Didn’t taint witness, officer testifies

Teen has said he was fed key details of bathtub murder Boy did not describe an ‘accidental death,’ detective says

A Peel homicide investigator never fed crucial key information to the former boyfriend of one of two teenage sisters accused of murdering their mother, a court has heard.

“ It’s his evidence we wanted to hear, not my evidence,” Peel Det. Mark Armstrong told a Brampton court yesterday. “ I didn’t want to taint the witness.” The teen, 18, has testified Armstrong “ painted his memory” by giving him extensive information about the Jan. 18, 2003 murder, and “completely convinced” him that he had various incriminating and disturbing conversations with the girls about their murder plot. He said Armstrong gave him the information before he was placed in an interview room on Jan. 21, 2004 — the same day the girls were arrested for killing their mother — and he suggested the veteran interrogator intimidated him and threatened to also charge him with murder unless he repeated the facts during a videotaped interview. The boyfriend, who has been declared a hostile crown witness, told the court that Armstrong spent anywhere from 50 minutes to two hours giving him details that he had no prior knowledge of. But Armstrong said he only spent about 20 minutes with the teen — the time between leaving the teen’s residence at 7: 29 a. m. and the time their four- hour interview began about 7: 50 a. m.

“Did you provide extensive details about the murder to ( boyfriend) prior to the interview commencing?” crown prosecutor Brian McGuire asked Armstrong.

“ No I didn’t,” Armstrong said.

“ Did you follow him into the bathroom and whisper into his ear, say this, say that, say the other thing,” McGuire asked later, referring to one of the breaks taken during the interview.

“ No, I didn’t,” Armstrong said.

“Did you coerce or intimidate or threaten him in any way that unless he co- operated he would be charged with first- degree murder?” McGuire asked.

“ No I didn’t,” Armstrong said. Co-crown Mike Cantlon told the court it would have been impossible for the teen to be told everything about the case and then repeat it back to the officer in an interview that spanned 100 pages of transcripts. The sisters, now 19 and 18, have pleaded not guilty to first- degree murder in the drowning death of their 44- yearold mother in a murder trial now in its fourth week. They were 16 and 15 at the time they allegedly plotted and murdered their alcoholic mother — a crime legal experts say is the first case of its kind in Canada where such young girls are accused of murdering their mother. The crime went undetected for almost a year until police received information that led to the girls’ arrest on Jan. 21, 2004.

Their identities are protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act, as are the identities of all civilian witnesses and the deceased woman, whose death was initially ruled by a coroner as being accidental due to alcohol consumption. The former boyfriend was charged Aug. 13, 2004 with conspiracy to commit murder and is still to be tried.

Armstrong said Det.- Sgt. Brent Magnus gave him briefing notes about the homicide about 5: 15 a. m. on the morning of the interview as well as a package containing various details about the case.

“ I felt as if I didn’t know as many details as I would have liked,” said Armstrong, who was involved in two other homicide investigations at the time. “The information (in the interview) that I received would have come from ( boyfriend).”

In that interview, played earlier in court, the teen, then 16, admits knowing essential details about the grisly crime, including talking the teens out of killing their mother by burning her instead of drowning, and that he played a role in their alibi by having dinner with them and another friend at Jack Astor’s restaurant after the murder. He has also denied giving the girls any Tylenol 3 pills, which the teens are alleged to have used to help knock out their mother before drowning her in their bathtub, even though he admits to providing the pills to the girls during his lengthy police interview. McGuire and Cantlon alleged the teens murdered their mother because she was ruining their lives with her alcoholism and pill consumption and the fact they stood to inherit their share of

a $ 200,000 life insurance policy, which the teens said they

were going to use to buy drugs

and take their friends on a European vacation.

“ He ( boyfriend) was treated

strictly as a witness, not a suspect,” Armstrong told the court, when asked how he viewed him before the interview began. One of the first questions Armstrong asked the teen was what he knew about the death of the woman.

“ It was an open- ended question . . . I asked him about the woman’s death and he told me about a murder,” Armstrong said.

“ He didn’t tell us about an accidental death.” The judge- alone trial continues today before Justice Bruce Duncan.