife to put it in my back and then when he smiled, the gift of fear said he’s going to put that in your back on the way out.”
Survival instincts kicked in for the girl as they walked toward the road.
“When we got closer to the light coming out of the forest, I said ‘I promise I won’t say anything, I promise I won’t say anything,’ ” Kehoe recalled.
But Joyce didn’t kill Kehoe that day, instead driving the youngster back to the city.
“We took John Counter, Counter Street back then,” Kehoe recalled.
As they made their way up what is now Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard, the girl recognized the roof of their family home from the car.
“I don’t know why I said it, but I could see the townhouse that I lived in, and I said ‘I live right there,’” Kehoe recalled, unsure if it was just survival instinct kicking in again, hoping he’d drop her off.
Part of her, she said, feared they might be headed to a third location, where he would continue his assaults or worse, kill her.
“I didn’t know where we were going,” she said.
As quickly as he’d snatched her off the street, he dumped her back onto it, Kehoe said, quickly veering the car to the side of the road and ordering her out.
“I can’t hear him telling me to get out, but I got out,” she said. And off he drove. “I can still see him driving down that road in a little blue car and I stood there for a second, not even knowing what to do.”
The 11-year-old then ran home. As she scrambled to find the safety of her own home, the very first feelings that have haunted Kehoe for the rest of her life began to set in.
“Like an iron blanket on my chest, I felt shame, embarrassment,” she recalled.
When she did arrive home, no one was there.
“I jumped the fence into our neighbourhood and I busted through the back door and nobody was home. I don’t know if someone was home if that would have made a difference,” she said. What would she have said if someone were home that day? “I don’t know,” Kehoe answered.
To this day, she can’t even recall when someone did arrive home. But she vividly recalled what she did when she got home that day to the empty house.
“I immediately went in the basement, I got clean clothes from the dryer, the clothes I was wearing, a white shirt, speckled grey design, blue shorts that had semen on them, I buried in the bottom of a garbage bag. We had a little rocker chair in the front bay window, and I hid behind it. I remember that.”
That day, she made a decision that would weigh her down for decades: Kerri Kehoe decided to follow through on her promise to her attacker and never utter a word about what happened.
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For the next 20 years, Kehoe buried the demons from that day deep inside her own personal hell, where she locked the doors and threw away the keys. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have to subdue those demons from time to time over the years.
The summer after it happened, Kehoe was in school and the Ontario Provincial Police were at the school as part of the VIP safety program when she experienced her first bout of post-traumatic stress disorder. She just didn’t know it then.
“This is crazy, it doesn’t make sense, there’s no sense to this at all, but I remember sitting in class in Grade 7 and the VIP came in and I convinced myself that that police officer knew what happened to me,” she said. “That doesn’t make sense. That’s not real, that’s not true. I remember cowering in my seat. I don’t know why I had that thought. I don’t know if it was shame or embarrassment, I have no idea.”
There was a school photo from her Grade 7 year that to this day can bring Kehoe to tears.
“I went to school and I was upset,” she said. “I was upset all the time after (Joyce’s attack). I was emotional all the time after that. I’d cry over things. I remember that. I don’t even know what I was like prior to that.”
Kehoe said that other than scant memories here or there, including her late father’s death in 1982, she doesn’t have any real childhood memories, only memories from that fateful day in 1990 forward.
“Memories start at 11 for me,” she said. “That school photo, I was in the bathroom on school picture day crying, crying, crying and my girlfriends were asking me why. I have no idea what it was, but in that school photo, you could see that my eyes were bloodshot red, I was physically upset but smiling.”
So distraught did she look in that photo that a retake was shot. “I was always happy about that retake photo because it meant I didn’t look like that class photo,” she said. “There was evidence that there was something going on. I’ve gone back and reflected, that photo’s actually quite sad,” she said, bursting into tears.
Then there were Kehoe’s nightmares, which recurred for years. “Have you had a weird reoccurring dream?” Kehoe asked her interviewer. “I had the same reoccurring dream all the time. It was the exact same one about being chased in a dark alley and then waking up before I’m caught.”
Just four years after she was attacked and left broken, at age 15, Kehoe moved out from her family home, where she struggled with her relationship with her mother and siblings.
Asked if Joyce’s violation of her contributed to her moving out of her childhood home at 15, Kehoe agreed that it had to have. As she had for four years to that point, Kehoe kept her secret deep inside.
“You didn’t tell anybody?” she was asked. “No,” she replied. “Not even your mom?” “No.”
To this day, she doesn’t know why she kept it from her mom when she was 11.
“Everyone kept saying that to me and I’m like ‘Why didn’t I tell my mom?’ ”
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Kehoe moved out and set down her own path, finding a job in the profession she loves, getting married and starting her own family. Life was as normal as normal could be for someone with unresolved childhood trauma. But that all changed one fateful day in 2011 while having breakfast with a colleague in the break room.
Kehoe said she rarely if ever ate in the break room, but fate brought her there that day. Her colleague walked into the break room toting a copy of that morning’s Whig-Standard, which he set on the table beside them. Kehoe glanced at it and a headline jumped off the page. It read: “Killer admits to sex assault on child.” Kehoe read on. As she read the details, and the timeline, her heart began to sink. She knew she was reading about the man who’d terrorized and assaulted her 20 years earlier.
“I saw the headline, I knew, but I didn’t know,” she recounted. “It’s not like I was thinking about it leading up to that. I just knew without knowing.”
The story detailed how Richard Charles Joyce, who was already serving life with no parole eligibility for 25 years for his role in the brutal first-degree murder of Margaret Yvonne Rouleau almost 20 years ago at Nozzles gas bar in Kingston, had admitted to being the sexual predator who attacked a nine-year-old girl, 15 months before the murder.
The story detailed how Joyce, 43, pleaded guilty to eight of the 11 charges laid against him, all arising out of a previously unsolved case of abduction and sexual assault on a child. The story noted that after hearing the facts, the judge told Joyce “your behaviour toward this nine-year-old girl was unspeakably brutal,” and added, “I’m at a loss for words to say how I feel.”
Joyce admitted, through his guilty pleas, to kidnapping the child; threatening her with death; using a knife in committing a sexual assault on her; beating her with a snow brush; threatening the little girl that he’d kill her mother; sexually touching her; inviting her to touch him sexually; and carrying a knife for the purpose of committing a sexual assault. Joyce brutalized the girl, which he did later to Kehoe.
In the days after reading that story, Kehoe began experiencing severe PTSD.
“Almost a week goes by and in that week, I experienced PTSD, the movie reels, the images, it was forcing its way back without an invitation and I was getting mentally unwell,” she said.
It was time, she said, to unlock the doors and free the demons.
To be continued.
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