Nov. 6, 02:13 EDT

Hadleys' problems aired with co-workers

Nicholas Keung
STAFF REPORTER
Toronto Star

There was a "rivalry" between Gillian Hadley and her half-sister, Lisa Parish, who along with her husband was on a "mission" to throw dirt on the woman's already troubled marriage, an inquest heard yesterday.

Timothy Kennedy, a shift manager at the envelope factory where all three worked in 1999, testified that Lisa and Brian Parish spread talk about Hadley's extramarital affair at work, the day after they led her husband, Ralph, to her lover's home on Jan. 7, 2000.

"For some strange reason, they were proud of it - that it's an onus on them to make that public and attack Gillian's character," he told the inquest into the Hadleys' June 20, 2000, murder-suicide.

Shortly after Ralph caught her having sex with Clark Kostyshyn and slapped her, Gillian called Kennedy.

"(Gillian) told me Lisa and Brian had betrayed her and led her husband to where she was," Kennedy recalled. "She said they had ruined her life and she felt they were on a mission to destroy her." Ralph was subsequently charged with physical assault and placed under a restraining order.

Kennedy said Lisa made no secret at work of the fact that she and Gillian had had a "pretty wild night" one evening in October, 1999, when the two married women met two men at the Excuses nightclub in Oshawa and went on to have sex with them.

There was an apparent rivalry between the sisters, he noted, and Lisa liked to point fingers at Gillian. At work, Brian would crack jokes about his fantasy of having sex with Gillian and being a private investigator spying on her, Kennedy added.

Gillian had told Kennedy that her marriage to Ralph was a "convenient thing" because their families were old friends. She feared that information Lisa and Brian were giving Ralph would aggravate the situation, he said.

After Ralph murdered Gillian, her former co-workers were left appalled by the Parishes' questionable actions.

"Everyone felt (Lisa and Brian) put a gun in his hand," Kennedy said. "Yes, they didn't pull the trigger, but certainly they were players."

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