National Post (National Edition)
THE ABUSE EXCUSE
Nicole Doucet hired a hit man to kill her husband. Were the courts right to drop the case against her?
Nicole Doucet wanted her estranged husband dead. In September 2007, her thoughts turned to murder. Although the couple had been separated for months and lived 80 kilometres apart in rural Nova Scotia, Ms. Doucet would later testify in her trial that she feared Michael Ryan. She would claim that she had no alternative but to have him killed. Her trial judge agreed. Ms. Doucet had put out a contract: $25,000 for Mr. Ryan’s life. She found a local man to do the job, but he just took the cash and demanded more. So in March 2008, Ms. Doucet tried again, making a deal with another tough guy.
They met outside a Tim Hortons doughnut shop in Bridgetown N.S.
“I need the job done,” Ms. Doucet, a schoolteacher, told the hit man. “Need it done this weekend,” she said. “I’ve been waiting long enough.”
He offered to shoot Mike Ryan dead, “nice and neat, clean.” Ms. Doucet agreed and she handed him a $2,000 down payment. The rest of their negotiated $25,000 fee would come later, from a third party, somebody else who was “pissed off,” said Ms. Doucet. “The cash isn’t coming out of my pocket.”
The hit man was curious about the motive. “What was the straw that broke the camel’s back?” he asked.
“Hmm, everything he took,” replied Ms. Doucet. “And destroyed. Attitude. How much do you, how much can you take?”
“Any beatings, like did he beat you or anything? Ever laid a hand on ya?” “No,” said Ms. Doucet. That hit man was an undercover RCMP officer. Their discussions were video-recorded. Ms. Doucet was arrested and charged with counselling to commission a murder, a very serious crime indeed.
A conviction seemed certain. Ms. Doucet signed an agreed statement of facts just before her trial in December 2009, in which she acknowledged her attempts to have her estranged husband killed. But she pleaded not guilty, claiming she had been under duress at the time of the offence.
Not a petty offence. It does not get more serious
She alleged in court that Mike Ryan was an abusive, violent husband. For nearly 15 years he had bullied her, threatened her. She swore that on four separate occasions he had held a pistol to her head. He had also pinned her against walls and had grabbed her by the throat. He threatened to “kill” and “destroy” her, many times.
Ms. Doucet said she feared for herself and for their young daughter. But she kept all of these incidents and concerns to herself, never breathing a word to anyone until her husband began a relationship with another woman six years ago.
Despite conflicting accounts that Ms. Doucet gave to police and others, despite the lack of any photographs, police evidence, or third-party corroboration, and despite evidence that called into question her credibility, Justice David Farrar of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court accepted the story. Furthermore, he came to the remarkable conclusion her actions in contracting murder were entirely justified. “A reasonable person,” the judge decided, “would have acted in the same manner.”
To the astonishment of legal experts, Mike Ryan, the RCMP and the Crown, Ms. Doucet was acquitted.
And this past January, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the trial judge’s decision. Mr. Justice Farrar had erred, the high court found. So had the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, which upheld the acquittal. In fact, Ms. Doucet’s defence of being a victim of duress when counselling murder “was not open to her in law,” the Supreme Court declared, as it is a defence reserved for someone bullied against their will into committing a crime. But then the court did something strange. It ordered a stay of proceedings, which means that even though Ms. Doucet’s defence was ruled completely invalid, she will never be held to account for her crime.
“It would not be fair to subject [Ms. Doucet] to another trial,” the Supreme Court judges ruled. “The abuse she suffered and the protracted nature of these proceedings have taken an enormous toll on her.” Only one judge, Morris Fish, dissented, calling the judicial stay “drastic”; he argued instead that Ms. Doucet should be tried again. But that will not happen.
The decision to stay proceedings under such circumstances is mystifying and should have sounded alarms, says Dalhousie University law professor Archibald Kaiser. The order is “tantamount to an acquittal,” Prof. Kaiser says. But Ms. Doucet’s crime “was not a petty offence. It does not get more serious,” he says. “She was contemplating the execution of another human being.”
Yet, rather than praise RCMP officers for preventing a murder, the courts, the government of Nova Scotia and the media all pointed blame at the Mounties, suggesting police ignored distress calls from Ms. Doucet prior to her crime.
“It seems that the authorities were much quicker to intervene to protect Mr. Ryan than they had been to respond to [Ms. Doucet’s] request for help in dealing with his reign of terror over her,” wrote the Supreme Court justices.
Professor Kaiser calls this very troubling. It suggests that in Nova Scotia, “the justice system is not functioning at all, that it is not able to protect people.”
And the suggestion is largely based on testimony from one prevaricating witness, Nicole Doucet, a woman alleged to have a history with dangerous confrontations.
The RCMP issued a statement denying it had failed to protect her; an internal review found the “multitude of violent incidents” Ms. Doucett claimed she had sought help for “were not reported to the RCMP.”
Nonetheless, Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry called on the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP to review whether Mounties were somehow culpable. The commission is expected to deliver its report to the province next week.
Meanwhile, a National Post investigation has found startling inconsistencies in statements that Ms. Doucet has made to authorities and to media, as recently as this year. It also raises questions about claims of violence and threats that Ms. Doucet made about members of her own family, about an alleged role that her father, Herbert Boudreau, played in the plot to kill Mike Ryan, and about whether the Canadian justice system, faced with a woman pleading spousal abuse, was perhaps too ready to overlook a plot to commit murder.
They met in 1990, at a junior officer leadership course flat surfaces, having my throat squeezed, being told he can do whatever.”
He was always getting into bar fights, she continued. He controlled all of the finances, and would not allow her to buy so much as a dress. “He would have freaked out.”
Yet she never thought about leaving him, and she never complained to anyone about the alleged abuse. “Because I felt sorry for my husband,” she testified. “I married him and I was going to stick by him, just because he has a fault in character wasn’t a legitimate reason to leave him.”
Her defence was presented prior to the Crown’s case; Ms. Doucet was the first witness to testify. Mr. Ryan was eager to give his version of events, to counter Ms. Doucet’s grisly accounts of their marriage, the alleged threats, the years of alleged abuse and his episodes of rage. He waited outside the You didn’t disagree … and if I did I
would suffer the consequences that the Canadian Forces offered members of the military and civilians. Mike Ryan was then a 25-year-old master corporal with the Royal Canadian Regiment, based in London, Ont. Nicole Doucet was a 19-year-old Acadian, one of nine children in her family. She was studying to become a teacher.
Ms. Doucet would not agree to be interviewed for this story. But it seems she does not recall their first encounter with fondness. “He was a bully and he was aggressive towards the other students,” Ms. Doucet testified at her trial. Still, she married him two years later, in April 1992. “Mike wanted to get married,” she told the court.
Whatever Mike wanted, he got. “You didn’t disagree [with him],” Ms. Doucet testified, “and if I did I would suffer the consequences ... Being pinned up against the wall or being pinned up against any courtroom every day of the trial, waiting to be called. He never was. “His testimony was not required,” Crown prosecutor Peter Craig said later, in a terse statement.
Ms. Doucet testified that she had been regularly forced to have intercourse and to engage in oral sex. But she never told that to police investigators, or to a forensic psychiatrist who interviewed her several times after her arrest.
She testified that from 1992 until 1999, she spent relatively little time with Mr. Ryan. He lived a soldier’s itinerant life, moving from one military base to another, in Edmonton, in Trenton, Ont., in Gagetown, N.B. and serving one tour overseas in Bosnia. Ms. Doucet stayed close to her family in Nova Scotia.
Even when Mr. Ryan took up duties at Detachment Aldershot, a Canadian Forces training base near Kentville, N.S., Ms. Doucet remained in Little Brook, almost a twohour drive away.
Their daughter was born in 2000. After her birth, “there was a lot of animosity and hatred towards my family.”
“By whom?” asked her defence lawyer, Joel Pink. “By Mike.” But Nicole Doucet seemed to have had her own problems with family members, no strangers to violent confrontation themselves. Passing reference was made at her trial to difficulties she’d had with Peggy Doucet, her elder sister. According to a RCMP report obtained by the National Post, Peggy and Nicole became estranged in 2001, following a “disagreement over a dirty diaper.”
Five years later, Peggy went to RCMP in Meteghan, N.S., alleging that Nicole had tried to run her over with a car.
According to an RCMP General Occurrence Report, Peggy claimed that she had been “walking along Second Division Road in Concession [N.S.]. Her sister, Nicole, was driving a car on the same road, coming towards Peggy. Nicole suddenly swerved towards Peggy, causing her to move out of the way to avoid being struck by Nicole’s car.”
“She keeps a grudge,” Peggy told police. “She will never in her life talk to me again. She blames me for [her] not having any friends.... I was her target. She just hates me.” Nicole Doucet refused to answer questions from the police and no further action was taken.
Then, a month later, in February 2006, there was another allegedly violent incident involving Nicole Doucet, this time between her and her father, Herbert Boudreau.
At a court hearing, Ms. Doucet made allegations of “physical and mental abuse” against both her father and her sister Peggy. She claimed that her father — whom she described as “a very violent man”— had approached her and demanded money she allegedly owed him.
She alleged that had it not been for her husband being there, the situation would have escalated.
She then alleged that her sister Peggy had choked her in the past. “A few years ago ... approximately five years ago and that’s why we stopped talking, because she grabbed me by the throat over at my parent’s house.”
The hearing ended with the two parties — Ms. Doucet and Mr. Ryan, and Mr. Bou0dreau and Peggy Doucet — agreeing to have no contact with the other. The agreement did not last very long.
“My problems were always with Nicole’s family, and not with her,” says Mr. Ryan, now a Canadian Forces sergeant. “There was always so much conflict in her family. Eventually I just had to get away.”
Mr. Ryan admits that by the time he met Nicole Doucet in 1990, he was into drinking and had “anger management” issues.
“When I was a young soldier and hanging around a military base, it was not a fun thing,” he says. “I was like so many other testosterone-ridden guys who think they’re the strongest in the world. I got into a few bar fights here and there. I had a little bit of a control issue with my temper .... I received a full pardon for all my misdemeanours back in 2000.”
Had he ever put anyone in hospital? “Oh yeah,” he says. “I was a big guy, very fit.”
In 1991, he says, he “started anger management counselling.” He and Nicole married a year later. He denies having ever abused her, emotionally, physically or sexually. He says he never held a gun to her head, as Ms. Doucet alleged at her trial, though he did possess a licensed handgun and other firearms.
Contrary to her testimony in court, he says he was the one who suggested a divorce, not her. That was in late 2006, he says, a few months before he met and became friends with a Canadian Forces corporal named Shannon Huntley.
Their friendship turned into a romance and by summer 2007, they were living together in Kentville, not far from Detachment Aldershot, where they both worked.
Mr. Ryan and Ms. Doucet were living apart and divorce proceedings had commenced by September 2007, when Ms. Doucet says she began to think about having Mr. Ryan murdered.
Email correspondence between the estranged husband and wife, from October and November 2007, was entered as evidence by the Crown at Ms Doucet’s trial.
Exchanges that touched on their separation arrangements were “civil,” Ms. Doucet acknowledged in her testimony. Some even seemed conciliatory.
On October 3, 2007, for example, Ms. Doucet emailed Mr. Ryan “to say that I miss you and I am thinking of you.”
Her emails relating to Mr. Ryan’s relationship with Ms. Huntley, however, revealed anger.
“Seeing those pictures [of Mr. Ryan and Ms. Huntley] I could ripe [sic] your head apart,” Ms. Doucet wrote to Mr. Ryan, later that month.
Mr. Ryan wrote to Ms. Doucet on October 10, 2007, court heard. “Nicole, I would like us to try and put whatever anger we have for each other and deal with this,” reads his email.
“If not for our own sanity, we need to put [our daughter] before us. Everything we do from this point on will impact her. I don’t want to fight ... We should first decide what we want and talk sensibly. Whatever you want to do is fine with me, Please be reasonable.”
A month later, RCMP responded to a “possible domestic dispute” at Ms. Doucet’s home in Little Brook. According to police records of the incident, Ms. Doucet alleged that Mr. Ryan had repeatedly called her at home and on her cell phone, and had threatened to burn down her house.
Police were informed that Mr. Ryan was scheduled to pick up their daughter and some of his belongings from the house that day, but Ms. Doucet then told him not come. He was not at the scene when police arrived and says he was never there.
RCMP officers took the matter seriously. They arrested Mr. Ryan and had him sign an undertaking of no contact with Ms. Doucet and their daughter.
They seized three registered firearms from his home in Kentville. “As per the RCMP policy, this incident is considered a High Risk Domestic Violence file,” reads a prosecutor’s information sheet on the matter. Mr. Ryan was charged with uttering threats.
He says he did not come to the house, and never threatened harm. The charge was eventually withdrawn.
On December 17, 2007, police attended Ms. Doucet’s Little Brook house once again, only this time in response to a violent attack on Mr. Ryan and Ms. Huntley.
Ms. Doucet and her daughter had moved out of the house two weeks earlier; Mr. Ryan and Ms. Huntley had come by to pick up some of his belongings, according to court documents.
Mr. Ryan was loading his truck when Ms. Doucet’s father, Herbert Boudreau, arrived with another of his daughters and a son-in-law.
Mr. Boudreau grabbed a galvanized steel pipe from his own vehicle, came at Mr. Ryan, and struck him on the head, drawing blood. Mr. Boudreau was arrested and charged.
Seven months later, a Nova Scotia Provincial Court judge found him guilty of committing an assault with a weapon.
One month after that incident, the National Post has learned, police became aware of a murder plot. Their suspicions turned to Mr. Boudreau. On January 20, 2008, police obtained a statement from Hubert “Yogi” Thibault with regards to their investigation. No charges were laid at the time, and Mr. Thibault was never charged with any crime. Ms. Doucet would eventually identify Mr. Thibault as the man whom she paid first to kill Mr. Ryan.
Police launched their undercover operation. On March 27, 2008, an RCMP officer posing as a hit man contacted Ms. Doucet by telephone and a meeting was arranged outside the Bridgetown Tim Hortons. They quickly got down to business. Ms. Doucet told the undercover officer that she had already paid “Yogi” Thibault $25,000 to kill her husband, and she discussed how that deal went awry: Mr. Thibault had demanded an additional $25,000 payment and “two pieces of land. So we were talking over a hun- dred thousand,” Ms. Doucet complained.
He asked why she wanted her estranged husband dead. “Is he f---ing around, was he f---ing around on ya, or?
“Oh yes,” Ms. Doucet replied. “But that’s, he’s always done that.”
She handed him a photograph of her husband, along with his address in Kentville, N.S., just up the road. “There is a hot tub in the back yard,” she said. “And he does use it in the evening.”
More information was exchanged during the encounter and in a second rendezvous that evening.
Minutes after the second meeting, Ms. Doucet was arrested for counselling murder. She spent the night in a police cell and spoke to a lawyer. The next day, she was interviewed by RCMP ma- jor crimes investigator Keith Stothart.
Ms. Doucet initially refused to answer his questions. What had led her to commit such a desperate crime? Why had she told the undercover officer that the murder had to be done that weekend? She would not say.
Eventually, she opened up. “I did something that was wrong. I know that. I knew it was wrong to begin with,” she said. “Because I am not safe. My family is not safe. I know who Mike Ryan is.”
She then gave a rambling story about the emotional abuse that she and her daughter had suffered because of Mr. Ryan.
“He told me he was going to destroy that house and he did. He hasn’t ripped off the roof yet, which he said he would, but it’s probably ‘cause it’s a little bit too cold. He will go rip off the roof. Oh
I did something that was wrong. I know that. I knew it was wrong to begin with. Because I am not safe. My family is not safe
yeah, what he says, he means and he does,” she told Sgt. Stothart. “He lives with lies and he remembers them. How in the hell can you remember a lie?” she said. “I don’t even know what is a lie and what is the truth all the time.”
One month later, her father was also charged with counselling the commission of murder, and with conspiracy to commit murder. He was arraigned and a preliminary hearing was held, but his charges were withdrawn in 2010, after Ms. Doucet’s acquittal. “A legal issue precluded the Crown from proceeding on the case against Mr. Boudreau,” Nova Scotia’s Public Prosecution Service told the National Post.
Mike Ryan and Nicole Doucet had one child, their daughter. She was placed in foster care after her mother’s arrest, but soon she was allowed to be with her father, Mike Ryan, with whom she has lived ever since. During an ensuing child custody battle in 2009, a Nova Scotia court ordered a child-needs assessment.
The psychologist who conducted the assessment interviewed Mr. Ryan, Ms. Doucet and their little girl and was concerned about the erratic claims of Ms. Doucet, and the risks she posed to the girl.
“Ms. Doucet has provided inconsistent information about Mr. Ryan (e.g. whether he physically abused her or not) and her reported concerns about him have escalated over time,” the assessment reads.
“There is much, if not more, evidence that Ms. Doucet poses a risk to [their daughter ’s] physical and emotional well-being. This includes information that she may have threatened to take her own and [her daughter’s] life.” The fact that she may have attempted to have her husband murdered would be “considered extreme family violence and would be expected to have a devastating effect on a child.”
Four months later, citing her “enormous stress,” Ms. Doucet withdrew her opposition to Mr. Ryan’s application for full custody. The girl, who turns 13 this year, lives happily with Mr. Ryan and his new wife, Shannon Huntley, in Angus, Ont. She hasn’t heard from her mother in three years, says Mr. Ryan. “Not a phone call, not even a Christmas card or birthday card.”
Through her lawyer in Halifax, Nicole Ryan refused to comment for this story. “Nicole wants to put the matter behind her and [will] not give any further interviews,” Joel Pink explained in an email. “We were not impressed with the lack of investigative reporting of Michael Ryan by some of the major networks and newspapers and they let Mr. Ryan speak without looking into
his background which would have showed his lack of honesty.” He declined to elaborate.
But Ms. Doucet received sympathy from the courts. According to Nova Scotia’s Public Prosecution Service, her trial judge accepted her evidence “without qualification” and made findings that are “palpably wrong.”
And Ms. Doucet has since continued to offer up new, startling claims. In January, after the Supreme Court of Canada make its dubious decision to stay her proceedings, explaining that she had already suffered through Mr. Ryan’s “reign of terror,” Ms. Doucet and Mr. Pink appeared on CBC radio’s The
Current.
Contrary to all of the evidence she gave at her trial, to police, to court-appointed psychiatrists and to her own counsellor, Ms. Doucet began suggesting that Mr. Ryan had, on some occasions, hit her about the face with his fist.
“I would imagine then that you also tried to hide bruises,” host Anna Maria Tremonti put to Ms. Doucet, with her lawyer present. “Yes,” Ms. Doucet replied. “How would you do that?” “With clothing, and makeup. Hitting me with his fist around my face was not a common thing. It was mostly holding me with his hand on my throat,” said Ms. Doucet. “It was more muscle strain than actual bruises. The bruises on my neck, I’d just wear turtlenecks.”
There was more. Mr. Ryan “had knives to my throat,” Ms. Doucet claimed, again for the first time. “He was pretending to stab me, and then he would hold a knife to my throat.
“And he’d laugh. It was a joke to him. But then after a few minutes, you knew it was no longer a joke. That’s what was always happening.”
Her new allegations were left unchallenged.
Michael Ryan’s former wife allegedly tried to have him murdered, but was then acquitted of the crime after she accused him of domestic violence. Ryan is adamant the claim is not true.