Murder at McDonald's Read Online Free PDF Page B

planning, and MacNeil tried to recruit a potential replacement. But their candidate wasn’t interested, so the job was postponed for a week. And they would go ahead with or without a guard at the outside entrance.
    At about seven-thirty on the evening of May 6, Freeman MacNeil drove Derek Wood to work. Before he entered the restaurant, Wood took the tiny silver .22-calibre pistol from MacNeil and grabbed a handful of ammunition. He stuffed the bullets and the weapon into the black-leather pouch he wore around his waist, and went inside. Down in the crew changing-room in the basement, Wood took off his street clothes and pulled on his McDonald’s uniform. Then he put his clothes and the leather pouch into his brown canvas knapsack and headed up to work.
    A few hours later, MacNeil picked up Muise at a local pool hall. The two parked on a side street near Sydney harbour, where they put on a second set of clothing over their street clothes. These outer layers would later be discarded; that way, any fibres left behind at the scene—or anything their clothing picked up while they were in the restaurant—could not be traced back to them. The would-be robbers expected to find between $80,000 and $200,000 in the safe, and they knew there would be an intense investigation when the job was done. After changing, they drove to the Tim Hortons in the Sydney River shopping plaza. As they parked in front of the coffee shop, the two could see McDonald’s, just up the hill.
    In the basement of the restaurant, Derek Wood took his knapsack and jammed it against the frame of the door that led to the black steel door on the outside wall; if the inner door closed, it would lock. After helping Arlene MacNeil with the inventory, Wood had gone to the crew room and changed out of his McDonald’s uniform, which he stuffed into the knapsack, retrieving his leather pouch. With the inner entrance safely propped open, Wood closed the outside door almost all the way, leaving just enough space to allow him to grab an edge and pull it open when he returned.
    Then he headed over to Tim Hortons. He jumped into the brown-and beige Chevy Impala and confronted Muise and MacNeil; he had tried calling them—why hadn’t they answered? Apparently they hadn’t heard the pay phone ringing. Well, they would go ahead anyway; after all, Wood had left the door open, so they could still get inside. Freeman MacNeil would play a more active role; he would go inside and guard the basement door while Muise went up to the kitchen and Wood waited for the all-clear to try the safe. The young men drove away from Tim Hortons and onto Kings Road, past the front of McDonald’s and underneath the Sydney bypass. On the other side of the bypass, they entered a residential area and turned onto a dirt road, following it almost to the end, where it intersected with a secluded gravel road. There, the robbers stepped out into the night; they were at the corner of Britannia Street and Sheridan Drive. In front of them, across the bypass, was their target. The three walked across the field beside the highway, aglow in deep yellow light, then hustled across the brightly illuminated four lanes to the field on the other side—the one bordering the McDonald’s property. They moved quietly towards the building, approaching the side away from the driveway, then made their way down to the front corner, where the basement door, still slightly ajar, awaited them. They stepped into the building and pulled the door shut behind them.

    Derek Wood, Darren Muise, and Freeman MacNeil made their way to this basement door, stepped inside, and closed it behind them. [RCMP crime scene photo.]
    Meanwhile, Arlene MacNeil and Donna Warren were getting ready to leave the basement office where Arlene had been sorting the children’s party favours.
    Once the robbers had closed the basement door, they found themselves in a dark, windowless little porch outside the crew