In a Quebec courtroom last October, Sylvie Desjardins delivered a message to her daughter’s killer that was 30 years in the making.
“You thought you were taking a life, but in truth, you only added weight to your own existence,” she told killer Réal Courtemanche.
“You will carry this silence, this emptiness, this gaze you extinguished until your last breath.”
For decades, the murder of 10-year-old Marie-Chantale Desjardins north of Montreal had haunted investigators and her family. Her battered body was found in 1994, with her bicycle leaning against a nearby tree, four days after she had headed home from a friend’s house….