Blatchford,
Thus was a 21st-century murder trial dragged through the obscure genealogical muck of the 1700s and 1800s.
As a bombshell, it was delicious, if also weird.
Gary Miller, one of the lawyers who represent the accused father-killer Dennis Oland, was cross-examining Maureen Adamson, the late Richard (Dick) Oland’s longtime executive assistant.
After duly setting the stage by placing the appropriate documents before her, Miller abruptly thundered: so, he said, “Worthington Brice hooked up with an Oland woman and produced the bastard John Oland?”
Now Miller seems a pleasant and reasonable fellow, but he said this with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for climactic questions such as, “And then you stabbed him through the heart, didn’t you?” or at least, in lesser matters, “And that’s when you stole the sausage and stuffed it in your bag, isn’t it?”
The question wasn’t really meant for Adamson, but rather to portend the importance of the Oland father-and-son shared love of the family tree.
As Miller said a little later, in response to New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench Judge John Walsh’s gentle inquiry about relevance, “The evidence will later show this was of significant interest to my client and his father.”
For the moment, however, the only obvious purpose was to show that father and son deeply bonded over Oland family history, as if to suggest, what? “See, no killer here.”
In any case, thus was a 21st-century murder trial dragged through the obscure genealogical muck of the 1700s and 1800s, indirectly giving Walsh and the jurors another bewildering glimpse into the lives of the very rich.
If these Olands are at all typical, such familial conversations tend to go like this.
“I know,” one may say, “let’s talk about us and from whence we came!” “Oh yes, let’s do!” says another. For the record, though at the trial thus far, most participants have delicately referred to Dick Oland’s “passing” or, as Adamson repeatedly did, spoken about “the incident,” the 69-year-old was, in fact, bludgeoned about the head and neck.
His body, face down in a huge pool of congealed blood on the floor of his uptown Saint John office, was discovered by Adamson on July 7, 2011.
It was by no stretch of any imagination a passing: Dick suffered 40 distinct strikes of sharp and blunt-force trauma, mostly to his head, and defensive wounds on his hands showed he fought for his life.
Dennis Oland, who’d come for a visit the day before to chat about all matters Oland with his dad, is the last known person to have seen Dick alive.
He is pleading not guilty to second-degree murder and is supported in court every day by members of the family.
Dennis might have arrived that infamous day with some of the exciting documents he’d found in his recent genealogical research or on his recent trip to England.
Some of these — one a log of the various Brices, another a learned paper about an 18th-century poet known only as “W.O.,” who was belatedly identified as one William Oland — were found on Dick’s desk, spattered with blood.
Copies are now exhibits at the trial. The tidbit was that in his last will and testament, Worthington Brice (whoever he was) had left some annuities to “my natural or reputed son John Oland of the said city of Bristol” — he is the presumed bastard.
Apparently, this was a source of some amusement to Dick Oland: there are Halifax Olands and Saint John Olands, and the Halifax branch had purportedly traced its roots and made a claim about having descended practically from royalty, Miller told the jurors.
In the latter document, the goody was a selection of the more than 40 rather dreadful poems William Oland had printed under his initials in the Gentlemen’s Magazine.
W.O., who died in 1785, was also a prosperous maltster — in other words, a brewer of beer, just like the Canadian Olands, who founded and still run Moosehead Breweries, the oldest independently owned brewery in the country. He must have been a better maltster than poet.
As the learned paper notes, W.O.’s poems offer “ample testimony to his steadfast piety, moralistic bent and genial disposition.”
Yet he managed to keep an eye on local matters, just as Dick Oland did, with his involvement in various fundraisers and projects.
One poem, sadly not reproduced in the paper, is entitled Epigram on good Houshold (sic) Bread and on good Breakfast-Rolls. Well, who hasn’t been moved to verse, if not song, by the softness of a splendid roll? Two local bakers were then going head to head for the coveted “master of the rolls” title and, living in Bristol, “Oland was well-positioned to watch the unfolding contest between the two bakers.”
At the time of his death, the jurors have heard, Dick had $37 million in investments, the lion’s share of which came from the 2006 sale of his shares in Moosehead to his brother Derek.
Miller asked Adamson if, after that, “Richard Oland was a little looser with the purse strings?” Adamson, ever genteel and discreet, declined to put it like that, but agreed that it was when “he bought his yachts and so forth.”
Dick’s wife Connie, Adamson said, nonetheless continued to send in receipts for household and personal expenses. The executive assistant agreed with Miller that “it wasn’t that he wasn’t generous with Connie,” but rather, as she put it, “he was by nature somebody who wanted to see receipts for everything.”
One of the unreproduced, but named, poems in the paper about W.O. is called Epistle to a Miser. The jurors haven’t heard if Dick Oland ever saw the reference, and, if he did, if he was amused by it, too.