RCMP Watch

Tim Cook, Canadian Press via Canoe, July 1, 2006

REGINA (CP) - It’s forecast to run almost a year longer than expected and cost nearly five times as much.

But as the inquiry into David Milgaard’s wrongful conviction breaks for the summer, the lawyer responsible for leading the evidence at the Saskatoon hearings, Doug Hodson, is making no apologies for what it has become.

The Saskatchewan government asked for the definitive word on why Milgaard spent 23 years behind bars for a heinous rape and murder he didn’t commit, Hodson says, and that’s exactly what it’s going to get.

“We have to look at the issues that were presented to us,” he says. “We did not go out and create the issues. The issues were already there. I think the bottom line is that it’s the nature of the case that dictated what we have had to do.”

Milgaard’s wrongful conviction is widely known as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in modern Canadian history.

Milgaard was a 16-year-old kid travelling through Saskatoon on a road trip with friends on the morning nursing aide Gail Miller was raped and stabbed to death in January 1969.

Over the 170 hearing days since January 2005, Justice Edward MacCallum has listened to 107 witnesses, and the previous testimony of 18 more has been read into the record. The transcript is now more than 35,000 pages long.

The budget has ballooned from $2 million initially to about $10 million as it sits now - $7.5 million of which has already been spent.

A common perception the inquiry has had to battle from its outset is that everything is already known about the Milgaard case and the story has grown stale in the eyes of the public.

Over the last 35 years there was the original trial and appeal, two applications for a review of the conviction to the federal justice minister, a Supreme Court review of the conviction, an RCMP investigation publicly released into allegations of a coverup, the trial of the man eventually convicted of the crime, Larry Fisher, and his appeals. There have been countless news stories about the case, at least two books and a made-for-TV movie.

But Hodson points out the inquiry has the task of bringing all of the material from the various proceedings together and distilling the facts of the case from perceptions that have developed over the years.

“There have been a number of issues, or allegations if you want to call it that, that have been in the public domain for many, many years.

“Certainly those issues are being looked at by the commission in a public forum and, perhaps most importantly, giving those parties with standing the right to question witnesses about those issues.”

Perhaps the key allegation being considered by the inquiry is the notion that information pointing to Fisher as a suspect was covered up by authorities to maintain Milgaard’s conviction.

Milgaard’s mother, Joyce, and her lawyers went public with that allegation in the early 1990s. At a news conference they revealed they had a source within the Saskatchewan Justice Department, who said the Fisher and Milgaard case files were taken into a high-level meeting in the early 1970s, after Milgaard was convicted.

Fisher was a serial rapist operating in Saskatoon at around the time Miller was murdered. But his name didn’t come to authorities’ attention until after Milgaard was in jail.

There were elements of the way Fisher was handled by the justice system that fuel suspicion.

He was brought to Regina to plead guilty to the rapes he committed in Saskatoon. His rape victims were also never told that their attacker had been caught.

The inquiry has heard, however, that bringing Fisher to Regina was a matter of convenience. Fisher wanted to have the charges dealt with as soon as possible and the easiest way to do that was in the provincial capital. The rape victims weren’t told about the guilty pleas because it wasn’t standard practice for the police to do so at the time.

The inquiry has also learned through employment records that the Milgaards’ source, now identified as Michael Breckenridge, wasn’t working for the Justice Department at the time the meeting was alleged to have occurred.

Determining exactly when Fisher should have become a suspect in Miller’s murder has also been a big part of the inquiry.

Investigators at the time of the murder believed that a serial rapist, later identified as Fisher, could have killed Miller. But that lead was dropped when one of Milgaard’s friends, Albert Cadrain, came forward and said he saw blood on Milgaard’s clothes the morning of the crime.

In 1980, Larry Fisher’s former wife, Linda, went to Saskatoon police saying she thought he might have committed the murder. But with the Miller file closed for a decade, it appears police never followed up.

In 1983, a journalist investigating the Milgaard case did an interview with Cadrain in which Fisher was referred to as a rapist who lived in the basement of the Cadrain house.

The journalist went as far as taking out a classified ad looking for Linda Fisher, but never followed up the responses he got.

In 1986, when articling student David Asper began working on an application to free Milgaard, he failed to key on the mention of the rapist in the Cadrain transcript.

Larry Fisher didn’t get linked to the crime in any substantive way until 1990, when the team working on Milgaard’s case, including Asper, got an anonymous tip that Fisher was the real killer.

This time the lead was followed. Fisher’s previous crimes were uncovered and the theory that he could be the killer was taken to the Supreme Court, where Milgaard’s conviction was thrown out in 1992.

Lawyer Aaron Fox, who represents one of the lead detectives on the original investigation, Eddie Karst, says his client appreciates that the inquiry has gone to such lengths to clear the air on the Milgaard file.

“From Mr. Karst’s point of view, his position has been that he regrets obviously when he sees what happened to David Milgaard but he never intended a guilty man go free or an innocent man be incarcerated,” Fox says.

“I am pleased to see that what this inquiry is doing is trying to get to the bottom of the factual issues.”

But Milgaard’s lawyer, Hersh Wolch, says he has yet to see what he is most interested in at the inquiry - why was it so difficult to free an innocent man through the processes established by the federal government?

“That’s the stuff we really want to find out and we want to know about. How were these mistakes made by them and why didn’t they reopen it sooner?” Wolch asks.

“Quite frankly, the parts that I have mainly been interested in I haven’t heard yet. There are issues that haven’t been resolved.”

The inquiry was to adjourn for the summer on Thursday and has five more weeks of hearings scheduled, beginning the last week of August, to hear a final handful of witnesses and closing arguments.

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The inquiry into David Milgaard’s wrongful murder conviction, by the numbers:

Struck: Feb. 20, 2004.

Began hearing witnesses: Jan. 17, 2005.

Budget: Originally $2 million, now about $10 million.

Number of hearing days: 170 so far; 18 more scheduled.

Number of witnesses: 107 so far; 18 more had previous testimony read into record; 35,000 pages of transcript.

Number of documents in evidence: about 54,000 (325,000 pages).

By comparison: The inquiry into the federal sponsorship scandal was in session for 131 days, heard from 183 witnesses, had 946 exhibits and an operating budget of more than $30 million