HUNTER: Cop killer who murdered 4 is out, victims still in hellish prison

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Ed McDonald was just a kid when he saw his father for the final time.

One year later, his dad, James, would be dead on a warm September night in 1980. Shot to death in the Palace Hotel in Vancouver, along with another bartender and an elderly patron.

The killer, a mustachioed cauldron of rage named Steven Lee LeClair, then made his way to the Surrey RCMP detachment. There, the thug asked the first Mountie he saw how quick he was on the draw.

Before the rookie cop could answer, LeClair parked a bullet point-blank into his chest, killing him. Ten years before the murder, in 1970, LeClair was charged with attempted murder for stabbing his father five times.

Last year, LeClair, now 76 and infirm, was granted day parole.

To Ed McDonald, LeClair should have gotten the big adios for the quadruple murder. The slaying 44 years ago has stained his life. LeClair has been his bogeyman.

“My parents split when I was young and he moved to Vancouver. My mom found out about it (the shooting) in the Toronto Sun and she just knew it was him,” McDonald, 57, told the Sun.

“I was in shock, a little kid. I took it the worst of anybody, I knew my father a bit more than my brother, who was seven at the time.”

LeClair — “angry at the world and drunk” — was quickly arrested and convicted. As the killer began his four decades in prison, so too did Ed McDonald.

This is what soft-on-crime politicians do not understand, nor do they try.

“I really unravelled,” McDonald said. “I became a drug addict, first weed, then cocaine and that’s the road I went down … I got worse and worse.”

LeClair’s evil action turned a jovial kid into a raging young man, full of hatred — mostly directed at his father’s killer.

“The last time I saw my dad, he came to the schoolyard at St. Teresa’s in Etobicoke. He was a bad gambler and in 1977 lost the mortgage money on the Kentucky Derby,” McDonald said, adding that his mother had had enough.

“It was very vivid. He told me to do what mom asked, go to church and ‘always be a good boy.’ All those lost years, I wasn’t.”

For many years, he wanted to go to B.C. and put LeClair in the ground as the killer had done to his father. But thanks to a kindly priest, McDonald’s rage ebbed and he cleaned up his act. He has been clean 10 years now.

“He told me if I couldn’t let go, it would eventually kill me. I woke up one morning and no longer hated LeClair,” he said. “I was still angry but didn’t hate.”

According to reports, LeClair is essentially an invalid even though he’s still considered highly dangerous. He has shown little remorse.

In 1980, LeClair had been booted from the Palace Bar. He left, came back with a gun and then killed. In Surrey, he killed again.

The killer would have been sprung sooner if it wasn’t for a slew of infractions inside prison and an utter lack of remorse.

Ed McDonald’s decades of agony mean little to the judicial-industrial complex’s mandarins.

LeClair should have been swinging from a rope.

“Absolutely, when you kill four people, including a cop … it’s only fair that the government is going to hang you,” McDonald said.

“Our government has done everything for that man (LeClair) and zero for our family.”

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun