Judge to rule Oct. 17 on admissibility of Mr. Big sting
A Saskatoon Queen’s Bench judge will decide if the confessions Joseph ‘David’ Caissie made during a Mr. Big sting about killing his girlfriend, Carol King, should be admissible evidence at his firstdegree murder trial.
Justice Richard Danyliuk heard arguments on Thursday and reserved his decision on the monthlong voir dire hearing until Oct. 17.
Caissie was the target of an undercover operation in 2016 into the disappearance and death of King, whose body was found near Herschel, Sask., on Aug. 27, 2011.
Police officers posed as members of a fictitious criminal organization trying to recruit Caissie. They told Caissie to be honest about any past criminal behaviour if he wanted to become a trusted employee.
During the five-month investigation, Caissie talked with three different undercover officers about killing King. He initially said he choked her, but when confronted about an undisclosed discrepancy in his story, he said he lied and actually stabbed King to death.
An autopsy report could not determine King ’s cause of death due to decomposition.
The defence argued Caissie gave false confessions because he wanted to please his bosses after they told Caissie they thought he killed his girlfriend and got away with it, which made him an asset.
He thought he would get fired if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, Caissie’s lawyer, Kevin Hill, said.
Crown prosecutor Matthew Miazga argued the confessions were real and Caissie was not coerced or threatened into giving them; in fact, some were made without any police urging at all.
Hill argued the operation preyed on Caissie’s financial instability by paying him for lucrative jobs. Miazga said Caissie wasn’t on social assistance and had the ability to make money elsewhere — even turning down job offers because he liked the “easy money” the organization offered.
Caissie’s story does not match the physical evidence, Hill said. If Caissie was telling the truth about killing King, he would have known where her purse was and that a jug was jammed under the gas pedal of her car — a detail Caissie vehemently denied, Hill pointed out.
Hill said his client, to sound believable, also regurgitated information from media stories, local gossip and the evidence police presented him during an hours-long interview in 2012.
Many details from Caissie’s confessions match with evidence only the killer would know, Miazga said when arguing the sting’s probative value. Caissie said King was wearing a pink shirt; a piece of pink fabric was found on her remains. He took undercover officers to the same abandoned farmyard near Herschel where her body was found and consistently said he left her in the bushes, which a forensic archeologist confirmed.
When Caissie was pulled over for speeding on Aug. 6, 2011 — the day King disappeared — he told the officer he was racing to Saskatchewan because his girlfriend was throwing his stuff away.
Hill said it would be impossible for Caissie to take King from her home, kill her, dump her body, get rid of her car and burn his clothes before driving four hours back to Alberta within the four-to-fivehour window he had in Herschel that day.