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Subject: The Stalking Of Kristin;The Law Made It Easy For My Daughter's Killer<By
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 92 09:18:27 EST
Message-ID: <35.1992Nov22.091827@AmeriCast.com>

The Stalking Of Kristin;The Law Made It Easy For My Daughter's
Killer<By George Lardner Jr.=

THE PHONE was ringing insistently, hurrying me back to my desk.
My daughter Helen was on the line, sobbing so hard she could
barely catch her breath.

"Dad," she shouted. "Come home! Right away!"

I was stunned. I had never heard her like this before. "What's
wrong?" I asked.  "What happened?"

"It's - it's Kristin. She's been shot . . . and killed." Kristin?
My Kristin? Our Kristin? I'd talked to her the afternoon before.
Her last words to me were, "I love you Dad." Suddenly I had trou-
ble breathing myself.

It was 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 30. In Boston, where Kristin
Lardner was an art student, police were cordoning off an apart-
ment building a couple of blocks from the busy, sunlit sidewalk
where she'd been killed 90 minutes earlier. She had been shot in
the head and face by an ex-boyfriend who was under court order to
stay away from her. When police burst into his apartment, they
found him sprawled on his bed, dead from a final act of self-
pity.

This was a crime that could and should have been prevented. I
write about it as a sort of cautionary tale, in anger at a system
of justice that failed to protect my daughter, a system that is
addicted to looking the other way, especially at the evil done to
women.

But first let me tell you about my daughter.

She was, at 21, the youngest of our five children, born in D.C.
and educated in the city's public schools, where not much harm
befell her unless you count her taste for rock music, lots of
jewelry, and funky clothes from Value Village. She loved books,
went trick-or-treating dressed as Greta Garbo, played one of the
witches in "Macbeth" and had a grand time in tap-dancing class
even in her sneakers. She made life sparkle.

When she was small, she always got up in time for Saturday morn-
ing cartoons at the Chevy Chase library, and she took cheerful
care of a succession of cats, mice, gerbils, hamsters and guinea
pigs. Her biggest fault may have been that she took too long in
the shower - and you never knew what color her hair was going to
be when she emerged. She was compassionate, and strong-minded
too; when a boy from high school dropped his pants in front of
her, Kristin knocked out one of his front teeth.

"She didn't back down from anything," said Amber Lynch, a close
friend from Boston University. "You could tell that basically
from her art, the way she dressed, the opinions she had. If you
said something stupid, she'd tell you."

Midway through high school, Kristin began thinking of becoming an
artist. She'd been taking art and photography classes each summer
at the Corcoran and was encouraged when an art teacher at Wilson
High decided two of her paintings were good enough to go on
display at a little gallery there. She began studies at Boston
University's art school and transferred after two years to a fine
arts program run jointly by the School of the Museum of Fine Arts
and Tufts University. She particularly liked to sculpt and make
jewelry and, in the words of one faculty member, "showed great
promise and was extremely talented."

In her apartment were scattered signs of that talent. Three
wide-banded silver and brass rings, one filigreed with what
looked like barbed wire. Some striking sculptures of bound fig-
ures. A Madonna, painstakingly gilded. A nude self-portrait in
angry reds, oranges and yellows, showing a large leg bruise her
ex-boyfriend had given her on their last date in April.

"It felt as though she was telling all her secrets to the world,"
she wrote of her art in an essay she left behind. "Why would any-
one want to know them anyway? But making things was all she want-
ed to do .  confusion, and a need to get out whatever lay inside
of her, hoping to be meaningful."<'I Told Her That He Could Kill
Her'<Kristin wrote that essay last November for a course at Tufts
taught by Ross Ellenhorn, who also happens to be a counselor at
Emerge, an educational program for abusive men. He had once men-
tioned this to his students. He would hear from my daughter in
April, after she met Michael Cartier.

By then, Kristin had been dating Cartier, a 22-year-old bouncer,
for about 2 1/2 months. She broke off with him on the early morn-
ing of April 16. On that night, a few blocks from her apartment,
he beat her up.

They "became involved in an argument and he knocked her to the
ground and started kicking her over and over," reads a Brookline
police report. "She remembers him saying, 'Get up or I'll kill
you.' She staggered to her feet, a car stopped and two men as-
sisted her home.

"Since that night," the report continues, "she has refused to see
him, but he repeatedly calls her, sometimes 10 or 11 times a day.
He has told her that if she reports him to the police, he might
have to do six months in jail, but she better not be around when
he gets out.

"She also stated the injuries she suffered were hematomas to her
legs and recurring headaches from the kicks."

Kristin didn't call the police right away. But she did call El-
lenhorn in hopes of getting Cartier into Emerge. "I made clear to
her that Emerge isn't a panacea, that there was still a chance of
him abusing her," Ellenhorn says. "I told her that he could kill
her . . . because she was leaving him and that's when things get
dangerous."

Cartier showed up at Emerge's offices in Cambridge, around April
28 by Ellenhorn's calculations. Ellenhorn, on duty that night,
realized who Cartier was when he wrote down Kristin's name under
victim on the intake form.

"I said, 'Are you on probation?' " Ellenhorn remembers. "He said
yes. I said, 'I'm going to need the name of the probation off-
icer.' He said, '(Expletive) this. No way.' "

With that, Cartier ripped up the contract he was required to
sign, ripped up the intake form, put the tattered papers in his
pocket and walked out.

"He knew," Ellenhorn says. "He knew what kind of connection would
be made." Michael Cartier was, of course, on probation for at-
tacking another woman.

Cartier preyed on women. Clearly disturbed, he once talked of
killing his mother. When he was 5 or 6, he dismembered a pet rab-
bit. When he was 21, he tortured and killed a kitten. In a
bizarre 1989 incident at an Andover restaurant, he injected a
syringe of blood into a ketchup bottle. To his girlfriends, he
could be appallingly brutal.

Rose Ryan could tell you that. When Kristin's murder was reported
on TV - the newscaster described the killing as "another case of
domestic violence" - she said to a friend, "That sounds like
Mike." It was. Hearing the newscaster say his name, she recalls,
"I almost dropped."

When Ryan met Cartier at a party in Boston in the late summer of
1990, she was an honors graduate of Lynn East High School,
preparing to attend Suffolk University. She was 17, a lovely,
courageous girl with brown hair and brown eyes like Kristin's.

"He was really my first boyfriend," she told me. "I was supposed
to work that summer and save my money, but I got caught up with
the scene in Boston and hanging out with all the kids . . . . At
first, everything was fine."

Cartier was a familiar face on the Boston Common, thanks to his
career as a freelance nightclub bouncer. He had scraped up enough
money to share a Commonwealth Avenue apartment with a Museum
School student named Kara Boettger. They dated a few times, then
settled down into a sort of strained coexistence.

"He didn't like me very much," Boettger said. "He liked music
loud. I'd tell him to turn it down."

Rose Ryan liked him better. She thought he was handsome - blue
eyes, black hair, a tall and muscular frame - with a vulnerabili-
ty that belied his strength. To make him happy, she quit work and
postponed the college education it was going to pay for. "He had
me thinking that he'd had a bad deal his whole life," she said,
"that nobody loved him and I was the only one who could help
him."

Cartier also knew how to behave when he was supposed to. Ryan
said he made a good first impression on her parents.  As with
Kristin, it took just about two months before Cartier beat Ryan
up.  She got angry with him for "kidding around" and dumping her
into a barrel on the Common. When she walked away, he punched her
in the head; when she kept going, he punched her again.

"I'd never been hit by any man before and I was just shocked,"
she said. But what aggravated her the most, and still does, is
that "every time something happened, it was in public, and nobody
stopped to help."

Cartier ended the scene with "his usual thing," breaking into
tears and telling her, " 'Oh, why do I always hurt the people I
love? What can I do?  My mother didn't love me. I need your
help.' "

Shortly after they started dating, Ryan spent a few days at the
Cartier-Boetgger apartment. He presented her with a gray kitten,
then left it alone all day without a litter box. The kitten did
what it needed to do on Cartier's jacket.

"He threw the kitten in the shower and turned the hot water on
and kept it there under the hot water," Ryan remembers in a dull
monotone. "And he shaved all its hair off with a man's shaving
razor."

The kitten spent most of its wretched life hiding under a bed. On
the night of Oct. 4, 1990, Cartier began drinking with two
friends and went on a rampage. He took a sledgehammer and smashed
through his bedroom wall into a neighbor's apartment. And he
killed the kitten, hurling it out a fourth-floor window.

"I'd left the apartment without telling them," Ryan said. "When I
came back, the police were in the hallway . . . . They said, 'Get
out. This guy's crazy.' They were taking him out in handcuffs."
Three months later, Cartier, already on probation, plea-bargained
his way to probation again - pleading guilty to malicious des-
truction. Charges of burglary and cruelty to animals were
dismissed; the court saw nothing wrong with putting him back on
the street.

"I thought he was going to jail because he violated probation,"
Kara Boettger said. So did Cartier. "(But after the January hear-
ing) he told me . . . 'Oh yeah, nothing happened. They slapped my
wrist.' "<'He Was Born That Way'<When Michael Cartier was born in
Newburyport, Mass., his mother was 17. Her husband, then 19, left
them six months later; Gene Cartier has since remarried twice.
Her son, Penny Cartier says, was a problem from the first.

"He'd take a bottle away from his (step)sister. He'd light
matches behind a gas stove. He was born that way," Penny Cartier
asserted. "When he was five or six, he had a rabbit. He ripped
its legs out of its sockets."

"None of this," she added in loud tones, "had anything to do with
what he did to Kristin . . . . Michael's childhood had nothing to
do with anything."

Life with mother, in any case, ended at age 7, when she sent him
to the New England Home for Little Wanderers, a state-supported
residential treatment center for troubled children. Staff there
remember him - although Penny Cartier denies this - as a child
abused at an early age. "That's the worst childhood I've ever
seen," agrees Rich DeAngelis, one of Cartier's probation off-
icers. "This didn't just happen in the last couple of years."
Cartier stayed at the New England Home until he was 12. In Oc-
tober 1982, he was put in the Harbor School in Amesbury, a treat-
ment center for disturbed teenagers. He stayed there for almost
four years and was turned over to his father, a facilities
maintenance mechanic in Lawrence.

Michael Cartier was bitter about his mother. "I just know he hat-
ed her," Kara Boettger said. "He said he wanted to get a tattoo,
I think maybe on his arm, of her hanging from a tree with animals
ripping at her body."

Penny Cartier didn't seem surprised when I told her this. In
fact, she added, after he turned 18, "he asked my daughter if she
wanted him to kill me."

Cartier entered Lawrence High School but dropped out after a cou-
ple of years. "He was just getting frustrated. He couldn't keep
up," said his father. By his second semester, he was facing the
first of nearly 20 criminal charges that he piled up in
courthouses from Lawrence to Brighton over a four-year period.

Along the way, he enjoyed brief notoriety as a self-avowed skin-
head, sauntering into the newsroom of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune
with his bald friends in June 1989 to complain of the bad press
and "neo-Nazi" labels skinheads usually got. "The state supported
me all my life, with free doctors and dentists and everything,"
Cartier told columnist Kathie Neff. "My parents never had any-
thing to do with that because they got rid of me. This is like my
way of saying thanks (to them)."

Neff said Cartier cut a especially striking figure, walking on
crutches and wearing a patch on one eye. He had just survived a
serious car accident that produced what seems to have been a mag-
ic purse for him. He told friends he had a big insurance settle-
ment coming and would get periodic advances on it from his
lawyer. Gene Cartier said his son got a final payment late last
year of $17,000 and "went through $14,000" of it before he mur-
dered Kristin.<'No Acute Mental Disorder'<The high-ceilinged main
courtroom in Brighton has a huge, wide-barred cell built into a
wall. On busy days, it is a page from Dickens, crowded with yel-
ling, cursing prisoners waiting for their cases to be called.

Cartier turned up in the cage April 29, 1991, finally arrested
for violating probation. Ten days earlier, when Rose Ryan was
coming home from a friend's house on the "T," Boston's trolley
train and subway system, Cartier followed her - and accosted her
at the Government Center station with a pair of scissors. She
ducked the scissors and Cartier punched her in the mouth.

Even before that, Ryan and her older sister Tina had become
alarmed. After a party in December, Cartier got annoyed with Rose
for not wanting to eat pizza he'd just bought. She began walking
back to the party when he backhanded her in the face so hard she
fell down.  "And I'm lying on the ground, screaming, and then he
finally stopped kicking me after I don't know how long, and then
he said, 'You better get up or I'll kill you.' "

The same words he would use with Kristin. And how many other
young women?

Rose Ryan said Cartier threatened to kill her several times after
they broke up in December, and in a chance encounter in March,
told her he had a gun. The Ryan sisters called his probation off-
icer in Brighton, Tom Casey. He told Rose to get a restraining
order and on March 28, he obtained a warrant for Cartier's
arrest. It took a month for police to pick him up even though
Cartier had, in between, attacked Rose in the subway and been ar-
raigned on charges for that assault in Boston Municipal Court.

"Probation warrants have to be served by the police, who don't
take them seriously enough," said another probation officer.
"Probationers know . . . they can skip court appearances with im-
punity."

When Cartier turned up in Brighton, "he was very quiet. Sullen
and withdrawn," Casey said. "It was obvious he had problems,
deeper than I could ever get to." Yet a court psychiatrist, Dr.
Mike Annunziata, filed a report stating that Cartier had "no
acute mental disorder, no suicidal or homicidal ideas, plans or
intents." The April 29, 1991, report noted that Cartier was being
treated by the Tri-City Mental Health and Retardation Center in
Malden and was taking 300 milligrams of lithium a day to control
depression.

Cartier, the report said, had also spent four days in January
1991 at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. He was
brought there on a "Section 12," a law providing for emergency
restraint of dangerous persons, because of "suicidal ideation"
and an overdose of some sort. On April 2, 1991, he was admitted
to the Center on another "Section 12," this time for talking
about killing Rose Ryan with a gun "within two weeks." He denied
making the threats and was released the next day.

Tom Casey wanted to get him off the streets this time, and a
likeminded visiting magistrate ordered Cartier held on bail for a
full hearing in Brighton later in the week.  When the Ryan sis-
ters arrived in court, they found themselves five feet away from
Cartier in the cell. "Soon as he saw me," Tina Ryan said, "he
said, 'I know who you are, I'm going to kill you, too,' all these
filthy words, calling me everything he could . . . ."

After listening to what the Ryans had to say, the judge sent Car-
tier to jail on Deer Island for three months for violating proba-
tion. The next month, he was given a year for the subway attack,
but was committed for only six months.

That didn't stop the harassment. Cartier began making collect
calls to Ryan from prison and he enlisted other inmates to write
obscene letters. The district attorney's office advised the Ryans
to keep a record of the calls so they could be used against Car-
tier later.

Despite all that, Cartier was released early, on Nov.  5, 1991. "
'He's been a very good prisoner and we're overcrowded,' " the
Ryans say they were told.

Authorities in Essex County didn't want to see him out on the
streets even if officials in Boston didn't care. As soon as he
was released from Deer Island, Cartier was picked up for violat-
ing his probation on the ketchup-bottle incident and sentenced to
59 days in the Essex County jail. But a six-month suspended sen-
tence that was hanging over him for a 1988 burglary - which would
have meant at least three months in jail - was wiped off the
books.

"That's amazing," said another probation officer who looked at
the record. "They dropped the more serious charges."

Cartier was released after serving 49 of the 59 days.

Ryan had already been taking precautions.  She carried mace in
her pocketbook, put a baseball bat in her car and laid out a
bunch of knives next to her bed each night before going to sleep.
"I always thought that he would come back and try to get me," she
said.<Portrait of My Daughter<Kristin loved to go out with
friends until all hours of the morning, but she didn't have many
steady boyfriends. Most men, she said more than once, "are dogs"
because of the way they treated girls she knew.

She was always ready for adventure, hopping on the back of broth-
er Charles's motorcycle for rides; curling up with Circe, a pet
ball-python she kept in her room; and flying down for a few weeks
almost every August to Jekyll Island, Ga., to be with her family,
a tradition started when she was less than a week old. Last year
she caught a small shark from the drawbridge over the Jekyll
River.

"I think she'd give anything a go," said Jason Corkin, the young
man she dated the longest, before he returned last year to his
native New Zealand. "When she set her mind to something, she
wouldn't give it up for anything."

She could also become easily depressed, especially about what she
was going to do after graduation next year. As she once wrote,
her favorite pastime was "morbid self-reflection." Despite that,
laughter came easily and she was always ready for a conversation
about art, religion, philosophy, music. "I don't really remember
any time we were together that we didn't have a good time," said
Bekky Elstad, a close friend from Boston University.

Left in her bedroom at her death was a turntable with
Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring" on it and a tape player with a
punk tune by Suicidal Tendencies. Her books, paperbacks mostly,
included Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and Margaret Atwood's
"The Handmaid's Tale," along with favorites by Sinclair Lewis,
Dickens and E.B.  White and a book about upper- and middle-caste
women in Hindu families in Calcutta.

Her essays for school, lucid and well-written, showed a great
deal of thought about art, religion and the relationship between
men and women. She saw her art as an expression of parts of her
hidden deep inside, waiting to be pulled out, but still to be
guarded closely: "Art could be such a selfish thing. Everything
she made, she made for herself and not one bit of it could she
bear to be parted with. Whether she loved it, despised it or was
painfully ashamed of it . . . she couldn't stand the thought of
these little parts of her being taken away and put into someone
else's possession."

Buddhism appealed to her, and once she wrote this: "Pain only
comes when you try to hang on to what is impermanent. So all life
need not be suffering. You can enjoy life if you do not expect
anything from it."

She met Cartier last Jan.  30 at a Boston nightclub called Axis,
having gone there with Lauren Mace, Kristin's roommate and best
friend, and Lauren's boyfriend. At Axis, Kristin recognized Car-
tier as someone she'd seen at Bunratty's, a hard-rock club where
Cartier had been a bouncer. Cartier was easily recognizable; he
had a large tattoo of a castle on his neck.

What did she see in him? It's a question her parents keep asking
themselves. But some things are fairly obvious. He reminded her
of Jason, her friend from New Zealand. He could be charming.
"People felt a great deal of empathy for him," said Octavia Osso-
la, director of the child care center at the home where Cartier
grew up, "because it was reasonably easy to want things to be
better for him." At the Harbor School, said executive director
Art DiMauro, "he was quite endearing. The staff felt warmly about
Michael."

So, at first, did Kristin. "She called me up, really excited and
happy," said Christian Dupre, a friend since childhood. "She said

Kristin told her oldest sister, Helen, and her youngest brother,
Charlie, too. But Helen paused when Kristin told her that Cartier
was a bouncer at Bunratty's and had a tattoo.

"Well, ah, is he nice?" Helen asked.

"Well, he's nice to me," Kristin said.  Charlie, who had just en-
tered college after a few years of blue-collar jobs, was not im-
pressed. "Get rid of him," he advised his sister. "He's a zero."
Her friends say they got along well at first. He told Kristin
he'd been in jail for hitting a girlfriend, but called it a bum
rap. She did not know he'd attacked Rose Ryan with a scissors,
that he had a rap sheet three pages long.  Kristin, friends say,
often made excuses for his behavior. But they soon started to ar-
gue. Cartier was irrationally jealous, accusing her of going out
with men who stopped by just to talk. During one argument, ap-
parently over her art, Cartier hit her, then did his "usual
thing" and started crying.  Cartier, meanwhile, was still bother-
ing Ryan. A warrant for violating probation had been issued out
of Boston Municipal Court on Dec. 19, in part for trying to con-
tact her by mail while he was in jail. But when he finally turned
up in court, a few days before he met Kristin, he got kid-glove
treatment. Rather than being sentenced to complete the one-year
term he'd gotten for the scissors attack, he was ordered instead
to attend a once-a-week class at the courthouse for six weeks
called "Alternatives to Violence." "It's not a therapy program,
it's more educational," said John Tobin, chief probation officer
at Boston Municipal Court. "It's for people who react to stress
in violent ways, not just for batterers. Cartier . . . showed up
each time. You don't send probationers away when they do what
they're supposed to do."

What Tobin didn't mention was that Cartier had actually dropped
out of his Alternatives to Violence course - and, incredibly, was
allowed to sign up for it again. According to a chronology I ob-
tained elsewhere, Cartier attended the first meeting of the group
on Feb. 5 and skipped the class Feb. 12. His probation was re-
voked two days later. But instead of sending him back to jail,
the court allowed him to start the course over, beginning April
1.

Cartier's probation officer, Diane Barrett Moeller, a "certified
batterer specialist" who helps run the program, declined to talk
to me, citing "legal limitations" that she did not spell out. Her
boss, Tobin, said she was "a ferocious probation officer."

"We tend to be a punitive department," Tobin asserted.  "We are
not a bunch of social rehabilitators."

However that may be, it is a department that seems to operate in
a vacuum. Cartier's record of psychiatric problems, his admis-
sions to the Boston mental health center in January and April
1991 and his reliance on a drug to control manic-depression
should have disqualified him from the court-run violence program.

"If we had information that he had a prior history of mental ill-
ness, or that he was treated in a clinic or that he had been hos-
pitalized, then what we probably would have done is recommend
that a full-scale psychological evaluation be done for him," To-
bin told the Boston Herald last June following Kristin's murder.
"We didn't know about it."

Probation officer Tom Casey in Brighton knew. All Tobin's office
had to do was pick up the phone to find out what a menace Cartier
was.  Meanwhile, in Salem, where she had moved to work with her
sister at a family-run business, Rose Ryan remained fearful. But
she had a new boyfriend, Sean Casey, 23, and, as Rose puts it, "I
think he intimidated Mike because he had more tattoos. Mike knew
Sean from before."

Around March 1, Sean went to Boston to tell Cartier to leave Rose
alone. As they were talking, Kristin walked by. Sean didn't know
who she was, but recognized her later, from newspaper photos.

Cartier nodded at Kristin as she passed. "He said, 'I don't need
Rose any more,' " Casey recalled. " 'I have my own girlfriend.'
"<'Call Your Daughter'<Cartier was a frequent visitor at the
six-room flat Kristin shared with Lauren Mace and another BU stu-
dent, Matt Newton, but he didn't have much to say to them or the
other students who were always stopping by. He told Kristin they
"intimidated" him because they were college-educated.  As the
weeks wore on, they started to argue. When he hit her the first
time, probably in early March, Kristin told friends about it, but
not Lauren. She was probably too embarrassed. She had always been
outspoken in her disdain for men who hit women.

"He hit her once. She freaked out on that . . . ," Bekky Elstad
said. "She wanted him to get counseling . . . . He told her he
was sorry. He was all broken up. She wanted to believe him."

Kristin came home to Washington in mid-March, outwardly bright
and cheerful. She was more enthusiastic than ever about her art.
She was "really getting it together," she said. She had yet to
tell her parents that she had a boyfriend, much less a boyfriend
who hit her.

When she got back to Boston, Cartier tried to make up with her.
He gave her a kitten. "It was really cute - black with a little
white triangle on its nose," Amber Lynch said. "It was teeny. It
just wobbled around."

It didn't last long. Over Kristin's protests, Cartier put the
kitten on top of a door jamb. It fell off, landing on its head.
She had to have it destroyed.

Devastated, Kristin called home in tears and told her parents,
for the first time, about her new boyfriend. Part of her conver-
sation with her mother was picked up by a malfunctioning answer-
ing machine.  Rosemary: What does Mike do?

Kristin: Well, he does the same thing Jason did actually. He
works at Bunratty's.

Rosemary: He does what?

Kristin: He works at Bunratty's.

Rosemary: Oh. Is he an artist also?

Kristin: No.  Rosemary: Well, that's what I was asking. What does
he - ? Is he a student?  Kristin: No. He just - he works. He's a
bouncer."

"Oh," Rosemary said, asking after a long pause why she was going
out with a boy with no education.  Kristin told her that she
wanted to have a boyfriend "just like everyone else does."

When I came home, Rosemary said, "Call your daughter." When I
did, Kristin began crying again as she told me about the kitten.
She was also upset because she had given Cartier a piece of
jewelry she wanted to use for her annual evaluation at the Museum
School. He told her he'd lost it.

Gently, perhaps too gently, I said I didn't think she should be
wasting her time going out with a boy who did such stupid things.
We talked about school and classes for a few minutes more and
said goodnight.

She went out with him for the last time on April 16, the day
after one of his Alternatives to Violence classes. He pushed her
down onto the sidewalk in front of a fast-food place, cutting her
hand. She told him several times to "go home and leave me alone,"
but he kept following her to a side street in Allston.

"Kristin said something like, 'Get away from me, I never want to
see you again,' " Bekky Elstad remembers. But when Kristin tried
to run, he caught up with her, threw her down and kicked her re-
peatedly in the head and legs. She was crying hysterically when
she got home with the help of a passing motorist. She refused to
see him again.

But Cartier kept trying to get her on the phone.  He warned her
not to go to the police and for a while, she didn't. She felt
sorry for him. She even agreed to take a once-a-week phone call
from him the day he went to his Alternatives to Violence class.

He was rated somewhat passive at the meetings, but he got through
the course on May 6 without more truancy. The next day, he walked
into Gay's Flowers and Gifts on Commonwealth Avenue and bought a
dozen red roses for Kristin. He brought in a card to be delivered
with them.

Leslie North, a dark-haired, puffy-faced woman who had known Car-
tier for years, had helped him fill it out in advance. "He always
called me when he had a fight with his girlfriends," she said.
"He said that he was trying to change, that he needed help, that
he wanted to be a better person. He said, 'I'm trying to get back
with her.' "

Flower shop proprietor Alan Najarian made the delivery to
Kristin's flat. "One of her roommates took them," Najarian
remembers. "He was kind of reluctant . . . . I think he must have
known who they were from."

Police think Cartier may have gotten his gun the day of the murd-
er, but Leslie North remembers his showing it to her "shortly
after (he and Kristin) broke up," probably in early May.

Why did he get the gun? "He said, 'Ah, just to have one,' " North
says. "I asked him, you're not supposed to get a gun if you've
been in jail. I didn't tell anyone he had it."

"He told me he paid $750 for it," she continues. "I showed him
just a little bit of safety . . . how to hold it when you shoot .
. . . It looked kind of old to me."

The gun found in Cartier's apartment after he killed Kristin and
himself was 61 years old, a Colt .38 Super, serial number 13645,
one of about a 100 million handguns loose in the United States.
It was shipped brand new on Jan. 12, 1932 to a hardware store in
Knoxville, Tenn., where all traces of it disappeared.

North remembered something else she says Cartier told her after
he got the gun. "He goes, 'If I kill Kristin, are you going to
tell anyone?'

"I said, 'Of course, I'm going to tell.' I didn't take him seri-
ously . . . . He said that once or twice to me."<A Call for
Help<On May 7, the same day Cartier sent flowers to Kristin, he
told her that he was going to cheat her out of the $1,000 Nordic
Flex machine she'd let him charge to her Discover card. When she
told him over the phone that she expected him to return the dev-
ice, he laughed and said, "I guess you're out the $1,000."

Kristin was furious. She promptly called Cartier's probation off-
icer, Diane Barrett Moeller, and gave her an earful: the exercise
machine, the beating.

Kristin's call for help was another of the probation office's
secrets. Tobin said nothing about it to the Boston press in the
days after Kristin's murder, when it grew clear that there was
something desperately wrong with the criminal justice system. To-
bin told me only after I found out about it from Kristin's
friends.

"Your daughter was concerned," Tobin said.  "She put a lot of em-
phasis on the weight machine. Mrs. Moeller said, 'Get your prior-
ities straight. You should not be worrying about the weight
machine. You should be worrying about your safety . . . . Get to
Brookline court, seek an assault complaint, a larceny complaint,
whatever it takes . . . and get a restraining order.' "

According to Tobin, Kristin wouldn't give her name even though
Moeller asked for it twice. "We can't revoke someone's probation
on an anonymous phone call," he said. Kristin, he added, "did say
she didn't want this man arrested and put behind bars."

Tobin also claimed that his office could have taken no action be-
cause Kristin was "not the woman in the case we were supervis-
ing," which is like saying that probationers in Boston Municipal
Court should only take care not to rob the same bank twice.

The next day, Friday, May 8, instead of moving to revoke
Cartier's probation, Moeller called Cartier and, in effect, told
him what was up. Tobin recalled the conversation. "She told him
to get the exercise machine back to her. She told him she didn't
want to hear about it any more. And she ordered a full-scale
psychiatric evaluation of him. She also ordered him to report to
her every week until the evaluation is completed."

Cartier did all that while planning Kristin's murder.

When Cartier called Kristin again, she told him that if he didn't
return the exercise machine, she was going to take court action.
"He called back 10 minutes later from a pay phone," remembers
Brian Fazekas, Lauren's boyfriend. "He said, 'Okay, okay, I'll
return the stupid machine.' "

Kristin was skeptical about that. And she was worried about more
violence. The warnings of her friends, her brother Charlie, her
teacher Ross Ellenhorn and now Cartier's probation officer rang
in her ears. Her art reflected her anguish. She had painted her
own self-portrait, showing some of the ugly bruises Cartier had
left. Hanging sculptures showed a male, arms flexed and fists
clenched. The female hung defensively, arms protecting her head.

By Monday, May 11, she had made up her mind. She was going to
rely on the system. She decided to ask the courts for help. She
talked about it afterwards with her big sister, Helen, a lawyer
and her lifelong best friend.  Kristin told her, sparingly, about
the beating and, angrily, about the exercise machine. Helen kept
the news to herself, as Kristin requested.

"She said she found out what a loser he was. She said, 'He's even
been taking drugs behind my back,' " Helen recalls. He was snort-
ing heroin, confirms Leslie North - it helped him stay calm, she
remembers him saying.

Late in the day, Kristin went to the Brookline police station,
Lauren Mace and Brian Fazekas beside her.

"The courts were closed by the time we got there. We waited out-
side," Lauren said. "An officer showed her (Cartier's) arrest
record. When she came out, she said, 'You won't believe the size
of this guy's police record. He's killed cats. He's beat up ex-
girlfriends. Breaking and enterings.' The officer just sort of
flashed the length of it at her and said,

Brookline police sergeant Robert G.  Simmons found Kristin "very
intelligent, very articulate" - and scared.  Simmons asked if she
wanted to press charges, and she replied that she wanted to think
about that. Simmons, afraid she might not come back, made out an
"application for complaint" himself and got a judge on night duty
to approve issuance of a one-day emergency restraining order over
the phone. The next day, Kristin had to appear before Brookline
District Judge Lawrence Shubow to ask for a temporary order - one
that would last a week.

Other paperwork that Simmons sent over to the courthouse, right
next door to the police station, called for a complaint charging
Cartier with assault and battery, larceny, intimidation of a wit-
ness and violation of the domestic abuse law. It was signed by
Lt. George Finnegan, the police liaison officer on duty at the
courthouse that day, and turned over to clerk-magistrate John
Connors for issuance of a summons.

The summons was never issued. Inexcusably, the application for it
was still sitting on a desk in the clerk's office the day Kristin
was killed, almost three weeks later.

Other officials I spoke with were amazed by the lapse. Connors
shrugged it off. "We don't have the help," he said. "It was wait-
ing to be typed."

Shubow was unaware of the criminal charges hanging over Cartier's
head at the May 12 hearing. And Shubow didn't bother to ask about
his criminal record. Restraining orders in Massachusetts, as in
other states, have been treated for years by most judges as dis-
tasteful "civil matters." Until Kristin was killed, any thug in
the Commonwealth accused under the domestic abuse law of beating
up his wife or girlfriend or ex-wife or ex-girlfriend could walk
into court without much fear that his criminal record would catch
up with him. Shubow later told the Boston Globe, "If there is one
lesson I learned from this case, it was to ask myself whether
this is a case where I should review his record. In a case that
has an immediate level of danger, I could press for a warrant and
immediate arrest." Instead, Shubow treated Docket No. 92-RO-060
as a routine matter. He issued a temporary restraining order tel-
ling Cartier to stay away from Kristin's school, her apartment
and her place of work for a week, until another hearing could be
held by another judge on a permanent order, good for a year.

"The system failed her completely," Shubow told me after
Kristin's death. "There is no such thing as a routine case. I
don't live that, but I believe that. All bureaucrats should be
reminded of that."<'I Had This Gut Feeling'<Downtown, in Boston
Municipal Court, chief probation officer Tobin said that "if we
had found out about the restraining order, we would have moved
immediately." But Tobin's office made no effort to find out.
Cartier's probation officer knew that the anonymous female caller
lived in Brookline; a call to officials there would have made
clear that Cartier had once again violated probation by beating
up an ex-girlfriend. No such call was made.

Apparently, the probation officer didn't ask Cartier for the de-
tails either. According to a state official who asked not to be
identified, Diane Moeller met with Cartier on May 14, just eight
days after he completed her Alternatives to Violence course and
three days after Kristin obtained her first restraining order.
Moeller did nothing to get him off the streets.

"She was concerned about getting additional assistance for this
guy," the state official said of the May 14 meeting. "No charges
were filed."

In Brookline, Lt. Finnegan said he sensed something was wrong. He
walked up to Kristin outside the courthouse on May 12. "I had
this gut feeling," he said. "I asked her, 'Are you really afraid
of him?' She said, 'Yeah.' I asked her if he had a gun. She said,
'He may.' "

Finnegan told her to call the police if she saw Cartier hanging
around.

The phone rang at the Brookline police station shortly after mid-
night on May 19; Kristin's request for a permanent restraining
order was coming up for a hearing that morning. Now, in plain
violation of the May 12 order, Cartier had called around mid-
night, got Kristin on the line and asked her not to go back to
court. She called the cops.

Sgt. Simmons, on duty that night as shift commander, advised
Kristin to file a complaint and sent officer Kevin Mealy to talk
to her; Mealy arrived at her apartment at 1:10 a.m. "Ms.  Lardner
said that Mr. Cartier attempted to persuade her not to file for
an extension of the order," Mealy wrote in his report, which he
filed as soon as he got back to the station house. "A criminal
complaint application has been made out against Mr. Cartier for
violating the existing restraining order." Sgt. Simmons says, "I
told Kevin, 'They've got a hearing in the morning.' The documents
went over there. But who reads them?"

Kristin arrived at the courthouse around 11:30 a.m. May 19, ac-
companied by Lauren Mace and Amber Lynch.

"He (Cartier) was out in front of the courthouse when we got
there," Lynch said. "We all just walked in quickly. We waited a
long time. He kept walking in and out of the courtroom. I think
he was staring at her."

There was no one in the courtroom from the Norfolk County D.A.'s
office to advise Kristin. Brookline probation officials didn't
talk to her either. They had no idea Cartier was on probation for
beating up another woman.

Neither did District Judge Paul McGill, a visiting magistrate
from Roxbury. Like Shubow, he didn't check Cartier's criminal
record. Unlike Shubow, it didn't trouble him. To him, it was a
routine hearing. Kristin was looking for protection. She was pro-
cessed like a slice of cheese.

"She thought he was going to be arrested," Lauren said. Brian
Fazekas said, "It was her understanding that as soon as he got
the permanent restraining order, he was going to be surrendered"
for violating probation.

"What he (Cartier) did on the 19th was a crime," David Lowy, le-
gal adviser to Gov. William Weld and a former prosecutor, said of
the midnight call. "He should have been placed under arrest right
then and there."

The hearing lasted five minutes. It would have been shorter ex-
cept for a typical bit of arrogance from Cartier, trying to stay
in control in the face of his third restraining order in 18
months. He agreed not to contact Kristin for a year and to stay
away from her apartment and school. But he said he had a problem
staying away from Marty's Liquors, where Kristin had just started
working as a cashier. "I happen to live right around the corner
from there," Cartier complained, according to a tape of the hear-
ing.

The judge told him to patronize some other liquor store, but not
before more argument from Cartier about how he would have to
"walk further down the street" and about how close it was to
Bunratty's, only half a block away.

McGill ended the hearing by ordering Cartier to avoid any contact
with Kristin, to stay at least 200 yards away from her and not to
talk to her if he had to come closer when entering his home or
the nightclub. And with that, Cartier walked out scot-free. Yet,
Massachusetts law, enacted in 1990, provides for mandatory arrest
of anyone a law enforcement officer has probable cause to believe
violated a temporary or permanent restraining order. In addition,
a state law making "stalking" a crime, especially in violation of
a restraining order, had been signed by Gov. Weld just the day
before, May 18, effective immediately.

McGill later said that if he'd known Cartier had violated his
restraining order by calling Kristin that morning, he would have
turned the hearing into a criminal session.

The application for a complaint charging Cartier with violating
the order was moldering in clerk John Connors's offices. Like the
earlier complaint accusing him of assault and battery, it was
still there the day Kristin was killed.

"Kristin "could have said something (in court), I suppose,"
Lauren said. "But she just figured that after that, he would be
out of her life. She said, 'Let's go home.' She felt very re-
lieved that she had this restraining order."<'What a
Weirdo'<Kristin, who now had 11 days to live, talked enthusiasti-
cally about going to Europe after graduation, only a year away.
After that she was hoping to go to graduate school. She had lost
interest in boys, wanting to concentrate on her art.

"I spoke to her the night before (she was killed)," Chris Dupre
said.  "She was like the most optimistic and happiest she'd been
in months. She knew what she wanted to do with herself, with her
art."

She even had a new kitten, named Stubby because its tail was bro-
ken in two places. She was working part-time in the liquor store
and hoping for more hours as summer approached. But she liked to
stay home and paint or just hang out with friends now that
classes were over.

Cartier was still skulking about, even after issuance of the per-
manent restraining order. One afternoon, Kristin stepped out of
the liquor store to take a break. She saw Cartier staring at her
from the doorway of Bunratty's.

On the afternoon of May 28, she and Robert Hyde, a friend who had
just graduated from BU, decided to get something to eat after
playing Scrabble (Kristin won) and chess (Robert won) at
Kristin's flat. The two hopped on the back of his Yamaha and were
off. First stop was the Bay Bank branch on Commonwealth Avenue,
two doors from Marty's Liquors. As they turned a corner, Kristin
saw Cartier looking in Marty's window. "Did you see that?" she
asked Hyde moments later as they got off the bike. "Mike was
peeking in the window. What a weirdo!"

Hyde didn't think that Cartier saw them, but later that night,
after taking Kristin home, he went over to Bunratty's to play
pinball. Cartier was there, and he began an awkward conversation
to find out where Hyde lived.

"I thought it was kind of weird, but I didn't think too much of
it," Hyde said. He shuddered about it after the shooting.  Car-
tier had always been disturbingly jealous - and unpredictable.
"He'd get under pressure, he'd start breathing heavy and start
talking all wild," a longtime friend, Timothy McKernan, told the
Lawrence Eagle-Tribune.

He couldn't handle rejection either. Cartier "told his friends
that she broke up with him because she wanted to see other peo-
ple," Bekky Elstad said. "That's not true. But that's why he
killed her, I think. If he couldn't have her, no one else was go-
ing to."

If Kristin was bothered by the stalking incident that Thursday,
she seemed to put it out of her mind. The usual stream of friends
moved through the flat all day. She called me that afternoon in
an upbeat mood. We talked about summer school, her Museum School
evaluation and a half dozen other things, including the next
month's check from home. I assured her it was in the mail. She
had a big smile in her voice. All I knew about Cartier was that
she had gotten rid of the creep. When I made some grumpy refer-
ence to boyfriends in general, she laughed and said, "That's be-
cause you're my dad."

Cartier called his father that day, too.

Gene Cartier knew about Kristin and about the restraining order.
"I asked him what happened," the older Cartier said. "He said,
'Well, me and my girlfriend had a fight.' I figured they argued .
. . . He loved animals, he loved children. He wouldn't hurt a
fly."

A man with a persistent drinking problem, Gene Cartier at times
seemed to confuse Kristin with other girlfriends his son had, but
his son's last call about her stuck firmly in his mind. "He said,
'She's busting my balls again,' " Cartier recalled. "I think she
was seeing another guy - in front of Michael - to get him jealous
. . . . He was obsessed with her." Kristin went to bed that night
with a smile. It had been Lauren's last day at Marty's and some
of the students who worked there stopped by the flat. "We were
having a really, really good time," Lauren Mace said. "I
remember, I said, 'Good night, Kristin.' I gave her a hug. The
next morning, I saw her taking her bike down the street, on the
way to work. I did not see her again."<My Daughter's
Death<Saturday, May 30, was a beautiful spring day in Boston, a
light breeze rustling the trees on Winchester Street below the
flat.  Kristin was looking forward to a full day's work; Lauren
was supposed to meet her at 6, when she was done at Marty's.
Lauren had just graduated from BU; they were going to buy a keg
for a big going-away party at the flat on Sunday.  One of the
managers at the liquor store, David Bergman, was having lunch
across the street at the Inbound Pizza when Kristin walked in. He
waved her over to his table. She had a slice of Sicilian pizza
and then, as he remembers, two more. "We talked for half an
hour," Bergman said. "She was going to travel to Europe with her
friend, Lauren. She had all these plans laid on."

After lunch, the day turned sour. Leslie North walked into
Marty's with another girl. So, clerks say, did a man in his thir-
ties with rotting teeth and thinning hair - North's boyfriend. He
got in Kristin's checkout line and started cursing at her.

Not long after North and her friend left Marty's, J.D. Crump, the
manager at Bunratty's, walked in for a sandwich from the deli
counter. He'd known Kristin since she had dated Jason. "She said
she was having a tough day," he told the Globe. "The customers
were being mean. I told her it would get better."

When Crump spoke with Kristin on May 30, it was about 4:30. Car-
tier, meanwhile, was at a noisy show at the Rathskellar on Ken-
more Square. Friends told the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune that he was
acting strangely, greeting people with long hugs instead of the
usual punch in the arm or a handshake.

"He wasn't the hugging type," Timothy McKernan told the Eagle-
Tribune. "I think he knew what he was going to do." Cartier left
suddenly, running out the door.

Kristin was scheduled to work until 6, but at 5 p.m., she was
told, to her chagrin, to leave early, losing an hour's pay.  "We
had other cashiers coming in," the manager explained. Instead of
hanging around to wait for Lauren, Kristin decided to go to Bekky
Elstad's apartment and return at 6. It was a decision that seems
to have cost her her life.  Lauren had come by around 5:40 p.m.,
and left when told Kristin had already gone. Kristin was still at
Bekky's, keeping her eye on the clock and by now recounting how
this "disgusting . . . slimy person" had been cursing at her at
the cash register.

"She was laughing about how gross he was and then his being with
these two girls - friends of Michael's - who were so gross," Bek-
ky Elstad said. "She seemed pretty much in a good mood."

It was getting close to 6. By now, Cartier was back in the neigh-
borhood, looking for a crowbar. He first asked for one at the
Reading Room, a smoke shop about a block away, "maybe 20 minutes
before it happened," said the proprietor. "I asked him why he
wanted a crowbar. He said he had to go hurt somebody." Then he
went over to Bunratty's, in a fruitless search for the same
thing.

At one minute to 6, Kristin was heading down Commonwealth Avenue
toward Marty's. Cartier, approaching from the other direction,
stopped at a Store 24 convenience shop on the other side of Har-
vard Avenue. J.D. Crump was in there, buying a pack of
cigarettes. According to the police report: "Crump stated that
while in Store 24 . . . he saw Mike and asked him (whether) he
was going to work that night.  Mike said that he was but had (to)
shoot someone first. Crump stated that he did not take him seri-
ously and walked away from him."

The shots rang out seconds later. Mike Dillon, a clerk at Marty's
who clocked out at 6, had just stepped onto the sidewalk when he
heard the first shattering noise.

"It was very loud," he said. "I looked up immediately. I saw
Kristin fall."

Dressed all in black, she dropped instantly to the pavement out-
side the Soap-A-Rama, a combination laundromat, tanning salon and
video rental store four doors from Marty's.

"She was lying on her right side, curled up in kind of a fetal
position," Mike Dillon said. "I kind of froze dead in my tracks."

Cartier must have seen her and hid in a doorway or alley until
she passed by him.  Witnesses said he came at her from behind and
shot into the rear of her head from a distance of 15 or 20 feet.
Then he ran into a nearby alley.

Al Silva, a restaurant worker, started to walk towards Kristin to
see if he could help when Cartier darted back out of the alley,
rushed past Silva, and leaned down over her.

"He shot her twice more in the left side of the head," Mike Dil-
lon said. "Then I saw him run down the alley again . . . . I was
still in shock. I didn't know what to do. I took one of her hands
for a second or so, I don't know why. Then I ran back to call the
police, but I saw a woman in the flower shop. She was already on
the phone."

Chris Toher, the proprietor at Soap-A-Rama, heard the first shot
from the back of his store and hurried up to the doorway. "I saw
him fire the final shots," Toher said. "It happened so fast she
never had a chance. She was completely unconscious at the point
he ran up to her. Her eyes were shut."

A brave young woman was dead.<A Killer's Farewell<The killer fled
down the alley, which took him to Glenville Avenue where he lived
in a red brick apartment building. Back on Commonwealth Avenue,
police and an ambulance arrived within minutes. But the ambulance
was no longer necessary.

Police questioned Crump at the Soap-A-Rama and learned where Car-
tier lived. Brooke Mezo, a clerk from Marty's who witnessed the
interrogation, heard Crump say "that Michael had spoken to him in
the past couple of weeks and said he couldn't live without her,
that he was going to kill her. And he talked about where to get a
gun."

That made at least two people who knew Cartier had or wanted a
gun and was talking about killing Kristin. How many others should
have known she was in grave danger?

Police quickly sealed off the area around Cartier's apartment.
"He had apparently made statements to several people that he hat-
ed policemen and had no reservations about shooting a cop," homi-
cide detective Billy Dwyer said in his report. "He stated that he
would never go to prison again."

A police operations team entered Cartier's apartment at 8:30 p.m.
He was dead, lying on his bed with the gun he used to kill Kris-
tin in his right hand. He had put it to his head and fired once.
Police recovered the spent shell from the bedroom wall. They
found three other shell casings in the area where he murdered
Kristin.

Later that night, Leslie North walked into Bunratty's, looking
for Cartier. "I said, 'He shot Kristin,' " said J.D. Crump. "She
didn't look surprised. I said, 'Then he went and shot himself.'
At that point, she lost it. She started screaming, 'What a waste!
What a waste! He's dead!' "

Crump later said, "I've had to live the past couple of weeks
feeling I could have stopped him. I should have called his proba-
tion officer."

It's doubtful that would have done any good. The system is so
mindless that when the dead Cartier failed to show up in Boston
Municipal Court as scheduled on June 19, a warrant was issued for
his arrest. It is still outstanding.<

George Lardner is a Washington Post reporter.<02:35 11-22C9999--
---

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