Killer gets 75-year sentence
‘You have done a terrible thing,’ judge says in sentencing Douglas Garland
CALGARY — Triple murderer Douglas Garland will spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime a judge says was carried out with meticulous planning and precision.
Justice David Gates on Friday imposed a sentence on Garland that prevents the 57-year-old from seeking parole for at least 75 years from the time of his arrest. That means he would have to live to the age of 129 before being eligible.
Gates said Garland’s degree of moral blameworthiness in the deaths of Alvin and Kathy Liknes and their grandson Nathan O’Brien in June 2014 is very high.
“Mr. Garland, you have done a terrible thing. The horror and the terror you visited on these three innocent people extends almost beyond the boundaries of ordinary human comprehension,” Gates told the courtroom.
“It is difficult to conceive a more cunning, cruel and horrific set of circumstances of a assault, abduction, torture and murder. You will have to live with this knowledge for the rest of your life.”
Garland simply said “no” when asked if he wanted to address the court.
Gates said he accepted the Crown’s theory that the Likneses and five-year-old Nathan were still alive after Garland attacked them at the couple’s Calgary home. He then took them in the back of his pickup truck to his farm where he killed and dismembered them and burned their bodies.
“I’m satisfied Alvin and Kathy Liknes were not dead,” the judge said. “I’m also satisfied Nathan was injured but not killed in the bloody struggle in the Liknes residence.”
The Crown had suggested that Garland’s anger built over a dispute about a patent for an oilfield pump he and Alvin Liknes had worked on together. Gates said he agreed that “a petty grudge over many years . . . festered and grew over the passage of time.”
The judge said the usual automatic life sentence with a minimum of 25 years before parole eligibility needed to be increased because of aggravating factors that included Nathan’s young age and Garland not expressing remorse or regret.
A jury on Thursday convicted Garland of three counts of first-degree murder after hearing four weeks of testimony that included descriptions of what the judge called “tools of his gruesome and barbarian acts.”
Family members sat through that testimony and on Friday court heard victim impact statements from five of them.
Jennifer O’Brien, Nathan’s mother and the daughter of Kathy Liknes, said she still fights “the darkness that threatens to take me down.”
“It seems the pain is never-ending, something that I did not ask for resulting in heartache that has not lessened since the murder,” she said.
“I still hurt and ache. Sometimes I am angry. Sometimes I just cry all day.”