Accused killer ‘a failure and coward,’ Crown says
But defence accuses police of ‘tunnel vision’ in investigation of triple slaying
Ian Bush is a “failure and coward” who attempted to rewrite his own sorry history by tying up and murdering three people, a Crown prosecutor alleged in his closing arguments to a jury Monday.
Bush is on trial on three counts of first-degree murder in the slayings of retired tax court judge Alban Garon and his wife, Raymonde Garon, both 77, and their neighbour Marie-Claire Beniskos, 78. The three seniors were killed in the Garons’ luxury condominium on Riverside Drive on June 29, 2007.
In his closing address to a jury, prosecutor James Cavanagh argued that the accused killer had been “disgraced and humiliated” in front of his family when it was revealed he owed his mother $60,000. Bush was angry at Revenue Canada for holding back money he thought he was owed and decided to “lash out at those he held responsible,” Cavanagh said.
He alleged that’s when Bush plotted the murder of the Garons. Alban 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.
Beniskos died because she happened to walk in on the “horror show” that was being inflicted on her friends and “there could be no witnesses,” Cavanagh argued.
In the struggle, Bush left behind a hair that linked him to the crime, Cavanagh said.
Notebooks and a novel that were seized by police after Bush’s arrest, seven years after the killings, show that Bush tried to rewrite reality in an effort to transform himself from a “brutal thug ” into some kind of a hero, Cavanagh alleged.
“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,” he said.
But Bush’s defence lawyer, Geraldine Castle-Trudel, argued to the jury that police had “tunnel vision” after identifying Bush as a suspect and ignored evidence that could call that conclusion into question.
“A dangerous rush to judgment has been made,” Castle-Trudel said.
In succinct closing submissions that lasted less than an hour, Castle-Trudel asked the jury to question how the hair that Bush readily admits is his might have found its way to the bloody crime scene. Castle-Trudel referred the jury to testimony from an expert explaining how someone’s hair can end up in places the person has never been.
She also questioned the reliability of a mixed sample of blood that contained DNA of a second person. Bush couldn’t be excluded as being a contributor of that partial sample of DNA, court heard. The partial sample also matched a Toronto man who testified he had never even been in Ottawa before 2009, and has since been ruled out as a suspect.
Bush’s rambling journal writings — including one that labelled tax collectors the “lowest form of humanity” — 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,” Castle-Trudel said.
She suggested that a noise that sounded like a cough or an exhale of breath when police first responded could have been made by the real killer. That person could have been hiding on the 10th floor balcony, which was never checked, before climbing over the railing and escaping, she suggested.
But Cavanagh told the jury that Castle-Trudel “cherry-picked her way through” the “overwhelming ” totality of the evidence against Bush. Castle-Trudel’s questioning of certain aspects of the evidence relied on nothing more than the “wildest, wildest speculation,” he argued.
The seasoned prosecutor said there was no “innocent explanation” for how Bush’s hair ended up in the condominium. The only explanation, Cavanagh argued, is that Bush was there and committed the killings.
An expert testified that the most likely way the hair would have come free was during a physical struggle. Cavanagh argued that the blood with a DNA sample in which Bush couldn’t be excluded as a contributor was the unexpected result of Bush’s relying on a bar to repeatedly bludgeon Alban Garon’s head after Garon surprised Bush by fighting back and breaking his restraints.
Cavanagh said he believes 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 condominium on the day of the killings.
Police also seized a bag and tool kit that included duct tape, rubber gloves, a sawed-off rifle, ammunition, and plastic bags with suffocation warnings.