National Post (National Edition)
A stolen jacket, a wanted killer & the TOP POLITICIAN who tipped off the police
NEWFOUNDLAND PREMIER HELPED IDENTIFY MURDER SUSPECT
Just a few weeks before winning the election that would make him premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Dwight Ball looked at a photo released by police of a murder suspect and saw a startling detail.
The suspect appeared to be wearing a black windbreaker that Ball had once owned, until it was taken by a man his daughter was dating.
Ball was then leader of the Official Opposition and preparing for the biggest political moment of his life.
Newly unsealed court files — files that Ball has been fighting to keep secret — show the future premier went to the police and within days Brandon Phillips was arrested. Earlier this month, Phillips, 29, was convicted of second-degree murder and will be sentenced in February.
It’s the latest in an extraordinary chain of events that has seen a sitting premier trying to block the public from learning what he told police about a homicide investigation in the run-up to the 2015 provincial election.
It all centres around a St. John’s hotel bar robbery gone wrong, when a 63-year-old man who tried to intervene was shot in the groin and died of blood loss.
Police were tipped off that the shooter might be Phillips when Ball contacted them on Oct. 8, 2015, five days after the shooting and just weeks before the Nov. 30 election.
Ball’s role in the investigation is outlined in search warrant documents that were shielded from publication until a court released them on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, after Ball learned the local CBC station had gained access to the documents and was preparing to publish, he asked the court to order a publication ban. The documents had already been kept under seal while the trial took place, and on Dec. 4 a judge granted an interim injunction for a publication ban until a full hearing could be held.
Tuesday’s decision unsealed a portion of the documents, and a decision on the rest will be made on Feb. 12.
Ball’s lawyers say he is trying to block public access for the sake of his daughter Jade, who had been dating Phillips intermittently for years when the robbery took place.
“My daughter is an innocent person in all of this,” Ball told The Canadian Press. “When I made the decision ... to go forward with this information it’s because I felt it was the right thing to do as a citizen, as a resident in this province. I would do the same thing again.”
Ball told investigators on Oct. 8, 2015, that his daughter, then 29, had known Phillips for four or five years, and that they moved in together soon after meeting.
“Mr. Ball said at that point Jade and Brandon had a very serious drug problem” — particularly opiates, says the document, an Information to Obtain a search warrant. “Mr. Ball paid all outstanding bills they (Jade and Brandon) had. Mr. Ball’s concern was to make them safe.”
Neither Ball nor his daughter was called as a witness during Phillips’s trial. Jade Ball has not been charged with a crime.
During the trial, the court heard that Ball’s apartment and one of his cars had been under police surveillance shortly after the murder, as investigators tracked the movements of Phillips and Ball’s daughter for days before arresting Phillips.
But the unsealed documents show just how turbulent Ball’s life was in the lead-up to the shooting — a time when he was the leader of Liberals and gearing up for a provincial election campaign.
A drug dealer had started harassing Ball and his daughter over massive debts owed by Phillips, and had even slashed the tires on Ball’s car. Jade Ball had also spoken to the police over the escalating threats.
“Ms. Ball states since the harassment has started, the persons responsible have now been harassing her father for the money, and at one point, bought a car using her father’s stolen credit card number,” according to the documents.
The botched robbery occurred at the Captain’s Quarters Hotel in downtown St. John’s shortly before midnight on Oct. 3, 2015.
Larry Wellman, a former firefighter, had been sitting in the bar at a video lottery terminal when a masked robber burst in with a shotgun. Despite efforts by his wife to stop him, Wellman confronted the robber and attempted to knock him down with a wooden table.
The robber shot Wellman in the groin and fled. An ambulance rushed Wellman to the hospital, but he was bleeding profusely and was soon dead.
Police used the information provided by Ball as part of their search warrant application for the home of Phillips’s mother, where they found the murder weapon, a sawed-off Winchester 12-gauge shotgun.
A toque with eyeholes cut out that had been dropped near the hotel had also been recovered. It had gunshot residue on it and DNA that was found to be a match with Phillips.
On Dec. 8, just days after Ball entered his third year in office as premier, Phillips was convicted by the 12-person jury.