Garland trial hears grim blood evidence
‘Big guns’ come out at trial over murder of family
Ain Calgary s Toronto prosecutor Robin Flumerfelt once told a jury in a murder trial replete with unsavoury witnesses whose collective credibility defence lawyers giddily had driven a truck through, “but DNA doesn’t lie.”
“You can’t challenge its memory. Or question its credibility. It isn’t biased. It doesn’t play favourites.
“All it does … is point away from the innocent, and at the guilty, with equal and total indifference.”
And so it goes at the trial of Douglas Garland, who is pleading not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the June 2014 disappearance of Kathy and Alvin Liknes and their five- year- old grandson Nathan O’Brien.
Prosecutors allege that Garland violently removed the three from the Likneses’ Calgary home, drove them to the acreage near Airdrie north of the city where he then lived with his elderly parents, and killed them there, burning their bodies.
As prosecutors wind down their case — they are expected to close at week’s end — they saved the big guns for the last.
In rapid succession this week, Court of Queen’s Bench Judge David Gates and the jurors have heard from the president of an aerial surveying company whose air- craft happened to be in the air over Airdrie the day after the alleged murders and accidentally captured shocking photographs of what appear to be human bodies in the grass at the Garland acreage, a Calgary Police officer who almost burned out his eyes watching grainy surveillance video until he managed to track what is alleged to have been Garland’s truck ferrying its ghastly cargo away from the Likneses’ house, and a DNA scientist who identified the genetic blueprints of the grandparents and Nathan all over the 40-acre farm.
Wednesday, as part of the prosecution’s powerful finish, came Calgary Police Acting Sergeant Jodi Arns, a bloodstain pattern analyst.
As has been the case with all the last witnesses, defence lawyers Kim Ross and Jim Lutz conceded Arns’ expertise and qualifications from the get-go.
While the jurors have seen pictures of the blood-splashed Likneses’ house before, it was nonetheless sobering to have the stains analyzed and interpreted.
Arns even provided a colour chart to help the jurors: where blood stains or spatter returned a DNA profile from Kathy Liknes, they were coloured pink; where they were from Alvin, they were blue; and for the little boy, at the house only because he was having a sleepover at his grandparents’ before they moved away to the Edmonton area, they were coloured green.
Part of Arns’ expertise is that she can interpret, from the size and volume of blood drops, their directionality and the like, what may have led to what those in her field call a “blood-letting” event.
On a second- floor closet, for instance, Arns found a transfer stain with four areas of striation and a few “friction ridges” that indicated to her “it was a hand,” which made the marks.
DNA there came from both Kathy Liknes and Nathan, she said.
And in the front spare bedroom, where the DNA of both the grandmother and the little boy was found in bloodsoaked bedding, Arns concluded “there was at least one impact to the blood source Kathryn” and that she likely “was on the floor at the time of the impact.”
She explained Mrs. Liknes could well have been hit multiple times, because a person doesn’t always bleed at an initial blow.
Most of Alvin Liknes’ blood was found in the master bedroom, where it appears on the evening of June 29, he slept, his wife and Nathan bunking in the spare room.
Alvin was struck — with what Arns couldn’t say, but it was significant — at least once in the bedroom and once again on the landing on the way to the garage, where again his DNA was found in a stain on the wall, its “upwards and outward” trajectory the telltale sign of an “impact” stain.
In the areas between the second- floor bedrooms and the garage, Arns examined all manner of bloodstains on the walls, door frames and stairs, stains she said could have been made by fabric or hair ( these have a wispy curvilinear aspect), stains that appeared to have been wiped with a rag (as if part of an attempted cleanup), and “saturation” stains, where blood dripped and pooled onto absorbent surfaces.
The evidence against the 57- year- old in the prisoner’s box is pooling too.
ALL IT DOES … IS POINT AWAY FROM THE INNOCENT, AND AT THE GUILTY …