Three people murdered — for nothing

As the world will never know how Douglas Garland killed a fiveyear-old boy and his grandparents, so it also will never know why it was that the jurors at his trial took as long as they did to convict him.

The former is information only Garland knows, the latter by law is sacrosanct and must never leave the confines of the jury room.

After about 8.5 hours of deliberation spread over two days, jurors returned Thursday to pronounce Garland guilty of three counts of firstdegree murder.

The 57-year-old, despite an overwhelming case against him and in the absence of any viable defence, had pleaded not guilty in June 2014 to the disappearances of Alvin and Kathy Liknes and their grandson Nathan O’Brien, who was staying with them overnight.

The three were last seen alive at the Likneses’ Calgary home on the evening of June 29.

But though their bodies were never found, what prosecutors called “their footprints of life” — credit card use, phone calls and the like — abruptly stopped hours later.

And enormous amounts of forensic evidence — including the DNA of all three found in such grim and unlikely places as a meat saw and meat hooks on the acreage near Airdrie, Alta., where Garland then lived with his elderly parents — showed they had all been there.

While Garland and Alvin Liknes had a business relationship that soured in 2007, and Kathy Liknes had also occasionally been to the farm during that period, Nathan wasn’t even born when the two men had their falling-out. He had never been to the farm, yet his DNA was found, along with his grandpa’s, on the meat saw.

After being incinerated in a “burn barrel,” all that was left of three human beings was biological material, as the lawyers called it, and several tiny pieces of teeth.

Garland believed he’d been robbed of credit on a patent and short-changed for his work on a pump — his sister Patti and his parents Doreen and Archie testified to his enduring bitterness. It was a petty dispute that, as prosecutor Vicki Faulkner once said, never brought anyone money or fame.

Yet, as prosecutor Shane Parker argued in his closing argument, Garland felt “dominated and wronged” and nourished the grudge against Alvin over the years.

By December 2013, his Internet searches showed, Garland’s resentment broadened to include Kathy at about the same time he was developing an unholy interest in bondage and torture.

If Nathan couldn’t have been part of Garland’s larger plan — it was an impromptu sleepover, with the little boy begging to stay at his grandparents’ place because the Likneses had sold the house and were moving to the Edmonton area — jurors nonetheless found Garland had had time enough to make a deliberate decision to kill Nathan too.

At the first bloodied scene, the Liknes’s house, Garland was as Parker once put it, “mistake-free.” Not a trace of him, no DNA or hair or fibre, was ever found in the house.

But as the jurors learned, Garland had in his storehouse of disturbing supplies the protective “bunny suits” forensic police officers wear to prevent contamination, and he was known, both within his family and via his web searches on police techniques, as a compulsive and meticulous researcher and planner.

He emerged as the key suspect only after surveillance video in the Likneses’ neighbourhood showed a green Ford pickup creeping through the area in the early hours of June 30. Police released pictures of the truck, and Garland’s sister Patti told police she thought it was his.

At the 40-acre farm, Garland was either uncharacteristically careless or, more likely, ran out of time.

While he was able to burn the three bodies and much of the evidence, proof that the grandparents and the little boy they loved was everywhere — Kathy’s DNA on a meat hook and a corner of the truck’s license plate, and the DNA of all three, and Garland’s too, in a pair of his rubber boots.

The one-time medical student was also unlucky. A survey aircraft just happened to be over the farm on July 1 and July 2 that year.

Photographs from the first day showed two unmistakably recognizable adults lying on their stomachs, naked but for the adult diapers that had become part of his fantasy for “bound and diapered” adult women. Beside them, curled up, the image less clear, was a smaller figure Parker and Faulkner told the jurors was Nathan.

But the bodies were gone in photos from the following day.

Outside court Thursday, Parker was sombre as he remembered the little boy who never had a chance to grow up (“Who knows what Nathan would have grown up to be?”) and his grandparents, on the brink of retirement.

Jennifer O’Brien, the Liknes’ daughter and Nathan’s mother, and her husband Rod have suffered “the loss of three critical people in their family,” he said.

Garland will be sentenced Friday.

Though the sentence for first-degree murder is automatic — life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years — Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Judge David Gates will have to decide if Garland should serve the sentences concurrently, as is the norm, or consecutively, as a 2011 amendment to the Criminal Code allows.

As Shane Parker told the jurors in closing arguments, “There was never a ransom note. This was not for profit. It was spite.”

It was for nothing.