Remembering to breathe during a trial such as this
It is not too often a Saskatoon courtroom is as packed as it was for the David Woods murder trial.
There were more people than the city’s biggest courtroom could accommodate. There were family and friends of Dorothy Woods, his wife of 19 years, clubbed and strangled to death in the backyard of the family’s suburban home. There was the mother of the accused and her friends and family. There were police investigators who helped build the circumstantial case against David Woods. There were Crown prosecutors, busy with their own cases, who couldn’t stay away. There was the full contingent of reporters. There were law students and legal tourists who wanted to see in person what they had been reading and hearing about for the last two weeks. Benches from the halls were hauled in for extra seating, and it wasn’t enough.
Some were asking if this was the most crowded courtroom ever in Saskatoon. They were not old enough to remember when people lined up outside the courthouse in February in Saskatchewan for a seat at the Colin Thatcher murder trial. Co-incidentally, Thatcher’s lawyer at the time, Gerald Allbright, now is a Queen’s Bench judge, presiding at the Hales murder trial in another courtroom just down the hall.
In terms of public attention, the Woods trial was the biggest thing in Saskatoon, at least until that professor got frogmarched off campus for disrespecting the administration, only to be reinstated the very next day after the university was denounced by just about everyone on planet Earth. The Woods murder trial, by comparison, unfolded to general acclaim.
The tension in that crowded courtroom with the accused on the stand was terrific. I was just an observer and I had to remind myself occasionally to breathe. By then end of the day, I was spent, like I’d run a marathon. The stress on the actual participants, the lawyers, the judge, the jury, the witnesses, the families, the accused, I can only imagine. That’s why they call it a trial.
Something that makes it a little easier to take is that we don’t have the death penalty. The whole episode is sad and sordid enough without having that hanging over the proceedings. It wouldn’t be fair to jurors or to the judge to ask them to pass judgment when the stakes are that high. They are under enough pressure as it is. How the Americans, otherwise so generous of spirit, could continue to impose the death penalty in 2014 is beyond me.
This case was dramatic enough from the start, when Dorothy Woods went missing in November 2011. She was a middle-aged woman married with two children in school and a reliable daycare business she ran out of the family home in south Saskatoon. She had a network of friends who could not bring themselves to believe she had just dropped everything and abandoned her family, as her husband claimed. Among other things, they put up missing-person posters all over the city. Quite a few of the jurors, when questioned before they were empanelled about pre-trial publicity, said they had not followed the case in the news, but they had seen the posters.
Before there was evidence of a crime, there already was a mystery. Where was she? Concern only escalated in the days that followed. Almost eight weeks had gone by when RCMP issued a news release about a woman’s body found outside the city. Was it Dorothy Woods? The police weren’t saying, but who else could it be?
As it so happened, it was someone else, a young aboriginal woman, Bernadine Quewezance, whose death remains unexplained and still is under investigation. On that day, however, police kept the details ambiguous, deliberately so, apparently. Thus was David Woods led by police to believe his wife’s body might have been found. When he drove south of the city that afternoon into the valley at Lake Blackstrap where he had left the body in a drainage culvert, police tracked him with a GPS device they had hidden on his car. When they got to where he had stopped his vehicle, it took them only 15 minutes to find Dorothy Woods’s frozen remains. Woods was charged soon thereafter.
This was a ploy that Sherlock Holmes might have come up with. The element of ingenious police work made the case even more compelling.
The accused, too, was a mystery. A career potash mine employee, he had no criminal record. No one could contradict his testimony that he had never before raised a hand against his wife. It has been said before of murderers, however, that none of them is typical.
There also was the jarring aspect of terrible violence in a seemingly serene domestic setting. The Woods lived in a nice house on a nice street in a nice neighbourhood. Meanwhile, David Woods was seeing prostitutes and Dorothy Woods was having multiple affairs. When she made up her mind to leave him, he lured her into the back yard, bludgeoned her on the head, tied her up, strangled her, hid her body and told her friends she had run off. Materials used to bind and wrap the body were forensically linked to materials found in the family home’s attached garage, along with Dorothy Woods’ wallet and makeup bag. Why Woods didn’t get rid of the incriminating evidence in the week between the murder and his first arrest when his house was searched, no one can explain, perhaps not even David Woods.