Between May and September 2003, four boys disappeared from Freeport, the main town on Grand Bahama. Mackinson Colas, Deangelo McKenzie, Junior Reme and Desmond Rolle were aged 11 to 14. Police had no answer for months. In October 2003 a 35-year-old warehouse worker named Cordell Farrington went to the police himself and confessed that he had killed them, and that the year before he had killed Jamal Robins, 22, the young man he had lived with.
He was charged with five counts of murder, but none of the five cases ended in a final murder conviction. A jury found him guilty of murdering Robins in 2006 and he was sentenced to death. Two years later the Court of Appeal ruled that a severe personality disorder had left him unable to form the intent to kill, substituted manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, and imposed life imprisonment. In 2010 prosecutors accepted his pleas of guilty to manslaughter of the four boys on the same ground, and a judge gave him four life sentences. In 2015 the Court of Appeal set aside the life sentence in the Robins case and sent it back for a new sentencing hearing; the four life terms for the boys were not affected.
The four boys had a good deal in common. All went to government schools in Freeport, all lived close to one another, all worked as bag packers at the same grocery store, and all spent time at the same downtown game room, the Freeport News reported in 2011. A Tribune columnist, Larry Smith, wrote in 2005 that they came from low-income homes.
Mackinson Colas was 11 and in sixth grade at Lewis Yard Primary School when he disappeared on May 16, 2003. Deangelo McKenzie, 13, was in eighth grade at Jack Hayward High School; he went missing 11 days after Mackinson. Junior Reme, 11, a fifth grader at Freeport Primary School, disappeared on July 29. Desmond Rolle, 14, a ninth grader at St. Georges High School, went missing on Sunday, September 28, after leaving his part-time job that morning.
A fifth boy, 12, vanished on May 9, 2003, a week before Mackinson Colas. His case was the first, and the Freeport News later described it as the one that first spread fear through the community. Police said it was not connected to the four boys, and none of the charges against Farrington concerned him. In October 2003 four other boys were charged in connection with his disappearance, but the charges were dropped and they were released; Smith reported in May 2005 that they had been discharged for lack of evidence a few days earlier. In 2011 police said the boy's case remained open and that his remains had not been found.
Smith's column, published in The Tribune in May 2005, recalled the months of the disappearances. Police were, in his words, totally stumped, and they kept much of what they knew from the public; the Freeport News criticized that silence in an editorial and suggested it was a political decision. Rumors spread across the island, some of them about cults and foreign traffickers, and some damaged the reputations of people who had done nothing. Police publicly denied one rumor, that human remains had been found in a food store freezer, although officers did seal off and search a downtown store.
Outside help came in. According to Smith, officials from the FBI, Scotland Yard and the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children joined the search, and the American television program America's Most Wanted was preparing a segment on the case. In early October 2003 police arrested three people on the strength of tips from the public. None of it led to the boys.
Smith also pointed to an older case: about 24 years earlier, three 12-year-old schoolboys had disappeared on Grand Bahama in a single afternoon.
Jamal Robins was 22. He and Farrington lived together in Freeport; The Tribune and The Nassau Guardian described him as Farrington's live-in lover, and the Freeport News as his live-in friend. The charge later laid in Freeport magistrate's court said he was killed in Freeport at some time between July 12, 2002 and October 26, 2003. The Tribune in 2014 and The Nassau Guardian in 2015 dated his death to 2002.
His mother told The Tribune in 2006 that when her son disappeared she went looking for him and contacted Farrington, who was the last person she had seen with Jamal. His father hoped to give him a Christian burial in Freeport once his remains were released.
The four disappearances remained a mystery until October 2003, when Farrington went into a police station and confessed. He told officers that he "couldn't take it anymore," The Nassau Guardian reported. Smith wrote in 2005 that the case was solved only because he turned himself in.
Detective Sergeant Michelet Merinard of the Central Detective Unit in Grand Bahama later told the Robins trial that, after confessing, Farrington led police to Jamal Robins's remains in Freeport. They were found on October 26, 2003. A DNA specialist from a laboratory in Fairfax, Virginia, testified that DNA from the remains matched blood samples from his parents, which confirmed who he was. An American forensic anthropologist, Dr. Anthony Falsetti, examined the remains and also gave evidence.
The four boys' deaths were set out in court in 2010, when the prosecutor, Neil Brathwaite, read Farrington's confession statements into the record.
In late October 2003 Farrington, then 35, appeared in Freeport magistrate's court charged with five counts of murder: the four boys and Jamal Robins. Because the charges were indictable offenses he did not enter a plea, and he was remanded to Fox Hill Prison. The media were barred from the arraignment, Smith reported. He was indicted in the Supreme Court in Nassau in April 2004.
His lawyer, Romona Farquharson, applied to have the case moved from Freeport to Nassau. In May 2005 she told Smith she did not expect a quick trial, because others had already waited three or four years in jail on serious charges and would be heard first.
Before the Robins trial, the defense asked for all five killings to be tried together. Farquharson argued that the five deaths, taken together, showed a pattern of psychosis. The trial judge, Justice Anita Allen, ordered separate trials, and the defense appealed; the Court of Appeal did not overturn her ruling, The Tribune reported. The Robins case went first.
The trial lasted about a month, ended in August 2006 and heard 32 witnesses: people who knew Farrington, police investigators, forensic experts and psychiatrists. In early August, while Detective Sergeant Merinard described the events that the prosecution said led to Robins's death, Robins's mother became upset and was escorted out of the courtroom. Justice Allen adjourned the trial briefly after the forensic evidence.
The defense did not dispute that Farrington had killed Robins. Farquharson argued that he had been suffering from an abnormality of mind at the time. She relied heavily on the psychiatrist Dr. Michael Neville, and on Farrington's account of a troubled childhood, to explain the personality disorders she said he had developed. Farrington gave an unsworn statement from the dock. The prosecution's case was that he was not insane, knew right from wrong, and had killed Robins in cold blood.
In her summing-up Justice Allen reminded the jurors of their oath and told them that they were the judges of the facts and could accept or reject any of the evidence. The jury retired at about 12:30 p.m. and returned after 3:30 p.m. with a unanimous verdict of guilty of murder. The Tribune reported the verdict in its edition of August 19, 2006.
Robins's relatives were elated, and some cried. "I am very happy with the verdict, justice has been served and now my son can rest," his father said. He wanted Farrington to go to the gallows. His mother accused Farrington of "playing crazy." Asked whether he wished to say anything, Farrington told the court, "I turned myself in to police because I knew I committed a crime"; The Tribune described the rest of what he said as incoherent. He was driven away from the court building on Bank Lane in an unmarked police car.
Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Cheryl Grant-Bethel said at the time that proceedings in the four boys' cases were expected to begin within three months. Robins's mother said she planned to attend those trials. Sentencing in the Robins case was set for September 11, 2006.
Justice Allen sentenced Farrington to death. In October 2007, The Bahama Journal reported, he went before the Court of Appeal to challenge the sentence. His lawyer, Wayne Munroe, argued that the judge had not taken into account that Farrington had turned himself in, confessed and led police to the evidence, which in counsel's view showed remorse, and that she had not weighed his personality disorder or his history of childhood abuse.
In October 2008 the Court of Appeal, with its President, Dame Joan Sawyer, sitting with Justices Milton Ganpatsingh and Emmanuel Osadebay, quashed the murder conviction and the death sentence. The court held that a severe personality disorder had left him unable to form the intention to kill that murder requires. It substituted a conviction for manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility and imposed life imprisonment. He was still awaiting trial in the boys' cases.
The four families spent years trying to have the boys' remains released for burial. In July 2008 the four mothers held a joint funeral at a church in Grand Bahama, the Freeport News reported.
In the end there was no trial in the boys' cases. In the week before sentencing in 2010, prosecutors accepted Farrington's pleas of guilty to the reduced charge of manslaughter in all four deaths, on the ground that he had been suffering from a severe personality disorder when he killed them. At the sentencing hearing, before Senior Justice Jon Isaacs, the prosecutor read Farrington's confession statements into the record. The boys' relatives reacted with outbursts, and the judge ordered police to remove them from the courtroom. Farrington apologized to the families.
Before passing sentence, Justice Isaacs said that nothing in Farrington's actions showed that he should be allowed back into society. He imposed four life sentences, one for each boy. The Freeport News later gave the date of sentencing as October 1, 2010.
The families saw the result differently from the court. When they learned of the manslaughter pleas, the Grand Bahama families called them "a slap in the face," and said that the absence of a death sentence was an insult, the Freeport News reported.
In May 2011 the Freeport News spoke to the Rev. Glenroy Bethel, president of Families for Justice, who represented the boys' mothers. He said the families had never received justice. He urged parents and guardians to watch for warning signs and protect their children, warned that many children were left unsupervised, and said the community had grown complacent. "We would not want to have history repeat itself like the Cordell Farrington case," he said. He also cautioned against assuming that Farrington was the only person capable of such crimes.
In December 2014, at 46, Farrington went back to the Court of Appeal, this time on his own initiative and without a lawyer. He told the judges that when the 2008 panel replaced his murder conviction and death sentence with manslaughter and life imprisonment, it had done so without hearing anything from him. Asked by Justice Abdulai Conteh whether he had made any submissions on sentence, he said he had not had the chance. Justice Anita Allen, by then a judge of the Court of Appeal, asked whether he relied on the Privy Council's ruling in the case of Dominique Moss, and he said he did.
Moss had been convicted of murder for a killing in 2000. The Court of Appeal later reduced the conviction to manslaughter, because he had been drunk and so could not have formed the intent to kill, and imposed a sentence of 25 years without first hearing his counsel on sentence. In November 2013 the Privy Council in London ruled that the appeal court should have heard argument on sentence and sent the case back. Moss was resentenced and released in May 2014.
The prosecutor, Ambrose Armbrister, reminded the court that Farrington had confessed to four other killings on Grand Bahama and had received four life sentences on manslaughter pleas in 2010. Farrington at first asked for those sentences to be considered too, then confirmed that his appeal concerned only the Robins case. He asked for Romona Farquharson-Seymour, who had defended him at his trial and who was in the courtroom, to represent him. She agreed, and the court assigned her at public expense. Justice Allen said she would not sit on the panel that heard the appeal, because she had been the trial judge who convicted him and first sentenced him to death. The hearing was adjourned to March 30, 2015.
On March 30, 2015, the Court of Appeal, with Justice Conteh speaking for the court, ruled in Cordell Farrington v The Queen. Having heard counsel, it set aside the sentence that the Court of Appeal itself had imposed and remitted the case to the Supreme Court for a proper sentencing hearing, guided by the principles in Dominique Moss v The Queen. It ordered that the manslaughter conviction substituted in 2008 would stand and that Farrington would remain in custody until that hearing took place. Armbrister had argued that a new hearing was unnecessary because no court could reach a different sentence on the facts.
The Nassau Guardian called the coming hearing an academic exercise, because the four life sentences for the boys, which Farrington had not challenged, would keep him in prison. In 2017 the Court of Appeal cited the Farrington ruling as a similar case when it dealt with another appellant's sentence; that judgment does not say what the Supreme Court later decided in Farrington's case.
As of March 2015, Farrington stood convicted of five counts of manslaughter: one, of Jamal Robins, substituted on appeal for the 2006 murder verdict, and four, of Mackinson Colas, Deangelo McKenzie, Junior Reme and Desmond Rolle, on his own guilty pleas. He was serving four life sentences for the boys and was in custody awaiting a new sentencing hearing in the Robins case. Whether that hearing has since taken place, and what sentence resulted, has not been reported.
Murder or manslaughter. Newspapers in The Bahamas called Farrington a serial killer and, in places, a convicted killer of five. In law, every one of the five killings ended as manslaughter. One 2010 report said he had pleaded guilty to the boys' murders, but the same report, and every other account of the hearing, says the prosecution accepted pleas to the reduced charge of manslaughter.
When Robins died. The Tribune in 2014 and The Nassau Guardian in 2015 put his death in 2002. The Freeport News in 2011 and The Nassau Guardian in December 2014 called it the 2003 killing, and the charge itself covered a period from July 2002 to October 2003.
The death sentence date. The Tribune reported in August 2006 that sentencing was set for September 11, 2006. A report of his 2007 appeal, carried by the Hands Off Cain campaign from The Bahama Journal, said Justice Allen sentenced him to death in August 2007. The Tribune in 2014 described the life sentence as imposed seven years earlier, while the appeal decision itself is reported from October 2008.
Names and ages. The newspapers spell the victims' names in different ways: Jamal or Jamaal, Robins or Robbins, Deangelo or DeAngelo. The Tribune and The Nassau Guardian write Jamal Robins and Deangelo McKenzie. Mackinson Colas was 11 according to the Freeport News and 12 according to Smith's 2005 column.
Other cases. Police said the separate 2003 disappearance of a 12-year-old boy was unrelated to the four boys, and Farrington was not charged over it.
July 12, 2002 to 2003: the period in which, according to the charge, Jamal Robins, 22, was killed in Freeport; reports place his death in 2002.
May 9, 2003: another boy, 12, disappears in Grand Bahama (a separate case; police said it was unrelated).
May 16, 2003: Mackinson Colas, 11, disappears.
May 27, 2003: Deangelo McKenzie, 13, disappears.
July 29, 2003: Junior Reme, 11, disappears.
September 28, 2003: Desmond Rolle, 14, disappears after leaving his part-time job.
Early October 2003: police arrest three people on public tips; the search draws in the FBI, Scotland Yard and the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
October 2003: Farrington goes to the police and confesses.
October 26, 2003: he leads police to Jamal Robins's remains in Freeport.
Late October 2003: charged in Freeport magistrate's court with five counts of murder; remanded to Fox Hill Prison.
April 2004: indicted in the Supreme Court in Nassau.
August 2006: the Robins murder trial before Justice Anita Allen, about a month long with 32 witnesses, ends in a unanimous verdict of guilty of murder (reported August 19, 2006).
After the verdict: sentenced to death by Justice Allen.
October 2007: appears before the Court of Appeal to challenge the death sentence.
July 2008: the four boys' mothers hold a joint funeral.
October 2008: the Court of Appeal quashes the murder conviction and death sentence, substitutes manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, and imposes life imprisonment.
2010: pleads guilty to manslaughter of the four boys; prosecutors accept the pleas on the ground of a severe personality disorder.
October 1, 2010 (date given by the Freeport News): Senior Justice Jon Isaacs imposes four life sentences.
May 2011: the families' representative says they never received justice.
December 2, 2014: Farrington tells the Court of Appeal he will challenge the Robins sentence, relying on the Dominique Moss ruling.
March 30, 2015: the Court of Appeal sets aside the Robins life sentence and remits the case to the Supreme Court for a new sentencing hearing; the manslaughter conviction stands and he stays in custody.