Rampage by Lee Mellor Read Free Book Online

with an official recognition of the massacre. The bodies of the slain were displayed in pearl caskets in a chapel below the University of Montreal tower, where tens of thousands of grieving Canadians lined up in the winter cold to pay their respects. Across the country, public and private vigils were held for the deceased. The fallen were Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Marie Klueznick, Maryse Laganiere, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, and Annie Turcotte. The only people in attendance for Lépine’s funeral at a Boucherville crematorium were his mother, his sister Nadia, her boyfriend, and a few members of Monique’s church.
    Marc Lépine had left three documents in his pocket: a suicide note (which we will examine in detail later) and two letters to his friends. In the latter two, he instructed them to give his fridge to his landlord to compensate for missed rent, and everything else he owned he left to his old school chum Jean Belanger. Interestingly, one source claims that on December 7, an unnamed friend of Marc’s received a letter bequeathing him some personal belongings. We will refer to the mystery friend as “James.” Lépine’s cryptic letter suggested that the motive for the murders was hidden somewhere at 2175 Bordeaux. Donning a ski mask to hide his identity, James accessed the apartment using a key Lépine had entrusted to him, and passed through the narrow, linoleum-floored hallway into his late friend’s bedroom. The turquoise lair was piled high with books on science and the Second World War, along with videocassettes of violent pay-TV movies and a plastic skull. As journalists hammered on the windows and doors, James began to explore, and spotted a sliver of paper lodged between the floorboards. “The author is the solution,” it read. “If you have found this, it means you are already in the know.” The note suggested looking on the shelf for a book by an author mentioned in the earlier letter. It turned out to be a biography of American pilot Chuck Yeager, who in 1947 became the first person to break the barrier of sound. Inside the pages, James discovered a second message: “If you have found this letter you are on the right track. It contains my last wishes. At the back of the room is a suitcase with a few things I would like to pass on.” Given the context of this scavenger hunt, its contents were anticlimactic to say the least: hardware and computer games — hardly the secrets of Lépine’s derangement.
    Overwhelmed by the magnitude of what had happened, Monique Lépine sought refuge with friends in Switzerland immediately after the massacre. Upon returning in January 1990, she discovered two bulky black garbage bags in her closet. The first was stuffed with Marc’s bedding, movies, and a Beta video player, while the second contained his outstanding report cards — a reminder of the potential he had once exhibited as a little boy. There was also a brief handwritten letter that read, “I am sorry, Mom. This is inevitable.” Without her knowledge, in the days preceding the murders , Marc had entered her condo while she was out and deposited the garbage bags.
    To this day, the echoes of the Polytechnique massacre continue to reverberate. Many survivors of the massacre developed post-traumatic stress disorder and were haunted by terrible nightmares. On August 20, 1990, former student Sarto Blais hanged himself in his apartment bathroom. Among the reasons the Gaspé native offered in his suicide note was, “[I] could not accept that as a man I had been there and hadn’t done anything about it.” [22] Though Blais had finished school and found work with a Montreal construction firm, his guilt combined with the memories of blood-drenched hallways was unbearable. Within a year of his suicide, Blais’s parents killed themselves — the seventeenth