Jeffrey Baldwin is shown in a Halloween costume in this undated handout photo released at the inquest into his death. Photo: CP/handout TORONTO — It was never more than the mawkish comment of a man whose children were utter strangers to him and who was struggling to answer a lawyer’s gentle questions about who Jeffrey Baldwin had been.
Richard Baldwin was Jeffrey’s father, but he didn’t have a clue about what the little boy had liked, what kind of child he was, what had made him tick.
So at the coroner’s inquest into his son’s murder last fall, when lawyer Freya Kristjanson was asking him about Jeffrey, Baldwin had to search his scant memories.
What he came up with was frankly observational, a list of things a passerby or one-time babysitter could have offered: Jeffrey was affectionate; he had blond curly hair; he loved dinky cars and, oh yes, Superman.
This man who about a month before Jeffrey died on Nov. 30, 2002 — finally wasted, starved and broken beyond repair — watched him crawl up the stairs in his grandparents’ home because at the age of five he was too weak to walk, and who noticed that his son’s face was sunken, and who did sweet bugger all to help him, then or ever, dared to say, “Jeffrey was my world. He was my little man.”
From this caricature of a parental epilogue from this caricature of a parent was born a myth and a great kindness.
The myth is that Jeffrey loved Superman.
Maybe he did, but none of those who were in a position to know — his young and self-absorbed parents, the maternal grandparents who starved and neglected him unto death, the inept social worker from the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto (CCAS) — paid enough attention to the little boy to actually know.
And all of them are nakedly unreliable or self-serving witnesses, just as they were in the witness stand at the inquest.
The original kindness came from an Ottawa man named Todd Boyce, who followed Jeffrey’s wrenching story as it emerged last year via the coroner’s inquest, and then raised the funds to erect a memorial to him and hired a sculptor. The secondary kindness came Wednesday in an announcement from DC Entertainment, the comic book publisher, which reversed itself and decided it will allow the Jeffrey statue to be dressed as Superman, complete with the iconic S shield.
Good for Boyce and good for DC Entertainment.
That said, I am enraged that anything that came out of Richard Baldwin’s mouth should have led to this and cringe at the thought that years from now, people may see Jeffrey’s statue and not have a clue as to the horror of his life and death and what it says of our world.
He died of pneumonia, septic shock and starvation. He weighed less at his death than he had as a healthy one-year-old — 21 pounds.
He and his sister, just a year older, were locked in a foul, unheated room of the grandparents’ house. The little girl was probably spared only because she had started kindergarten for half-days, where she wolfed down all the snacks she could get.
Jeffrey spent most of his life in that fetid room, which reeked of feces and urine (the children couldn’t get to the bathroom, their door being locked from the outside). When he was allowed out, he was usually forced to stand in a corner of the kitchen, variously called the “pig’s corner” and the “pig wall,” and sometimes allowed to root with his sister in a bowl of leftovers from the other members of the family.
He was always treated with contempt and cruelty.
Living in that small east-end Toronto house at the time were six adults: Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman, the grandparents convicted of second-degree murder, and two of their grown daughters and their husbands or boyfriends.
There were also six children: Jeffrey and the neglected sister, two other siblings (who were not treated so shabbily, but were left scarred with guilt nonetheless) and a couple of cousins.
Bottineau and Kidman had gained custody of Jeffrey and his three siblings, with the approval of family court and the support, often overt, of the CCAS, because their parents (Baldwin and Yvonne Kidman) were good at having babies, not looking after them.
And though the parents weren’t living at the house, and though their collective care could be described generously as cavalier, they knew enough of Jeffrey’s deteriorating condition. Baldwin admitted this, reluctantly and furiously, only in cross-examination with Kristjanson, who represented Jeffrey’s surviving siblings.
The key CCAS worker, Margarita Quintana, had inexplicably formed the view that Bottineau was a warm and motherly figure.
Neither she nor anyone else at the agency ever discovered what was long in their own files — that both Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman were already convicted child abusers.
Quintana went on to have a full career, from which she has now retired, at the agency, despite her role as overseer in Jeffrey’s death.
I have been writing about him since shortly after his death, on and off, at two newspapers. Yet when the inquest began last year, what had happened to this child (and to varying degrees to his siblings) was treated as news, when in truth the facts of the case had already been explored at the grandparents’ murder trial in 2006, and before that, in the papers.
People didn’t remember. Neither will they when they walk past the statue of him in his Superman outfit.
If I’d designed the thing, I’d have put food beside Jeffrey, and toys, and blankets — all the necessities of life, as they’re called, that he was denied, not to mention the little luxuries, like love and kindness.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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