Who Killed Ty Conn

Who Killed Ty Conn is classic straight-ahead reporting: MacIntyre and Burke are journalists, both of whom knew Conn before his escape - the first successful escape from Kingston pen in fifty years - made the headlines. MacIntyre and Burke (from television's fifth estate) first met Ty Conn five years before, when he was in a correctional institute in saskatchewan, and they were working on a show on the effects of child abuse. They had encouraged Conn to start an autobiography, and maintained correspondence with him over the years, offering them an amazing quantity and quality of material to work with in uncovering how Ty Conn came to be one of the country's most notorious bank robbers. Conn's journals and letters are not only thoughtful and introspective, they're also clever and funny. It's hard not to feel sympathetic towards this affable, amiable kid, who'd had such a hard life. He was "twenty-seven doing forty-seven... And never so much as threw a punch." And Burke and MacIntyre are indeed sympathetic, they wear their hearts on their sleeves. This is evident from the first paragraph of chapter one: "Ernie Hayes [Conn's birth name] was, by all accounts, the loveliest child that anyone had ever seen. Bright and cheerful, he seemed to be immune to all the sorrow and confusion that whirled around him from the first moments of his life." But who can blame them? This is, after all, Ty Conn, whose won the respect and trust of prison wardens, whose honesty and self-deprecating charm made him (to his ultimate downfall) a media darling in his weeks on the run. Detailing his life from birth to his tragic adoption as a toddler into a household run by a paranoid schizophrenic (the family had connections and circumvented normal channels in order to adopt the charming little boy), through his tormented childhood and a litany of foster home cruelties, his later life as an escape artist seems almost inevitable. Can't blame him for making a career out of running away. MacIntyre and Burke construct a solid argument that abuse of children makes them unable to function legitimately in the world. With the deck already stacked against him from birth, Conn also found himself up against a criminal justice system woefully lacking in manpower and money. While unwilling to look at himself as a victim ("He then told me bluntly... That he'd never been wrongly convicted or, in his view, unfairly sentenced"), it is undeniable that someone who had never, never committed an act of violence should not have been locked up in maximum "where the most dangerous people are kept." Who wouldn't try to escape that? Conn's is a great story. From the early horror and pathos, we watch Ty Conn grow from a clever kid into the cunning, cocky (during one escape, he sent a Christmas card to his old warden) fugitive of justice. We're sucked in. Like the public of the time, we can't help rooting for him: The policemen asked her what she'd do if he showed up again."I said: 'You know what? I've tho