Blood patterns tell tale of struggle, violence
Warning: Graphic Content
On the evening of June 29, 2014, Jennifer O’Brien snapped a photo of her mom and two boys, after another happy day spent together.
Reclining in a well-worn rattan Papasan chair, Kathy Liknes had a broad smile on her face as she laid back on its circular cushion, her right arm wrapped around five-year-old Nathan, her left around his baby brother Max.
A few hours later, the 53-yearold’s blood would intertwine with that of Nathan’s, the streaks and spatters covering a bed, a door and walls along the upper hallway of the home Kathy shared with her husband Alvin.
When she first arrived at the Liknes home on July 1, 2014, Sgt. Jodi Arns did a walk-through of the crime scene, dressed in a Tyvek suit, rubber gloves, booties and a mask.
She didn’t always put on a mask, but in a scene where the blood of three people would be found in various locations — some deep crimson pools, others faint drag marks and swirls along walls — extra precautions to not contaminate the scene were necessary.
“Once we lock down a scene we become quite possessive,” says Arns, a blood pattern analyst with the Calgary Police Service, about her commitment to maintaining the integrity of the evidence she’s tasked to examine.
In the home the Likneses were preparing to move from in the coming days, there was no shortage of the many varieties of bloodstain patterns Arns is trained to identify and analyze: swirls, wisps and saturations, for example.
She’d later apply colour-coded markers to the individuals whose DNA matched the blood; blue for Alvin, pink for Kathy and green for the five-year-old boy who was staying over at his grandparents’ for an impromptu sleepover.
Arns is one more in a long line of experts testifying at the triplemurder trial of Douglas Garland. In her opening statement on January 16, Crown prosecutor Vicki Faulkner laid out the case against the 57-year-old loner, who she contended acted out a meticulous plan to abduct and murder the couple. Garland, who the Crown said had a years-long grudge against Alvin Liknes over a patent dispute, is accused of violently removing the three from the home, then taking them to the Airdrie-area farm where he lived with his elderly parents to dispose of their bodies.
The day previous, DNA expert Vivian Mohrbutter provided an exhaustive recounting of all the places on the Garland farm where the trio’s DNA was found, from black rubber boots to a meat hacksaw and a burn barrel.
Heaped on to Monday’s aerial photos entered into evidence — where images of two adult bodies next to a smaller, curled-up figure were captured by surveyors on the morning of July 1, 2014 — it’s easy to forget at times that this is a murder trial absent of victims’ bodies.
Not only have their physical presences been felt in the courtroom as, piece by piece, experts in the sciences have accounted for such tell-tale signs of life like teeth, blood and DNA, so too have their final hours.
As Arns details swipe patterns on the kitchen walls evidencing “signs of a clean-up,” and stains on the floor of the spare bedroom that made her conclude “Kathy was on the floor at the time of impact,” a picture emerges that is simultaneously heartbreaking and horrifying.
Like every other day of the previous 15, Garland sits in the prisoner’s box with an expression of studious detachment, squinting behind his glasses as he listens to the testimony, hunching over occasionally to scribble down notes.
The entirety of the evidence, says Arns, had her conclude that Alvin Liknes had been struck in several areas of the house, as was his wife; and that Nathan was “actively bleeding” on the mattress of the spare room bed where he had gone to sleep with his grandmother just a few hours earlier.
Within this scene of struggle and an apparent attempt to conceal some of the carnage, there was one bloody handprint on a closet door.
Arns couldn’t say whose hand it was, although one thing was certain. The blood was that of two people mingled together: Nathan O’Brien and his grandmother Kathy Liknes.