ADAM PICARD TRIAL TIMELINE
2011 — 2012: Adam Picard moves to Ottawa from Thunder Bay. The former soldier applies to be an Ottawa police officer and enrols in school to be a chef. He meanwhile establishes a drug-running network, shipping marijuana to his hometown connections, who mail back cash stashed in magazines.
January 2012: Picard is looking for a bigger and better supply and is introduced to Fouad Nayel through his cousin Pat Picard, Nayel’s construction co-worker and close friend.
May 2012: One of Picard’s deals goes dry and he opens an envelope with six $20 bills. He was expecting $17,000. He texts one contact: “There goes our summer.” Prosecutors say the loss sets in motion his plan to murder and rob Nayel.
Mid-June 2012: Nayel tells friends he is about to close a lucrative dope deal with a military man and asks friends to go with him on a drive to Petawawa that Sunday. It’s Father’s Day, though, and no one is available. Picard, meanwhile, walks into Action Sports and pays cash for a Mossberg 500 pumpaction shotgun, and test-fires a few rounds in marshland off Beaton Road near his Orléans home.
June 17, 2012: Picard drives Nayel to Calabogie to a remote hunt camp, a location that, according to the Crown, Picard had scouted out previously. Nayel is carrying $30,000 worth of weed, Picard is armed with a shotgun. There are no witnesses to Nayel’s murder, as Picard shoots him twice and leaves his body in a shallow grave.
June 26, 2012: Police first interview Picard in connection with Nayel’s disappearance, which at the time was being treated as a missing-person case. Picard signs a document allowing police to seize and search his cellphone data. He then goes to his brother’s house, where he and Darcy Picard do a Google search for “cell tower dump.” Darcy Picard pleads with his brother not to return to Brydges Road.
June 27, 2012: Adam Picard returns to Brydges Road with a shovel, pickaxe and cement, and moves Nayel’s remains from the site to another remote wooded area off Norton Road, where a human femur is later discovered by a hunter.
August, 2012: Police seize Picard’s phone. He would later claim this is the time frame when the two mystery men who actually killed Nayel called his house and threatened him. Investigators would later testify they found no trace of those calls in his extensive phone records.
Nov. 11, 2012: A hunter finds human remains off Norton Road, where police descend with search teams and K-9 units, eventually turning up Nayel’s remains, which are partially encased in cement. The rest, presumably, has been carried off by wild animals. Just over a month later, police are led to the crime scene on Brydges Road, but with winter arriving, the search is suspended until the spring. When investigators return in April, they find two possible grave sites.
Dec. 12, 2012: Adam Picard is arrested and charged with first-degree murder. His brother Darcy Picard and Darcy’s common-law wife, Jamie Taniwa, are arrested the same day as accessories after the fact. Taniwa would later complain she was left in a jail cell — cold, barefoot and hungry — for hours after her initial interview. She initially tells police Adam Picard had been at their house all day on the day of the killing, but later testifies Picard told her to lie to police. She eventually cuts a deal and tells police everything she knows, and both she and Darcy Picard are released.
April 2013: Police receive an anonymous letter claiming to be written by the ex-girlfriend of Nayel’s real killers. The letter offers a description of the killers, but no names, and claims police have arrested the wrong man. Prosecutors believe Picard either authored or dictated the anonymous typewritten letter after gleaning details of the investigation from early bail hearings. He hears, for instance, that someone had spotted a blue Audi in the vicinity of the crime scene. Investigators later learn the vehicle has nothing to do with the crime, but the identical vehicle description appears in the anonymous letter as the car driven by the killers.
2014: The case proceeds with preliminary hearings, which are marked by some courtroom drama as emotions run high among all parties.
May 2016: Picard writes a letter by hand from jail and sends it to the attention of lead investigator Det. Sean Gordon of the Ottawa police major crime unit. “You guys have it all wrong,” he writes as he lays out his entire story, with some details that mirror those in the anonymous letter police received three years earlier. Picard claims he is a witness to Nayel’s murder, not the killer. He provides a description of the mystery killers and promises “information” that will lead police to the killers. Prosecutors say the information was actually an attempt to distract and deceive police, and their information leads them straight back to Picard.
Nov. 17, 2016: In a surprise move on the eve of Picard’s first-degree murder trial, his then-defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon successfully argues his client’s Charter rights have been violated by unreasonable trial delay. A July 2016 Supreme Court of Canada ruling placed time limits on court delay, setting a ceiling of 18 months for provincial court cases or 30 months in Superior Court. Picard’s murder charge is stayed and he is released, a free man. The Crown files an immediate appeal as the ruling becomes the first major test of the Supreme Court’s so-called Jordan decision. Picard maintains his innocence as he speaks with reporters outside court.
June 2017: The appeal is heard, and by September, the first-degree murder charge against Picard, who had walked free eight months earlier, is reinstated. Ontario’s highest court rules Picard must stand trial.
“First-degree murder is the most serious offence in the Criminal Code. Given the serious nature of the alleged crime, there is a heightened societal interest in a trial on the merits,” Justice Paul Rouleau rules in writing for the three-member appeal panel.
Sept. 3, 2018: Now represented by the defence team of Michael Crystal and Rosellen Sullivan, Picard’s long-awaited trial begins with jury selection. The first evidence ever publicly aired in court comes the following day as the Crown lays out its entire case. Originally set for six weeks, the trial takes almost as many twists and turns as the case did in winding its way through the legal system before finally landing in Courtroom 36. Ontario Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips presides over the case, with Crown attorneys Dallas Mack and Louise Tansey prosecuting.
September 2018: “It’s a murder trial. Everything’s contentious,” Crystal exclaims in court in a rather accurate foreshadowing of proceedings to come. The jury is on several occasions led out of the room as Crystal raises numerous objections, and several motions are raised, including one for a third-party suspect application, a defence suggestion that there may be other unindicted suspects. The Crown counters by saying there is “no evidentiary basis” for the application.
October 2018: Darcy Picard takes the witness stand but claims he has suffered memory loss, and can’t even recall simple details like the fact he cut a deal with police in exchange for the truth. “I must have because they let me go home that night,” he muses. The Crown elects to instead play for the jury his entire testimony from a 2014 preliminary hearing, when his memory was intact and he testified under oath about what he knew about the killing. Darcy Picard sits silently on the witness stand for four days as he listens to his prior testimony, describing the blood he saw his brother washing from his legs on the day of the murder. Crystal declines to crossexamine either Darcy Picard or his common-law wife Taniwa, calling their testimony “a toxic heap of unreliability.”
Adam Picard then takes the stand and quarrels with prosecutors as they pick apart his story about the two mystery killers.
The defence makes its closing arguments, suggesting investigators had “tunnel vision” when they zeroed in on Picard as their prime suspect.
Mack counters with the Crown’s closing argument, laying out exactly why investigators believed they had their man.
The jury begins deliberations around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, and returns a little more than 24 hours later with a verdict: Adam Picard is found guilty of first-degree murder.