The Bulldog and the Helix Page 4
After giving his statement, Dhillon turned over his Blazer to the investigators for several hours. They searched the vehicle thoroughly, took fingerprints, and vacuumed up all manner of soil, particles, and fibres, and sent everything off to the Crime Detection Laboratory in Vancouver. It was now July 15, three months after Carolyn’s murder.
“We also took the vacuum cleaner bag out of their home because, if he had gone home and vacuumed out his car, we might find something,” Blair said. “I even took him down to Victoria for a polygraph. I was surprised he agreed. But at the time, they said the results were inconclusive.”
The next year, Sergeant Blair transferred out to take over as detachment commander in Fort Nelson in northeastern BC. He said it was difficult to leave Port Alberni with the Carolyn Lee case unsolved. “Things were pretty much stalled. We were pretty sure we had the right guy, but then we got the polygraph results, and we weren’t so sure,” he said. “But I’m quite thoroughly convinced we did a reasonably good job with the resources we had available. Nowadays, with this type of case, they wheel in a command post and a dozen senior guys. In those days, it fell to the local members, with some outside help, such as the helicopter and the dive team that came in. Would [the investigation] have been more efficient if [the crime] had happened years later? Who knows? I can’t see that we made any mistakes, but we didn’t get any really big breaks, either.”
While Dhillon had emerged as the main suspect, investigators interviewed all known sex offenders and even asked employers to identify employees who were absent from work on the afternoon of the abduction. Each was subsequently interviewed. Employers were also asked to provide the names of any men who were in town looking for work, and investigators scrutinized the guest lists of all local hotels and motels.
As Dan Smith continued to review the Lee case files, he noted that Blair’s replacement at the Port Alberni GIS, Sergeant Bob Martin, would be at the helm when the Carolyn Lee investigation moved into its next, equally frustrating phase, when Dhillon was to be charged in two unrelated sexual assault complaints and when his ex-wife made a statement to police. Now, eleven years after the crime and confronted with a mountain of paperwork in the case file, Dan Smith continued to look for something to re-energize the investigation.
“There was just no chance of reading everything in the file. They were just sequential papers, filed starting on day one,” he said. The files had not been collated or organized by topic or by the names of the witnesses interviewed. They had merely been entered in the order they were received, then stamped and dated. Smith knew if he was going to find a game-changer, it was not going to jump out of the mass of documents accumulated in the Carolyn Lee file cabinet.
“But there was one exception, and that was the exhibits that were seized and the lab analysis. They were two separate sub-files.” Of particular interest was the vacuum cleaner bag that had been used when examining the Blazer. Perhaps there was something in that bag, some trace material, that had not been detected in the 1977 lab analysis. Perhaps there was some new forensic process that had come along in the past decade.
ON APRIL 18, 1977, three days after Carolyn Lee’s body was found, Dorothy Clark, an analyst in the hair and fibre section of the forensic lab in Vancouver, received a number of exhibits, including items of Carolyn Lee’s clothing and samples of her hair (head and pubic). Later Clark was sent Dhillon’s hair samples (head and pubic). She subsequently concluded that a pubic hair found on Carolyn’s sweater belonged to neither the victim nor the suspect. Similarly, a number of scalp hairs found on her clothing were also foreign to both. They were described as “light in colouring and Caucasian in origin.”
Clark also examined a footprint left on Carolyn’s jacket. The impression was of a Vibram sole typical of a work boot. While the impression was insufficient to identify a specific boot, the granular residue left in the footprint was to prove critical in restarting the investigation. Clark’s colleague, serologist David O’Keefe, received the swabs taken from the victim (Exhibits 21 and 24). On May 3, he would receive the clothing items first examined by his hair and fibre analyst colleague. O’Keefe was able to identify human semen and spermatozoa in Exhibit 21. All exhibits were analyzed for the presence of blood, and all proved negative, except for one soil sample and the jacket. Both samples were consistent with the victim’s blood.
Three months later, Clark received two vacuum cleaner bags and their contents. One had been collected at the Dhillon home on April 26, and the other was taken from Dhillon’s Blazer on the same day. Clark examined the human scalp hair found in both vacuum bags but was unable to find any scalp or pubic hairs that matched the victim. The presence of pubic and scalp hairs unrelated to the victim or the accused suggested that there was a second, Caucasian suspect involved in the assault and killing. Over the next twelve years, two suspects would emerge, and there were sufficient grounds to obtain hair samples from the two, who were identified only by initials.
In August 1981, hair and fibre analyst Julian Ann Graham received scalp and pubic hair samples taken from one individual, PRK. Graham compared them to the pubic hair found on Carolyn Lee’s sweater and scalp hairs found on her leotards, ski jacket, and a blanket and subsequently concluded that PRK’s known hairs were not consistent with the questioned hairs. In November 1989, after Dan Smith inherited the case, Graham would reach a similar conclusion following examination of known hair samples collected from another individual, TG.
NEW WITNESS STATEMENT
Continuing through the files, Dan Smith discovered that Dhillon’s partner, Sharon McLeod, had made a statement to police on November 23, 1983, fully six years after the crime, following her separation from Dhillon. On November 16, 1998, she testified that, when investigators first came to her home to talk to Dhillon, she didn’t pay much attention. Later, when the RCMP arrived with a search warrant, she was home alone. She told the court that she had stood outside the home while investigators conducted the search, and in fact, police never interviewed her.
When McLeod married Dhillon in 1981, she was well aware that he was still a person of interest in the killing of Carolyn Lee, and she knew he was “a drinker and a womanizer,” but she didn’t believe the police accusation that he was a murderer. “Looking back,” Blair said in hindsight, “I’m pretty convinced that if we had interviewed her, she wouldn’t have given us anything.”
But in 1983, McLeod told Sergeant Bob Martin that, on the night of the killing, she made dinner at six and waited for Dhillon to come home from work. When he didn’t show up by 6:30, she drove down to the foundry to see if he was still there. When she saw the foundry was locked up for the night, she “tried a few nearby bars” but was unable to locate him, and she returned home within fifteen minutes. She told police that she then phoned “a few bars” but couldn’t remember specifically calling the Beaufort Hotel, where Dhillon told Blair he’d been.
McLeod’s testimony at the trial in 1998, if it is accurate, suggests that Dhillon chose the most exposed route out of town, turning onto Third Avenue at the edge of the uptown business district with a captive twelve-year-old girl in the back seat. She had told police that, at about 7:00 PM, she was looking out her east-facing kitchen window when she saw Dhillon pass by in the Blazer, heading south toward the Ship Creek Road junction. This had not been part of her original statement in 1983. From their house on the corner of Bruce Street and Second Avenue, she would have a reasonably good view of the intersection at Third Avenue. When Dhillon did not make the right turn onto Bruce, McLeod said she assumed he had driven one block further to Anne’s Grocery to buy cigarettes. He didn’t get home until 7:30.
While Dhillon told Blair that he’d run his Blazer through the free car wash at Somass Division, according to McLeod, when he returned home that night, the vehicle was caked with mud and the wheel wells were jammed with sticks and brush. Dhillon was “not friendly,” and he demanded that she wash the truck. Sergeant Blair said the Blazer was clean when his crew went thro
ugh it on April 26. Had Dhillon driven the vehicle on the Cox Lake dirt road, it would have needed more than a quick pass through the car wash to get rid of the mud. “I went through that car wash many times in police cars,” said Blair. “All it did was knock the dust off the roof and sides. It didn’t spray under the car or blast out the wheel wells.” The Blazer had definitely been washed by hand, and the wheel wells and undercarriage were clean when police examined the vehicle.
McLeod later testified that she frequently washed Dhillon’s truck by hand, and that on the night of the murder, the mud on the truck did not look like dirt from the foundry. She thought he must have been out four-wheeling in the short interval between when she saw him drive by at about seven and half an hour later when he pulled into the driveway, acting surly. McLeod told police she’d found a blue, bow-shaped barrette and an earring with a wire hook in the Blazer that night, but neither, on further investigation, had belonged Carolyn Lee.
While investigators sought to put together a solid case against Dhillon based on McLeod’s statement in 1983, the suspect found himself implicated in a pair of unrelated sexual assaults involving adult women. As a result of one of the complaints, which alleged that on February 12, 1984, Dhillon had assaulted a fifty-four-year-old woman, he was charged with one count of sexual assault and one count of buggery under the Criminal Code of the day. Dhillon was not formally charged until July 3, however. By that time, he had been taken into custody as a result of another sexual assault allegation filed on June 28 by a thirty-six-year-old woman. Dhillon was charged on both complaints and was set to appear for a preliminary hearing on August 3, 1984.
BUT THE DHILLON investigation had not gone unnoticed in the community. In an unsourced article on April 19, boxed under a headline “No Arrest in Murder,” Port Alberni RCMP told the public there was no arrest in sight for the Carolyn Lee murder. “The streets are ripe with rumours, the police confirmed, but the Times was told, ‘there is no evidence to make an arrest.’”
According to the “rumours,” it was widely understood that Dhillon was a prime suspect in the investigation, and the first set of assault allegations had raised hopes that the case, now seven years old, would be broken. What was not mentioned was that, shortly after Sharon McLeod made her statement to police, Dhillon submitted to a second polygraph test, which was again determined to be “inconclusive.” But by April, the RCMP had decided to quash expectations.
“The Times story is prompted by the public concern in the latest series of rumours and is published in the interest of quieting inaccurate speculation that is alive in the community and not fuelling more,” the article concluded. In hopes of encouraging any previously reluctant witnesses to come forward, the Carolyn Lee Memorial Committee reissued the reward it had offered at the time of the crime. The newly reissued reward totalled $11,000 and was valid through May 31, 1985. In the Times, Carolyn Lee Memorial Committee spokesman Ramon (Ray) Kwok observed: “There has been a lot of talk around town about what is happening,” adding his hopes that the reward might encourage someone to come forward with more information.
THE FOOTPRINT
Despite the statement from Dhillon’s estranged wife and the wave of rumours it generated—enough to trigger the re-issuing of the reward—the Crown was not satisfied that it had enough evidence to make a case, especially after the 1984 sexual assault charges were dismissed by the court. But when looking through the lab analysis reports, Smith believed he had found a window to reopen the investigation. Reviewing the case, Smith knew that Dhillon was considered a “strong subject of interest” who’d originally been eliminated through polygraph examination. Later, however, the polygraph results had been re-examined and deemed “inconclusive.” Dhillon had tires on his vehicle that were the same size, shape, and tread pattern as the ones that made the tracks at the crime scene.
But what stuck in Smith’s mind was the fact that Dhillon worked in a foundry. Smith, who had schooled himself in the making of firearms and ammunition, including the working and casting of metals, was convinced that Dhillon must have left trace materials at the crime scene that were unique to a working foundry. “I was wondering if metals that were common in a foundry could be found in the footprint that was left on the back of Carolyn’s jacket. The suspect, when he killed her, stepped on the back of her jacket.”
Going through the records from the forensic lab in Vancouver, Smith discovered that the soil sample had not been analyzed specifically for metal content. Back in 1977, the RCMP chemist, Brian Richardson, had analyzed the soil samples, and while he did not look for nor analyze any metal content, he did reach several salient conclusions. First, the soil found in the footprint (Exhibit 18) contained “one small spherical particle that appeared to be metal.” The soil from the jacket was of a different composition from the soil underneath the victim’s body and the soil from the nearby roadside. And none of the soil samples except Exhibit 18 contained any spherical objects.
Smith discovered that there was still an uncontaminated sample of the footprint soil among the physical exhibits. As he transitioned into his new role in the Port Alberni GIS, Smith waited for an opportunity to find out whether there were any trace metals in the fatal footprint that were specific to a foundry. He telephoned analyst Tony Fung at the Vancouver lab and explained that he wanted a detailed spectrographic analysis of soil in relation to an unsolved eleven-year-old murder investigation in Port Alberni, specifically to identify cast-off metals from a foundry.
Fung said the best he could do was to compare the soil from the footprint with a sample of soil taken from the foundry. There were two problems with that suggestion. First, eleven years had elapsed since the crime, and unless Alberni Foundry was using the same equipment to make the same products with the exact same processes, the soil at the foundry might no longer contain the same metals. The second problem was more serious: without probable cause, Smith would be unable to obtain a warrant in order to take a soil sample. Without a warrant, any evidence he collected would be thrown out of court. But Smith had the feeling that he could match the suspect to the crime scene—if he could get a sample of soil from the grounds of the foundry. If the analysis proved positive, he could come back with a warrant in the future. So, one night in late 1989, he jumped the fence at the foundry and scooped up some soil samples.
Smith sent the samples to Tony Fung in Vancouver and waited. Fung reported that he was unable to make any conclusions based on the samples Smith had provided and the 1977 crime scene exhibits. In particular, the soil sample taken from the footprint on Carolyn’s jacket was too small to undertake a definitive analysis. “They told me it was ‘of no investigative value at all,’” Smith said.
For the moment, Smith’s hopes of a breakthrough based on the footprint soil were dashed. But by this time, officials at the Major Crimes Unit in Vancouver were following his efforts with great interest. And then he discovered a whole new realm of forensic science and realized that it could be the game-changer he had been looking for.
Canada Enters the DNA Age
IT WAS DURING a visit to the dentist, shortly after he’d joined the GIS in Port Alberni, that Dan Smith experienced a revelation—one that he first shared with documentary filmmaker Jerry Thompson for his Witness episode, “The Gene Squad,” of 1989.
Smith picked up a copy of Equinox magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. “And in this magazine there was an article about deoxyribonucleic acid,” or DNA. Smith was reasonably well versed in the basics of genetics and how inherited characteristics are passed down through the generations. What he discovered in the article was that at the University of Leicester in England, scientists had learned how to interpret selected portions of a cell’s DNA structure to create a genetic “fingerprint” of an individual organism. This DNA fingerprint could be used in any number of applications, Smith learned. By comparing DNA profiles of different individuals, it would be possible to determine if they were genetically related. Those snippets of deoxyribonucleic acid at
key locations (called loci) on the DNA helix were the biochemical equivalent of the lines and arrows and boxes on a family tree. And then the author focussed on the forensic applications of the new science. Smith took particular note: “The article discussed . . . how DNA had been used, on one occasion, to solve two murders in England.”
On January 22, 1989, an English court had convicted twenty-seven-year-old bakery worker Colin Pitchfork on two counts of murder in the deaths of two fifteen-year-old women, Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. His arrest came as the result of a massive DNA manhunt in which police took blood and saliva samples from nearly five thousand men and compared their DNA profiles with that of the killer. The Pitchfork case later became the basis of a bestselling book by American crime writer Joseph Wambaugh, titled The Blooding, and first published on February 1, 1989.
While the Equinox article had just scratched the surface of the investigation, it was enough to convince Smith that DNA could help solve the Carolyn Lee murder. One of the major sources in the article was Dr. James (Rex) Ferris, then regarded as one of the world’s top experts in the DNA field. He was also based in Canada.
Smith decided to take a bold step. “I located Dr. Ferris. No one had told me I couldn’t reach out for whatever I needed. I figured, I’m assigned a murder, I’m going to get on it,” Smith said. Smith apprised Ferris on the details of the Lee investigation since 1977 and told him the physical evidence that was available—specifically, the semen samples that had been taken from the victim.