The Bulldog and the Helix Read online

  The Kelowna forensic unit went over the entire crime scene, processing every shred of evidence available—except for a light bulb that the killer had unscrewed to darken the light over the door of the four-plex while committing the crime. According to conventional wisdom, a fingerprint deposited on the hot glass surface of a light bulb would burn off almost instantaneously. For that reason, the Kelowna Ident team hadn’t bothered to dust it for fingerprints. They had a number of surfaces to process, and it was a particularly horrific crime scene.

  But for the young investigator’s sergeant, Bob O’Connor, that only intensified the need to search for every possible piece of evidence to catch the killer. And that meant throwing conventional wisdom out the window. First, he demanded that the Ident team dust the light bulb. “They checked it, and it had Harvey’s fingerprint.”

  In the course of the attack, investigators also discovered that the suspect had cut the telephone cord with a knife. If investigators could match the cut marks on the copper wire of the telephone cord to one specific knife, it would double the chances of convicting the killer. O’Connor sent the phone cord to the RCMP crime lab for analysis of the cut marks on the telephone cord. A firearms and toolmarks specialist determined that the knife had been sharpened with a particular type of stone that left characteristic striations on the blade.

  Djos and his Kelowna RCMP colleagues eventually took down Andres at gunpoint in the parking lot of a local grocery story, but he hadn’t yet been identified as the suspect in the Baker killing. The arrest was based on allegations that he had planted eight sticks of dynamite in the car of a detective from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. But at the time of his arrest, the biker was carrying a buck knife. When the fingerprint taken from the light bulb implicated Andres in the Baker homicide, O’Connor had Kelowna RCMP send the toolmarks specialist to the buck knife factory in Idaho to help with the analysis. Thus informed, the lab was able to match the striations on Andre’s buck knife to the cut marks on Baker’s telephone cord. On November 7, 1977, while Port Alberni investigators were still grappling with the Carolyn Lee investigation, Andres was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. In part as the result of his role in the high-profile arrest, Djos was awarded the Silver Jubilee Award.

  Andres, however, later managed to escape from the Kamloops Regional Centre while awaiting trial on the Baker homicide, but he was recaptured. Following his sentencing, Andres escaped twice from the maximum-security penitentiary in Edmonton, and both times he was recaptured. During a severe snowstorm on March 12, 1981, he hid in a dumpster and made his getaway in a garbage truck. He was returned to prison after shooting it out with Calgary police on April 19. One year later, almost to the day, on March 11, 1982, Andres slipped out of the same institution with four other inmates; on July 6, he was caught after taking four slugs from Saskatoon police.

  It was long suspected that Andres was responsible for the rape and murder of seventeen-year-old Shirley Ann Johnston, on May 23, 1982, following his second escape from prison. According to investigators, Andres had barricaded her in a closet and set the house on fire. She died of asphyxiation. In an echo of the Carolyn Lee case, the Crown did not have enough credible evidence to bring Andres to trial until the introduction of forensic DNA and the reopening of unsolved homicides in the mid-1990s. The Port Alberni cold case, in effect, kick-started a series of RCMP re-investigations dating back decades, and prosecutors learned valuable new lessons each time one of these landmark cases played out in the courts. The murder of Shirley Ann Johnston by Harvey Harold Andres would become Canada’s second cold case solved by using the latest in forensic DNA analysis.

  Dale Djos was also involved in a high-profile domestic terrorism case. On May 25, 1986, four Canadian Sikh extremists attempted to assassinate India’s Minister of State for Punjab, Malkiat Singh Sidhu, on a dirt road near Gold River on Vancouver Island. Based on wiretap evidence obtained by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Dale Djos and his Campbell River colleagues subsequently arrested four suspects. They were convicted at trial in February 1987 and sentenced to twenty years in custody. It was Canada’s first successful prosecution for domestic terrorism. Later that year, however, the conviction was overturned when it was ruled that the wiretap from CSIS had been based on affidavits from an unreliable witness. The error cost CSIS director Ted Finn his job, but the convictions were later upheld when Ottawa appealed.

  The Crown appeal came in June 1990. By that time, Djos had been head of Port Alberni GIS for a full year. But Djos needed no reminder that major cases have a tendency to play out over a number of years and that the investigating officers may be long gone from the jurisdiction as a case proceeds through the courts.

  WHEN DJOS ARRIVED in Port Alberni in 1989, he found out that one of his investigators had locked on to a long-unsolved killing of a twelve-year-old girl, and he wasn’t about to let go. “Shortly after I arrived, we were going over some unsolved files. That’s pretty standard: you see what outstanding major files there are, and you can’t get any more major than the murder of a young child. So you go through the files, looking for new ideas, seeing what can be done.”

  When Djos discovered the steps that Smith had already undertaken, including incorporating DNA forensics into the long-stalled investigation, he realized that the quiet, self-effacing corporal had the skills and the determination to bring Carolyn’s killer to justice no matter how long it took. What Smith and Djos did not fully realize was that the E Division Serious Crimes Unit had also locked on to the case.

  Slow Progress in Boomtown

  WHEN CAROLYN LEE was murdered in 1977, the city was at the apex of its economic boom. The foundry operated by the Dhillon family supported the rise of industry in Port Alberni, making metal castings for industrial equipment. But the city did not remain long at the top of the economic heap, and over the twenty years of the Lee investigation, the city continued to follow a path of dynamic transformation and had evolved into a much different town by the time of the next case in which DNA played a key role.

  Ten years earlier, in 1967, the twin cities of Alberni and Port Alberni had merged. Contrary to popular belief, the merger was not driven by the massive destruction caused by the Good Friday tsunami of 1964. For residents in the City of Alberni, the merger was prompted more by the fear of becoming the poor cousins of their neighbours to the south, the City of Port Alberni. Alberni had a very limited business district and relied mostly on residential tax, while Port Alberni not only benefited from the taxes of the sawmill, but that sawmill employed a large portion of both populations.

  In 1935, the forestry company Bloedel, Stewart & Welch Ltd. received a twenty-year fixed tax assessment from the City of Port Alberni to build and develop the Somass Division plant on the waterfront. Ten years later, in 1945, they approached the city for a similar agreement to build a pulp and paper mill. The pulp mill complex, known as Alpulp, was built on the historic site of a Tseshaht First Nation village called Lupsi Cupsi. The tax break was to run through 1965, at which time the City of Port Alberni would then receive the full tax benefit from both operations. In 1951 Bloedel, Stewart & Welch merged with H.R. MacMillan to become the single entity known as MacMillan Bloedel.

  The tsunami that surged through the upper Alberni Inlet on March 28, 1964, meanwhile, forced the two communities to pool resources, illustrating the value of a merger. On the night of March 27, a magnitude 9.2 megathrust earthquake caused massive destruction in Anchorage, Alaska. Fifteen people died as a direct result of earthquake damage, while another 106 died as the result of tsunamis that struck the coast from Alaska to California.

  There were no deaths in Port Alberni, but it was close. Shortly after midnight, after the main shock wave passed Barkley Sound, a series of three massive waves surged northward up the narrow Alberni Inlet. When the initial warning was issued, the city manager of Alberni, Jim Sawyer, took up his post at the old city hall at the foot of Johnston Road. When the water suddenly began t
o rise for a second time, he hurriedly jumped in his car and drove to higher ground. He was standing on the pump island of a nearby gas station when the power suddenly went out and the five massive boilers at the nearby pulp mill began to shriek in an emergency shutdown.

  Unable to contact the city work superintendent, Sawyer stood in the dark as the massive second surge of water swept away log booms, stacks of lumber, dozens of motor vehicles, and even houses. The damage was horrific, and the two rival cities had to cooperate to recover from the immediate damage. But as Sawyer explained, the amalgamation process actually flowed from that aggressive, long-term tax incentive program by the City of Port Alberni to attract major milling and processing operations onto the waterfront. By the time of the tsunami in 1964, that policy was about to bear fruit in a big way, and the merger process itself was already underway. Citizens on both sides soon voted to amalgamate, and the combined City of Port Alberni became official in 1967.

  BY 1980, HOWEVER, after decades of prosperity, Port Alberni’s economy was in serious trouble. In that year, unionized workers at MacMillan Bloedel had undertaken a protracted strike—and won. For years, old-time members of the union (International Woodworkers of America) spoke with pride about how they “beat the company.” But it was a pyrrhic victory. Almost as soon as the new contract came into effect, the company began to downsize and shed jobs. The community had already undertaken a round of school closures across the Alberni Valley as families moved out and the school population shrank.

  At the time of the Lee murder in 1977, MacMillan Bloedel’s Somass Division was running flat out. The A Mill had three shifts of workers; B Mill ran three shifts; and the shingle mill had two shifts. Three planers and a remanufacturing plant all ran three shifts. But through the 1980s, the company made major changes to its waterfront operations, installing more efficient (and less labour-intensive) milling machinery and shutting down first the shingle mill and, subsequently, the plywood mill.

  MacMillan Bloedel and other wood processors had begun to rethink how they would utilize their timber stock. The concept, known as linear programming, was the optimization of available log stock. Up until that point, the plywood plant consumed all of the available large fir stock. But as it turned out, those big clear-grain logs would get a higher return by being processed into lumber than by peeling them for plywood. The plywood mill shut down, and to this day, those big logs continue to travel by road to the town of Chemainus, about 117 kilometres east across Vancouver Island.

  Facing what proved to be a temporary downturn in the world price of plywood, MacMillan Bloedel shut down its Alply operation in 1991. The sprawling plywood mill had opened in January 1942 to supply the Allied war effort and was fed with large old-growth Douglas fir logs called peelers. By the 1990s, the supply of high-quality peelers was declining, and the environmental movement, in concert with several Indigenous groups, had already begun targeting BC forest operations.

  In 1993, MacMillan Bloedel also made a decision to close down the two kraft pulp lines at the Alpulp operation on the mouth of the Somass River, throwing yet another two hundred people out of work. On a positive note, however, closing the kraft operation at one stroke eliminated the characteristic omnipresent sulphur smell common to most pulp mill towns, and the effect on water quality in Alberni Inlet was almost immediate. For the people of this once-booming community, it was one more uneasy trade-off.

  In the mid-1950s, MacMillan Bloedel had installed a weir at the outlet of nearby Sproat Lake, effectively raising the water level more than three metres. Along with the weir, the company installed a huge aboveground waterline to feed clean water to the massive boilers at the paper mill. At the same time, a dam was installed on the Stamp River just below Great Central Lake, about sixteen kilometres north of the city, to hold back water through the dry season. By means of controlled water releases, the company maintained the flow of fresh water into the Somass River Estuary through the summer to flush out the pulp mill effluent.

  The Stamp River and Sproat River join to form the Somass River. An unintended but welcome side effect of raising the water levels in both lakes was that it created a large amount of new spawning habitat for sockeye salmon. By the 1990s, an entirely new recreational sockeye salmon fishery had established itself on Alberni Inlet. During the same time period, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans had built up a hatchery complex on Robertson Creek, which flows into Great Central Lake. The Robertson Creek Hatchery became the main source of Chinook salmon on Alberni Inlet, with a secondary focus on Coho salmon and steelhead trout.

  All told, by the 1990s, the Somass River flowing into Port Alberni harbour had become BC’s fourth-largest salmon-producing stream. But even as new technology scrubbed the air clean of soot and fly ash, and the water in the harbour went from hazy brown to clean enough to swim in, the visible environmental improvements were outweighed by the loss of well-paying union jobs. You could hang out your laundry without worrying about collecting a layer of airborne crud, but it was small comfort if you were out of work.

  ONE SOOT-PRODUCING OPERATION not directly related to the forest industry was forced to move from the Lower Third Avenue area. By 1990, MacMillan Bloedel had informed Alberni Foundry owners, the Dhillon family, that they were cancelling the lease on their Third Avenue property adjacent to Somass Division.

  At first, the owners were confident that they would be able to relocate the operation to a new city-owned industrial park on Tebo Road. The new development was located on the south side of Johnston Road, just blocks from Alberni Mall. That June, the city council approved the move. Central to the relocation was the terms of the air emission permit that had been issued in 1980. The discharge permit was limited to four hours per week. The maximum allowable discharge rate for particulates during that four-hour period was 14.175 grams per second, to a maximum of 19.5 kilograms per week, and according to the city engineer’s report, the foundry had stayed within that limit since testing began in 1980. But after receiving approval by the city in June that year, the move was shot down by the provincial Ministry of the Environment, based on the projected level of emissions and because it was too close to a residential area.

  Unable to find a suitable location within the City of Port Alberni, the Dhillon family located a site just beyond city limits in the Cherry Creek electoral area. In early 1992, the Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District approved the permits required to move the foundry

  SERIOUS CRIMES UNIT JOINS THE TEAM

  In 1991, when Dan Bond, a seasoned RCMP officer, arrived in the Serious Crimes Unit at RCMP headquarters in Vancouver, Wade Blizard was one of the corporals. The unit that Bond joined comprised four constables, four corporals, two sergeants and one inspector-in-charge. Blizard had by now made contact with Port Alberni’s Dan Smith and Dale Djos after monitoring Smith’s activity on the Carolyn Lee C-237 files. “At the time, the Serious Crimes Unit was evolving from a review and advisory role,” Bond said. “It had become clear that we had to become more than that. We had to be able to provide support.” The role of Serious Crimes was to provide assistance to detachments outside the Lower Mainland. Bond emphasized that Serious Crimes members went in to those small detachments to bolster local investigators, not to assume conduct of a case. They would assist with interviews and interrogations, coordinate case files, and write requests for warrants. And if any covert operations or surveillance were required, those outside members were not identifiable as local cops.

  The Carolyn Lee case demonstrated the need for the RCMP to expand its capability for solving historic crimes. In 1991, Bond and Blizard made a road trip to Port Alberni to perform a file review and to map out a strategy for obtaining a search warrant and for subjecting the crime scene samples to DNA analysis. “My role was to do an exhibit flow chart so it could be presented in a court of law,” Bond said. “Some exhibits only change hands between investigators one or two times. Some might change hands forty or fifty times—it all has to be documented.”

  WHEN
THE NEW foundry site in Cherry Creek District was approved in 1992, Gurmit Dhillon was listed as a caretaker at the Second Avenue plant, living in a trailer on the property. He was in police custody on a sexual assault allegation when Corporal Dan Smith asked him for a sample of his blood. According to the Crown, an Indigenous woman named Jesse Jack told police that Dhillon had, in the course of assaulting her, threatened her by telling her he had killed Carolyn Lee. The case was later dismissed on the grounds that the victim was extremely intoxicated at the time of the incident and would be an unreliable witness. It was another frustrating episode for Port Alberni police, who believed Dhillon had developed a habit of selecting extremely vulnerable women for his assaults.

  When Smith first approached Dhillon for the blood sample, Dhillon told the investigator that he would contact his lawyer and get back to him. After receiving no reply, Smith returned to make a second request, which was also ignored. Once Dhillon was released from custody, the Serious Crimes Unit deployed four members to Port Alberni to maintain surveillance on Dhillon prior to conducting a search of his trailer. It was critical to establish that Dhillon was the sole occupant of the trailer, otherwise any cast-off DNA evidence would be subject to challenge in court.

  Maintaining surveillance on a trailer plunked down next to a working foundry in a high-traffic industrial area posed some challenges for the Vancouver team, but the crew monitored Dhillon’s movements and work habits for several weeks while awaiting the warrant. Then, on March 6, 1992, Wade Blizard and Dan Bond came to Port Alberni armed with a search warrant. Dhillon was back home in the trailer, and the gate was locked when Smith, Djos, Blizard, and Bond arrived.