A woman holds a photo as several hundred people attend a community vigil to remember Rehtaeh Parsons at Victoria Park in Halifax on Thursday, April 11, 2013. The girl's family says she ended her own life following months of bullying after she was allegedly sexually assaulted by four boys and a photo of the incident was distributed. Andrew Vaughan / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Rehtaeh Parson's father Glen Canning and his wife Krista, at left, and Rehtaeh's mother Leah Parsons and her partner Jason Barnes, at right, in Ottawa on Tuesday. , Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Nova Scotia's justice minister is considering a review of an RCMP investigation that concluded there were no grounds to lay charges against four boys over allegations they sexually assaulted Rehtaeh Parsons, who later committed suicide. / THE CANADIAN PRESS

It was a dog’s breakfast of a file — with the singular feature, almost unheard of in a sexual assault complaint, of an independent witness — that led police and prosecutors to conclude they couldn’t charge anyone in the Rehtaeh Parsons case. With information from sources close to the investigation, Postmedia has learned that much of the accepted gospel about the case — teenager is gang-raped, humiliated by the circulation of a cruel picture of the assault, then abandoned by the justice system and driven to suicide — is incomplete. The 17-year-old attempted to hang herself in the bathroom of her mother Leah Parsons’ home in the Halifax suburb of Cole Harbour on April 4. Rehtaeh suffered lethal brain damage and three days later was removed from life support. Her mother turned to Facebook on April 8, the day after her daughter’s death. “Rehtaeh is gone today because of the four boys that thought that raping a 15-year-old girl was OK and to distribute a photo to ruin her spirit and reputation would be fun,” Parsons wrote in part. She also decried the “bullying and messaging that never let up” and declared flatly that “the justice system failed her.” Proving the modern maxim that she who gets to social media first may set the script in stone, the post ignited a firestorm. FACEBOOK PAGE GOES VIRAL The Facebook page went viral; the hacker group Anonymous soon was threatening to out the alleged rapists by name, bullying Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry “to take immediate legal action” and condemning police and prosecutors as incompetent, and the Justice for Rehtaeh online petition was well on its way to acquiring the more than 450,000 signatures it now has. Just Thursday — completing an about-face that saw him first defend, then throw investigators and Crown attorneys under the bus by ordering a review of their decisions as public pressure mounted — Landry announced the formation of a new “cyber-investigative unit” and promised legislative changes under a new provincial Cyber-Safety Act. The announcement came one day after Rehtaeh’s mother and father Glen Canning travelled to Ottawa for a special meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The parents, and Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter, who also met with Harper, are pushing for Criminal Code changes that would outlaw so-called “revenge porn.” But Postmedia sources point to huge problems with the case that made it virtually impossible to take to court, chiefly the shifting accounts from Rehtaeh herself and independent evidence, including retrieved online messages, that supported the suggestion the sex that took place was consensual. NOTORIOUS PICTURE Even the notorious cellphone picture, first sent by one of the alleged assailants and re-circulated thereafter, shows virtually nothing that would stand up in court. The photo is of a male naked from the waist down, giving a thumbs-up sign, pressing into the bare behind of another person who is leaning out a window. What the picture doesn’t reveal, however, is a recognizable face, if there even was a sexual assault going on, or if the second person was a female.

Rehtaeh was just 15 when, on the night of Nov. 12, 2011, she went to a party with a girlfriend and was allegedly sexually assaulted by three or four boys (the reported number varies). It was only a week later, after the picture surfaced and made the rounds at her high school, that police were first called by Parsons. In her original statement to police, Rehtaeh identified the boy in the picture and herself as the second person, said she had had a lot to drink very quickly, and that she had sex with two of the four boys present at the house. When she leaned out the window to be sick, she told police, one of them assaulted her. She remembered almost nothing else. The girlfriend of Rehtaeh’s who was at the party told police Rehtaeh was being flirtatious, even egging the boys on. The friend said she was in and out of the bedroom where Rehtaeh had disappeared, and that at one point saw Rehtaeh on the bed with the two boys, naked and laughing. The friend tried to get her to leave with her, but Rehtaeh wouldn’t. The friend was furious — she had a crush on one of the two boys and had asked Rehtaeh to stay away from him. But she was still a good girlfriend: She later returned to the house with her mother, and again tried to persuade Rehtaeh to leave, to no avail. Only in a second statement to police about two weeks later did Rehtaeh say for the first time that she had told the two boys “No” and tried to get them off her. About everything else, her memory remained virtually non-existent. Add to all this conversations police know Rehtaeh had with friends the day after the party, which revealed a young woman filled with regret for what she portrayed as consensual sex with two boys and who was now afraid her friends would think her “a slut.” Not until the picture surfaced and Rehtaeh told her mother about it did she start talking about pressing charges. “How many people was it?” one friend asked. “Three I think,” Rehtaeh told her. JOINT POLICE TEAM The case was handled by a joint Halifax Regional Police/RCMP sex assault team, the lead investigator a woman. It took almost a year for the police to bring the case to a senior Crown attorney within the province’s Public Prosecution Service (PPS). Also a woman, she is an experienced sex assault prosecutor. While in a few provinces, Crown attorneys have to approve charges, Nova Scotia isn’t one of them, though police often ask for legal advice. (These two arms of the province’s justice system have different legal standards to meet. For police, it’s what’s called RPG, or reasonable and probable grounds, to lay a charge. For prosecutors, it’s “a realistic prospect of conviction” in court.) Essentially, what police ask is, “Do I have a case here?” The prosecutor “looked at it really thoroughly,” PPS spokesperson Chris Hansen told Postmedia in a telephone interview Thursday. “She concluded there was no realistic prospect of conviction.”