PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "“Mom had lie detector and she passed with flying colours,” London child abuse specialist Dr. David Warren is quoted as saying in a February 2018 note in the CAS case files. Warren had frequent contact with the police detectives at different parts of the investigation, the documents reveal. Reading this, Rose-Anne commented. “It was good to see it in the document. I just wish that had been given to us back then.” Warren is also quoted as telling a CAS worker in late 2015 that Nathaniel’s injury “Couldn’t have happened Monday night, people would have noticed significant difference Tues a.m.” The significance of that comment is that at one point there was a police suspicion that Nathaniel was hurt the night before while in his parents’ care. The night before Nathaniel was rushed to hospital after collapsing at the daycare he was bumped by a door and fell backwards onto the floor."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Another comment in the CAS case notes comes from Dr. Rick Mann, the regional coroner in the London area. This was late December 2015 (two months after Nathaniel was rushed to hospital). Mann is quoted as saying: “He then said that neuropathological analysis has indicated a more precise window of time where the injury to Nathaniel must have happened. This rules out the previous day entirely. This also rules out the ‘behind the door’ possibility of causation for two reasons: the time is wrong (it happened the day before) and the mechanism does not match the likely mechanism of the fatal injury.”
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STORY: "Nathaniel McLellan's mother aced a lie detector test. Children's Aid and doctors cleared the parents. Why did the parents only learn about this now?" by Chief Investigative Reporter Kevin Donovan, published by The Toronto Star on June 30, 2021.
SUB-HEADING: "Nathaniel McLellan's family not informed of findings in 2015 death until this week."
GIST: "Rose-Anne McLellan passed her OPP lie-detector test with “flying colours.” So did her husband, Kent. This according to newly released case files kept by a provincial agency that looked into the 2015 death of their son Nathaniel.
Also, the regional coroner in London, Ont., a top child abuse doctor, and a team of child protection workers cleared the parents in the death of 15-month-old Nathaniel years ago, according to statements in the case files.
It took until this week for the McLellan family, which has been under a cloud of suspicion, to see most of this information, five and a half years after Nathaniel collapsed at a home daycare. A 200-page document was released to the family through provincial freedom-of-information laws, following 400 pages of documents released earlier.
Meanwhile, the 42-year-old Strathroy woman who ran the unlicensed daycare that was looking after Nathaniel when he collapsed in October 2015 was arrested by OPP detectives and charged with manslaughter last week. The charges have not been tested in court, and Meggin Van Hoof, the home daycare owner, has declined through her lawyer, Kevin Egan, to speak about the case. Van Hoof appears in court in London on July 15.
The new information in this story comes from about 600 pages of “case notes” kept by the Children’s Aid Society of London and Middlesex. This agency was involved in the background of the Nathaniel investigation from the start, called in by a doctor at the Strathroy hospital who initially treated Nathaniel. Agency workers sat in on one series of police interviews (of the McLellan children in the early days) and conducted a home visit of the McLellans, remarking in their notes on finding a Christmas tree, and a happy home, though a grieving one. CAS workers never looked into the home daycare, their documents show, though the McLellan family asked them to.
“There is no evidence (Nathaniel) was injured by his parents,” a senior CAS caseworker writes in December 2015, six weeks after Nathaniel was rushed to hospital.
What the new documents do provide is a window into the police investigation, because the CAS case workers frequently sought and recorded in their notes updates from police detectives and doctors. One update dealt with the lie-detector tests of the McLellans.
Most people’s knowledge of a polygraph machine, also known as a lie detector, comes from FBI movies on late-night television. This century-old method uses a machine that detects changes in a person’s stress level as questions are asked. The instrument, through probes attached to a person’s fingertips and chest, detects increase in perspiration, respiration, blood pressure and pulse rate. The theory behind this controversial test is that all of these reactions increase when you lie.
As the Star detailed in Death in a Small Town, a five-part series, Nathaniel collapsed at 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 27, 2015. Van Hoof, the home daycare owner, at 11:50 a.m. called the school where Rose-Anne taught, told her Nathaniel was unwell, and Rose-Anne rushed to get her son to Strathroy hospital, arriving at 12:04 p.m. Rose-Anne had dropped Nathaniel at the daycare owner’s home near her school at 8:30 a.m. and she later told police he was completely fine. At the London hospital where Nathaniel was later transported it was discovered that he had a bruise on his left temple and a nine-to-10-centimetre fracture at the back of his skull. He died several days later.
Strathroy-Caradoc police and the OPP focused their investigation on Rose-Anne and Kent, police documents show. As part of their joint investigation they asked Rose-Anne and Kent, and the home daycare provider, to submit to polygraphs. As the Star previously reported, Van Hoof did not undergo a lie-detector test.
The McLellans’ polygraphs took place at the London OPP detachment on Exeter Road in 2016. (They would have been earlier but Rose-Anne was pregnant and it was felt a polygraph would provide too much stress.) Police documents related to the polygraphs have not been released, but there are references to them in the new documents, and both Rose-Anne and Kent made notes of their polygraphs and provided them to the Star. The family, as part of their search for justice, kept detailed notes of their various experiences with the medical and legal system.
Rose-Anne recalls a “small interrogation room, all cinder block walls, no windows, bare bones room, one desk, two chairs.” The polygraph expert asked her a number of questions at the start in an attempt, it was explained to her, to get a baseline for the tougher questions. He began with questions like what is her middle name. He also asked, at one point during a preliminary chat (though he said he ultimately only wanted yes and no answers) when she had her last drink. Rose-Anne said she almost never drinks but when they visit a friend who owns a hotel in Kingston every year or so he makes her a daiquiri.
Kent says his early questions included, “What was the happiest day of my life,” and “what was the worst day of my life.” At one point, the examiner showed them a card trick. Kent was to keep his eyes open during the polygraph; Rose-Anne was to keep hers closed. No explanation for any of this was provided.
These “getting-to-know-you questions” concluded, and with the sensors attached, Rose-Anne said the examiner started in on the real questions.
She and Kent recall they were all different ways of asking “if we had anything to do with the death of Nathaniel.” Each time, they answered in the negative. The examiner provided them with no official written proof of how they did. He did say, Rose-Anne recalls, that they passed, but it was in the manner of a hospital technician telling a patient that things seemed fine.
On Tuesday, the most recent batch of CAS documents arrived in Rose-Anne’s inbox. She had asked for these in January 2020, when a new provincial law brought children’s aid societies under the freedom-of-information law.
“Mom had lie detector and she passed with flying colours,” London child abuse specialist Dr. David Warren is quoted as saying in a February 2018 note in the CAS case files. Warren had frequent contact with the police detectives at different parts of the investigation, the documents reveal.
Reading this, Rose-Anne commented. “It was good to see it in the document. I just wish that had been given to us back then.”
Warren is also quoted as telling a CAS worker in late 2015 that Nathaniel’s injury “Couldn’t have happened Monday night, people would have noticed significant difference Tues a.m.” The significance of that comment is that at one point there was a police suspicion that Nathaniel was hurt the night before while in his parents’ care. The night before Nathaniel was rushed to hospital after collapsing at the daycare he was bumped by a door and fell backwards onto the floor.
Another comment in the CAS case notes comes from Dr. Rick Mann, the regional coroner in the London area. This was late December 2015 (two months after Nathaniel was rushed to hospital). Mann is quoted as saying:
“He then said that neuropathological analysis has indicated a more precise window of time where the injury to Nathaniel must have happened. This rules out the previous day entirely. This also rules out the ‘behind the door’ possibility of causation for two reasons: the time is wrong (it happened the day before) and the mechanism does not match the likely mechanism of the fatal injury.”
Neither Warren or Mann would reply to questions from the Star.
The McLellans provided the documents to the Star because, they said, they wanted to shine light on the their family’s probe by children’s aid, and their experiences with police and doctors involved in the case.
Neither the Strathroy-Caradoc police nor the OPP will respond to questions about the case. "
The entire story can be read at:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGkXwNcdCHmcrVkKNGtGjxrglSC
