I saw pools of blood and hand MARKS OF BLOOD on the wall in front of me, so I thought something was REALLY WRONG here. Something REALLY BAD has happened here
In 11 hours, her world shifted and went dark.
On June 29, 2014, Jennifer O’Brien and her two youngest boys, Nathan and baby Max, spent a beautiful if poignant day with her parents, Alvin and Kathy Liknes.
The Liknes were retiring, moving to the Edmonton area, and inevitably, some of the casual, talk-every-day, drop-in-whenever closeness they shared with their daughter’s family would diminish.
So they all puttered about the Liknes’ home, which had been sold and where now the couple was selling all the stuff you acquire, as Jennifer put it, in “a house that raised five kids.”
So it was weird and hard, as it is when “everything’s up for sale and your family’s moving,” but it was sweet, too, the way it is when people who love one another squarely face the great constant, change.
Jennifer slipped out about 10:45 p.m.
Maximus was only one, and he was used to sleeping in his crib, pressed up tight against the sides, and he kept bumping up against the headboard of the bed in Jennifer’s old room. He wouldn’t settle, neither of them was going to get any sleep, so she bundled him up and went home, leaving Nathan with her mom, snuggled on the pull-out couch in the basement.
She came back the next morning, about 10 o’clock. She had baby Max on her hip. Her spidey senses were already tingling: Her mum hadn’t called her and when she called her mum’s cell, there was no answer.
The side door was open; she had locked it when she left.
She walked into the mud room, and saw “pools of blood and hand marks in blood on the wall in front of me. I thought something’s really wrong here … something really bad has happened here.”
She went to the basement, where she’d last seen her fiveyear-old and her mum. She went into her parents’ bedroom, and saw more pools of blood. She went into the kitchen and saw blood throughout.
She walked out of the house, Max still on her hip, and called her husband, Rod O’Brien.
She was testifying at the triplemurder trial of Douglas Garland, which began here Monday, and prosecutor Vicki Faulkner asked her, “What did you say to him?”
“I said ‘My family’s been murdered and he’s taken the bodies,’ ” O’Brien replied.
And that, according to prosecutors, is pretty much just what happened, only worse.
Despite a vast search, the bodies of Alvin, Kathy and Nathan were never found.
But, as Faulkner told Court of Queen’s Bench Judge David Gates and jurors, a great deal of evidence — including the DNA of all three — was found at the 40-acre farm near Airdrie, north of Calgary, where Garland lived with his parents.
Faulkner’s overview of the evidence she expects jurors to hear was brief.
As she said off the top, “This trial is about a petty grudge” Garland, now 56, harboured against Alvin Liknes, a grudge that morphed over years into an obsession and ultimately into a meticulous killing plan that grew to include Kathy.
And, Faulkner said, when Garland unexpectedly found Nathan at the house, “he was able to incorporate the taking of his life into his wellresearched plan.”
Garland is pleading not guilty to three counts of firstdegree murder.
Asked three times by the judge if he understood each of the charges, he said yes in a small frail voice. However, when the judge asked how he was pleading, Garland replied firmly as he said “Not guilty” three times.
The murders, Faulkner essentially told the jurors, were for nothing, the grudge about a patent Liknes once filed for a pump that Garland had worked on. It was “a pump that never made any real money,” Faulkner said, “a pump that didn’t make anyone famous.”
Yet Garland made it his obsession, and over the years, it appears to have to melded with or fed into his other interests.
A hard drive found hidden in the rafters of the basement in the Garland house showed he researched “how to kill without emotion,” researched not just the Liknes and their social media but even the particular lock on the side door to their house. His “fascination with autopsies,” particularly female bodies, and “a fascination with restrained and diapered women” was evident.
Faulkner said “he methodically researched not only ways to kill, but weapons to kill with, not only how to perform autopsies, but tools to perform them with, and then you will see those wellresearched tools and those well-researched weapons located on the farm …
“This was not just research,” Faulkner said, “it was research that led to action, research that led the accused to purchase weapons and tools for killing and dismembering.”
She told jurors the DNA of both Liknes and Nathan was found on Garland’s property,
THIS WAS NOT JUST RESEARCH. IT WAS RESEARCH THAT LED TO ACTION.
Alvin’s and Nathan’s “on a saw,” Kathy’s “on meat hooks.”
And in a burn barrel on the farm, bones and a small tooth were discovered; a tiny piece of burnt flesh was in the grass beside the barrel.
For all the careful work by police, Faulkner said, “dumb luck” also played a role — an aerial photography company, hired by the city for mapping purposes, had a plane over the Garland property during that long weekend. Prosecutors say pictures “clearly show the bodies of Alvin Kathryn and Nathan,” Nathan the “small figure curled up on the grass.”
After Jennifer O’Brien called her husband that morning, and then the police, and was interviewed, one of the officers noticed her shoes.
“They were covered in blood and hair, which I think was Nathan’s,” she said softly.
When she left that day, she was barefoot, and bereft.