Vader gets life for ‘banal’ crime: killing two seniors

He was broke, desperate and, as ever, wanted what he wanted; they were available. Thus did an Alberta judge sum up what he called the “incomplete but unpleasant picture” of the fatal encounter between Travis Vader and Lyle and Marie McCann, an elderly couple on their way to holiday in British Columbia, heading west on Highway 16.

The bodies of the McCanns, respectively 78 and 77, have never been found, but Court of Queen’s Bench Judge Denny Thomas concluded they likely met Vader in an isolated rest stop off the highway, perhaps after he waved them down.

There, Thomas found, they were killed, “on the open road, a major Canadian highway with thousands of innocent travellers using it every day … the randomness of these homicides is terrifying for all Canadians.”

He sentenced the 44-year-old Vader to life in prison, with no chance of parole for seven years.

It was last fall that Thomas convicted Vader of two counts of manslaughter in the couple’s deaths.

That decision followed the judge first convicting Vader of second-degree murder by mistakenly relying on an outdated “ghost section” of the Criminal Code that, like other such sections long ago deemed unconstitutional, are still nonetheless faithfully reprinted in each new edition of the code.

Thomas’s decision Wednesday in Edmonton was lengthy and carefully crafted.

He declined to sentence Vader consecutively, though he killed two people, because there were gaps in the narrative and prosecutors couldn’t prove the killings had been sequential, that he had killed first one of the couple and then the other, a vision that haunted McCann family members.

Thomas even gave Vader a three-for-one credit for some of the time he spent in pretrial custody because conditions at the remand centre were onerous.

But Thomas was scathing in his assessment of Vader’s relentlessly self-involved character, his chronic lying and his ability to manipulate peers, including witnesses who testified at his trial, by intimidation.

As the judge put it once, “What mattered was they (the McCanns) had something he wanted, and that they were in his way.”

Prosecutors had called the case one of “stark horror,” the judge said, but “What instead I find is the striking feature of this crime is the banality of the offence.

“Mr. Vader had needs. He selected victims on the basis of those needs. He did not care who they were.

“What mattered was they were available, and appeared to have what he wanted.”

It was an horrific end for a couple who were married in 1952 and were at the centre of a loving and large family.

Defence lawyers had argued the deaths could have occurred almost accidentally, after a low-level bout of “fisticuffs,” and asked that Vader be deemed to have served enough time and released. But the judge rejected that.

He also concluded that “Mr. Vader represents something encountered more often in fiction than in real life — an intelligent criminal” who was acutely aware of his rights as an accused person and who sought from the moment of his arrest in 2010 to “tailor his story” to the evidence police had against him.

Even when his claims — that, for instance, he’d been subjected to a lengthy and humiliating strip search — were manifestly untrue, as demonstrated by video that showed the search was in fact brief and relatively private, Vader stuck to his story.

THEY WERE AVAILABLE, AND APPEARED TO HAVE WHAT HE WANTED.

That, said Thomas, is what Vader does, calling his allegations “an exercise in historical revisionism and reinvention.”

Similarly, though at other times he told police and another judge he was a methamphetamine addict, he also claimed he wasn’t.

Thomas found that Vader was, in fact, addicted to meth, but noted that his track record showed he didn’t commit crimes while he was high, but rather that he robbed people in order to get cash or property he could use to buy drugs and get high.

The judge concluded that at the time the McCanns fell off the radar, Vader was unusually desperate — broke, out of food — and that this was what drove him.

In other words, Thomas said, Vader “didn’t choose to rob the McCanns out of any animus to them, personally.” It wasn’t about him and them; it was, as always, only about him.

“He knowingly chose to put himself into a situation where he would likely confront property owners, whoever they were.”

The McCanns, the Smiths, the Joneses: Travis Vader simply didn’t care.

As the judge predicted, Vader stuck to his guns even Wednesday, protesting his innocence.

His lawyers already have said they will appeal.