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Melissa Todorovic

There are those who imagine that, now that her name and face are public, they know or at least may get a sense of Melissa Todorovic, the girl who engineered the slaying of Stefanie Rengel and was sentenced, as an adult, to life in prison.

But the truth is, as no less than Ontario Superior Court Judge Ian Nordheimer noted, Ms. Todorovic springs from a stable background, with loving, hard-working parents (her mother is a nurse, her father a mechanic) and a dear, chubby-cheeked younger brother who clearly adores her and who Tuesday fell sobbing into the arms of his shattered family.

His sister has no criminal record and no previous brushes with the law. She was a good, if dogged rather than brilliant, student. She had friends. She is plain and a bit pudgy - in a striking oddity, a colleague's lingering descriptions of her weight early on in the trial seemed to disproportionately enrage her father, Zoran - but there are worse curses in adolescence, and still she managed her fair share of boyfriends.

In fact, said the judge, "She has had all of the structure and support to develop as a normal, respectful, considerate, law-abiding person."

And yet she didn't: Rather, she grew into the girl who waged a relentless campaign with her boyfriend against Stefanie, nagging, threatening to withhold sexual favours or give them elsewhere, until, on New Year's Day of 2008, he relented.

After a three-week jury trial and a one-week sentencing hearing in which two psychiatrists testified about their examinations of her, there is no clear answer to what makes Ms. Todorovic tick, particularly what drove her to become what Judge Nordheimer called "the puppet master" of the slaying of a 14-year-old girl she had never even met.

"Ultimately in this case," the judge concluded, "we are left with a horrific event caused by a young person for reasons that are still unfathomable."

It was that lack of knowledge - what is the matter with Ms. Todorovic, how can it be treated if at all, how amenable will she be to whatever the treatment is - that cemented the judge's decision to hand her a more severe adult sentence.

Tried under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, whose fundamental premise is that young people are not to be held to the same level of responsibility as are adults, Ms. Todorovic was six days away from her 16th birthday when her "puppet," a then-17-year-old boyfriend who has yet to be sentenced and so can be identified only as D.B., lured Stefanie out of her family's east Toronto home and stabbed her six times.

When D.B. duly reported that the deed was done, Ms. Todorovic promptly phoned Stefanie's cell to double-check that she was really dead, then made D.B. re-enact the slaying. Only then did they have sex.

But Ms. Todorovic's youthfulness also worked against her because, as the two psychiatrists testified, her personality isn't fully developed; that happens only when the human animal reaches the mid-20s. Until then, until personality (and its disorders) are rigidly fixed, psychiatrists are reluctant to diagnose.

And absent a diagnosis, let alone treatment, Ms. Todorovic's future dangerousness is as unknowable and unpredictable as she is. The sum of the psychiatric evidence, the judge said, "is that there is some risk of a repetition of this conduct. While the precise degree of risk is unknown, the nature and extent of Melissa's role in this incident is cause for grave concern."

A youth sentence - a maximum of six years in custody, four in the community, and then no supervision - would have meant that just as Ms. Todorovic's personality was fully developed, good or bad, she would be back on the streets, free as a bird, completely unmonitored.

And that, Judge Nordheimer said, was unacceptable: "The concept that a young person would ultimately be left free of supervision where there has yet to be an accurate diagnosis of the problem, nor any effective treatment program developed, is as contrary to the need for the public's protection as one could imagine."

The judge was not consoled - it is difficult to be consoled - by the view of court-appointed psychiatrist Dr. Phil Klassen that Ms. Todorovic probably would be dangerous only in intimate, or domestic, relationships, and that any potential victims would likely be "intimate partners, third parties and possibly children."

"It's my sense that Melissa could, in different contexts, be at low, medium or high risk of [direct or facilitated]aggressive behaviour," said Dr. Klassen - a blunt admission that he didn't really know.

And he was troubled by her resistance to "any notion that she has a problem or is in need of help."

As for the theory of the defence psychiatrist hired by Ms. Todorovic's lawyer, Marshall Sack, Judge Nordheimer was dismissive.

Dr. Julian Gojer had suggested that Ms. Todorovic appeared unremorseful because she was an immature girl who had trouble expressing her emotions. "I have difficulty accepting [that]explanation," the judge said, noting that according to Dr. Gojer, "Melissa's family said that she had a full range of emotions in the home setting."

Dr. Gojer also said Ms. Todorovic was unhappy with her body, and suffered from body dysmorphic disorder. If the psychiatrist meant this as a primary diagnosis and intended it to explain her conduct, Judge Nordheimer said, it bordered "on the facile."

Dr. Klassen, as well as a psychologist who tested Ms. Todorovic and a prison official, agreed on one thing - she showed a striking lack of remorse for Stefanie's death. This was obvious even in her lengthy police interviews, conducted the day after, in which an unruffled Ms. Todorovic coolly admitted she wanted Stefanie dead and knew D.B. was on his way to her house with an eight-inch blade, so shocking her mother, Rachel, that at one point, she blurted out, "Mel, do you know what you're saying?"

What's more, even 18 months afterwards, Ms. Todorovic was still minimizing what she did, still having thoughts of hurting other people (those who said "hurtful things" about her during the case), and telling Dr. Gojer that her instructions to her boyfriend (such as, "I want her dead, D.B. We've been through this," and "Cut fucking leotards" when he was stalling and claiming he didn't have a mask) were but comments "not made to be taken literally. She said that what she did was to utter words and what D.B. did was his choice."

Ms. Todorovic's recent statement in court, made at the end of the sentencing hearing earlier this month, was the proverbial day late - "after many other opportunities to express regret have passed by," the judge noted - and a dollar short. She said that she rued "my part" in Stefanie's death - hardly, the judge said, an "unequivocal acceptance of responsibility for the crucial role that she played …

"I do not accept that Melissa has a reduced responsibility for this terrible act," Judge Nordheimer said. "A person who plans and orchestrates and directs another person to take the life of a human being is at least as morally culpable as the person who does the actual act. Put simply, the puppet master is not less blameworthy than the puppet.

"Indeed, I would suggest that the master is more culpable since he or she puts the wheels in motion and then stands back under a facade of disassociation while the scheme that they have created unfolds."

With the adult sentence, Ms. Todorovic will be eligible to apply for parole only after serving the maximum allowed by the youth act - seven years. (A real adult sentence for first-degree murder carries a minimum 25 years behind bars.) Because the clock starts running from the day of her arrest, she will then be about 23 - just about the time the experts say that personality becomes fixed. Who the person eventually emerging from prison will be is anyone's guess.

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