Too young to drink. Too young to vote. Old enough to kill
The Richardson family consisted of Marc Richardson, Debra Richardson, and their children, Jasmine and Tyler Jacob, aged 12 and 8.
They all lived in Canada, southeast Alberta, a city along the South Saskatchewan River called Medicine Hat, to be exact. The city was classed as the sunniest place in Canada with a population in 2006 of 56,997.
By the end of April 23, 2006, that figure was going to be reduced by 3 to 56,994. All because of a tragic love story.
Marc and Debra Richardson loved their daughter but disapproved of her boyfriend and forbade her to continue seeing him. At 12 years old, Jasmine was headstrong and was convinced that her first love was her one and only.
It wasn’t just the age difference, he was 11 years older at 23, that her parents were aghast at, but the fact that he also thought he was a 300-year-old vampire, going so far as to profess that he liked the taste of blood; there was no way he was going to be a good influence on their impressionable daughter.
Jasmine, not surprisingly rebelled, refusing to be grounded, going as far as to consider running away from home.
But her boyfriend, Jeremy Steinke, had other ideas. So enamored was Jasmine that she agreed with his suggestion of how they could stop her parents from interfering in their relationship. The solution came to him after watching Natural Born Killers, a story of two young lovers, and she embraced the idea he came up with.
It was a simple plan. Kill them all.
The horror that greeted police officer Brent Secondiak when he arrived at the Richardson home on April 23 at 1 pm was a bloody crime scene that rattled him to his core.
It wasn’t finding the bodies of Marc and Debra in the basement of the premises, their throats ruthlessly slashed open, that tore at his soul. It was the body of their young son, Tyler Jacob, still in his bed, his peaceful face in stark contrast to the jagged wound across his throat, dried blood soaked into the sheets around his little head.
At first, he feared that Jasmine may have been a victim also. But when she was found 130km away on the other side of Saskatchewan the very next day with Steinke, questioned, showing no remorse, it was obvious that they were the actual killers.
Both were promptly arrested, Steinke confessing to murdering the parents and Jasmine to killing her little brother. When the news broke across the airways, the whole city of Medicine Hat shuddered with shock.
Disbelief and the horror of what had happened was laid out for all to hear in November 2007 when Jasmine was sentenced to 10 years in prison, the maximum term under the law for a person of her age. Steinke, being older, had his punishment fit the crime and was given 25 years without the possibility of parole.
The city of Medicine Hat exhaled in relief that justice had been given to the victims. But the painful scar was still there in the local community, and the loss of loved ones forever felt by family members and close friends.
In the end, Steinke changed his name to Jackson May while Jasmine became notorious for being the youngest person in Canadian history to be convicted for multiple first-degree murders.
She was released in 2016, her term served, rehabilitated, a psychiatric evaluation deeming her to be no threat to the public.
When interviewed about her release, now an Inspector, Brent Secondiak expressed his hope that Jasmine Richardson would finally show some remorse for her crimes.
When asked if he thought she would re-offend, if she would kill again, he confessed that didn’t know. He was concerned that she had simply fooled the system and her true nature had been revealed years ago when she had slaughtered her family.
Could she change?
The response from the community, when asked, was a lot simpler, “Time will tell.”