From the Past: Elaine Campione
Two little girls murdered by their mother during a bitter divorce. But was Elaine an abused woman who suffered from postpartum psychosis, or did she murder her girls as vengeance against their father?
The video starts off innocently enough. Three-year-old Serena and 19-month-old Sophia are coloring on the night of Oct. 2, 2006. The footage is taken by their mother, Elaine Campione, in the small apartment where they lived in Barrie, Ontario, Canada.
In the background is the sound of the bathtub running. At 8:39 p.m., Elaine turns off the camera.
She turns it back on at 9:27 p.m. Elaine sits on the couch, a beige wall behind her with a framed photo of her babies. The mother is pale with a tiny frame, and her thin, light brown hair is tied back into a messy ponytail, her face free of makeup while it scrunches up into what should be a sob, but there appear to be no tears trickling down her cheeks as she addresses the children’s father.
“Leo, there are you happy?” she says in a quiet whine before delving into her version of what happened in their marriage.
“You wouldn’t give peace. You wouldn’t tell the truth,” she continues, saying no one believed her about how he allegedly abused her.
“How you beat be me, three years behind closed doors. Beat me when I was pregnant with Serena and Sophia. You didn’t care about our babies. You didn’t care about me. You only care about yourself.”
Her next words — harrowing, haunting.
“Everything’s gone... The idea that you could actually have my children — God believes me and God's taking care of them now.”
At 8:19 a.m. on Oct. 3, Elaine once more sits on the couch, in the same spot as the night before, as she says she tried to overdose in an attempted suicide but it didn’t work.
“It’s morning and our babies are in heaven,” she added.
Still, the world wouldn’t know the horrors that occurred in the near hour the camera was off the night before until Oct. 4, when at 6:15 a.m., Elaine called police on an administrative line instead of 911.
Calmly, she told the person who answered: “My children are dead.”
Upon being questioned about it, she simply said, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Const. Greg Brickell of the Barrie Police Service (BPS) was one of the first officers to respond to the scene. He knocked on the door of Elaine’s apartment. When she answered, he asked her if she had children.
“Yes, they’re dead. They’re on my bed,” Elaine told him.
Brickell went into the master bedroom. Two tiny forms remained beneath the covers, the bed made neatly, as if expecting the inevitable discovery of the girls, who had, the night before, been coloring and living their lives.
Serena wore a lavender nightgown and lay beside her baby sister, Sophia, still in her Tinkerbell pajamas. Both girls wore a necklace and pair of earrings. The rosary and a photo album had been placed between them. No breathing. No rising and falling of their little chests. No eyes blinking awake groggily. Serena had a bruise on her forehead, while Sophia’s mouth was purple despite their hair being neatly combed. The sisters were holding hands.
“There were no signs of life in either of the children,” Brickell testified later in court. “Both of them were cold and clammy to the touch and they had greyish, bluish skin.”
The tell-tale odor of decomposition had already began, and a fan had been set up to face the bed, set to high. In the girls’ bedroom, Brickell described how clothes had been piled up on the two small beds. Someone had attached a note to the door with burial instructions.
In what has been edited out from the police videos the media was later permitted to release, the girls are seen propped up on the bed as if they were decorative dolls. A mark on Serena’s face seems to match the mat from the bathtub.
Out in the living room, Const. Linda Young, bewildered, interviewed the eerily stoic mother, sitting on the couch.
“I was in shock. I thought the mother would be in hysterics — but she was calm. She kept talking, she kept blaming her husband. She was saying he beat her and that it was all his fault,” Young later testified.
Elaine told Young that she had swallowed 56 clonazepam tablets, prompting police to take her to the hospital as a precaution. She actually fell asleep while waiting for doctors to come see her. When the doctor arrived, they found nothing wrong with her.
Then, Elaine was released into police custody and promptly charged with the first-degree murder of her children. But sitting in the interview room, she claimed she couldn’t recall how her daughters died.
“I woke up beside them and their lips were purple. They were stiff ... I don’t know why,” Elaine said, her demeanor still bizarrely calm.
She claimed to recall bathing Sophia first, but Serena didn’t want her bath and began running from her.
An autopsy would later determine that both girls were drowned.
The Interrogation
The eerie, quiescent demeanor of the mother continued when Elaine sat down in an interview room to be questioned by a male detective, in what would become a truly intriguing interrogation.
The detective took a soft, gentle approach to his line of questioning. Elaine, for someone who just lost her kids and stood accused of murdering them, didn’t cry, didn’t sob inconsolably over the loss, didn’t plead for the detectives to believe her innocence. Her cheeks are dry. She sits in the corner of a bland, grey room at a table, with her back to the wall, and the detective sitting to her immediate right. Elaine maintained a blank expression, keeping her hands clasped in her lap, appearing confused, but never out of control, and always calm. It’s possible she was also in shock at this point.
Almost right away, Elaine informs him that she has spoken to duty counsel, who urged her to answer “no” to everything.
The detective explains the situation, and why she is there.
“The charges are for murder in regards to both of your children,” the detective tells her.
His words seem to evoke the first emotions detectives see out of Elaine since they arrived at her apartment. Her face scrunches up and she appears to start crying while the detective reaches out to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. When asked to describe what she remembers, the mother explains that she and her girls had what she deemed a normal night.
“Serena was in the living room coloring, doing sign language,” Elaine said in a meek voice. “Sophia was having a bath. We were video taping. Everything was fine. We were listening to music. Same as we always do.”
But it didn’t take her long to begin complaining about her ex-husband. She claimed Leo was “dragging me into court for this and that. Meanwhile, my daughters are bawling their eyes out because they don’t want me to be away from them.”
Elaine remained adamant that she didn’t know what happened, and that she lost two days she couldn’t recall. In her description of the morning of her arrest, she claimed to be in her bedroom, but yet kept asking where her daughters were all the while they were right there on the bed the entire time; the same bed she would later claim she slept in beside her babies.
“Next thing I know, I’ve got people at my house. A guy with a blue outfit with orange on it in my bedroom,” she told the detective. “A police officer telling me about charges. I’m asking where my daughters are. And they’re just looking at me, telling me they need to put handcuffs on me, I need to get on a stretcher and I’m still asking them where my daughters are.”
She claimed she didn’t even remember calling the police.
What she did recall, she said, was that Serena wasn’t in the bathtub with Sophia like she usually was. Serena had her bath after her little sister.
“Where do you think your children are now?” the detective asked.
“I assume my husband has them,” she replied.
Through her crying, Elaine said she stopped recording when Sophia got water in her ear while trying to float on her back. But she denied ever pushing the toddler beneath the water.
“I wouldn’t kill my babies. My babies are my life,” she told the detective.
She did admit, though, to taking pills in between the two baths in an attempt to commit suicide. At around nine or ten, she said she went to curl up in bed with Sophia. Since Elaine had a fan running, she said Sophia was cold so she pulled the blanket up around both girls, and that they slept in Elaine’s bed that night.
“Usually they turn and cuddle in with me, but they weren’t cuddling in with me. Sophia had weird-colored lips. And that’s when I thought something was wrong and I looked at Serena and she was looking weird too,” Elaine explained, adding that she assumed she called police after that.
Throughout this ordeal, she maintained that haunting placid demeanor, only appearing to cry at mention of her girls being murdered and that she did it, but she keeps eye contact with the detective. Her crying doesn’t seem to last long when it happens.
She claimed the bruise on Sophia was from a week prior when they were at the YMCA swimming. Sophia apparently hit her head on the corner of the “cement thing.” Serena, she said, tripped on the sidewalk, causing the mark on her forehead.
“There was ten other witnesses who saw that,” Elaine tells the detective.
The detective keeps up the compassionate facade as he speaks with Elaine, pushing her softly to discuss the baths in specific. But Elaine only describes the before and after. She said that while video taping, she asked Serena if she wanted a bath. Serena said yes. Elaine claimed she turned off the camera at that point. Sophia, she said, remained in the tub.
Serena was running around the apartment, which Elaine said made it difficult to get her into the bath. She chased her daughter around the apartment in order to bring her to the tub. Elaine claimed that while Serena bathed, Sophia was “laying in front of the tub with her bottle while Serena had her bath.”
“She looked like she was about to fall asleep,” Elaine said.
Instead of running circles around the deaths, the detective began pushing a little more.
“How did they die?” he asked directly.
“I am not allowed to speak without an attorney present,” Elaine stated, withdrawing from the discussion altogether.
What he did get her to say though, was that they died “peacefully.”
“My children had no idea what happened,” she said. “I’ll have to answer to God.”
When a female detective took over, she took a different angle at Elaine, being a bit sterner and more straightforward about what police thought happened in that apartment. Elaine tried to keep up the meek appearance, her voice still frail and soft. When Elaine maintained that she didn’t know her children were dead when she went to bed that night, the detective, sitting in the same seat her male counterpart had, laid it out quite bluntly.
Elaine explained that on Wednesday morning, when she finally woke up after sleeping through Tuesday following the night the girls died, she got Sophia a bottle, thinking her youngest was ready for feeding.
“Her hand was beside me and it was freezing,” she described.
“You knew Monday night when you went to bed that they weren’t breathing and they weren’t moving,” the detective said.
“You were hoping you were going to pass along with… you were hoping you weren’t going to wake up,” she continued.
“I know,” Elaine said. “I figured they would roll over, do something…”
“Then what?” the detective asked. “If you didn’t wake up.”
“I don’t know,” Elaine said softly.
“If those pills had worked and you went to sleep and you didn’t wake up, what were your girls going to do?” the detective pushed.
“I don’t know,” Elaine repeated several times.
“Why don’t you know that?” the detective said.
“Because I don’t know and I can’t answer anymore questions without an attorney,” Elaine said.
It’s important to note here the difference in Canadian laws. In the U.S., investigators must abort an interrogation immediately upon someone asking for a lawyer. Canada doesn’t have the same strict Miranda rights as our southern neighbors. We have the right to retain an attorney, and a right to remain silent, but police can continue to interrogate someone after they have invoked such rights. The interrogation remains admissible to court as long as everything the suspect says is done so under voluntary circumstances and wasn’t coerced or threatened out of them. This interrogation with Elaine was legitimately legal under Canadian law.
During the interrogation, Elaine seems to have trouble discerning events between Monday night and Wednesday morning, confusing the detective. Whether this is intentional on Elaine’s part isn’t clear. Much of the rest of this interrogation is Elaine reciting what she told the male detective, but with a massive difference. Elaine’s seemingly fragile demeanor fades into a more stern one with the female detective’s more direct approach, the old fashioned good cop/bad cop routine. Elaine leans forward more, her hands leave her lap in gestures trying to articulate her story the detective clearly isn’t believing.
Nor does Elaine cry at all during any point of this part of the conversation. She denies giving the girls pills or suffocating them. And she flat out didn’t respond when the detective asked if she drowned them.
The male detective comes back in after, and describes in detail what he thinks she did. Elaine doesn’t cry this time in front of him, but the sternness she’d taken up against the female detective fades into a defeated whisper when she once more repeats she won’t talk without a “legal advocate.”
It’s truly a rollercoaster of an interrogation, and incredibly difficult to watch. Partly because we know what happened, and mostly because Elaine is simply… emotionless. Even her supposed crying feels empty. Her recitation of that night feels well-rehearsed. There’s no remorse, no grief, no evident panic at the accusations against her. I know grief manifests in different ways, but her calmness is a bizarre immediate reaction to someone who just woke up two days after trying to commit suicide, to mysteriously find her two children dead, can’t remember what happened, and almost right away accused of murdering her children. The whole thing feels off and eerie. I’ve included a link at the end of this to the National Post’s YouTube channel, where they posted the videos.
The heartwrenching deaths of these two little girls would soon become overshadowed as details of their parents’ bitter divorce and custody battle would come to light. It would be filled with Elaine’s abuse allegations and a controversy over whether she was telling the truth, or using it as a convenient cover to use filicide as revenge on her ex-husband for trying to get custody of the girls, the innocent bystanders to it all until they became the helpless victims.
He said, she said, but it didn’t change the tragedy
Another part of that first video shows Serena waking up on her birthday, August 2, to get a gift, followed by a series of videos of the girls in the apartment with their mother. Elaine keeps asking Serena: “how much do you love me?” and “how much does Mommy love you?” to which Serena stretches out her arms as wide as her small frame can possibly reach.
Towards the end of the footage, Elaine’s remark of how clean and tidy her apartment is leads into a tirade that seems to unsettle her daughters. She begins talking about the physical and emotional abuse she claimed to have suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, and the emotional and mental abuse she said she endured from his family. Elaine doesn’t reference any incidents specifically, but rants about how “unfair” it was that she had to share custody of the kids with her ex.
The next court hearing for the custody battle was scheduled for Oct. 5, 2006. Elaine had moved into her apartment upon leaving her husband, Leo Campione. He lived with his parents in Woodbridge after his wife took their kids and moved into the apartment building behind the Bayfield Mall. In one fell swoop, he watched his family leave him.
The fallout of the marriage was as ugly and bitter as the tumultuous relationship had been. Via court documents, CBC revealed that Leo had been arrested in June 2005 and charged with four counts of assault, one count of assault causing bodily harm and one count of uttering threats. Allegedly, he had hit both Elaine and Serena, which his wife claimed was her breaking point.
Elaine said that the first time Leo assaulted her, he had shoved her and verbally abused her in 1999.
Domestic violence laws across Canada have changed immensely since 1999. Before that, what happened in the home was still viewed as a private matter between spouses, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. As a nineties kid myself, I remember hearing people say things like “what happens at home is no one else’s business.” To hear that while living in a home where domestic violence was a daily and terrifying occurrence was quite surreal (and no, I am not immediately siding with Elaine here. This was merely my experience growing up with domestic violence. We’ll delve into both sides of this divorce shortly).
All that to say this: Attitudes, both in police and civilians, towards domestic violence were vastly different back then compared to now, and abuse in the home was viewed as a matter of privacy despite laws differentiating wife abuse from common assault charges. It fell mostly to the woman being abused to press charges and free herself. It’s not easy today to escape an abusive spouse. It was harder then. I say all this because with these attitudes still prevalent at that time, it could have impacted either side of this equation.
Which begs the question: which side of this marriage was trying to escape their spouse? Was Elaine, as she ranted about, an abused woman escaping a “monster”? Or was Leo trying to pull his daughters away from a mother who’s mental health was quickly deteriorating and on the verge of doing something drastic and dangerous?
Elaine: Abuse victim, or hostile ex-wife fatally possessive over her children?
There isn’t much said on Elaine’s early life, but both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail reported a bit on it. Her mother, Faye Goodine, testified in court that Elaine’s upbringing in Gaspereau Forks, New Brunswick was normal enough. Elaine was the youngest of three daughters. Besides a car accident when Elaine was a teenager, there appears to be no trauma that we know of. Faye described her daughter as a busy high school student who became a busy college student. She was social, went to dances, and hung out with her friends.
Throughout high school, Faye said, Elaine babysat for a local family.
“She really loved the kids, and they really loved her,” Faye stated.
After college, Elaine got a job in a local nursing home. When a back injury sidelined her from her job, Elaine moved back home with her parents. For the next year, Faye said that her daughter was depressed, and spent a lot of time in solitude, watching TV and reading books.
“She didn’t mix with a lot of people … she seemed depressed,” Faye said.
A doctor treated Elaine for depression and migraines, and suggested she move to a larger area.
Gaspereau Forks is an isolated town situated on a crossroads where Highways 123 and 116 meet, about an hour northeast of the province’s capital, Fredericton. Various smaller towns litter the surrounding area. Even Google doesn’t bring up much about Gaspereau Forks, other than the communities near it. It seems to just fade into the region without anything notable about it. And from a quick look at Stats Canada, it seems to be a place where generations of families keep it a dot on the map, and fewer people actually move there.
Elaine’s early life was probably quiet, then; spent in the mundaneness of a small town that leads many young minds to restlessness and yearning more. Perhaps watching those two highways meet and divide, wondering where one or the other went, and which one she should choose.
At 20, she did just that. She spent a year in a community college studying to become a home worker before moving to Ontario to pursue nanny jobs. It appears her whole life revolved around children long before she had her own. She eventually landed a nanny job in Toronto. Things seemed to be looking up, and Elaine seemed to be emerging from the rut she had been in back home.
She met Leo Campione in 2000, according to Faye. This contradicts Elaine’s earlier claim that Leo first assaulted her in 1999 — which was reported by CBC in Oct. 2006 via court documents filed by Elaine herself. She had then claimed she and Leo had met in 1998.
In an affidavit reviewed by the Globe and Mail, Elaine claimed that Leo abused her for the first time months after they moved in together in 1999. She went to the hospital with bruising, she said, but police laid no charges.
Faye described the couple’s first visit together to Gaspereau Forks as tense. Leo was allegedly extremely critical of Elaine, and Elaine seemed to cater to him and do anything to make him happy. Faye said her daughter seemed “tired” and “stressed” from the start of the relationship. Elaine, she claimed, seemed to be “on edge.”
The couple married in August 2002.
Faye stated that Elaine, despite being on her honeymoon, racked up a $200 phone bill for her parents by calling them frequently.
In visits after the wedding, Faye said Elaine appeared to be reserved around Leo.
“She had to do what he wanted, do things the way he wanted,” Faye said, according to the Globe and Mail. Elaine apparently appeared stressed, tired, and wasn’t eating.
Elaine and Leo visited New Brunswick again after Serena was born, though Faye noted that the couple weren’t the blissful new parents they should have been. Elaine’s acne was back, and her daughter seemed more distant than ever. Faye took pictures Elaine as a new mother, and said “the baby's on her lap but she’s just not interested. She’s disengaged.”
In the spring of 2004, Faye explained that Elaine, Leo, and Elaine’s parents had a quarrel that ended with Faye not hearing from her daughter for the next year. Elaine refused to take any phone calls from her parents. When Faye sent only $5 in an Easter card for Serena, Elaine called only to berate her parents.
“Then she hung up on me,” Faye told the court.
In court documents obtained by CBC, Elaine alleged that “when I was six months pregnant with our first child, he began shoving me. It stopped for three to four months when Serena was born and then started again.”
Elaine further claimed that Leo told her he would she would never see the children again after threatening to “tell everyone that I was crazy and unfit to raise our children.”
When Elaine did call her mother again the next year, she was in tears and told Faye that Leo had hit her. The Children’s Aid had come to the house, after which she took the girls with her when she went to go stay in a women’s shelter.
The family appeared on the Children’s Aid’s radar in Feb. 2005. Elaine claimed in the affidavit she tried to leave then but was too scared. But, months later, she said she finally had enough.
“The last incident occurred June 2, 2005. He slapped me and gave me a black eye. He slapped Serena, leaving bruises on her cheek,” she said.
Police arrested Leo. Elaine went to the hospital, where staff documented her injuries in photographs.
CityNews Toronto reported on this after court documents regarding Elaine’s allegations against Leo were released. According to the shelter staff, Elaine apparently had injuries on her head and legs consistent with being beaten.
“I have been sick to my stomach for two months now, but since I got to the shelter I can eat now,” Elaine told a nurse there.
Elaine maintained that her husband had beat her for years, claiming he drew blood when he did so, and allegedly even made Serena bleed when he once hit her. According to the Globe and Mail, she filed for divorce on June 13, 2005. In the documents, she asked for sole custody of the girls and for permission to move them to New Brunswick.
Leo protested, denying the allegations and preventing Elaine from legally moving the kids to another province.
That summer, CityNews continues, Elaine took three weeks to leave behind the skyscrapers and endless pavement of the city to return to the solitude in Gaspereau Forks, her girls in tow. Leo remained back in Ontario. That crossroad she had stared at for years must have seemed even more confusing than ever.
Faye once again became concerned. Elaine couldn’t seem to leave the negativity behind and enjoy her time in the quiet isolation of her hometown. Faye explained that she spent more time on the phone with Leo’s boss and groomsman, and other people in Ontario, and less time with her kids.
According to Faye, “she didn’t seem to be engaged with the girls … she didn’t seem to be interested in taking care of them.”
When it came time to go home, Faye said that Elaine wanted to do anything but. In fact, Elaine begged her mother to return to Ontario with her. Faye did, but they didn’t move back in with Leo. Faye stayed with Elaine and the girls at the women’s shelter.
“I was worried about her. About the girls, too,” Faye said.
Elaine stilled seemed to be fearful while in the shelter, while at the same time, acting superior to the other women in there. They were all women who been beaten by their husbands, Elaine told her mother, and they were all the same.
“She felt she was better than the other people,” Faye noted.
Faye also described the day that Elaine demanded she take a picture of the girls with her, saying Elaine wanted the girls “to know they’d had a mother.”
In that photo, Elaine appears as Faye described her during this time: exhausted, reserved, wearing a white t-shirt and jeans; the only difference being that Elaine is actually holding her daughters as if she hadn’t ignored them for most of the three weeks they were in New Brunswick. Serena and Sophia are both wearing light-colored gowns, and aren’t smiling. It is a photo that speaks of a broken family, with the innocent children helpless to the circumstances, and probably very confused and hurt by the sudden uproot of their lives.
Perhaps it was meant to portray an abused woman and her children, a portrait of sympathy Elaine meant to paint for the upcoming custody battle. She would have to face Leo sooner or later, and share her children, possibly losing them altogether since her housing situation and her mental health seemed so unstable. Perhaps she was already suicidal at this point, and didn’t plan on being around for the girls, but wanted to give them something to remember her by. Either way, it seems Elaine knew she was on the losing end.
Leo signed an affidavit on Sept. 25 in which he listed the criminal charges against him due to his soon to be ex-wife’s allegations. Contact with Elaine and the kids was barred, except for an exception to allow them to attend marriage counseling.
In October 2005, Elaine underwent a week of psychiatric care, according to CityNews.
Leo’s father, Diego Campione, filed court documents on Sept. 25, 2006 regarding Elaine’s mental instability during this time. Diego stated that before undergoing that week of care in Oct. 2005, Elaine had shown up at her in-law’s home unannounced with the kids. He claimed she and the children both looked malnourished, and one of the girls had a diaper rash.
“Elaine’s behaviour was strange and disturbing because she made no sense when she spoke. She was incoherent in her speech,” he said in the statement. “She stated someone wanted to kill her.”
She would be hospitalized two more times, with the Children’s Aid taking the girls while she was receiving treatment, only to release them back to her when she was discharged.
Two months after she dropped the kids off with Leo’s parents, Leo was charged for breaching the terms of his release (for the arrest after the alleged altercation that led to Elaine leaving him in June 2005), as he allegedly tried to contact Elaine in order to convince her to change her testimony in court.
All through this, Leo denied the abuse allegations and said that Elaine’s mental instability proved she wasn’t credible. It’s important to note that Leo was never convicted of anything regarding the abuse accusations. It was his word against hers.
Within the following year, Elaine moved to Barrie with the girls while the custody dispute played out. She found an apartment in a 13-story building on Coulter St. It was the last home the girls ever knew.
Sharon Lynn, a friend of Elaine’s, told the Toronto Sun that Elaine was “a woman who was tormented.” She added that her friend had been trying to cope with a life that was “so bad.”
“That mother needs a hug. She needs to know that people love her,” Lynn said.
A neighbor, John Kerr, told the Sun he had never seen Elaine smile in the times he’d see her on the elevator.
“She was not a happy person at all,” he remarked.
Still another neighbor, Cathy Morgan, recalled seeing the mother and her daughters in the building, and how lovely the children were.
“They were the sweetest little girls that you’ve ever seen in your life; tiny, petite and well-behaved. The mother always took such good care of them. They were always dressed in princess dresses,” Cathy said.
Interestingly enough, someone from the same neighborhood where Leo grew up told the Sun that Elaine fell into a deep depression after she gave birth to Sophia. At one point, Elaine dropped the kids off with her in-laws, saying she couldn’t deal with them, according to this neighbor.
The Campiones welcomed the children again in May 2006 when the Children’s Aid took them and sent them to their grandparents. Elaine once more had to seek treatment for her mental problems. In June 2006, the same month she left Leo, Elaine was also hospitalized after what the Globe and Mail claims was a suicide attempt.
After this, it appeared Elaine was making small steps towards finding herself after leaving her husband. Right up until a few days before the murders, Elaine had attended counseling sessions. On Oct. 2, according to the Globe and Mail, Elaine met with lawyer Linda Lewis to swear an affidavit to prepare for the Oct. 5 court hearing for custody. She showed a letter from a neighbor, named Ruth Robinson, who wrote that: “Elaine is doing a wonderful job with her girls and I only wish that others in this building could take a few lessons from her.”
Elaine also produced an attendance certificate upon completing a course called “Considering the Children: Parenting Skills for Separating Families,” and other documents confirming she had been a client at a sexual assault center and a service which helps victims of domestic violence.
All in all, it was a heartwrenching and toxic ending to a whirlwind marriage that started with an $11,800 engagement ring, a new house in Bradford, and Elaine’s dreams of being a stay-at-home mom with her girls with Leo’s $70,000 salary as a construction foreman. And in the center of the new tumultuous hurricane of allegations, mistrust, and hostility, were two innocent little girls who relied on their increasingly unstable mother to navigate this new life.
Leo: “Monster” of a husband, or a desperate father who knew his children were endangered with their mother?
Information about the early years of the man whose life was painted into two vastly different pictures is scarce. Maybe it adds to the mystery of who Leo Campione truly is, or it speaks to his need for privacy despite how high profile and public Elaine’s trial was.
Leo’s first public image was one no one wants to wake up to: his daughters drowned by their mother, and that same woman making nasty allegations on video publicly available to the media in the weeks to come.
“Hideous monster.”
“The devil.”
“I want you to know how much I hate you.”
“You wanted to win and you won. ... Are you happy? … You beat your wife to death and your children and don’t you ever, ever, ever forget it.”
All poisonous words spewed from the lips of the woman who left him and barricaded him from her life and effectively, their daughters.
Leo didn’t just lose his children that day. He lost his reputation, one that remains steeped in controversy among true crime circles. Was he a devil who terrorized his wife and kids? Or, as some media outlets reported, was he a gentle, loving father, railing against a system that kept his children in danger with their mother despite the blatant red flags?
We’ve seen that type of case before. Eli Hart’s father, Tory, fought for months on end in court to extract him from the custody of his mother, Julissa Thaler, who struggled with addiction, instability, and mental illness right up until she shot the six-year-old boy to death in the backseat of her car in May 2022. Thaler accused Tory of being abusive and racked up numerous orders of protection against him. And yet, Tory was praised as being the more stable and loving parent despite Thaler winning custody of Eli two weeks before murdering him. Tory filed complaints with the court and produced evidence about Thaler’s mental issues, but to no avail. The system turned it’s back in the moment it took Thaler to rob young Eli of his short life. Tory can never bring back his son, but he did file a lawsuit against child protective services in Minnesota.
Clearly, Elaine Campione struggled with some form of mental illness (which I will get into in the psychology section of this story). So, how many of Elaine’s claims were true, and which were fabricated by a tormented mind?
One thing Leo hasn’t done in the years following the horrifying murders of his daughters is speak ill of Elaine — at least not publicly. All he has said is that he never wants to see her face or hear her voice again; a perfectly valid reaction to what he has been through. He didn’t reciprocate the public mud slinging that Elaine’s video very well could have instigated.
The flip side of his silence is that we never did hear his side of the story, so it’s hard to weigh his word versus that of his ex-wife. I really only have media reports and court documents to go on.
The Abuse Cycle: Who was really the monster?
Psychologist Lenore Walker was one of the first to introduce the four-part cycle of abuse in her book “The Battered Woman,” but we now know and acknowledge that both men and women can be abused, and this cycle is similar regardless of the abuser’s gender. At the same time, it’s also much more complex than this.
The four stages in this cycle are:
Tension: External struggles trigger anger and resentment which fuels tension in the relationship. Things like exhaustion, financial problems, family issues, and more. During this stage, the victim feels paranoid, angry, and powerless, but despite that, might try to pacify their abuser to avoid the abusive outburst they can feel coming.
The incident of abuse: This can come in the form of verbal, physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, manipulation, or property destruction. Commonly, an abuser will blame the victim for pushing them to the edge and for the “relationship problems.”
Reconciliation: Once the tension has detonated, things calm down — for the time being. The abuser attempts to smooth things over with gifts and grand gestures to prove they “love” their victim, to create the illusion that the relationship can work and they can change.
Calm: This is the period where the abuser’s behavior appears to change. They’re more attentive to their victim than normal and exude an exterior of apologetic remorse (while blaming others) and minimizing the abuse.
And, it keeps going back. Of course, we know now that domestic violence is not nearly as simplistic as this cycle makes it out to be. A victim doesn’t always know when a new relationship will turn abusive. The best analogy I ever read when it came to this is that of a frog in boiling water. A frog in room-temperature water is content. When you gradually turn up the heat, the water warms, but the frog adjusts to the changes. By the time the water is boiling, they didn’t really see it coming and become frantic for a way out. Any way out.
Abuse is about power and control. An abuser always has control over each stage of this cycle and the temperature of that water. A calculating puppeteer. The spouse and the children are their puppets, and they are the master of it all, creating an illusion to the rest of the world that everything is fine while said puppets wear fake smiles plastered on their faces and mimic the falsehoods the abuser perpetuates. All the while, the water reaches closer to a boiling point.
What Elaine accuses Leo of doing appears to fit this cycle: periods of a volatile marriage followed by periods of peace.
But we also know that sometimes, the abuser flips the script and makes their victim appear to be the abuser. Elaine’s accusations seem cut and dry enough. The alleged abuse started early, it continued, her family noticed a change in her personality, and her new husband appeared to be controlling and demanding.
And yet, Elaine also had to control the narrative when it came to the divorce. She is the one who publicly accused Leo, who recorded her children in specific settings, had to point out how pristine her apartment was while bitterly lamenting about how people thought she was an unfit mother. She continually coaxed her children into claiming how much they loved her, by stretching their arms out wide while awkwardly avoiding eye contact with the camera. We didn’t see this from Leo.
In fact, several reports claim the contrary: that Leo was a loving dad, devastated and broken by the deaths of his daughters who he tried to save from their unstable mother. But even when he has had the chance to do so, he has never tried to control a narrative. He hasn’t spoken to the media, has done little to publicly amend his reputation, and even when he had a chance to say something via his victim impact statement, he made that only about the little girls who so tragically lost their lives in this hostile divorce. He has never publicly addressed the abuse allegations.
His silence could mean he was guilty of it and knows it, and has moved on, or he hangs his head in shame that Elaine got the better of him, manipulated him, and destroyed his life.
“Serena and Sophia were my life and they still are. I found my place in life and my peace was with them. Above all else in life nothing brought peace to me like they did from their loving embrace,” he wrote in his victim impact statement.
The Toronto Sun reviewed family court records pertaining to the custody battle between Leo and Elaine. According to such, on one visit after a month of not seeing his girls, Leo had tears in his eyes when he greeted Sophia and Serena. This was also two weeks before they were murdered, and the last time Leo saw his children. He was confined to visiting them at the Simcoe/Muskoka Supervised Access Center as Elaine refused to let him take the girls to his parents’ home.
He only had an hour with which to visit the girls.
The documents describe how Leo blew bubbles with the girls and brought them a homemade lunch, and how Serena snuggled on his lap after eating. He cried again when the hour was over and Elaine picked them up.
“Can you come too, Daddy?” Serena asked.
“No, not today, but I’ll see you soon,” Leo told her.
The supervisor of the visit noted that Leo seemed to be an attentive, loving father.
“Several times he is heard telling them that he loves them ... he sets age appropriate limits with respect to play, safety and hygiene,” noted staff supervisor Shelley St. Amant.
In January 2007, the charges against Leo were stayed, ironically on what would have been Serena’s second birthday. Leo spent that morning in court, then went to the graveyard to visit his girls.
“On the day when I was supposed to be celebrating my youngest daughter's second birthday, today I'll be spending my time by her grave,” he said outside the courthouse that day. “And I have no other comment.”
The Toronto Star reported in April 2007 that Leo was becoming something of an activist.
“If I am in a mall and there are other children running and I hear a baby call out ‘Daddy,’ it is just a torment to my heart. It is indescribable. This happened to me. I am going to do everything possible to make sure it doesn’t happen to anybody else,” he said.
He showed public support for for Ontario ombudsman Andre Marin, who was trying to urge the government to give him power to investigate 53 children’s aid societies within the province. Marin sent a written submission to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy to request those investigative powers.
Indeed, Bill 165, the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth Act, was enacted in 2007 and provides the Ontario child advocate with independence to investigate and respond to complaints in regards to child protective services.
“I have already lost all that is most precious and valuable to me. I really don’t have anything to gain, except that their deaths were not in vain. My greatest resolve now is that this does not happen to any other children. It is what gives me the strength to keep going,” Leo said.
This… sure doesn’t sound like the selfish “monster” Elaine described. Most abusers wouldn’t take to activism like this, but move on to their next victim with complete disregard to the damage done. His focus, still, is on his girls, while Elaine focused on angry retaliation towards Leo.
And further, abused women don’t tend to murder their children. They usually try to protect them from the abuse however they can without harming them. Even in psychiatrist Phillip J. Resnick’s extensive studies of filicide, this doesn’t even come into consideration in his five classifications of mothers who murder their kids. Altruistic Filicide is usually a result of a suicidal mother who plans on killing herself after the kids, or is experiencing delusions or psychosis.
It’s clear that Elaine struggled with mental illness. There’s no denying that. She had depression before she had the kids, and it appears to have snowballed into postpartum depression she never really came back from, maybe with bouts of psychosis. But that woman we see in the interrogation didn’t seem to be someone who just snapped out of a psychosis to realize her girls were murdered by her own hand, unless she was in severe shock.
What Elaine did appears to align with Resnick’s classification of Spousal Revenge, whereas a woman will murder her kids as retaliation to a former partner who is seeking custody or trying to take her kids from her. An act of defiance.
“If I can’t have them, nobody can.”
Quite ironically, the very thought process typically attributed to abusive personalities. Power. Possessiveness. Control. Similar to what led Julissa Thaler to murdering her son.
According to the Cry for Justice blog, abusers tend to have that attitude of superiority and entitlement, looking down on everyone while simultaneously putting them down. On the contrary, abuse victims tend to withdraw into themselves and insult or blame themselves. They’re confused, paranoid, powerless. Even nasty allegations can be spouted off by an abuser as a means of keeping a victim in their place. Reminding them that no one would believe them if they spoke out.
This blog also points out that male abuse victims specifically tend to exhibit shame and humility. They usually don’t open up about their experience.
“Real abuse victims, you see, often lack allies. It is the abuser who has them!” the blog notes.
Leo certainly had his family on his side. But Elaine had the allies that would hand her their children: child services and the cops. The allegations made sure of that. Hence, my earlier rant about how the views on domestic violence were vastly difference back when this happened, and when I was growing up.
On one side, we see Elaine using nasty words and bitterness and even her own children as weapons in a divorce she knew she was losing. On the other side, Leo remained strangely quiet about whatever happened in that marriage, with a focus where Elaine’s never was: on the well-being of their girls.
Unraveling this marriage and divorce makes one question who was the monster, for sure. Was Elaine telling the truth and trying to be brave in sharing her story? Or was she gas lighting the world to cover up her own actions, her accusations a projection of her own behavior?
Was Leo charged on false accusations, or were he and Elaine equally toxic to each other and he realized what she would do to their children if left alone with them in the aftermath of their split, when he finally got time to think clearly for himself? Did he in fact hit Elaine in that altercation, lost control, and realized he screwed up? Or was he as guilty of abusive behavior?
Elaine knew the Children’s Aid wouldn’t hand the girls back to Leo with abuse charges pending. Even the outside world saw glimpses of the different masks Elaine wore. Sometimes, a doting mother with princesses for daughters. Other times, she was a woman who was never happy.
“I felt like my hands were tied at all times,” Leo later told the Toronto Star. “I felt the children’s aid society was an organization that ran independently, that their actions or inactions or whatever decision they made, was unilateral.”
And then, Leo did allegedly ask Elaine to change her testimony when it came to court regarding the assault charges, breaching a no-contact order. This is typically a red flag. We don’t know what Elaine was going to testify. Was Leo trying to convince her to tell the truth that he didn’t abuse her, or was he more subtle in trying to spin a narrative to his own favor?
There’s another possibility. With Elaine’s history with depression and mental illness, it’s possible that she struggled with depression before and after having Serena. Her preexisting depression could have become postpartum — which would explain her delusions and paranoia. If Leo struggled with a lack of emotional regulation, or didn’t know how to handle her, it’s possible his reactions to her could have become physically aggressive, and abusive. It’s possible they pushed each other to the edge.
Only Leo and Elaine truly know what happened within the walls of their marriage. Regardless, it was Serena and Sophia who paid the ultimate price. Elaine went to prison for life, with no chance of parole for 25 years. Leo simply went back to work, took on some activism in the names of his daughters, and generally seemed to try to move on.
The Appeal
In Feb. 2015, Elaine filed an appeal which claimed the judge made three errors in instructing the jury on how to determine whether she was not criminally responsible, according to CBC. Her defense claimed that her postpartum and other mental illnesses prevented her from knowing right from wrong when she murdered her kids.
The appeal court dismissed this, ruling that the jury were, indeed, properly instructed.
“The jurors were made well aware that, if they accepted the appellant’s version of the killings, they had to render a verdict of NCR. I see no basis for confusion on this issue,” the appeal panel wrote, adding:
“While the focus of the test is on the appellant’s state of mind and her capacity for rational choice, the question is not whether the appellant considered the acts justified according to her own moral code, but whether she was incapable of knowing that her actions were contrary to society’s morality.”
However, in 2023, 17 years into her sentence, the Parole Board of Canada approved continued supervised temporary absences from custody for volunteer services and rehabilitative purposes, according to a CTV report. The board called her behavior while incarcerated “very positive.”
She now uses her maiden name, “Goodine.” The parole board recommended Elaine be approved for ETAs once a week for up to five hours so she could attend church and special celebrations.
It’s an extension of the limited freedom she was granted in 2018, when she was permitted ETAs once a month, then again in 2019, but these were halted in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. She received supervised day release once more in 2022.
The board notes that Elaine received over 40 certificates while in custody for various programs, participated in numerous workshops and interventions, and as of that report, she was a Chaplain’s assistant. According to the board, she maintains a “quiet, stable profile” and “worked well with staff.”
Elaine, they determined, wouldn’t present “an undue risk to society during these absences.”
The little princesses never forgotten
Serena’s obituary says that one the day of her birth, “a light was born into the world.”
“Her life, though short-lived, served as a testament to the vulnerability of innocence, the complexities of family dynamics, and the profound impact that even the briefest lives can have on the world around them,” it reads.
Her smile is described as radiant, her eyes curious, a beacon of joy despite the hardships she and her little sister faced in their short lives. She was a child filled with wonder, joy, and “the simple pleasures of childhood.”
“Every moment she shared with her family, every laugh, every tear, painted a vivid picture of a life full of potential,” the obituary says.
She loved coloring, playing with her sister, and sharing time with the family. The writer of the obituary acknowledges that the girls’ early lives were wrought with the complexities and bitterness of their parents’ marriage and split. It’s interesting to note that even in this obituary, there is still no speaking ill of Elaine outside of the facts of the case, while acknowledging her mental illness.
Despite it all, Serena still viewed the world as a wondrous place, “a playground for discovery,” and a place filled with love.
“In remembering Serena Campione, we remember the fragility of life, the profound importance of mental health support, and the undeniable truth that every life, no matter how brief, leaves an indelible mark on the world.”
Sophia’s obituary shares the same photo as her sister’s: the girls, both in white frilly dresses as they were known to wear, with Serena standing beside the wooden rocking chair where Sophia sits. Both blond, bright-eyed little girls abundant with love and bliss and playfulness. Perhaps indicative of who the girls would grow up to be: Serena, always protective of her sister, and Sophia, eternally looking up to her.
“It is said that a child is the embodiment of innocence and purity, and Sophia was no exception,” her obituary reads. “Her life, however short-lived, would have been filled with the inquisitive nature of infants, discovering the world around them, taking joy in the little things, and finding comfort in the embrace of family.”
These were two baby girls stuck in a turbulent storm long before they could ever comprehend how complex, how toxic, how dangerous it was. All they knew was that they loved their parents, their family, and their daily activities that any normal kids would partake in. Their home was broken, but their spirits remained bright and brimming with hope that the hurricane-force winds and gloomy clouds wouldn’t last forever.
It was a home that couldn’t be put back together. But it is heart-wrenching that their mother couldn’t set aside the bitterness and poisonous words long enough to see that it was her girls suffering the most. That in her bitter retaliation in the moments of submerging her daughters in a filled bathtub until they stopped breathing hurt Leo, yes, but it ended the lives of the two innocents in the divorce. Serena and Sophia didn’t deserve that end, whatever Elaine’s motive was. Especially if, unlike so many mothers with postpartum, she was lucid in those moments and knew exactly what she was doing.
Some might say that alone makes Elaine the true monster.
My Substack is all free with paid subscriptions being optional. I also have a Ko-Fi for one-time donations. Any support goes towards creating more content and books and furthering my writing career. All support, financial or not, is appreciated!
Sources
CTV
CBC
Toronto Star
Leo’s activism after the murders
The videos
The Globe and Mail
Toronto Sun
Obituaries of Serena and Sophia