CBC News: the fifth estate

Note: You are viewing the unstyled version of CBC.ca because you can not see our css files, or because you do not have a standards-compliant browser or you are a mobile user.

Aired October 18,
2006 at 9pm
on CBC-TV
& October 20, 2006
at 10pm ET
on CBC Newsworld

WATCH the fifth estate ONLINE:

Watch this story online.

Runs 40:16
REPORTER: Linden MacIntyre
PRODUCER: Kit Melamad
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER: Scott Anderson

WEB EXCLUSIVE:

Why do youth kill? Dr. Clive Chamberlain has studied over 100 cases and talks to the fifth estate.
Watch his interview online.

Runs 13:24
Video available in Windows Media Player.

AVENGING ANGEL

Under the cover of darkness early this past Easter Sunday, a seemingly ordinary young man set out on an extraordinary mission – to kill pedophiles in the state of Maine.

One of Stephen Marshall's victims, William Elliott.
His name was on the sex offender registry because when he was 20 he had a relationship with an under-aged girl.

Armed with two handguns and an assault rifle, 20-year-old Stephen Marshall from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, set his sites on more than two-dozen registered sex offenders in that State. By 8:00 am he had murdered two and passed by the homes of four others. Identified by a witness to one of the shootings, Marshall fled. He boarded a bus for Boston and later that evening at a police barricade turned his Colt 45 handgun on himself, ending his life with a single gunshot to the head.

As the first conflicting reports began to trickle out about the quiet, likable young man from Cape Breton, the fifth estate began to ask the questions -- who was Stephen Marshall and what drove him to this horrific act? Our investigation trailed Stephen's life journey from Nova Scotia to Idaho to Maine.

A quiet, unfocused life

The picture that soon emerged was of a withdrawn and intelligent young man with a wry sense of humor who never found a focus in life. As a boy, Stephen bounced between his parents across great distances, never putting down roots anywhere. Although there is no evidence that Stephen was abused himself, the fifth estate discovered that sexual predators did have a strange way of turning up in his orbit at different points in his life.

E-mail
Thirteen months before the shootings Stephen Marshall reconnected with his Idaho school friend Derek McFarland in this email. (pdf file)

The correspondence reveals a young man bitter about being rejected by the Canadian military, without a home or a job and the tense relationship at the time with his step father.

As well, the fifth estate learned that Stephen's father, a gun enthusiast, corresponded in letters to his son in religious overtones that pitted good against evil. Despite repeated requests for an interview, Stephen's father declined to speak to the fifth estate for this story.

For a brief moment, in the final months of his life, Stephen had what appeared to be an emotional crisis, fainting at work in January and falling into a deep depression. But just as fast as he fell into a funk, he snapped out of it. Stephen began to find a focus, committed to religion and seemed happy. As his friends in Nova Scotia revealed to the fifth estate, Stephen seemed normal.

Studying youths who kill

However, to psychiatrist Dr. Clive Chamberlain, who has studied a hundred cases of homicidal youths, Stephen Marshall fits a disturbing pattern.

"You see a little more than that if you look closely," Chamberlain tells the fifth estate. "You get a flavor of over control, of an excessive degree of smiling and pleasantness and no sign of turbulence at all. These kinds of kids tend to overvalue ideas. Ideas motivate them more than their feelings."

In the end Stephen Marshall left scant clues as to what ideas possessed him to kill last Easter Sunday.

NOTE: Some of these documents are PDF files. Download a copy of Adobe Reader to view them.

^TOP