TRIAL’S LESSON: DON’T MESS WITH PSYCHOPATHS
If there must always be a lesson, there’s only one to take out of the just-ended trial of the alleged multiple murderer Douglas Garland and it’s this: Do not inadvertently piss off the quiet psychopaths in your midst.
That’s effectively what prosecutors Shane Parker and Vicki Faulkner say Garland is and what Alvin Liknes did.
The two men had a business relationship, in the rough-and-tumble oil and gas world, that soured in 2007 and left Garland with a grudge he tended for the next seven years like a gardener worrying about a delicate orchid.
This petty grievance — it was over a pump that as Faulkner told jurors never made anyone any real money or fame — grew to incorporate Liknes’ wife Kathy, as a quasi sexual object, and was flexible enough to subsume Nathan O’Brien, the five-yearold who just happened to be having an impromptu sleepover at his grandparents’ Calgary home when Garland allegedly decided to exact his vengeance.
These are the three people the 57-year-old man is accused of violently removing from the house in the witchy hours of June 30, 2014, taking them to the acreage in nearby Airdrie where he then lived with his elderly parents, and killing, afterwards allegedly dismembering them and burning their bodies.
As aerial photographs taken by a surveying company later revealed, its sophisticated on-board camera showing two recognizably human bodies on the ground and curled up beside them a smaller figure, the adult Likneses “were diapered” after death, neatly mirroring what a search of Garland’s computer revealed — a disturbing interest “in restrained and diapered women.”
As prosecutor Parker told the jurors in a ferocious closing argument, “You know that the grainy, pixelated images are of Kathy, Alvin and Nathan.
“It is only debatable whether Kathy and Alvin were decapitated” in the photos taken on July 1 — and indeed, the figures appear to be headless.
Wednesday, the jurors received their instructions on the law from Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Judge David Gates and retired to begin deliberations.
They never heard either of the lengthy statements Garland gave Calgary Police; in the first, he was questioned for almost 24 hours by detectives Ken Carriere and Trish Allen.
With the clock running out before Garland either had to be charged or released — and after emotional pleas from his own elderly mother Doreen and from Jennifer O’Brien, Nathan’s mother and the Likneses’ daughter, had left him unmoved — Allen pressed a map of the farm on him and begged him to just point to “where the boy is.”
The police were convinced — and the evidence of a violent struggle, including a bloody handprint that may have been Nathan’s, supported their belief — that the three were still alive when they were taken from the house.
As are police the planet over most driven by the plight of children, they were desperate to find them, particularly Nathan, before they succumbed to the injuries that clearly had been inflicted upon them.
With the map in his hands, Postmedia has learned, Garland leaned back in his chair and studied it intently for a couple of long minutes.
Then he said, in effect, “I think I’m getting tired” and asked, as though he knew very well the clock was ticking, “What time is it?”
On that occasion, Garland was charged only with identity theft — he had a bank card in the name of Matt Hartley — and arrested.
He was released six days later, re-arrested on July 14 after a nighttime pursuit over rutted rural fields that saw him make a break for the farm and then give himself up.
He was charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
It was during this early period when police wanted so badly to believe the Likneses and Nathan could be saved that Garland abruptly emerged, from a pool of “persons of interest” as near-suspects are called, as their No. 1 target.
Garland’s own sister Patti tipped detectives that the green Ford pickup that surveillance cameras had caught near the Likneses’ house in the creepy-crawly hours of June 30 and released to the public, looked a lot like the one Garland drove.
The other “persons of interest” had been interviewed and mostly cleared when the tip came into Calgary homicide.
Its effect was immediate, “chaotic, like a bomb went off,” as Det. Lee Treit, the lead investigator, testified during pre-trial motions.
He decided they couldn’t wait for the Information to Obtain, as the paperwork to obtain a search warrant is called, and must make a warrantless search of the 40-acre farm.
Under what are called “exigent circumstances,” where lives may be at risk, police notified RCMP at Airdrie with a request their emergency response team go onto the property for a “hostage rescue mission.”
The plan was for the Mounties to either follow Garland when he left the farm, or “traffic-stop” him, and then the search would begin.
Police entered the farm and stayed for less than two hours, looking everywhere for a place a small boy could hide or be hidden.
Treit’s instructions were to search for live people, then get off the property.
But in an outbuilding, amid boxes and equipment all of which looked old, a tactical paramedic with the RCMP spotted a new and out-of-place black gym bag, opened it and looked inside.
He saw a couple of pairs of handcuffs, a dagger, a billy club.
He didn’t touch anything, he later testified, but the mere act of looking in the bag, as well as the actions of another officer who at about the same time seized Garland’s shoes before he’d been placed under arrest the first time, gave defence lawyers Kim Ross and Jim Lutz grounds to challenge the later, lawful search warrant for the farm.
The bag peek and shoe grab, the defence lawyers argued, breached Garland’s Charter rights against unreasonable search and seizure.
Had they succeeded, much of the wealth of evidence — DNA from blood and burned flesh that put the Likneses and Nathan indisputably at the farm and in such unlikely places as a meat cutter and meat hooks — would have been ruled inadmissible.
Judge Gates found those two pieces of evidence were indeed illegally obtained, but that under Section 24.2 of the Charter, their admission wouldn’t bring the administration of justice into disrepute.
That was Doug Garland’s best, arguably his only, defence.
Turns out, on the tongue of one of those shoes taken from Garland on July 4 was Alvin Liknes’ DNA.
And the black bag was what prosecutor Parker later called “a capture kit.” It didn’t contain Garland’s killing tools, he said, rather those he would use to subdue and control.
“His interests,” Parker said, “ran to more than just killing.”
HIS INTERESTS ... RAN TO MORE THAN JUST KILLING.