Distinguished by Good Behaviour

"I think your parents would be rather proud of you."

"You’ve indicated through your conduct over the last 8 1/2 years [since her conviction on three counts of first-degree murder] you have a desire to atone for what you did."

"Clearly you cannot undo the past, you can only live each day with the knowledge that you can control how you behave."

"The probation officer indicates that [she] has remained positive through the supervision."

"The probation officer has no concerns regarding [her] peer group, or how she spends her free time."

"[She has shown] a maturity and level of insight beyond her age."

Justice Scott Brooker, Alberta Court of Queen's Bench, Medicine Hat, Alberta

"[I agree that [J.R.] has become the woman her parents hoped she’d be]."

"I think she has, I think that based on the information that we’ve heard in court throughout the process that she has made huge gains and huge rehabilitative progress from where she was to where she is today."

Defence lawyer Katherin Beyak

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"She certainly was given a four-phase plan and according to all the treatment providers followed all four of the phases, all of the conditions that were set out by the judge."

"I’m not an expert on rehabilitation, I’m satisfied she followed the rules the judge gave her, but time will tell. There’s no question that she ... wasn’t fully invested in her own rehabilitation, that’s what all the reports say, and I accept that."

"I think we talked earlier in the sentence about baby steps, because the crime itself was so heinous, right, so it took a long time to figure out if she could comply and how she could comply."
Medicine Hat chief Crown prosecutor Ramona Robins

firsttoknow.com    Jasmine Richardson Murdered Her Parents & Brother with Help from 'Werewolf' Boyfriend

Amazing. It is well known to psychiatrists how skilled psychopaths are in convincing others that they are perfectly normal in all respects as integrated members of society. If, by chance, they have somehow distinguished themselves as behaving radically differently from most people for whom the social contract of human decency and regard for the well-being of others surfaces, their ability to manipulate perceptions of themselves knows no equal.

As for this now-young woman's parents -- dead by her urging and connivance -- being proud of the woman she has become, one can only say this is taking liberties with one's imagination. Known only as "J.K." to protect her identity at age twelve under the Young Offender's Act, she resented her parents' interference in her life and couldn't wait to have them dead. And nor would she spare her little brother, witness to the atrocity.

Her parents had a problem child in J.K., to say the very least. A young girl who had her own ideas of how she would live her life, and those ideas didn't include her parents' concern for her well-being. They were not prepared to countenance the company she kept, much less her boyfriend, eleven years her senior, a slow-witted low-life whom she wound around her little finger to convince among other things, that he was obliged to murder her parents.

Both she and her boyfriend, John Steinke, were found guilty of first-degree murder in the April 2006 killing in her parents' home. She committed herself to stabbing her eight-year-old brother when she failed to succeed in strangling him. And there was then no one who had witnessed the barbarity that she had planned and consummated between herself and her lover. She graduated with flying colours from an Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision review.

And now she is free to carry on her life in public as of Saturday. Her identity remains shielded and all records related to her youth convictions will be sealed after five years. The then-grade 7 girl, even then -- particularly then -- a skilled manipulator, found the seamy side of life more to her liking than the conventional life her parents had planned for their daughter. And this judge feels that her parents looking down from heaven at their daughter's progress would feel parental pride?

Back then just after the murders had taken place and police arrived at the blood-spattered family home with its grisly scene of three mutilated victims, they were convinced an abduction had also taken place, a young girl had been kidnapped and was missing, her parents and brother dead. Wrong, oh so wrong. She and her lover were celebrating their audacious success in removing the irritating protest against their relationship by parents who had no idea their deaths were summarily sealed through their daughter's exercise of her free spirit.

They arrived at the apartment of a friend, had sex, and partied, alcohol freely flowing, in the company of their friends some of whom surely must have been skeptical of their assertions, in witnessing the conscience-free abandon with which the two lovers disported themselves. They were arrested soon afterward. The girl's parents, an autopsy established, had been stabbed repeatedly, the father with 24 wounds, the mother a dozen. The failed attempt to choke her little brother led J.K. to stab her brother four times and he died of a gash to his throat.

And while the now-22-year-old woman is free to resume her new, untrammelled life, her partner in the murder of her family remains imprisoned to serve his life sentence without opportunity for parole for 25 years.