Summary

Marc and Debra seemed to have it all a lovely home in the Prairie town of Medicine Hat, fulfilling careers, a supportive marriage, and two beautiful children: eight-year-old Jacob and twelve-year-old JR. After years of struggle to reach this point, they finally felt their future held promise. But on April 23, 2006, their bodies were discovered in their basement, covered in savage stab wounds. Upstairs, Jacob lay dead on his bed, his toys spattered with blood. Investigators worried for JR's safety, but unknown to them, the pretty honour roll student had been developing a disturbing alter ego online. Runaway Devil professed a fondness for a darker world of death metal music, the goth subculture, and a love for Jeremy Steinke, a twenty-three-year-old high-school dropout who lived in a rundown trailer park. Soon, shocking evidence in JR's school locker printed here for the first time led police to believe the girl was a suspect in her family's murders. The case horrified parents everywhere. Journalists Robert Remington and Sherri Zickefoose have been covering it from the beginning, and inRunaway Devil, they reveal what really happened: the unlikely young love, the teenage rebellion, a troubling world of adolescent drifters, and a small community torn apart by an unthinkable crime. A modern cautionary tale,Runaway Devilis also a chilling portrait of an approval-seeking man smitten with a manipulative young girl who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted.

Author Biography

Robert Remington is a columnist with the Calgary Herald. His journalism career has taken him to Pakistan, East Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Central America. He was formerly a western Canadian correspondent for the National Post, an editor and columnist at the Edmonton Journal, and a syndicated columnist for United Features, New York.

Sherri Zickefoose is a crime reporter for the Calgary Herald. Her tenacious reporting on the murders led her to an exclusive interview with Steinke’s mother, who revealed a different side of the man being called a monster.

From the Hardcover edition.

Authors’ Note

1 All Hell for a Basement
2 The Almighty Jaxz
3 Prairie Wolves
4 Til Death Do We Part
5 RAWR!
6 A Blood Shedding Fight
7 Why?
8 The Party
9 Crime Scene
10 The Getaway
11 Peace in the Summerland
12 Love Letters
13 Swooning for Svengali
14 The Confession
15 Judgment Day
16 A Mini-Karla?
17 A Trail of Tears

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Index

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

1
ALL HELL FOR A BASEMENT

“Mommy, there’s bodies with blood on them.”

Jacob and Gareth were inseparable that spring, playing ball hockey, wrestling, and pretending to be Jedi knights engaged in a galactic struggle to save the universe. The afternoon of April 23 was a particularly good time to be a little boy. Bright, sunny, and warm, it hinted tantalizingly at the long summer days to come. Soon, the prickly pear cactus would be in yellow bloom, an anomaly in a country known for ice and snow but part of the normal cycle of seasons on the semi-arid southeastern Alberta prairie, where deep coulees hide dinosaur bones and rattlesnakes nest amid eerie outcroppings of sandstone sculpted by wind and rain.

For Gareth, it was certainly no day to be cooped up at grandma’s house. There were pretend hockey games to be won in sudden death overtime and home runs to be hit in the bottom of the ninth inning. Darth Vader’s Death Star had to be attacked, the Dark Side confronted, Imperial storm troopers vanquished, the republic restored.

The six-year-old boy gazed out the window and sighed. “Mommy, can I please go to Jacob’s and play?”

Sarah Penner looked at her son. He had been patient all morning, tagging along as she ran errands with his little sister in tow. Now, as they ate lunch at her mother’s house, he was growing restless and bored. He wanted desperately to see Jacob, his next-door neighbour and best friend.

The previous day, the two boys had played together all day, as usual. Gareth was supposed to sleep at Jacob’s house Saturday night, but instead he went with his grandmother to the hockey game between the hometown Medicine Hat Tigers and the Moose Jaw Warriors, who were battling for the Eastern Conference championship in the 2006 Junior A Western Hockey League playoffs. It was the hottest ticket in town, and the last-minute chance to go to the game was not to be missed. In lieu of a sleepover, Jacob’s dad, Marc, had cooked the boys hot dogs on the backyard barbecue. Sarah called Gareth home at 5:30 in the afternoon, bundled him off to the hockey game with her mother, and went out with a friend.

When Sarah got home at 10:30 p.m., Gareth was already home from the game, which the Tigers lost 4–3 in overtime, and sleeping soundly. Sarah parked her car in the driveway and noticed that the lights next door at Jacob’s house were off. Everything seemed normal.

On Sunday morning, after breakfast, Sarah headed to her mother’s house with the kids. Now, with lunch finished and Gareth beginning to fidget, Sarah agreed it was time to leave. She told her son to phone Jacob to see if he could play. If not, she would take him to the movies. Gareth darted to the phone and dialled Jacob’s number.

The family’s answering machine picked up. On the recording, Gareth heard the cheerful voice of Jacob’s mom, Debra: “Hello, you’ve reached the very happy home of —”

Gareth hung up, disappointed.

“I’ll take you to the movies instead,” Sarah promised.

Sarah left her daughter with her mom, gathered up her son, and made the short drive back to their house in Ross Glen, a tidy, suburban, middle-class community of mid-1970s bungalows and split-level homes in Medicine Hat, a city of 57,000 located 300 kilometres southeast of Calgary. It was about 1:15 p.m. when Sarah pulled into the big common driveway they shared with their next-door neighbours Marc, Debra, Jacob, and their 12-year-old daughter, JR.

Gareth’s face brightened when he saw Jacob’s dad’s white truck sitting in the driveway. He raced next door as Sarah walked into her house, set down her keys, and began looking for the discount matinee movie coupons she would use that afternoon.

Within a minute, Gareth was back in the front entrance, ca

Excerpted from Runaway Devil: How Forbidden Love Drove a 12-Year-Old to Murder Her Family by Robert Remington, Sherri Zickefoose
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