GUILTY / NOT GUILTY
One killing spree. Two countries. Three victims And two very different verdicts. A Canadian man batting severe mental illness killed two people in Nova Scotia, then crossed the border and soon claimed a third victim in upstate New York. Why was he guilty in America, but not in Canada?
CHAPTER1: ON THE BANK OF THE RIO GRANDE
Texas border guard Ramon Vargas Jr. was on patrol in the valley that forms the state’s southernmost tip on May 15, 2007, when a radio call warned him that a motion sensor had gone off by the river. Someone was near the border.
It was after 9 a.m. and already hot when Vargas steered his car toward the Rio Grande, a winding waterway that separates the U.S. from Mexico. Nearing the river, Vargas spotted a man — young, white, roughly five-foot-nine and 160 pounds, with brown hair and a scruffy beard, carrying a duffel bag on one shoulder and a backpack on the other.
The border guard didn’t know it yet, but the lone stranger had travelled nearly 5,000 kilometres over six days, from Canada’s east coast to the edge of Mexico, and he had been on a killing spree.
Vargas got out of his car and asked the man what he was doing.
“Just walking around,” the man replied, calm and polite.
Vargas asked for identification and the man handed him a Canadian driver’s licence, which said that he was Glen Race, age 26, of Nova Scotia. The border guard looked at the ID, and then back at Race. He asked for a passport. Race said yes, he had one, and dropped his duffel bag to the ground like he was going to retrieve it. But as Race pulled the bag open, Vargas saw the stock of a rifle.
The border guard ordered Race to step back and place his hands on the patrol vehicle. Instead, the fugitive lunged for Vargas’s service weapon, grabbing the gun with his left hand as Vargas held on with his right. In the struggle, Race sank his teeth into the border guard’s thumb and the side of his face. Still, Vargas managed to wrestle him to the ground. “Freeze or I’ll kill you,” Vargas said as he freed the weapon from his attacker’s grip. Lying in the dirt on his stomach, Race obeyed.
As backup arrived, investigators who examined Race’s belongings found the loaded rifle, ammunition, a kitchen knife, camouflage makeup, a balaclava, 370 Mexican pesos and balloons meant to keep bags afloat. They also found a driver’s licence for a Trevor Charles Brewster of Nova Scotia, whose body had been discovered under a wharf in Halifax on May 9, and a credit card in the name of Darcy Manor, who had been shot dead outside a hunting lodge in Clinton County, N.Y., on May 10.
In custody, Race kept his eyes squeezed shut. His body went rigid. He would not respond to questions or commands. Border officials had to coach him into a patrol vehicle. He repeated the phrase “walking in circles,” over and over. Later, in jail, correctional officers noted that he often appeared to be fighting imaginary people in his cell.
Race had been battling serious mental illness since his early 20s. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he had been committed to psychiatric hospitals on at least four occasions in Nova Scotia. His family had tried desperately to get him help, but nothing worked. Race lacked insight into his illness — a hallmark symptom of the disease — and did not accept that he was sick and needed treatment. Psychosis made him believe the world was inhabited by vampires and demons, and that he had been sent by God on a mission to purify the earth.
In Canada, he would be found not criminally responsible in the killings of two Halifax men — including Brewster — after four psychiatric experts concluded that Race’s mental illness made him incapable of appreciating that his actions were morally wrong. Had his crimes been contained to Canada, he would have been sent for treatment to a psychiatric hospital, where the goal would have been to rehabilitate him so that one day, if his mental health improved and he no longer posed a risk to the public, he might be released.
But by the time a Nova Scotia judge delivered his verdict, Race’s fate had already been sealed in a courtroom in upstate New York. Given a life sentence with no chance of parole, Race would find himself at Attica Correctional Facility, one of America’s most notorious prisons. The U.S. district attorney who prosecuted the case told local reporters after the verdict that if he could have sought the death penalty, he would have.
Race’s parents, brother and Halifax lawyer, Joel Pink, have long believed that he did not receive a fair trial in New York, and now the family is fighting to have his case heard again. Pink says that what happened in the U.S. courtroom never would have taken place on this side of the border — a view shared by many legal experts consulted for this story.
“It is my opinion that there was a miscarriage of justice,” Pink says. “I’m disturbed about what happened there.”
Mark and Donna Race, Glen’s parents, along with their younger son, Doug, are planning to mount an appeal that alleges Glen was not adequately represented by his court-appointed lawyer. But Pink says the judge, the prosecution and the defence attorney are all to blame for the unfair trial.
Why was Glen Race guilty in America, but not in Canada? On paper, the laws that govern mentally disordered accused people in this country and in the state of New York are nearly identical pieces of legislation that evolved out of the same precedent-setting1843 British ruling. But the Glen Race story — told in full here for the first time through court records, accounts from his family and an exclusive interview with Race — shows how a person found legally insane on one side of the border can be deemed perfectly culpable on the other.
CHAPTER 2: A BROKEN MIND
When Mark Race saw two men in suits standing on his porch, he figured whatever they had to say couldn’t be good. So as he greeted the strangers, Mark stepped outside and closed the door, leaving his wife, Donna Race, in the kitchen.
It was May 15, 2007, near suppertime. Mark, then 56, and Donna, 57, lived in a small yellow bungalow on a rural road next to an apple orchard in Windsor, N.S., roughly an hour outside of Halifax.
They had moved from the city two years before, hoping a quiet life might help their son, Glen, clear his mind. But the plan hadn’t worked. Glen’s mental health had deteriorated, and now his father feared that the men, who introduced themselves as police detectives, were there to tell him something bad had happened — that his son had been hurt. “What’s going on?” Mark asked. Donna, a small woman, frail in body and increasingly frail in spirit, watched from the kitchen window. She and Mark had been married for nearly three decades, and none of their years together had been as challenging as the last six, during which their first-born son had morphed into someone they didn’t recognize.
Outside, the detectives asked Mark if he had heard about the killings of two Halifax men, Paul Knott and Trevor Brewster. Mark said yes, he had seen it on the news.
When they told him Glen was a suspect, Mark, a serious man whose broad sixfoot-two frame filled the doorway, felt as though he had been drained of all emotion. Stunned, he went inside to tell his wife. The detectives followed.
Though tears came easily to Donna, she kept it together during the police visit. The parents sat at the kitchen table — inwardly devastated, outwardly numb — answering questions as best they could. Later, Donna would run through every decision she had made since Glen became ill, trying to identify what she could have done differently.
Donna, a grocery store cashier, and Mark, a retired power plant supervisor, had started their family in the 1980s in Mount Uniacke, a small community near Halifax where they lived in a home with a backyard that had a tree house and tire swing for their two boys. They later moved to the city, settling in Dartmouth.
Born on March 5, 1981, Glen was intelligent, driven and competitive. Doug, three years younger, was more popular and athletic, but the brothers were close. The boys had chores and paper routes. The family spent summers camping in a hardtop trailer at Kejimkujik National Park, where Glen, goofing around one day in a canoe, famously tipped his brother, father and himself into the lake.
Glen’s mental deterioration began in the fall of 2000, during his second year in Dalhousie University’s engineering program, following a period of heavy drug use and a stint abroad teaching English in Taiwan. His decline is documented in court records and etched in his parents’ memory.
In third year, Glen dropped out of school and moved back in with his mother and father. At home, he locked himself in the basement, cutting off the telephone, lights and television, and consuming only small amounts of food and water, telling Mark and Donna that he needed to cleanse himself. He lost 40 pounds in two months.
Glen was first admitted to hospital in November 2001. There would be many more involuntary admissions initiated by his desperate parents, and at least five escapes documented in medical records.
Schizophrenia can be managed with medication and therapy, and many who receive the diagnosis go on to lead ordinary lives. But for some, getting and staying well is much more difficult. Glen did not believe he was sick. He did not trust doctors and blamed his parents for his institutionalization. He considered his time in hospital a form of “spiritual rape.”
After one hospital stay, Glen stopped going out, gave up showering and did not brush his teeth for more than a year. He began to eat excessively, gorging himself to the point of physical pain. He developed a belief in vampires and demons. He told his family he was being attacked through the astral plane and that holding his breath would protect him. He became obsessed with purification, emerging one night from his bedroom having painted everything in it white — the walls, the furniture, a Bible, and himself. He
A mentally ill Nova Scotia man is serving a life sentence in Attica after killing three people, two in Canada and one in New York state. If he’d never crossed the border, he would have been sent to a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison. Why was Glen Race found guilty in one country, but not in the other? Amy Dempsey reports
punched holes in the walls, smashed stereo equipment and slept with a knife.
In 2005, Glen left home intending to walk to Mexico and live off the land, but was arrested in Nova Scotia after he broke into a cabin in the woods. A psychiatrist who assessed him warned that “the potential for ... increased risk for violence is there despite the lack of past charges.”
Later that year, Glen was taken to hospital with second-degree burns after he set himself on fire in his parents’ backyard. He appeared to improve, briefly, during a hospital stay in 2006 when he was on clozapine, a drug that has been successful in managing severe schizophrenia. But it didn’t last. By January 2007, Glen had stopped taking his meds again.
In the months before the two detectives appeared at their door, Donna and Mark had watched their son spread salt around the house to ward off evil. They had watched him leave food outside to feed the trees and spirits. They had watched him meditate while holding a knife. Glen told his mother that he had the power to forgive sin, but he never would.
In early May, Glen moved into a rental apartment in downtown Halifax, his first time living independently in years. His parents were worried about the change, but felt they had to support him. Mark had driven Glen back to his apartment after a visit on May 7, having no idea that his son had already killed one man and was about to kill another.
CHAPTER 3: DEMON SLAYER
On May 1, 2007, Glen Race spent the day at his new apartment in the north end of Halifax. He ran errands, taking out books on Mexico and Belize from the library and withdrawing cash from his bank account, according to court records that documented his activity that day and in the weeks that followed. He would later tell doctors that he had been summoned by God to wage war on demons and cleanse the world of sin.
That afternoon, Paul Knott, 44, a retired navy cook who had served overseas, was shopping with his 17-year-old daughter, Jennifer. As evening approached, Knott dropped Jennifer off at work, kissed her goodbye, and told her he would see her at home later.
Sometime that night, Knott and Race crossed paths on Citadel Hill in downtown Halifax, a military fort and national historic site that is a known meeting place for gay men. Both Knott and Race’s second victim were gay, but early theories that the killings were motivated by hate would be dismissed after extensive psychiatric evaluation. Race told doctors later that he chose the men because they were easy targets. (The victims’ families declined or did not respond to interview requests for this story.)
Knott was attacked inside his blue Chevrolet Malibu. Race slashed his throat and stabbed him in the thigh, chest and neck. He told doctors that Knott was a demon whom he had asked to repent for his sins.
Afterward, Race dumped his body in an overgrown path in a remote wooded area 60 kilometres outside of Halifax. Police would find a knife bearing Race’s fingerprints lodged between the driver’s seat and the centre console.
The next day, Race drove Knott’s car to a Halifax convenience store, where a clerk noted that Race appeared to be avoiding the security cameras, and to a Walmart, where he purchased another large knife.
That night, after removing the Malibu’s licence plate and covering its bloodsoaked back seat with a tarp, Race abandoned the car on a dirt road near Halifax International Airport. He rode his bicycle, which he had stored in the trunk, to a nearby gas station, and phoned his father to pick him up.
Driving to Windsor, Mark noticed his son was holding his breath for long periods of time. At home, Glen asked his father to hose down the family truck and his bicycle. He spent most of the next few days with his parents, who recall that he carried a knife around the house and sat on the patio steps jerking his head and arguing with an invisible person. They had no idea what he had done.
On May 7, Mark drove Glen back to Halifax. Later, the parents noticed that their son had cut himself out of a family photograph.
Across town that same evening, Trevor Brewster, 45, was working a shift at Steak and Stein, a well-known family restaurant where he had been employed for 24 years, primarily as a server. It was Brewster’s first day back after a vacation in the Dominican Republic. He had made plans to visit a friend after work, but didn’t show up.
Sometime that night, Brewster crossed paths with Race at Frenchman Lake in nearby Dartmouth. Race told psychiatrists later that he struck Brewster in the head with a metal bar, ordered him to repent for his sins and slashed his throat. Race hid Brewster’s battered body under a wharf and took off in the victim’s black Honda Civic. He said later that the Archangel Michael told him to flee.
At 1:30 a.m., Race screeched his tires while passing through a Dartmouth intersection and drew the attention of two RCMP officers, who pursued in a patrol vehicle. Seeing flashing lights behind him, Race sped up.
The officers, not wanting to endanger the public with a high-speed chase, recorded the car’s licence plate number and backed off. Race saw this as a sign that the Virgin Mary had intervened to instigate their retreat.
An hour later, Race passed through a toll station into New Brunswick, where he asked an attendant how to get to the U.S. border. He stopped briefly at a monastery that morning, where staff would not let him in but saw him wash himself and Brewster’s car, and then sit for a while in a towel in the parking lot.
The following day, May 9, he attempted to withdraw cash from an ATM near Montreal. Later that night, he hid and abandoned the Honda on an old logging road a few kilometres north of the U.S. border in Havelock, Que., and continued on foot.
On May 10, on a quiet rural road in the township of Mooers, in Clinton County, N.Y., local resident Marjorie Rushford spotted an unfamiliar man near the end of her driveway, wearing hiking boots and carrying a map and compass. Race told Rushford he was out for a walk. After they parted, he continued into the woods and broke into a hunting lodge through an open window.
Soon after, Darcy Manor, 35, a local mechanic, school bus driver and father of two, parked his 1992 Ford F-250 pickup truck outside the lodge. He had been asked by the owner to prepare an outdoor water pump for spring.
From inside the lodge, Race watched Manor kneel and lean over the pump. Then he grabbed a rifle from a nearby shelf and fired a single shot through the kitchen window. It struck Manor in the lower back and tore through his lungs, killing him.
Race told doctors later that he believed Manor’s appearance at the lodge was “pre-arranged,” and that because he was a “demon slayer” and “a superior spiritual being,” laws did not apply to him.
Race tied the victim to an all-terrain vehicle and dragged his body down a nearby trail. Then he drove away in Manor’s truck.
By the next afternoon, Race had passed through half a dozen states and covered 1,760 kilometres. In Dalton, Ga., he stole a South Dakota licence plate from a parked vehicle and used it to replace the one on Manor’s truck. He changed plates again the next day at a farm in Vinton, La., and later in Sabine Pass, Texas.
A flat tire stalled him on May 14 in Baytown, Texas, where he abandoned the Ford, walked to a truck stop and purchased a bus ticket.
By the next morning, he was in a taxi on his way to the Mexican border. “Be careful,” the driver told him. “They make their own laws in Mexico.”
Though Race wouldn’t reach his destination, the border arrest didn’t make his journey any less astonishing. He managed to travel nearly 5,000 kilometres while evading authorities in two countries for two weeks — a feat that would cast doubt on claims that he did not have the mental capacity to form criminal intent.
Race had a documented history of serious mental illness, but would it be enough to mount an insanity defence not only in Canada, but in the U.S.? Two forensic psychiatrists hired by his defence team to assess him believed so. But they would never get to testify in New York.
CHAPTER 4: ON TRIAL IN NEW YORK
The U.S. murder trial was held at the Clinton County courthouse in Plattsburgh, N.Y., a roughly 45-minute drive from the hunting lodge where Darcy Manor was killed.
On the first day, Sept. 8, 2008, a leaner and long-haired Glen Race sat with his lawyer at the counsel table wearing a baggy brown suit. His parents and brother were stationed behind him in the public gallery, but most of the courtroom seats were filled with local reporters and the family and friends of Manor, who had been a lifelong resident of the largely rural county of 81,000 people.
The jury box was empty, reflecting the defence decision to go with a judge-alone trial. Mark McCormick, Glen’s courtappointed lawyer, was a 37-year-old attorney who had resigned from his post as public defender in a neighbouring county the year before to “pursue other interests,” according to a local newspaper report. He had since gone into private practice and took on the Race case by special assignment from Clinton County, which didn’t have its own public defender.
Clinton County district attorney Andrew Wylie was the prosecutor. Wylie, a former criminal defence lawyer with the intensity of a college football coach, was a father of five in his mid-40s, married to a Catholic school teacher. He had been elected as the county’s top law enforcement official three years before. This was arguably the biggest case of his career so far.
Everyone in the courtroom expected Race to plead not responsible by reason of mental disease, or, as the defence is more commonly called in New York, not guilty by reason of insanity. Months earlier, a defence psychiatrist had concluded that Race’s actions were motivated by delusions that led him to believe he was a godlike figure on a mission to rid the world of evil. McCormick had provided that expert report to the state, as required by law when an accused intends to plead insanity, and Wylie, in turn, had hired his own expert to assess Race.
But as the trial began, Wylie, in a tense and lengthy discussion in court before opening arguments, admitted that the state’s expert report was not complete. McCormick would only receive it four days into the trial.
Even so, Wylie balked when he learned that McCormick also owed him a report from a second defence expert who had assessed Race, and expressed concern about being “blindsided” by new information. “We’re starting a trial,” Wylie complained. But it was McCormick who would be blindsided. Wylie had another surprise for the defence that morning: fresh evidence.
The prosecutor presented McCormick with a package of 27 CDs containing recordings of jailhouse telephone calls between Race and his family. Inmates are warned that calls are subject to surveillance, so the recordings were legal.
Only later would McCormick learn that the state’s expert witness, Dr. Angela Hegarty, had relied upon the wiretaps to form an opinion that Glen was “malingering,” or faking the symptoms of his illness. For now, McCormick asked the Race family to hold on to the CDs, and he did not immediately review their contents or send them to his own experts for analysis.
Those who looked back at the case later would question whether McCormick had a clear trial strategy. He had not prepared a formal witness list, and he began the trial with a request to delay his opening arguments until after the prosecution rested its case, a move that suggested he had not decided exactly what the defence would be. When the judge denied his request, McCormick waived his right to summarize his case.
On day 2, Race, in a conference in Judge Kevin Ryan’s chambers, tried to fire McCormick and represent himself. Race spoke in rambling, unending sentences — he had not been on medication for more than a year — but was clear that he felt McCormick’s representation was inadequate. Ryan denied the request, noting that Race had already dismissed his first lawyer and insisting McCormick was “one of the very best” and was doing an “excellent, excellent” job.
Wylie presented the state’s case over eight days in September. The evidence that Race killed Darcy Manor was circumstantial, but overwhelming. Multiple witnesses placed Race near the scene in the hour before Manor was killed, and Race had been arrested in Texas carrying Manor’s credit card and the murder weapon. The state rested on a Wednesday, and the defence was scheduled to begin its case the following Monday.
That Monday morning, Sept. 22, McCormick filed a surprise motion seeking a continuation — a delay in the trial of an unspecified length — to give his two psychiatric experts an opportunity to listen to the wiretaps that Hegarty, the state psychiatrist, had relied upon in her report. During the weekend break, McCormick had listened to some of the recordings and spoken to his experts. He said they would not be able to weigh in on Hegarty’s conclusions without more time.
“Short of a mistrial, it appears that a continuance is the only manner in which Mr. Race is to receive a fair trial under the circumstances,” he wrote to the judge.
Wylie was aghast that McCormick had not reviewed the new evidence or shared it with his experts sooner. “You’ve had every opportunity from Sept. 8 until today to listen to (the wiretaps) at night, on your way (to and from court) . . .” he argued in court. “Two weeks is plenty sufficient.”
McCormick said he simply hadn’t had time, in the middle of a trial, to review the material. Neither Wylie nor McCormick knew how many hours the CDs contained, but the calls had been recorded over 15 months.
McCormick told Judge Ryan that he couldn’t call his experts to testify without acontinuance. The judge disagreed, arguing they could at least speak to the conclusions drawn in their own reports, and ruled against the motion. “I do conclude that the defence has had these materials for two weeks, that’s not in doubt, and I do believe that’s under the facts of the case sufficient time,” Ryan said.
When the trial continued two days later, McCormick had a new plan: he dropped the insanity defence and instead prepared to argue that the state had not proven his client committed murder. Race, in another lengthy and difficult-to-follow speech, made a second attempt to fire McCormick. The judge denied his request.
McCormick called his only witness to the stand, a local woman named Carol Vennette who claimed she saw a second man with Race in Darcy Manor’s truck the night of the killing. McCormick argued that because the evidence against Race was circumstantial, the presence of this second man — seen by no one but Vennette — created a reasonable doubt. Vennette finished her testimony in under an hour, and the defence rested its case.
The verdict came two days later: Race was guilty of first-degree murder.
At his sentencing hearing, Race declared himself an “international celestial citizen” and proclaimed his innocence, saying he could do no wrong. The judge gave him life with no chance of parole.
Race’s documented history of psychotic episodes, the hospital stays, the years his parents spent trying to get him help, the psychiatric reports that said his actions were motivated by his disease — none of it came to light. No evidence of his mental illness was ever presented in court. Until he returned to Canada.