CHILD MURDER TRIAL HEARS OF ‘ MR. BIG’ SCHEME
Police detective outlines ruse used with Spencer Jordan, Marie Magoon
They watched the Edmonton Indy, went to a comedy show and partied together during the Calgary Stampede. In between planning ambitious crimes, there was still time to talk hockey, skydiving and other topics over beers at the pub.
For Spencer Jordan and Marie Magoon, the summer of 2012 was an exciting time, with a new circle of friends who also brought welcome business opportunities. To those friends, though, the happy times together were no more than “scenarios,” a police term for individual meet- ups, conversations and scenes with distinct investigative aims.
On Tuesday morning, a Calgary police undercover detective ( his and other officers’ names are protected by a court publication ban) lays out for the court the months- long “Mr. Big” operation on Jordan and Magoon, the pair charged in the first- degree murder of six- year- old Meika Jordan.
Meika Jordan was pronounced dead on Nov. 14, 2011, after suffering multiple injuries to her head, stomach and other parts of her body. The Crown is alleging that the injuries took place over a series of days in which Jordan, her biological father, and Magoon were the sole adults supervising the little girl.
The detective’s hours- long testimony is heard in a voir dire, its admissibility to be later ruled on by Justice Rosemary Nation. It gives fascinating insight into the make- believe world created over the summer of 2012, as a team of undercover detectives tried to win the trust and compliance of Jordan and Magoon.
After a week of exhaustive details of Meika Jordan’s injuries — one of the many physicians called to the witness stand broke down in tears describing the child’s badly beaten body — the minutiae of the Mr. Big operation is considerably more palatable for those present. Except, of course, for the two individuals in the prisoner’s box, who visibly wince throughout the detective’s recitation of their apparently effortless entry into a fake criminal organization.
It should be noted that in August of 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that RCMP undercover officers could not use confessions against Nelson Hart, a Newfoundland man accused of killing his twin three- year- old daughters, after it deemed the tactics of threatening violence and/ or offering false financial rewards can lead to false confessions.
Even though the Mr. Big operation against Jordan and Magoon occurred two years before the decision, it’s clear from the detective’s testimony that they were treading carefully. In the early days of the 2012 sting, he says, they made sure to concoct a crisis in which one gang member was found to have been stealing from the organization. Jordan was present to see his transgressions and witness his banishment — a PG- rated process where, much like a fast- food server caught with a free burger, it involved not much more than a tongue- lashing and confiscation of his company condo and car keys.
“We needed to express clearly that there was no threat to him,” the detective says of what he describes as a “high- impact” scenario.
Despite his new crime compatriots’ lack of teeth, Jordan appears to have quickly accepted the detectives’ various scenarios as they unfolded over several months. Within a relatively short period of time, he let his guard down with the detective testifying on this day, one of many regular and “cameo” officers assigned to the investigation, but his main handler.
In a conversation about hunting, Jordan told the detective about how he felt it would be easier to kill a human being than an animal; about how it was the “worst day” of his life when he learned that his ex- wife Kyla Woodhouse, Meika’s mother, had won a prize in a radio contest; and how he had thought of kidnapping his other children.
Still, the detective describes Jordan’s dominant mood over that summer as one of elation, where he was excited to find himself in situations where he felt like a “spy” or a “gangster.”
After the lunch break, plastic surgeon and burn expert Dr. Duncan Nickerson testifies to the burn on Meika Jordan’s hand.
It was a large and serious thirddegree burn, says the doctor, the type that should have sent her father and stepmother racing to an emergency room. It was most likely caused, he adds, by forcibly holding a hand over an open flame, likely a number of times.
It’s hardly surprising that Meika’s mom and her supporters — who were present for the detective’s make- believe scenarios — choose to sit out this all- too- real part of the day.