Justice for O’Brien-Liknes family
‘Who knows what Nathan would have grown up to be’ — Crown prosecutor
Family of his three victims let out a muted cheer, but Douglas Garland showed little emotion Thursday as a Calgary jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder.
Relatives sat quietly as the jury foreman read in guilty verdicts for the killings and dismemberment of Alvin and Kathy Liknes.
But when the foreman read the final verdict of first-degree murder in the death of their little grandson, Nathan O’Brien, those in the courtroom gallery couldn’t contain themselves.
Their cheers ended an emotional five weeks of courtroom drama where jurors heard grisly details of how Garland researched subjects such as dismembering and disposing of dead bodies.
The three-woman, nine-man Court of Queen’s Bench jury accepted Crown prosecutor Shane Parker’s theory that Garland meticulously plotted the deaths of the Likneses.
Parker suggested Garland held a years long grudge against Alvin Liknes over an oil field pump the grandfather had applied for a patent on in his own name.
Garland had done some work on the pump, which never made any money, a decade ago.
Parker said Garland also became obsessed with Kathy Liknes and decided to kill both husband and wife.
Jurors also agreed with the Crown that Garland incorporated five-year-old Nathan into his deadly plot when he discovered the boy was at the Liknes residence for a sleepover.
The prosecution’s theory was all three victims were taken from the home alive and transported in the back of Garland’s green Ford pickup truck to the Airdrie farm he shared with his parents.
There, they said, he killed them, perhaps after torturing them, before carving up their bodies and destroying them in a burn barrel.
Alvin’s DNA was found on a charred fragment inside the barrel, while Kathy’s DNA was discovered on small pieces of cloth found near the incinerator.
Nathan’s genetic material was also found on the property, including on a large meat saw, which also contained his grandfather’s DNA.
Despite arguments from defence counsel Kim Ross that there was no evidence linking his client to the Likneses’ Parkhill home in southwest Calgary, jurors found he was responsible for their deaths.
In his final submissions Monday, Ross noted there was no DNA of Garland, or any fingerprints, found inside the bloodied 38A Ave. S.W. residence.
But Parker pointed to critical pieces of evidence which could explain why there was no scientific connection between the killer and the crime scene.
He said police found an empty shoebox in Garland’s basement for size 13 Dr. Scholl’s Delta 2 runners.
Police purchased a similar set of sneakers and they match bloody footprints at the Liknes home.
Police also found three Tyvek suits, the kind forensic investigators use to prevent contaminating crime scenes, at the farmhouse, Parker noted.
He said it was likely Garland wore a fourth suit while disabling the victims and destroyed it and the runners in the same manner he disposed of the corpses.
Following the verdicts, Parker said outside court the case was tough for all involved, but particularly for the relatives of the three victims.
“I think for them, you’re not going to get an emotion like great relief,” he said, after speaking to family members, including the boy’s parents, Rod and Jennifer O’Brien.
“I think they’re numb,” he said, of the exhausting process of sitting through a five-week trial after waiting 2 1/2 years for justice.
“They’re still processing, but at the end of the day they’ve lost Kathy, they’ve lost Alvin, they’ve lost Nathan and the court process is working for different reasons than what their grief is going to allow.
“But at the end of the day they still have to deal with the loss of three critical people in their family,” he said.
“This decision doesn’t change that, they still have to grieve.”
Defence lawyers Ross and cocounsel Jim Lutz said the case, for them, was more than just a fiveweek trial.
“Its been a long process, it’s been one of the most complex cases we’ve dealt with,” Ross said.
“It’s a lot more than just the five weeks ... we’ve been dealing with pre-trial applications and preparation, preliminary inquiries, so it’s been a long process.”
Before jurors began deliberations late Wednesday afternoon, they were given final legal instructions by Justice David Gates.
Gates said they could come to four separate verdicts on each victim, either an outright acquittal, or guilty verdicts of manslaughter, second-degree, or first-degree murder.
To acquit Garland they would have had to have had a reasonable doubt the offender unlawfully caused the victims’ deaths, the judge said.
If they found he had illegally killed the trio, but didn’t have the intent required for murder, then manslaughter verdicts would have been appropriate.
If the intent for murder was established, Gates said, jurors would then have to determine if the killings were planned and deliberate, or in the case of Nathan committed in the course of a confinement.
The Court of Queen’s Bench judge detailed the gruesome evidence in the case, from the bloodied scene at the Likneses’ Parkhill home to the often bizarre findings police uncovered on the farm Garland shared with his parents.
Gates said the farm evidence, which included internet searches of ways to kill, torture and dismember bodies, photos of dead and dismembered women, women clad in adult diapers, some bound as well, and restraints, handcuffs and tools for carving up corpses, could be used by jurors to consider murderous intent.
The case is back in court Friday to deal with sentencing issues.
Garland faces an automatic life sentence for each of the three murders, but how long he will have to serve before he is eligible for parole still has to be determined.
Ten of the 12 jurors recommended Gates impose consecutive terms of parole ineligibility while two didn’t offer an opinion.
Gates could order Garland to serve a minimum 75 years before he can apply for full parole — when the triple killer would be 129 years old.
Gates will also hear victim impact statements from family members Friday.