‘Somebody had to do it’
22 YEARS AFTER PRISONER WAS FOUND DEAD IN KINGSTON PENITENTIARY, DNA OFFERS CLUES
Everyone on the 1B range at Joyceville Institution was on edge. It was July 24, 1994, and a “strange atmosphere” had come over guards and inmates alike at this medium secure federal penitentiary in Kingston, Ont., Crown prosecutor Janet O’Brien told a jury Monday.
Rumour had it that someone was hurt, so the prison’s “Keeper,” Marg Rose, ordered Corrections Officer William Jackson to take an extra patrol down the ground-floor 1B range. At 6 o’clock that summer evening, Jackson looked into cell nine, and saw its proper occupant, Phong Nien Chau, face down on his bed, covered up to his shoulders in a blue blanket, looking at first glance “almost as if he was asleep.”
He called for the Keeper, and together they discovered that Chau, 40, was already cold to the touch. He had been brutally murdered, beaten about the head and apparently strangled to his last breath by two ligatures: a set of bud style earphones, and his own wooden crucifix on a braided black necklace.
Blood had flowed from his mouth and nose and soaked the sheets underneath his body. His neck was mottled with bruising and ligature marks that were so clear they even showed the Y-joint from where the ear-bud cord splits in two.
In his right hand, he held a watch, and under his right fingernails was the genetic material that the Crown says eventually cracked the case. It belonged to a man, and it matched DNA found on the back of Chau’s blood-soaked green prison scrubs, and on one of the murder weapons, the crucifix necklace.
Brian Riches, 43, spoke Monday only once from the prisoner’s box, to plead “not guilty” as a jury began to hear the case against him. It is an unusual one. Back in 1994, police initially canvassed prisoners, and used DNA analysis, then in its infancy, to exclude two suspects on the range. Eventually, after two years, they simply ran out of investigative strategies.
“Within sufficient evidence to lay a charge, the case went cold,” O’Brien told the jury on the opening day of Riches’ trial for first- degree murder.
Riches was charged only in 2014, 20 years after Chau’s death, and three years after the case was resurrected with an eye to using new technology on the old evidence.
According to the prosecutor, the case against Riches involves DNA analysis, and the jury will hear from scientific experts to explain the Crown’s position that “Brian Riches cannot be excluded as the source of the DNA” on the necklace, scrubs and fingernails.
But it also involves oldfashioned finger- pointing, in the promised testimony of both Riches’ ex- wife and his former best friend and prison “brother.”
No details were given in court about why either Chau or Riches was in Joyceville in the first place, except that both were serving a federal sentence, which are longer than two years. Riches is also known as Brian Spinks.
Court heard that after the investigation was reopened, police interviewed a man called John Taylor, who at the time of the murder was in the cell directly across the hall from Riches, meaning they could talk face to face from just a few feet away. Taylor told police he and Riches were good friends, and called themselves brothers. He said Chau was a quiet man who got a hard time from the other inmates on the range.
Taylor is expected to testify that, on the day of the murder, he was at the pay phone at the end of the hall when he saw Riches, obviously angry, hit Chau in the face, and go with him into Chau’s cell. Soon after, according to the prosecutor, Riches told Taylor, “F-ck him, it’s done.”
Taylor asked him why.
“Somebody had to do it,” Riches said, according to the prosecutor. Taylor then helped Riches devise a ploy to thwart the police who would soon come to investigate, by telling them about two other inmates who supposedly beat Chau.
As prosecutor O’Brien put it, “the plan worked,” and Riches was never an official suspect.
Taylor was paroled in 1998, and had no further dealings with Riches, until the police came calling when the cold case was restarted in 2011. Rather than stick to his old lie, O’Brien said Taylor volunteered his own DNA and said detectives should look at “that weird kid,” meaning his former prison buddy, Riches.
Around the same time, police interviewed Rebecca MacDougal, who was married to Riches for about a year, ending in 2002. She is expected to testify that he told her that he and Taylor were involved in a murder.
Their credibility will obviously be a major question for the jury. Questions from Riches’ lawyer, Michael Mandelcorn, also suggest that a focus of his defence will be the continuity of evidence after such a long time, and the risks of contamination, for example by a coroner who touched Chau’s body without using gloves.
Mandelcorn also asked questions that seemed to support the view that Chau’s room was not the scene of an epic death struggle, given that items were mostly in place, not strewn about or toppled. Chau had a wellappointed room, with a TV, stereo, electric keyboard and guitar. He also had a leg brace, which he used because of the lasting effects of polio. His left leg was noticeably smaller than his right, and one set of bruises on his chest appears to be from the butt of his own cane.
Judge Gary W. Tranmer t old t he j ury t hey must make their decision without “prejudice, sympathy, or fear.” The trial continues.