Man convicted in murder of Ottawa tax judge
Neighbour, wife also killed in 2007 attack
• A man with a bitter hatred of the tax system has been convicted in the brutal killings of a retired tax judge, his wife and their neighbour, in one of Ottawa’s most high-profile slayings.
Ian Bush has been found guilty of three counts of firstdegree murder in the slayings of Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde, and their neighbour, Marie- Claire Beniskos.
The verdict was delivered Wednesday in an Ottawa courtroom.
In 2007, the three were beaten and suffocated to death with plastic bags in the Garons’ Riverside Drive condo.
The 77- year- old former judge, his 73- year- old wife and Beniskos, 78, were found in a pool of blood on the living-room floor the day after the killings by a worried relative. Alban Garon had a plastic bag over his head, and a hangman’s noose around his neck.
After l i nking Bush to the killings in 2015, police searched his home and seized a tool kit for murder, which included duct tape, rubber gloves, a sawed-off rifle, ammunition and plastic bags.
Ottawa police also found a handwritten journal, anchored in the ramblings of a man who wrote that tax collectors were the “lowest form of humanity” and likened them to extortionists.
During the trial, the jury — 11 men and one woman — heard that Ottawa police found DNA evidence at the crime scene that they matched to Bush years later.
Police also found a hair in the Garons’ home that Bush later admitted was his.
An expert t estified in court that the most likely way the hair would have come f ree was during a physical struggle. Police also found blood with a DNA sample in which Bush couldn’t be excluded as a contributor — what Crown prosecutor James Cavanagh said was the unexpected result of Bush using a bar to repeatedly bludgeon Alban Garon in the head after the man tried to fight back and broke his restraints.
Cavanagh said he believed the case against Bush was so strong that entire portions of the evidence could be ignored and Bush could still be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
That evidence included video footage of Bush getting off a bus carrying a bag and walking toward the Garons’ building on the day of the killings. Notebooks and a novel that were seized by police after Bush’s arrest show that Bush tried to rewrite reality in an effort to transform himself from a “brutal thug” into some kind of a hero, Cavanagh said during trial.
“What the evidence really tells you is Mr. Bush, out of anger and greed and bottomless self- pity ... decided he had the right to kill and try to take back money,” said Cavanagh.
Cavanagh argued that the accused killer was “sinking in a rising flood of failure and humiliation.” He owed his mother $60,000, having been forced to “borrow and beg money from his own mother” to pay his debt to the government, Cavanagh said.
His children and wife knew he had nothing, and he was angry at Revenue Canada for holding back money he thought he was owed when he decided to “lash out at those he held responsible.”
Cavanagh said that’s when Bush plotted the murder of Alban Garon and his wife. Garon had been identified as the “focal point” for his anger six years earlier in a bizarre fax that Bush had used to try to summon the senior tax court judge to his home. It was, for Bush, a “day of reckoning” with Garon as a figurehead of the tax court.
The Garons’ neighbour, Beniskos, likely heard the sounds of her friends being killed, Cavanagh said. It was enough to draw the 78- yearold, in just her nightshirt, over that morning.
Bush’s defence lawyer, Geraldine Castle-Trudel, tried to argue that police had “tunnel vision” after identifying Bush as a suspect and ignored evidence. During closing statements, she called it a “dangerous rush to judgment.”
Castle-Trudel asked the jury to question how the hair that Bush admits is his might have found its way to the bloody crime scene, pointing to testimony from an expert who explained how someone’s hair can end up in places they’ve never been.
Bush’s rambling journal writings were not unlike what Canadians hear in the House of Commons, in political science classes or spoken by politicians on the election trail, Castle-Trudel argued. There was no mention of Garon in any of his writings, she said.
“Ian Bush is not the first person and certainly won’t be the last who thinks he is paying too much taxes or there is too much red tape in government,” she said.
But what Castle-Trudel dismissed as run-of-the-mill bitterness against the tax man, Cavanagh painted as something sinister, malicious and downright murderous.
And on Wednesday, the jury agreed.