Earlier this month, Ontario’s highest court unanimously rejected Everton Biddersingh’s request to appeal his first-degree murder conviction and life sentence for brutalizing his 17-year-old daughter, Melonie, stuffing her in a suitcase and burning her remains.

Melonie’s mom and sister, on COVID-19 lockdown in a Kingston, Jamaica ghetto, greet the news with fatalistic nonchalance.

“Me? There’s no relief, Mr. James. No relief,” says Opal Austin, 65.

“Sometimes I wake up before dawn and I see mi daughter, natural, natural, when she was young in Jamaica, before she left … how she used to look … that quietness, that pleasantness of her …under the tree with one of the children in her lap …

“She would be 40-plus years old now. Maybe, I would not even be living ’round here now, with all the little ghetto people. Who to tell, I would be in foreign.”

More than four years after she travelled to Toronto for the trial of her baby’s father – described as “monstrous” and “savage” by a judge – Austin is still a heartbreak every time she speaks.

In 1991, Austin sent two of her seven children, Melonie and Sabu, to live with their dad Biddersingh and his wife, Elaine – tossing the kids a lifeline out of poverty, Austin thought. First, Sabu “fell” from a Parkdale apartment balcony and police said it was suicide. Then Melonie vanished – her whereabouts a mystery for 17 years until Elaine confessed to her pastor in 2011.

The discovery unmasked Melonie’s life in Canada as one of unspeakable horror – tied to apartment furniture, starved, forced to bathe on the balcony, her head held in the toilet as it was flushed, beaten with 24 broken bones, dehumanized to the emaciated remnant of 50 pounds, until, mercifully, death came.

Only those in that damnable apartment knew of her travails. And Opal and Melonie’s older sister, Racquel Ellis, sat through the trial – all the time staring down the monster in the prisoner’s box.

Racquel says now she had every confidence Everton’s appeal of his life sentence wouldn’t be accepted. “There was too much evidence. The children were right there, right under his nose,” she said from Kingston this week.

Opal? She is more preoccupied with survival. She has pains all over her body, was getting psychiatric therapy before COVID struck, passes her days in the shade and shuffles home to her laneway shack before 6 p.m. COVID curfew and fret about her lost children.

“Sabu is dead. Melonie? They ill-treat the little pickney and force her to sleep on cardboard on the floor. As poor as me is, she never sleep on the floor. Most of the time, me no know what to do, Mr. James. This is a big, big blow.”

She wonders how Everton and Elaine sleep at night.

It’s a reasonable question in a tragic tale that leaves a bundle of questions unanswered and weaves it way through many lives tortured beyond repair.

What would possess the Biddersinghs to so torture Melonie and her half-brother, Cleon for years? What exactly happened to Sabu on that balcony?

How dysfunctional was life in the Parkdale apartment – to the point where at least one of the three children birthed by Elaine and Everton have been in and out of institutional care? Was Elaine the object of spousal abuse that rendered her insensitive and immune to the carnage around her?

How could all this happen in our city without social services and police and schools and neighbours being aware?

Asked at his February 2016 sentencing if he had anything to say, to shed light on the loathesome act, Everton responded: “It won’t do any good, it won’t make any difference. No.”

Elaine had plenty to say at her September 2016 sentencing – delivered in rambling, raving threats and declarations directed at judge, jury and court. She is currently seeking permission to appeal her conviction of second-degree murder and life sentence with no chance of parole for 16 years.

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In Jamaica, Racquel, herself with four children, precarious living conditions, yet resilient, a hustler and a survivor, her job reduced to two days a week, is as uncertain about Elaine’s fate as she was certain about Everton’s.

“Canada is a woman and pickney country. They may give her lenience, especially since she give evidence against him. But I have a better idea. Just send them down to Jamaica and we will take care of them.”

Or, as Austin says: “She? She should go rot in prison.”