Horrid crimes play out in court during triple-murder trials
Warning: Disturbing content.
Multiple-murder cases are rare in Alberta.
But in 2017, a macabre hat-trick of sorts played out in southern Alberta courts as three different triple-murder trials took place.
Calgary, Lethbridge and Red Deer each played host to shocking cases involving horrible crimes and the destruction of bodies.
Douglas Garland was the first to face the music, so to speak, as he stood trial beginning Jan. 16, on three charges of first-degree murder in the disappearances and deaths of Alvin and Kathy Liknes and their five-year-old grandson, Nathan O’Brien.
The grandparents and child went missing from the couple’s southwest Calgary home on June 30, 2014.
Nathan’s mom, Jennifer, had left the boy there for a sleepover and when she arrived the next morning to pick him up she found a bloodied scene and her parents and child missing. Forensic testing later determined the blood of all three victims was in the home.
While their bodies were never found, forensic evidence showed the three victims had been taken to Garland’s Airdrie acreage, where they were likely tortured before being killed.
In his final argument before jurors who ultimately convicted Garland on all three charges, Crown prosecutor Shane Parker suggested the killer cut up his victims’ bodies before cremating them in burn barrels on the property he shared with his elderly parents.
Garland was sentenced to life in prison without parole for a minimum 75 years, meaning he’ll be 129 years old, if he lives that long, when he can seek full release.
As disturbing as Garland’s crimes were, they were at least equalled in horrific detail by those committed by Crowsnest Pass resident Derek Saretzky.
On June 28, jurors took just three hours to find Saretzky guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in the slayings of a little girl, her dad and an unrelated senior.
Jurors accepted graphic confessions Saretzky gave to police in the Sept. 14, 2015, deaths of two-yearold Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette, her father Terry Blanchette, 27, and the killing of Hanne Meketech, 69, five days earlier.
He admitted breaking into Meketech’s Coleman home on Sept. 9, 2015, hitting her with a baseball bat and stabbing her for “no real reason.”
RCMP Staff Sgt. Mike McCauley asked Saretzky if Meketech’s killing was a practice run for the slayings of Hailey and her dad five days later.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he told McCauley in a March 2, 2016, interview at the Calgary Remand Centre.
Five nights later Saretzky entered Blanchette’s Blairmore home, killed the dad, drained his blood in an attempt to drink it and then kidnapped the little girl.
He took the toddler to a nearby campsite and strangled her with a shoestring before dismembering her body, drinking her blood, eating part of her heart and burning her remains.
He too was sentenced to life without parole for a minimum 75 years.
Both Saretzky and Garland have appealed their convictions.
The fates of triple-murder suspects Joshua Frank and Jason Klaus remain to be determined.
Justice Eric Macklin will rule in January whether the two men are guilty of three counts of firstdegree murder in the deaths of Klaus’s parents and adult sister.
Macklin heard evidence over several weeks in a Red Deer courtroom that both told undercover cops Klaus paid Frank to kill his family members Dec. 8, 2013, before burning their Castor farmhouse.