Before a terrible discovery, Tallio’s last day as a free man
FIRST IN A SEVEN-PART SERIES
Around 2 a.m. on Saturday, April 23, 1983, Phillip Tallio was sitting in the kitchen at a house party catching up with a relative he hadn’t seen in years.
According to court documents recently made public, he told the relative how excited he was to learn he was going to have a baby and a family of his own. About seven hours later, Tallio, then 17, was picked up by police for the murder of his 22-monthold relative, Delavina Mack. It was a crime Tallio pleaded guilty to, for which he’s served 34 years and counting in prison, but one he says he did not commit and is now appealing.
Details of Tallio’s last hours as a free man are included in a series of more than three dozen affidavits, totalling hundreds of pages, released after lawyers for Postmedia and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network argued before a B.C. Court of Appeal judge that the information serves Canadians’ right to see the administration of justice through open courts. Because Tallio’s case involves a claim of wrongful conviction, B.C. Court of Appeal judge Elizabeth Bennett said in court, it is of “significant public interest.”
The sworn affidavits, collected by lawyers and students affiliated with the UBC Innocence Project, were filed as part of Tallio’s appeal attempt, an eight-year effort that took a significant step forward on June 30 when Bennett ruled his appeal could proceed despite being more than 30 years past the filing deadline.
Affidavits were sworn by various people, including neighbours in Bella Coola, family members, doctors, scientists, police, lawyers and others. The statements about the fateful night of April 22 and morning of April 23 reveal gaps and discrepancies in the timeline, and the affidavits have not yet been tested in court or admitted as evidence. But they offer a glimpse into the community and families affected by the crime, and provide an indication of what Tallio’s lawyers may try to introduce as evidence in his appeal attempt.
The morning before the murder, Tallio left his uncle Cyril Tallio’s home to go to school, according to the affidavit of a relative, Celestine Vickers. He had been excited about a work program there that had him dressing up for job interviews.
Later that day, Tallio attended a volunteer firefighting drill, then he went roller-skating with his thengirlfriend Theresa Hood, and the couple watched E.T. at the local Moose Hall, according to affidavits by Hood and Phillip Tallio.
After the movie, the couple returned to Cyril’s home where they babysat his children and those of Vickers. Several affidavits describe Tallio as someone who got along well with kids and looked after them.
“He was protective of them,” as his aunt Geraldine Morton put it.
Around 1 a.m., Tallio’s uncle Cyril and aunt Nina came home from a local pub with Vickers, who is Nina’s sister, Vickers said in her affidavit. Tallio then walked Hood to her home at the end of Ong Ten Kai Street, according to his affidavit, “six to eight minutes away by foot, or five minutes if you took the shortcut past Uncle Ray’s House.”
After Tallio dropped Hood off, he returned to his uncle and aunt’s house where a party was underway, according to affidavits. Vickers, who had a medical procedure scheduled for the following day, had been advised not to drink that night, and was sober, she said in her affidavit. Tallio appeared to be sober, too, Vickers said, and the two sat on the freezer that night, talking in the kitchen while the party went on around them.
“Many people were intoxicated at the party,” Tallio said in his affidavit.
Vickers said in her affidavit: “Phillip was so happy because he had just found out that he and his girlfriend Theresa were going to have a baby. He was excited to have a family of his own as he had been in foster homes for a long time.”
Indeed, Tallio had only returned to his hometown of Bella Coola two months earlier, after spending most of the preceding seven years shuttling around the province to different foster homes, according to court documents, and spending a stint in a youth detention centre.
Affidavits of Tallio and Vickers filed in court assert that while the two of them chatted on Cyril’s freezer, a relative named Marion “Lotta” Bolton asked Tallio to check up on her daughter Delavina, who was being watched by her grandparents a few houses away.
Vickers and Tallio stayed up chatting until around 4:30 a.m., by which time various people, including Delavina’s parents and Cyril, were asleep on couches and beds, so Tallio tried to curl up on the end of a couch, according to Vickers’ and Tallio’s affidavits. Unable to sleep in that position, Tallio said, he rose after about an hour and “thought it would be a good time to check on Delavina, as Lotta had asked me to do earlier.”
After Vickers went to sleep around 4:30 a.m., the next memory she included in her affidavit was being shaken awake by her sister Nina, who told her something like: “Phillip just came back from checking up on Delavina and he says that she’s dead.”
Vickers said she could hear crying in the bathroom. Tallio’s affidavit said he was in the bathroom sobbing, and he started vomiting.
Between two and three hours later, according to court documents, two RCMP constables picked up Tallio at Cyril’s house, placed him in the back of a police car, and drove him to the local police detachment.
What Tallio said to the police at the station over the next 10 hours — and under what conditions — would later become a point of contention in court.