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A cell, a cot, a metal basin and a toilet.
Most people will never see the inside of a holding cell, fortunately. What a jury saw on Monday morning was a seemingly endless montage of silent videotape of Kalen Schlatter in custody at 13 Division.
Schlatter sitting, Schlatter standing, Schlatter lying down, Schlatter removing his jacket and using it as a pillow. Schlatter covering himself with a blanket. Schlatter thrice getting on his knees, curiously, to urinate into the bowl.
But crucially — which seemed to be the point of this voyeuristic exercise — Schlatter clearly speaking to someone who can’t be seen, at times gesticulating animatedly. That ongoing conversation, the court has heard, was with an undercover police officer in the next cell, and a second undercover police officer in a third cell further down: UC1 and UC2.
The three men aren’t visible to each other but they can talk easily enough, which they did from 4:10 a.m. to 8:25 a.m. on Feb. 5, 2018, just after the cell door was clanged shut on Schlatter by a pair of booking officers.
Twenty video clips lasting between one and eight minutes were shown to the jurors Monday. Nothing much happens in them. But while there’s ample footage indicating exchanges between the arrestee and the cops, no audio apparently exists. Nobody has yet explained the why of that.
It was left to UC1, in his testimony last week — delivered from behind a screen to protect his identity — to recollect the conversation, which he’d written down in 26 pages of formal notes, mostly after he’d been removed from the cell for good.
The defence, in cross-examination, has disputed the accuracy of the officer’s reconstruction of the conversation, which the officer has explained was not a verbatim account but close enough.
Schlatter has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the strangling death of Tess Richey on Nov. 25, 2017.
In his evidence under direct questioning from the prosecution, UC1 drew a picture of an exceedingly chatty Schlatter, at first drawn into discussion about board and card games, in particular Magic: The Gathering. Then segueing, without much prompting, into boastfulness about his alleged prowess with women — claiming he’d had sex with more than 40, sometimes in twosomes and foursomes, and he was still only 21 years old. He frequented gay bars because random straight girls could always be found there. And he posed nude for an art class, adding he wasn’t shy about being seen naked because he was “big” — as in well-endowed.
It was Schlatter, UC1 testified, who brought up the name Tess Richey, asking if the other two had heard of her.
The officer told court Schlatter said he’d been shown photos of the dead woman’s body and, as the witness remembered it, had claimed he’d feigned being upset by the images. “But in reality, it didn’t bother him at all,” the officer quoted Schlatter as saying.
Defence lawyer Lydia Riva has suggested the officer misheard Schlatter on that point and that he had been genuinely distressed.
The Crown has asserted that Schlatter killed Richey — who was a week shy of 23, the youngest of five sisters — after she rejected his sexual advances. Court has heard Schlatter’s semen and DNA — to a “statistical certainty” — was found of the victim’s clothing.
On the night of Nov. 24, Richey, depressed over a recent breakup with her boyfriend, had met up with an old high school friend at a bar in the Gay Village, where the two women drank until closing. There has been no evidence before the jury that Richey ever spoke to the defendant inside the club.
But in her opening address to the jury, Crown attorney Bev Richards said Schlatter had given Richey’s friend a light for her cigarette outside the club, as about two dozen people mingled on the sidewalk. Richards told court that a slew of surveillance cameras captured the women as they then walked up Church St., with Schlatter trailing them. They appear to have met up when the women stopped at a hot dog stand and were certainly together shortly thereafter, court heard, when encountering an area resident outside a house on Dundonald St.
Richards said the jury will see video — captured after Richey’s friend had headed home around 4 a.m. — of Schlatter leading Richey into a pathway between two properties on Church Street. They disappear down the exterior stairwell of a building under construction at 4:14 a.m. Richey had already called for an Uber. Some 45 minutes later, Schlatter reappears alone.
“He said that he wanted to have privacy with her so they could hook up,” UC1 has testified. “He then took her to the alley and they were making out and grinding on one another.”
Schlatter told the officer he’d ejaculated into his pants and that was why his semen had been found on Richey. The accused insisted Richey was alive when he left her.
The victim was reported missing to police by her family the next day. Yet Richey’s body wasn’t found until four days had passed — the horrific discovery made by her own mother and a friend who’d driven down from North Bay to undertake their own search, plastering the neighbourhood with posters and knocking on doors.
Two 51 Division constables have been charged with misconduct for neglect of duty under the Police Service Act over the allegedly mishandled search. Their hearing has been deferred until after the conclusion of this criminal trial.
The trial continues Tuesday.