Man guilty in murder of Ottawa tax judge
Wife, neighbour also found dead at gruesome scene
• A man with a bitter hatred of the tax system has been convicted in the brutal killings of a retired tax judge, his wife and their neighbour, in one of Ottawa’s most high-profile slayings.
Ian Bush has been found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in the slayings of Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde, and their neighbour, Marie- Claire Beniskos.
The verdict was delivered Wednesday in an Ottawa courtroom.
In 2007, the three were beaten and suffocated to death with plastic bags in the Garons’ upscale condo.
The 77-year-old former judge, his 73-year-old wife and Beniskos, 78, were found in a pool of blood on the living-room floor the day after the killings by a worried relative. Alban Garon also had a noose around his neck.
After linking Bush to the killings in 2015, police searched his home and seized a toolkit for murder, which included duct tape, rubber gloves, a sawed-off rifle, ammunition and plastic bags.
Ottawa police also found a handwritten journal, anchored in the ramblings of a man who wrote that tax collectors were the “lowest form of humanity” and likened them to extortionists.
During the trial, the jury — 11 men and one woman — heard that Ottawa police found DNA evidence at the crime scene that they matched to Bush years later.
Police also found a hair in the Garons’ home that Bush later admitted was his.
Notebooks and a novel that were seized by police after Bush’s arrest show that Bush tried to rewrite reality in an effort to transform himself from a “brutal thug” into some kind of a hero, Cavanagh said during trial.
“What the evidence really tells you is Mr. Bush, out of anger and greed and bottomless self-pity ... decided he had the right to kill and try to take back money,” said Cavanagh.
Cavanagh argued that the accused killer was “sinking in a rising flood of failure and humiliation.” He owed his mother $60,000, having been forced to “borrow and beg money from his own mother” to pay the government, Cavanagh said.
His was angry at Revenue Canada for holding back money when he decided to “lash out at those he held responsible.”
Cavanagh said that’s when Bush plotted the murder of Alban Garon and his wife. Garon had been identified as the “focal point” for his anger six years earlier in a bizarre fax that Bush had used to try to summon the senior tax court judge to his home.