David Bagby - Dance With the Devil: A Memoir of Murder and Loss

Diversion Books
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Copyright 2007 by David Bagby
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Original cover artwork by Evan B. Harris.

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First Diversion Books edition August 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-967-2

To Zachary,
to Edward Shaw,
and to all potential bail-release murder victims

If we cannot find the truth, what is our hope of justice?
Scott Turow, from Presumed Innocent

By Elliott Leyton,

Professor Emeritus of Forensic Anthropology,

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Dance with the Devil tells a story so achingly vile and contemptible that everyone has a duty to read and consider its contents. The book documents how the system of social work, law, and psychiatry arrogantly facilitated the tragic murder of a child, Zachary Turner.

We Canadians may be proud of our peaceable kingdom, but we rarely pause to consider its defects, and few of us understand how inhuman and incompetent our major institutions can be. Read this book to see how the professionals who are paid to serve and protect our interests systematically fussed over and pampered a murderer, ignoring all warnings that she would kill again. When she did kill for a second time, murdering her baby and herself, the professionals acted only to protect themselves, blocking all inquiries into how this dereliction of duty could have happened. Thus, you will learn how the caring professions of social work and psychology treated an endangered child with an ignorance and indifference that would prove fatal; how the healing profession did nothing to foresee the coming rampage; and how the judges and attorneys in the Department of Justice were incapable of grasping the most elementary principles of criminality, let alone justice.

David and Kate Bagby are among the most gentle and lovable people you could ever hope to meet; they are also among the most trusting, a quality that was shared by their son, Andrew. Alas, their innocence would soon end in the annihilation of their entire bloodline.

David, an engineer in California, and his devout English-born wife, Kate, must have been delighted that their only child, Andrew, had been accepted into medical school at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canadas windswept easternmost province. They could not have known that while he was in medical school, Andrew would have a college romance with a fellow medical student, Shirley Turner, an older woman with a long history of mental instability and many children from previous marriages. Most of Turners fellow students and professors recognized that she was a volatile, even dangerous woman. Turner was known to have made several suicide attempts when lovers had rejected her, and she was also infamous for her rages whenever her plans were thwarted (so threatening was she that a senior physician and professor in the medical school had taken out a restraining order against her, forbidding her to contact him). All of this information was available, but none of it was exchanged among the social workers, psychologists, lawyers, judges, and psychiatrists who were later to be responsible for Turner and her child, despite official policies insisting such information be shared.

After she murdered Dr. Andrew Bagby because he had ended their relationship, she then fled to Canada. Through a fantastical display of bumbling incompetence and indifference that goes to the very heart of the senile Canadian bureaucracy, the brutal killer used her personal powers of evasion and manipulation to fight extradition for almost two years. The Newfoundland police officer whose job it was to liaise with the Pennsylvania police read the file and interviewed Turner. He was one of the few to recognize what a dangerous woman she was and tried to warn the social workers and attorneys (as had the Bagbys) who were responsible for Turner and her soon-to-be-born child, Zachary.

Turner was temporarily placed in a correctional institution to await extradition to the United States, and Zachary was turned over to the Bagbys. The Bagbys said nothing, revelling in the love of their grandson and fearful that if they interfered with the process of justice they might lose him.

The Bagbys fears were justified. In fact, a kind of conspiracy of indifference was growing among the professionals, an unconscious agreement between the social workers, the legal system and the psychiatrists involved in the case, based on a shared inability to see the killer who was sitting in front of them. Ultimately, this incapacity would release Turner on bail, return Zachary to her care, and grant Turner the freedom to murder her child. Turner manipulated her psychiatrist, as well as two impecunious new friends into standing bail for her (in Newfoundland, a preposterous system exists in which no money need be put up to bail out a person, merely a promise). At the critical bail hearing, neither the Crown attorney nor Turners defense lawyer questioned the wisdom of releasing an indicted murderer from institutional control. Worse, no one had explained to those posting the bail that if they later changed their minds about Turners reliability (as at least one of them did), they had the right to retract the bond. Most damning of all, if true, is that it remains unclear whether or not the presiding judge even read the airtight file on Turner prepared by the Pennsylvania Police.

On the loose and fighting extradition, Turner now came under the care of the social workers and psychologists in the Department of Social Services and the Department of Child and Youth Services. Turner deftly manoeuvred the young and inexperienced social workers, who were utterly lacking in direction from senior bureaucrats, into using public money to provide her with welfare housing and incomeeven a daily cleaning lady. Clearly, the social workers saw Turner as their sole responsibility and they treated her and Zachary as social-service recipients, rather than treating Turner as a dubious person with a child in need of protection. The Bagbys counted for nothing.

David Bagby writes with passion about the murders of their only child and only grandchildmurders that destroyed, perhaps for all time, any hope that he and his wife might ever have for peace of mind. But he also writes to a noble social purpose. His hope in writing this is that such bureaucracy-facilitated killing will never happen again in Canada; that someone awaiting extradition on serious charges of murder will never again be allowed out on bail and in control of a child; and that the practices of bail and child protection will be radically changed. It is David and Kate Bagbys desperate hope that never again will the justice industry trample on all morality, intelligence, and natural justice.

In the wake of the killings and the suicide, Newfoundlands Child Advocates Office sparked an enquiry that, in late 2006, issued a stinging three-volume report by forensic pathologist Dr. Peter Markesteyn, with David C. Day as legal counsel. It remains to be seen if the provincial government has the courage and the energy to implement their superb and necessary recommendations and to crush the incompetents who orchestrated this tragedy.

Author of Men of Blood: Murder in Everyday Life and Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer, Dr. Leyton served for fifteen months on the Child Advocates initial Advisory Panel reviewing the death of Zachary Turner.

November 6, 2001The body of twenty-eight-year-old Latrobe Area Hospital physician Dr. Andrew Bagby was found Tuesday morning in Keystone State Park, several miles north of Latrobe. He had been shot five times with a small-calibre weapon.