Justice on her ‘bucket list’ — and she’s not giving up
Sister hopeful despite attending years of court hearings into deaths of Harrison family and now facing the prospect of another trial
On trial days, Elizabeth Gallant arrives at the courthouse no later than 9:30 a.m. She pushes her walker across the parking lot, through the security scanner and into the third-floor courtroom reserved for the murder trial.
Gallant, 80, a slight woman with warm brown eyes, cropped white hair and a stooped upper back, has done this more than 100 times in the past 10 years, becoming a familiar face at the Brampton Courthouse.
“How are you holding up?” the court security officers sometimes ask.
One-word answers are all she can muster. “Struggling.” “Disappointed.”
For more than a decade, Gallant has come here to face the people accused of killing her brother, sister-in-law and nephew years apart in their Mississauga home.
The details of the case are well known. Her brother, Bill Harrison, 63, was found dead in his home on Pitch Pine Crescent in 2009. His wife, Bridget Harrison, 63, died there in 2010. But it was only after their son, Caleb Harrison, 40, was discovered strangled in the same home in 2013 that police determined all three Harrisons had been victims of homicide.
The case raised serious questions about how police, coroners and forensic pathologists failed to make connections between the deaths sooner.
As the matriarch of her family, Gallant has been a steady presence in court through the odyssey that has followed her nephew’s death, a tiny but powerful reminder of the toll the crimes have taken on everyone who knew and loved the Harrisons.
Now, after the latest case ended in a mistrial, Gallant faces the prospect of doing it all over again — a third trial in seven years.
A friend who came to support Gallant in court last month remarked on how the case had aged her.
“You’ve gotta stop. Look at what it’s doing to you.”
Gallant knew her friend meant well, but stopping didn’t feel like an option. The case would go on. She had no control over it; she never had.
“I’m not pushing this wagon,” she replied.
Of course, no one was forcing Gallant to be there. Everyone would understand if she sat the next one out. She is about to turn 81. Her health is declining. Why she remains committed to seeing this through tells a story not only about who Gallant is and what her family has been through, but about the legacy the Harrisons left behind.
“I have to represent my family,” Gallant said in a recent interview at her home in Mississauga, a week before the 15-year anniversary of her brother’s death. “I’m not gonna say, ‘I can’t be bothered anymore.’ ”
Composure amid the courtroom horrors
Gallant is one of the first observers to enter the courtroom each morning. She sits on a bench with a pillow from home tucked behind her back and a spiral notebook open in her lap. A uniformed court services officer hands her a headset hearing aid.
The gallery has given Gallant a front-row seat to the horrors her family endured. She watched as graphic crime scene and autopsy photos were projected onto a screen more times than she can count. She heard a six-foot-four former bouncer describe how he strangled her sister-in-law and nephew. Gallant had been warned that she must not show emotion in the courtroom, that such displays might influence the jury and compromise the accused person’s right to a fair trial.
She distracts herself by recording testimony and observations in her notebooks. She has filled seven. She keeps them in a banker’s box with newspaper clippings, notes and police records.
Most disturbing to Gallant were moments when the failures of the authorities meant to protect her family came to light. There was the coroner who wrote her brother’s death off as “natural” even though a pathologist had documented evidence of major injuries including a fractured sternum. There was the police officer who concluded “no evidence of foul play” in Bridget’s death even though there was reason to believe she’d been strangled.
She had to sit through it all, composed, believing that if her brother’s death had been properly investigated, his wife and son might still be alive today.
Gallant adored her younger brother, William. They had grown up together in Stratford, Ont., in a household of musicians and jazz enthusiasts. Their father ran a beauty parlour that their greatgrandfather had opened after he escaped slavery in the American South and came to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Her father was elated to have a son after two daughters. Gallant is grateful he wasn’t alive to see what happened to him.
Gallant, a retired nurse, had worked in hospital labour and delivery wards for many years, supporting women through childbirth. In labour, things could change on a dime, she said, and as the support person, you had to be there. You couldn’t miss any part of it.
The same goes for court, Gallant has learned. You have to be present. “It calls to mind for the people in the courtroom that somebody cares.”
Like her brother had become invisible
Caleb Harrison’s marriage to Melissa Merritt was over by 2005, but the custody battle concerning their two children would play out over many years.
More than a decade after their wedding, Gallant sat in court — headset on, notebook in lap — as Merritt stood accused of murdering Caleb and his mother. Crown lawyers alleged that Merritt was the driving force behind a plot to kill her former husband and mother-in-law at key moments in a custody dispute with the Harrisons, while her then-partner, Christopher Fattore, with whom she had four children, committed the acts. Fattore faced a third charge: the second-degree murder of Bill.
Merritt’s defence argued there was no evidence she had killed or planned to kill anyone and said the Crown’s case was based on circumstantial evidence.
In 2018, Fattore was found of killing Caleb and Bridget. He is serving a life sentence.
Merritt was found guilty of killing Caleb. She, too, received a life sentence. But the jury couldn’t reach a verdict in her charge on Bridget’s death, and the judge declared a mistrial.
Five years later, Merritt’s conviction in Caleb’s death was overturned after the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that the trial judge made two errors in his instructions to the jury. The decision triggered a new trial.
In February 2024, Merritt once again stood trial for the first-degree murders of her ex and his mother.
On Bridget’s death: not guilty. On Caleb’s death: a hung jury, and another mistrial.
Merritt now remains in custody awaiting a third trial, though the Crown could choose to withdraw the charge or offer a plea bargain.
While the prospect of more time in court is daunting, Gallant and her family want and expect the Crown to proceed with a third trial.
One thing that was particularly difficult for Gallant during the retrial was how her brother faded from the record. The jury heard little about Bill’s life or death in the second trial. Both the Crown and defence went to great lengths to avoid letting the jury hear that he died under suspicious circumstances, knowing that such information could be prejudicial against Merritt, who was not charged in his murder.
To Gallant, it felt like her brother had become invisible.
Douglas Blackwell, Bridget’s younger brother, who also attended the retrial with his wife and family, fears the same thing will happen to Bridget in a third trial — that she will be “completely deleted” from the record. “It just seems horrendously wrong.”
On her bucket list: justice
To really understand what Bridget and Bill were all about, Blackwell said, “you had to sit around a dinner table at 3635 Pitch Pine Cres. and listen to the conversations and the laughter and the jokes.” Bridget sat on one end of the table and Bill on the other, with family and friends sandwiched in between them. The house on Pitch Pine was a sanctuary, a second home to a large community of cousins, aunts, uncles and family friends.
Bridget and Bill were an inseparable unit, her fiery passion balanced by his calm, steady presence. Relatives joked that they could have charged consulting fees for their guidance on education, careers and relationships.
Bill, who worked as an analyst, was a mentor to the youth in their family circle who were drawn to his cool demeanour and sage advice. Bridget, a schoolteacher and principal, was celebrated as a visionary in her field, rising through the ranks to become a superintendent and special assistant to the education minister. More than 1,000 people attended her funeral, and when a speaker asked how many careers she had influenced, half the people raised their hands.
After they died, Caleb, who had a tattoo of his kids’ names above his heart, grew determined to become a model single father, Gallant said. He volunteered as a softball coach, hosted neighbourhood barbecues and seemed to always have a bunch of kids playing sports on his front lawn. He hired a piano teacher and French tutor for his children because he knew it would have made his parents proud.
In another life, Bill would have been a comfort for Gallant as they aged. He would have driven her to medical appointments, helped her with gardening. She would have invited him over for liver and onions, a favourite meal from their childhood.
They might have driven to Stratford together to visit family and see a play at the Festival, where they had worked as teenagers, and where Bill and Bridget met; she was an actress, he worked in the costume department.
Instead, Stratford is where Bill, Bridget and Caleb are buried. It’s where Gallant goes to visit their graves.
Seeking accountability for the Harrisons, Gallant has attended meetings with politicians, bureaucrats, police officials, tribunal members and lawyers. At a police services board meeting, Gallant told members that justice for her brother and his family was on her “bucket list.” She has not yet checked it off.
A planned coroner’s inquest has been delayed by the ongoing criminal proceedings. A third trial would delay it further. How long, Gallant wonders, is her family expected to wait for answers?
Little has changed. Her expectations are low. But she will see it through. If there is a third trial, she will be back at the courthouse, she said, pushing her walker through the doors by 9:30 a.m. “I can’t not be there.”