Mass Medicine Hat killer Jeremy Steinke changes name, seeks appeal

By Kevin Martin - The Calgary Sun

January 11, 2012

CALGARY - The man behind one of Alberta’s most grisly crimes — the slaughter of his 12-year-old girlfriend’s family — has changed his name.

In documents filed in the Alberta Court of Appeal, Jeremy Steinke said he is now going by the name Jackson May.

May is the convicted triple-murderer’s mother Jacqueline’s last name.

Steinke made the revelation in a hand-written note to the province’s top court a year ago stating he wished to appeal his 2008 conviction in the deaths of his child-girlfriend’s parents and younger brother.

“I’ve recently had my name changed to Jackson May,” he wrote under his given name.

In reply to his tardy appeal, Steinke was told by the Deputy Registrar of the Court of Appeal in Calgary his application was too late.

“Please be advised that your notice of appeal is out of time,” the court official wrote.

“You must file a motion to extend your time to file an appeal.”

Steinke has not done anything further on the case and contrary to other media reports, no court hearing has been set.

Steinke does have a meeting scheduled for May 15 with a case management officer in the Court of Appeal to determine if he intends to pursue his case further.

Despite the name change, all proceedings before the appeal court will be done under his given name unless Steinke makes a formal application to a judge to use a new moniker.

In his late notice of appeal, the convicted killer said the Dec. 5, 2008 decision by a Calgary jury “was an unreasonable verdict.”

He also said his unfamiliarity with the criminal system and his inability to find a lawyer caused him to miss the 30-day deadline to appeal.

“I didn’t appeal because I’m new to the system and did not know what I was doing and at the time could not find a lawyer who would take my case.”

Steinke said if the court permits an appeal he will contact Legal Aid to cover the cost of a lawyer.

His trial lawyer, Alain Hepner, said he was recently contacted by Legal Aid to provide an opinion on whether an appeal would be worth pursuing.

Hepner has not yet given an opinion.

Steinke, who turns 26 on Sunday, was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder in the April 23, 2006, deaths of his then-girlfriend’s parents and younger brother in their Medicine Hat home.

The girl was charged and convicted as a youth of the same three crimes.

Steinke is serving three concurrent life sentences without parole for a minimum 25 years.

Jasmine Richardson, Canada's Youngest Multiple Killer, Gets Glowing Reviews

Blogs.discovery.com/criminal_report

February 7, 2011

If you've followed true crime at all in the past few years, you should be familiar with the name Jasmine Richardson -- unless, of course, you live in Canada, where the media is banned from publishing her full name. In that case, you probably know her as J.R.

According to the National Post, Richardson -- a convicted killer who, along with her boyfriend, slaughtered her parents and her little brother -- has received a "glowing" sentencing review from an Alberta judge for progress she has been making while serving an open custody sentence in a Calgary group home.

Richardson has requested more freedom and said she plans to attend a university in the fall, the newspaper reported. A judge will review the case again later this year.

For those of you who don't know or who may have forgotten, Richardson was 12 years old when she became the youngest person ever charged with multiple counts of murder in Canada. It was a brutal crime that sent shock waves throughout the country and made headlines around the world. Both Richardson and her then boyfriend, 23-year-old Jeremy Steinke, were charged in the case.

The investigation into the murders began on April 23, 2006, when concerned neighbors called officers to the Richardson family home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. Inside, authorities discovered the bodies of Marc Richardson, 42, and his wife Debra, 48, sprawled out on the home's first floor. In an upstairs bedroom they discovered the lifeless body of the Richardson’s son, 8-year-old Jacob, lying on a bed.

Detectives initially thought Jasmine Richardson was missing, and possibly the victim of a kidnapping. However, as the investigation progressed, evidence quickly pointed to her involvement in the murders.

On April 24, 2006, police located Richardson and Steinke, 100 miles away in the town of Leader. Both were arrested at the scene and later charged with three counts of first-degree murder.

Police alleged that Richardson and Steinke's secret relationship was the motive behind the murders. Marc and Debra had recently forbidden the two from having contact with each other, a move that had angered both young lovers.

Richardson pleaded not guilty to all three counts. However, on July 10, 2007, a jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to the maximum 10-year sentence allowed by the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Richardson was required to serve four years of her sentence in a psychiatric hospital.

During his own trial, Steinke was also found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. However, unlike his younger counterpart, he was sentenced to life without parole for a minimum of 25 years.

Jasmine Richardson, now 17, is scheduled to have another sentence review in August. If all goes well, she could be released into the community as early as September. At that time she would still be under the supervision of the court, but not for long. Due to Canadian laws regarding juveniles, the court will be required to release Richardson once she reaches age 22. At that time, her sentence will be considered complete and her criminal record will be nullified.

Steinke Found Guilt of 1st Degree Murder

By Sherri Zickefoose, Canwest News Service

Friday, December 05, 2008

CALGARY – Jeremy Allen Steinke has been found guilty by a jury of three counts of first-degree murder in the gruesome deaths of an Alberta couple and their eight-year-old son.

The jury, which began deliberations Thursday afternoon following a two-and-a-half week trial, found Steinke responsible for the premeditated slaying of his then-12 year-old girlfriend’s family in their Medicine Hat home in 2006.

Steinke, 25, kept his head down as the guilty verdicts were read out in court. His mother Jacqueline May, clutching a Bible, dropped her head and wept.

“I did not expect first-degree,” she said afterward.

Relatives of the slain family have asked to read victim impact statements in person at Steinke’s sentencing, set for Dec. 15 in Medicine Hat, 290 kilometres southeast of Calgary.

Barring appeals, the verdict brings to a close one of the most shocking and bizarre multiple murder cases in recent memory.

The killings themselves were horrifying in the extreme. The first police officers to enter the family’s home in Medicine Hat, Alta., after the killings on April 23, 2006, found a crime scene awash in blood, the walls smeared with bloody handprints.

The mother died after being stabbed 12 times. The girl’s father fought for his life with a screwdriver, but was stabbed two dozen times, including nine times in his back. The body of their eight-year-old son was found lying on his blood-soaked bed. His throat had been slashed open.

Norm Boucher, the mayor of Medicine Hat and the chief of police at the time of the killings, said the jury delivered the only logical verdict based on what he said was incontrovertible evidence.

He said he hopes that holding the sentencing in Medicine Hat might help the shattered town move past the traumatic experience.

Boucher, who wanted the trial to be held in Medicine Hat, said he was pleased sentencing will be held in the community Dec. 15.

“That might be the final closure the community needs. It really shook the community when it happened,” he said. “To have national and international media in your community, particularly when it is a small community, is difficult.”

The Crown and defence agreed on only one point: Steinke stabbed to death the girl’s parents the night of after sneaking into their home, wearing a mask and dressed completely in black.

They clashed over the circumstances of the younger brother’s death and the motivation for the attacks.

The Crown painted a picture of Steinke as a cold-hearted killer who wiped out his young girlfriend’s family as part of a murder plan crafted in advance by the couple and documented in conversations with friends and in online messages they’d exchanged. The motivation, according to the Crown, was adolescent rage at the parents, who disapproved of their 12-year-old daughter dating the then-23-year-old Steinke, an unemployed high-school dropout.

Crown prosecutor Ramona Robins presented a recording of a conversation Steinke had with an undercover officer posing as a prisoner while he was being transported to a Calgary lockup. In it, Steinke admitted he was responsible for the deaths and gave details of the killings.

“You hear about that triple homicide?” Steinke said during the recorded conversation. “Yeah. You’re looking at him. . . . Me and my old lady have become legends.”

He told the officer the girl slit her brother’s throat. “It didn’t bother her at all, either, she didn’t cry or anything. In fact, the next day when we were on the road, f-n’ she was laughing about it. She’s got a few screws loose, too.”

Steinke described fanciful plans to marry his girlfriend in a Gothic wedding ceremony and move to a castle in Germany.

Robins also told the jury that Steinke told the undercover officer the father’s dying word was, “Why?” and that Steinke replied, “Because your daughter wanted it that way.”

Steinke also said that, in the hours before the killings, he was drinking a “two-four” of beer and a bottle of ‘Vampire’ brand red wine, and consumed a gram of cocaine.

He also claimed he was fond of drinking blood and once ate a batch of sugar cookies that a friend had made with blood.

“When they came out of the oven they were pink – that’s how much blood he put in them,” he said.

The Crown showed the jury transcripts of messages exchanged by Steinke and the girl a month before the killings. The girl, writing under the online alias “runawaydevil,” told Steinke: “I hate them. So I have this plan, it begins with me killing them and ends with me living with you.”

Steinke, writing as “Souleater,” responded: “Well, I love your plan, but we need to get a little more creative with like details and stuff.”

“(The girl was) the motive and Steinke was the means” to the killings, Robins said.

The Crown went after Steinke’s claim that he could do nothing to stop the girl from killing her brother. Robins suggested that Steinke stood back and watched the boy die because he knew the boy could have identified him.

The Crown also claimed Steinke tried to recruit friends to help him with the murder plan. Jordan Attfield testified that Steinke asked for his help and, when he refused, threatened to implicate him and others if he was caught.

Another friend of Steinke’s, James Whalley, told the jury Steinke boasted he “gutted” the girl’s parents “like fish.” An underage witness reported seeing Steinke and the girl smiling as they pored over newspaper coverage of the killings.

After their arrest, the couple exchanged jailhouse love letters and promised to marry.

The defence, meanwhile, presented Steinke as a damaged victim of a brutalized childhood, a lovelorn loser, too addled by drugs and alcohol to form the intent to kill.

His lawyer, Alain Hepner, claimed the attacks on the parents were “an impulsive reaction” triggered by his excessive intoxication and drug abuse that night, and by being surprised in the house by the girl’s mother.

He dismissed the conversation with the undercover officer as hollow boasts intended to shore up his prison reputation, and the online exchanges as the bluster of “a young man with zero self-esteem who finally found someone to love him.”

The defense put Steinke’s mother on the stand. Steinke wept in his prisoner’s box as Jacqueline May told court about the beatings and abuse he endured at the hands of her ex-husbands and lovers.

“He said he wished he’d never been born,” said May, adding her son had been on antidepressants and medication for attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder since his early teens.

Teen gets 10 years for murders

Canada's youngest convicted multiple killer is going to an Edmonton forensic hospital until she is 18 for her role in the "horrific" murders of a local family, said a judge, handing her the maximum 10-year sentence.

The Calgary Herald

November 9, 2007