No cheerful earful

>> >> Multiple murderer Valery Fabrikant sneaks his message through prison bars

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

The phone rang in my quiet Saturday morning living room. "This is Fabrikant," said the voice. "Look into the case of Tina Ruiz."

The conversation lasted all of 15 seconds. But it was enough to confirm that the former science professor, one of the city's most infamous unrepentant cold-blooded killers, who gunned down four Concordia University colleagues in August 1992, is still up to his old tricks. Although he's behind bars at least until he's eligible for partial parole on Aug. 24, 2014, Valery Fabrikant is still aggressively accusing others of concocting devious plots.

In one of his many ongoing campaigns, Fabrikant has recently championed the cause of a fellow inmate who he argues was unjustly convicted of killing Tina Ruiz. Fabrikant claims that staff from a local emergency room conspired to allow her to die of stab wounds in August.

According to Fabrikant's dubious reasoning, "Police told the doctors to withhold the treatment until she admitted that it was the boyfriend who stabbed her and they were happy to oblige." He concludes: "If one day you read in the newspapers that I have died in a hospital of 'natural causes'--do not believe it: I was murdered."

Fabrikant has managed to compose hundreds of such notes in spite of being limited to 20-minute collect calls, which he makes on evenings and weekends from one of five telephones shared among 100 other inmates in the Cowansville medium-security prison.

Working the phones

Although he is given a limited list of eligible phone contacts, Fabrikant gets around this by phoning the home of Maya Tyker, his wife and the mother of his two children. Someone in that household then puts him into contact with whatever number he requests through a three-way conference call.

In spite of this, Fabrikant has bitterly complained about his telephone access, accusing authorities of sharing profits from the collect calls with Bell Canada. Authorities refuse to comment on any of Fabrikant's charges. And although he has no Internet access, somebody using the name hollyric@colba.net has posted 1,361 of Fabrikant's messages on the Deja.com newsgroup. The messages are often signed with a salutatory "disrespectfully yours."

It appears that his son Isaac, 19, posts Fabrikant's Internet notes onto the various discussion groups. In one of his own posts, Isaac writes: "Hi, I am the son of Dr. Fabrikant, who was deliberately provoked into shooting four professors at Concordia University in Montreal." When I asked him of his involvement in his father's Internet activity, Isaac referred all questions to his father.

Mark Hogben, whose father Michael was among those murdered by Fabrikant, says he was first made aware of Fabrikant's attention-seeking activities when he did an Internet search for his own last name and discovered a series of notes, written by Fabrikant, justifying himself. Hogben believes that a twisted few actually celebrate Fabrikant's actions. "The more victims there are in a crime, the less voice there is for each of the victims because more time is spent on the murderer," says Hogben.

He warns readers to be wary of Fabrikant's recollection of events, describing them as "foreign to what everybody remembers." Hogben--like authorities from the Cowansville prison, Concordia University and Colba Internet provider--is resigned to Fabrikant continuing with his Internet activity. But Hogben wants to ensure that it remains from inside prison walls. "I believe he should never be let back into society. He's a predator, he's unrepentant and he'll continue being a predator. He's an aggressive personality who hasn't got a reflective bone in his body."

Conspiracy theories

The behaviour is nothing new for Fabrikant, who battled authorities in the Soviet Union prior to being hired at Concordia in 1982. After a decade of dealing with the vituperative professor, Concordia was stunned when he opened fire on the ninth floor of the Hall building. Among Fabrikant's various Internet messages written since his incarceration, Fabrikant has accused prison authorities of deliberately encouraging his ill health by denying him proper medical attention for a heart condition. He has also complained that they've kept him from teaching math to his fellow inmates. As well, he accuses a former lawyer of attempting to trick him into pleading insanity. He also argues that the shooting of crime reporter Michel Auger was a hoax.

Elsewhere, he boasts that he is revered inside the prison and that other inmates preparing for their releases have offered to kill his enemies as a service to him. But with his typical cynical and paranoid flourish, Fabrikant concludes these are simply prison informants attempting to frame him.

A week after his first phone call, Fabrikant called me back. "Did you make any phone calls about Ruiz?" I told him that I'm still working on it. "In that case," Fabrikant replied, "I won't speak to you until you start asking about it." Hopefully that's a promise.