Wise will plead not guilty to murder
Retired mechanic Jimmy Wise has served notice that he will contest the murder charge laid against him after a years-long cold case investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police.
Wise’s defence lawyer, Ian Carter, told reporters Friday that the 75-year-old, who has been in conflict with the OPP for most of his adult life, will plead not guilty.
It means Wise’s epic legal odyssey — he once sued the OPP for defamation after being publicly identified as a serial murder suspect — will continue for years to come.
“I can’t say anything about his state of mind at this stage other than the fact that the instructions I have are that he’ll be pleading not guilty to this charge,” Carter said outside the Cornwall courthouse where Wise made his first appearance on a murder charge Friday.
A dishevelled Wise was pushed into the courtroom in a wheelchair, his uncombed salt-andpepper hair standing on end.
Wearing a green sweater and blue plants, he told Justice of the Peace Ginette Forgues in a frail voice that he wanted his case conducted in English.
Wise was remanded in custody and ordered not to communicate with 31 people connected to the case.
He will appear in court again Monday by video link from the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre.
Carter asked that his client be kept in the jail’s infirmary while a potential bail plan is constructed. Wise suffered a stroke several years ago and was living in a Winchester nursing home until his arrest Thursday by OPP detectives. He requires a number of medications and has difficulty walking without assistance.
Outside court, Carter said he’s received a summary of the allegations against his client, and expects more details of the Crown’s case next week. Carter said he will also have to consider whether Wise can receive a fair trial in Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry given his notoriety.
“Given the history and the media coverage, and issues of reputation, that will certainly be one issue that we’re looking at,” he said. “Whether that necessitates a change of venue application is something we’ll consider.”
Wise has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of Raymond Collison, 59, whose decomposed remains were found in a Morewood drainage ditch in April 2014.
Collison had been reported missing in September 2009, three weeks after he was last seen getting on his bicycle outside the McCloskey Hotel in Chesterville.
OPP investigators have never revealed Collison’s cause of death, but their findings triggered a detailed re-examination of the county ’s large archive of cold cases, some of which date to the 1980s.
In 1987, Wise became known publicly as a serial murder suspect — an allegation he has repeatedly denied.
The province’s solicitor general apologized to Wise for having his name made public as a murder suspect. Wise later sued the OPP for defamation and civil rights abuses, and agreed to an out-of-court settlement in 2002.
After that settlement, Wise largely disappeared from headlines until last year, when this newspaper published a four-part series that revealed he was again under a police microscope as part of a large OPP cold case investigation.
As part of that investigation, the OPP produced a crime map that plotted five unsolved murders clustered around the small town of Morewood, along with more than 50 unsolved arsons and suspicious fires.
The map was based, in part, on the strong similarities that the February 2007 murder of Randy Rankin bore to three other unsolved homicides. Rankin, 46, a children’s clown who dabbled in harness racing, was shot in the head as he sat at his basement computer at 5 a.m.
His murder bore some of the same hallmarks as the November 1983 shooting of Harold Davidson, who was killed as he sat at the kitchen table of his remote farmhouse, near Brinston. Similarly, in May 1987, a single shot was fired through the window of an Avonmore farmhouse, killing Wallace Johnston, a 48-year-old dairy farmer, as he ate his supper. Months later, in July 1987, John King, 59, a reclusive bachelor, was shot in the head before his Morewood home was burned to the ground.