The Bulldog and the Helix Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  Step Back in Time

  Enter the Bulldog

  Canada Enters the DNA Age

  Slow Progress in Boomtown

  The Law Catches Up with Science

  Echoes of a Nightmare

  A Double Landmark

  Landmark Trial Moves Forward

  Suspect on Ice

  Boy Tried as Man

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Afterword

  Index

  Introduction

  WHEN I MOVED to Port Alberni in early 1994, I had no idea that my adopted hometown had already become Canada’s proving ground for forensic DNA law and technology. A brutal child sex slaying in April 1977 would become Canada’s first historic DNA cold case, but first, Ottawa would have to write legislation to govern the use of this new genetic fingerprinting system. The technology to create DNA profiles from long-degraded samples was also still in development.

  I was at my desk in the newsroom of the Alberni Valley Times in the fall of 1997 when I received a call from a documentary filmmaker for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Jerry Thompson. The previous summer, an eleven-year-old girl named Jessica States had been savagely murdered just a few hundred metres from the Times office, in a wooded gully across the street from Recreation Park. On the night of the crime, there was a well-attended men’s fast-pitch tournament at the park, and Jessica, who lived nearby, was on hand, retrieving foul-ball shots that flew into the gully.

  When conventional investigation techniques failed to turn up the suspect, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) launched a DNA manhunt, eventually taking blood samples, mostly voluntary, from hundreds of men who were known to be at the park that night. Thompson had received a tip that the case was about to break, and he wanted to make a one-hour segment for the CBC Television series Witness.

  On July 31, 1996, the night Jessica was killed, I was a forty-three-year-old rookie reporter, and the Alberni Valley Times had three industry veterans who handled the bulk of the early coverage. But by the time the States investigation shifted into a DNA manhunt, I had emerged as the primary court and crime reporter. It may be pure coincidence, but I was born on February 28, 1953, the day James Watson and Francis Crick published their findings on the DNA molecule—the double helix that gives this book its name. When I first encountered DNA science while in high school in the late 1960s, I was hooked.

  In December 1996, the Port Alberni detachment commander, Inspector Andy Murray, arranged a private tour for me at the RCMP’s E Division forensic lab in Vancouver, where I brushed up on the latest forensic DNA methodology with specialist Stefano Mazzega. At the time, the RCMP was just making the transition from the original DNA “fingerprinting” system known as Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP) to Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), which allows investigators to process much smaller amounts of trace material by making duplicates of the targeted genes.

  When Thompson contacted me in 1997, I had to tell him that the States investigation had gone cold again. But Port Alberni RCMP had another DNA case in progress. The previous March, they had announced the arrest of forty-seven-year-old Gurmit Singh Dhillon for the slaying of Carolyn Lee in 1977. When investigators submitted genetic samples taken from the crime scene to the new PCR analysis, the Mounties finally had their man.

  Why not, I suggested to Thompson, work backward through the Carolyn Lee murder case, while at the same time working forward on the Jessica States case? And if nothing breaks on the States investigation, load everything into the Lee case.

  And that is how things played out. As the States investigation dragged on and the Dhillon case proceeded to trial, Thompson crafted a one-hour segment titled “The Gene Squad,” which told the Port Alberni story in tandem with a successful DNA cold-case prosecution in Virginia. “The Gene Squad” aired in 1999, a few months after Dhillon’s conviction on December 3, 1998.

  Following the Dhillon trial, I decided that one day, when Jessica’s killer was finally caught and put away, I was going to write a book, taking that looking-back-at-Carolyn/looking-forward-at-Jessica viewpoint Jerry Thompson and I had originally envisioned for “The Gene Squad.” This is that book, a story about those cases and how some good cops did some good police work and hung in until the job was done. While that was happening, a rough-cut forest industry town underwent some major evolutions as it entered the twenty-first century.

  Though my long-term goal of writing The Bulldog and the Helix dates back to early 1999, by the time I began writing in 2014, I was quite fortunate to have access to a number of critical source materials, many the result of foresight on my part. From my first days at the Alberni Valley Times, I saved every story I filed and annotated and stored all of my negatives separately from those of my colleagues. When the Times went digital, I saved the images on my hard drive and later transferred them to CDs.

  The resulting archive, made up of my own files along with clippings sourced from the Alberni Valley Times, the Victoria Times Colonist, the Vancouver Province, and the Vancouver Sun by my Alberni Valley Times colleague Denis Houle, provided a clear narrative of the cases as they evolved, and I have striven to attribute these sources in situ. I have also long had an interest in Port Alberni’s history, beginning with Jan Peterson’s The Albernis: 1860–1922 and Twin Cities: Alberni– Port Alberni. I also have combed through exhibits and writings at the museum. Having that background was invaluable when I began my “accidental” career as a journalist a few years later.

  My other main source was the people involved in the cases. As a reporter, there is a temptation to depersonalize tragedy and to treat victims and their families in the abstract. They become “sources,” as opposed to genuine human beings in the process of grieving, while at the same time the emotions that are the inevitable result of tragedy are often sought as part of the story. In part because of my own history of childhood trauma, I have always tried to avoid re-traumatizing the people I interview.

  In the late 1980s, I became familiar with the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in first responders during alcohol recovery meetings and listening to the stories of others, including those of first responders. That knowledge provided valuable insight when I began conducting interviews for The Bulldog and the Helix, some face to face and some by telephone, all recorded. Listening to the recordings again and hearing the great variation in individual voices led me to tell much of the story in extended quotes to create the effect, for readers, of sitting directly across the table from these investigators and witnesses and hearing their stories first-hand.

  Make no mistake, these two crimes have left a lasting impact on the Port Alberni community and beyond. When the subject comes up in conversation, one frequently sees a brief moment of disconnect, a gaze off into the distance that has become a sort of familiar “Oh, that” moment. I had to be conscious of that fact when conducting interviews. Early on, I made the decision not to reach out to families of the aggrieved for interviews though I did contact Rob and Dianne States to advise them about the book and made efforts to locate Carolyn Lee’s family.

  As I spoke with the people who lived these events, the lingering emotions were telling. Nearly forty years after heading the first stage of the Carolyn Lee investigation, Donald Blair’s voice cracked at key moments, in the same way it had during his testimony at the Dhillon trial in 1998. Lyle Price freely admits that the shock of discovering a battered child’s body in his potato field still affects him. Again, that is reflected both in his recollections at trial and at lunch at my dining room table. Nearly two decades later, Dan Smith would still slip into a clenched-jaw first-person, present-tense narrative when
describing some of the more frustrating moments of the States investigation.

  From the very beginning, I wanted to capture that moment when the lab technician identified the DNA profile that led to the arrest of Roderick Patten. As it turned out, Hiron Poon and I graduated from the same Vancouver high school (Sir Winston Churchill Senior Secondary), five years apart, and we had a few of the same teachers. After he provided me with a thorough background on the procedures that were then in use at the RCMP forensic lab, I asked him about the “cold hit.” I have striven to share with the reader his bubbly, frenetic description of the next few minutes in that laboratory. Likewise, I wanted the reader to meet the feisty Shelley Arnfield, who earned her place on the Port Alberni General Investigation Section simply by proving she was willing to do what was necessary to get the job done.

  Recent innovations in forensic DNA investigation have led to a number of high-profile arrests in murder cases dating all the way back to the 1960s. For Canadians, it all started in Port Alberni, British Columbia, with two terrible tragedies and some dedicated investigators who were willing to push the DNA frontier.

  Step Back in Time

  MANY OF THE old familiar landmarks have disappeared, but if you want to envision where it all started, back in 1977, take a short hike from what is now Port Alberni’s Harbour Quay, a popular destination for tourists at the foot of Argyle Street. In those days, of course, Harbour Quay didn’t exist. It wasn’t built until the 1980s, when the city undertook a major renovation to make the run-down waterfront more inviting to visitors.

  Walk a few blocks past the historic Port Alberni train station and turn left onto Kingsway Avenue. Here, for over a century, the Somass Hotel and its satellite buildings dominated the northeast corner of the intersection before they were demolished in the summer of 2014. A new administrative building and apartment complex owned by Uchucklesaht First Nation now overlooks the waterfront.

  Kingsway north of Argyle is an industrial thoroughfare that has not changed much since April 14, 1977, the day twelve-year-old Carolyn Yuen Lee went missing. The marine hardware store has recently expanded into a full-fledged boat dealership, and the tire shop that continues to service the big rigs that haul logs and lumber along the waterfront has undergone some renovations, but the business traffic remains much the same.

  On your left are the parking lots that were built for the workforce of the sawmill operated by MacMillan Bloedel’s Somass Division, which lies across the railroad tracks. On April 14, 1977, Somass Division was composed of the A Mill, where the huge old-growth cedar, Douglas fir, and hemlock logs from MacMillan Bloedel’s own logging divisions were sliced into lumber and siding; the B Mill, which dated back to the early 1950s, processed smaller logs; and adjacent to this, the shingle mill. In 1977, more than 1,100 workers kept the machinery fed, running three shifts per day.

  The Kingsway Hotel still sits at the foot of Athol Street, serving thirsty millworkers since the early days of the Somass Mill although nowadays the clientele is more likely to be retirees. Looking up Athol, the derelict Arrowview Hotel looms over the low cinderblock building known to generations of Port Alberni residents as the Pat Cummings School of Dance, now empty. The hotel was gutted by fire in the spring of 2015 but later purchased for re-development. The city subsequently ordered the building to be demolished, but as of this writing, the building still stands.

  With the Arrowview’s visibly sagging roof, its fire escapes dangling off the side of the paint-peeled exterior, and its covered-over entryways, one might be tempted to imagine it as a once grand old building only recently fallen on hard times. Maybe it wouldn’t have seemed particularly menacing on that spring evening in 1977 when Carolyn Lee left her afternoon dance class and set out on foot toward her family’s restaurant, just three and a half blocks away on Third Avenue.

  That assumption would be wrong. The story of the Arrowview Hotel in many ways mirrors the fortunes of the forest industry boomtown that spawned it. Built in 1929, the hotel was intended as a drinking establishment, but the city rejected the owner’s application for a liquor licence because he already owned the Kingsway Hotel. The required “Men” and “Men and Women” beer parlour entrances had already been roughed in, facing Second Avenue. The owner simply covered them over with plywood, and they remain discernable under successive layers of plywood and particleboard.

  Ask a group of long-time Port Alberni residents how the Arrowview subsequently fit into the community, and you will likely receive a variety of responses. Most tellingly, some might not want to comment at all. They might tell you it was a straight-up hotel, and in a sense, they would be right. In 1943, it was taken over by Bloedel, Stewart & Welch Ltd. as a lodging house for single millworkers, and by the 1970s it had been taken over by private owners, who operated a woodworking shop. But if you ask the right person—someone less concerned with maintaining any fiction of gentility—you’ll hear the dirty secret: for much of its existence, the Arrowview Hotel was a brothel, where lonely single millworkers and loggers could find temporary female companionship.

  MILLTOWN STREETSCAPE

  On April 14, 1977, when Carolyn Lee stepped out of the dance school and prepared to walk along Second Avenue to the rear entrance of her parents’ restaurant, the Pine Café, Port Alberni still held the distinction of being home to the world’s largest wood-processing complex and, through the early 1970s, frequently topped the list of Canadian cities with the highest average annual income. With so much wood processing so close at hand, jobs at the mill or in related support trades were so easy to find that many Port Alberni males dropped out of high school at fifteen or sixteen and within a few months found themselves earning as much as their fathers. They bought the latest muscle cars and partied hard. You could quit a job (or be fired) one day and still be assured of finding another in short order.

  In 1967, the CBC aired a thirty-minute documentary, Young in a Small Town, focussing on the young generation in Port Alberni and their obsession with the car culture of the day. Young in a Small Town painted a picture of circumscribed blue-collar affluence and a seemingly secure future based on the forest industry.

  By that last day of Carolyn Lee’s short life in 1977, however, cracks were beginning to develop in the local economy. If you were a member of IWA Local 1-85 and you didn’t already have a couple of year’s seniority locked in, you would eventually fall victim to the massive layoffs that occurred beginning in the early 1980s. If you had stayed out of jail, had not been fired too many times, or had not switched from job to job too recently, you could expect to hold on to your high-paying union job, buy a house and a boat, raise a family, and build up your pension benefits.

  But even during the high times, for those who couldn’t keep a handle on their lifestyle issues, the picture wasn’t so bright. If your work history was spotty, chances are you could be stuck in a shabby rooming house, waiting for the phone to ring. And if you lived at the Arrowview Hotel, chances are you had a good view of the sidewalk in front of the dance school, where the children of your more fortunate co-workers absorbed some of the social graces along with the latest dance steps. The industry collapse was still a few years into the future, but the storm clouds were already gathering on the day Carolyn Lee was abducted, raped, and murdered by a twenty-seven-year-old foundry worker and a still unidentified accomplice. The foundry worker did not have to worry about job security or, as the investigation dragged on, lawyer’s fees; his father owned the foundry, which was tucked behind the MacMillan Bloedel’s Estevan Division office (since demolished) at the north end of Second Avenue.

  LAST SEEN

  A photograph of Carolyn Lee and her sister Brenda, taken in front of their home some eighteen blocks east on Argyle Street a short time before Carolyn’s disappearance, shows the two of them in a dance pose, arms linked, exuberant. Investigators have never established any link between Carolyn’s disappearance and the sketchy rooming house with the clear view of the sidewalk in front of the Pat Cummings School of Dance.
But looking east up Athol Street, one might be able to visualize Lee and her fellow students streaming out onto the sidewalk sometime after six o’clock that fateful Thursday. Carolyn, five feet tall and weighing ninety-five pounds, has shoulder-length black hair, and when she leaves the dance school, she is wearing a waist-length navy ski jacket, a sweater with a pale green criss-cross design, blue jeans, and blue runners. She carries a red pull-string tote bag. She and her fellow students joke, they rag each other for mistakes made on the dance floor, they do impromptu dance moves. Some have parents waiting, engines idling.

  Setting out from dance class, Carolyn has only three and a half blocks to negotiate, and at the Pine Café, staff are in the middle of the dinnertime rush. Her father, John, usually picks her up at the restaurant at about seven o’clock. So she walks the same way she does every Thursday.

  The streetscape she steps into on the last day of her life is noisy and sooty. The streets echo with the sound of pickup trucks and muscle cars roaring up nearby Argyle Street, trying to beat the stoplight at Third Avenue. Just a few blocks away, on the old forty-foot saw carriage at Somass Division A Mill, the head rig noisily bites into giant cedar logs. At the B Mill, smaller logs pass through the gang saw, and at the shingle mill, short chunks of cedar are mechanically slammed back and forth across a razor-sharp splitting blade, trimmed into uniform slabs, and bundled up for sale across North America. And down at the Alberni Foundry, two blocks north, the son of the foundry owner is sharing an end-of-day drink with his father and a few associates before closing up shop and setting out along Second Avenue in his blue Chevy Blazer.

  At one time, the Port Alberni waterfront was dotted with giant cone-shaped boilers known as beehive burners, used for burning off the wet waste wood, mostly bark, known as hog fuel. By 1977, MacMillan Bloedel was burning much of that hog fuel to generate electricity for its mills. A large boiler system at Alberni Pacific Division (APD), south of Argyle Street, provided power for both itself and for the Alply plywood mill farther down the shore. APD milled whitewoods, mainly hemlock and balsam fir. The clean chips produced in the milling process were shipped across town to make paper or trucked up to a storage dump located in the hills overlooking the Alberni Inlet.