RCMP Watch

Newmarket, Ontario (Maria Babbage, The Canadian Press) - A former Toronto police officer who carried on a nine-year affair with his mistress before she ended up dead and concealed in the wall of his basement was found guilty Wednesday of first-degree murder in the February 2002 death of Linda Mariani.

It took a jury little more than a day to convict Richard Wills after a costly - and often bizarre - five-month trial in this suburban town north of Toronto.

Ontario Superior Court Judge Michelle Fuerst said Wills is facing a life sentence with no chance of parole for at least 25 years.

“I suspect any judge sitting in your place would have returned the same verdict,” Fuerst told the jury.

Following the verdict, Wills’s teenage daughter Jessica left the courtroom in tears and sobbed uncontrollably outside, occasionally shrieking in despair and calling out, “Daddy, Daddy.”

The father of three was accused of hitting Mariani in the head with a baseball bat and strangling her with a skipping rope, then stuffing her body in a garbage bin and hiding it behind a wall in the basement of his home in Richmond Hill, Ont., north of Toronto.

The defence maintained Mariani, 40, died after falling down stairs at Wills’s home, while the Crown alleged he killed her because she wouldn’t leave her husband.

Wills, 50, said he hid Mariani’s body because he wanted to bury her later near his family cottage in Wasaga Beach, Ont., as they had agreed to in a secret lovers’ pact.

A baseball bat and skipping rope - the latter wrapped three times around Mariani’s neck - were found with the body when Wills led police to it four months after she vanished.

The trial heard Mariani’s cause of death could not be determined because her remains were too badly decomposed.

John Valeri, who spoke on behalf of Mariani’s family, said they are relieved that justice has been served.

“We knew that there was plenty of evidence for first-degree murder, and we’re glad the jury was able to see through the web of lies that Wills and the defence put forward,” he said outside the courthouse.

“It’s five-and-a-half years that Wills has managed to manipulate the judicial system.”

Wills’s lawyer, Raj Napal, said his client will appeal.

“He said to me, ‘Raj, I’m innocent, and I’m going to challenge this, I’m going to appeal.”‘

The trial - punctuated by the ex-cop’s bizarre and often disruptive behaviour in court - took a scandalous turn Tuesday when it was revealed that taxpayers were on the hook for an estimated $1.3 million in defence costs.

About $804,310 in defence lawyers’ fees had been billed as of June 14, while another $142,000 was billed as “friend of the court” fees for representing Wills’s legal interests when he represented himself at his preliminary. It’s estimated another $200,000 will be billed in defence fees.

Wills, who had pleaded not guilty to killing his longtime mistress and business partner, divested his assets to his estranged wife and their three children within two years of his arrest. He was charged in Mariani’s death in June 2002.

Wills then applied for legal aid, but refused to agree to terms of repayment offered. After unsuccessfully seeking that the attorney general either pay his legal bill or have the charge stayed, Wills took over his own defence. His outrageous behaviour at the 2004 preliminary hearing forced Justice Bryan Shaughnessy’s hand in granting the order for legal aid.

Outside the courthouse after the verdict, Mariani’s family urged Ontario’s new attorney general, Chris Bentley, to examine how Wills managed to drag out and nearly sabotage the trial, and to also look into the public funding that he received for his legal costs.

“He was a millionaire by the time he was 28 - he said so himself,” Valeri said. “Why taxpayers have had to pay for his defence makes no sense, and I would issue a challenge to the new attorney general that they now look into why our judicial system is this way.”

In closing arguments, Napal said the evidence didn’t support the Crown’s theory that Wills hit Mariani in the back of the head or that she died of asphyxiation. Napal also argued there was no evidence to suggest the couple was not getting along.

Instead, the defence argued that Mariani fell down the stairs and died almost instantly when she struck the back of her head on the ceramic tile floor.

Wills testified that he hid Mariani’s body out of a sense of panic.

He said he was worried her relatives would want to bury her in the family plot and not near Wasaga Beach, where he said the couple had planned to be interred together.