Man confessed to killing B.C. girl because he feared losing crime job: lawyer

Fear of losing a job that offered multiple perks and a promising future with a well-connected crime group led a man to falsely confess to murdering a 12-yearold girl in British Columbia in 1978, a defence lawyer said Monday in closing arguments. Patrick Angly told B.C. Supreme Court that Garry Handlen also didn’t want to bring any “heat” on members of the closeknit organization that supported him through his common-law wife’s cancer treatment and accepted him as family. Handlen’s alleged confession came after an undercover officer posing as the head of the fictitious group told him police had a DNA sample linking him to the crime but it could disappear if he provided enough details to pin the blame on a former employee who was dying.

Angly said the boss had already told Handlen he was certain of his involvement in Monica Jack’s death near Merritt. He said there were witnesses and the case would be going to court. “They’re coming for you,” the undercover officer told Handlen in November 2014, about nine months into a so-called Mr. Big sting in Minden, Ont.

“He has to agree with the boss,” Angly said. “He has to say he did it.”

Handlen says in the hiddencamera confession already presented in court and outlined by Angly on Monday that he was in a drunken stupor and remembers picking up a girl, having sex and strangling her.

“I know she was native,” he says.

However, Angly said Handlen didn’t provide any new information, only what he’d already been told by the RCMP during a 40-minute interview about a month after Jack disappeared in May 1978.

“It would be wrong of you to draw inferences from the fact that Mr. Handlen was questioned in 1978,” he told jurors. “That would be wrong and unfair.”