The Bulldog and the Helix Page 8

  According to police, on the morning of the killing, Tommy George had moments earlier fled a nearby home in an agitated state. Defence counsel Adrian Brooks would later maintain that his client had been consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms just prior to the crime, rendering him incapable of forming criminal intent to commit murder. Investigators were unable to establish any previous contact between the agitated young man and the unsuspecting senior. For reasons never explained, George threw the elderly man to the sidewalk and smashed in his skull, striking him multiple blows with a large rock. He then rolled the body down a nearby embankment on the Coal Creek gully. Neighbours soon discovered Evenson’s body, and George was apprehended the next day.

  “We were on him,” said Djos. “We knew he had been on the trail, and we got on him right away.” But while a quick arrest meant they could dial back the hunt, the often slow, methodical process of building a case had just begun. “You shift into prosecution mode,” Djos explained. “Evidence. Lab work. Autopsy reports. Do we have DNA evidence? All of these things have to be addressed. You have one chance to do the right thing, or you can lose the whole case.” In short, the room temperature drops, but the sense of urgency remains.

  Despite the early apprehension, the Tommy George case would spin out in the court system for the next six years, even as the investigation and prosecution into Port Alberni’s second murder of a young girl maintained its own slow but inexorable course.

  DNA WARRANT EXECUTED

  On March 8, 1996, based in part on the new evidence from Alice Lazorko, Dan Smith obtained a court-ordered blood sample from Dhillon through a DNA warrant issued under the new federal law. The sample, along with the original 1977 crime scene samples, was sent to the RCMP’s central forensic laboratory in Ottawa. By now, the Ottawa lab had made the transition to PCR analysis—although the Vancouver RCMP lab would continue to employ RFLP analysis well into the next year. This time, analyst Anne-Elizabeth Charland reported that the odds had now improved to one in thirty-eight thousand, based on a four-loci match on the 1977 samples.

  Once more, the results had improved, but it still wasn’t the sort of overwhelming odds that would convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But by now, Smith was growing more comfortable with DNA theory, and he had become convinced that, because the Genelex, Roche Biomedical, and RCMP labs had matched different gene sequences at different loci, the odds would multiply exponentially. Smith made his case to prosecutor Darrill Prevett, who subsequently located Dr. Ranajit Chakraborty, an expert in human population genetics, statistics, and demography, from the Human Genetics Center of the School of Public Health at the University of Texas. Prevett phoned Chakraborty to see if Smith’s theory was correct.

  “The doctor said, ‘The policeman is right. It’s called the ‘product rule’—assuming that all three DNA analyses are separate, that there is no overlap, and they are looking at different places on the DNA molecule, then you can indeed do the math.’” So Prevett sent all the data to Chakraborty in Texas. The scientist later reported that he determined that the aggregate of the three tests indicated a match of ten loci. Chakraborty estimated that the odds of such a match were between one in 151 million and one in 165 million for the Caucasian population, which includes people of Indian origin.

  While the investigators and scientists considered the strength of their DNA cold case against Gurmit Dhillon, Port Alberni was about to be thrown into the spotlight for an active DNA manhunt.

  Echoes of a Nightmare

  FOR RESIDENTS IN the Alberni Valley, the morning of August 1, 1996, followed a heartbreakingly familiar pattern. A pre-teen girl had vanished from plain sight, this time during a public event. Early that morning, those living in the South Port area heard the whop-whop-whop of the RCMP helicopter from the Courtenay Subdivision as it made repeated low-level passes over the Dry Creek gully adjacent to the Recreation Park sports complex.

  As a coroner with experience in homicide investigations and also mayor of Port Alberni, Gillian Trumper knew what that sound presaged. “I was at home when I heard the helicopters. I said to my husband, ‘They must be looking for something.’ Then I got the call.”

  In the parking lot outside the community arena, a search headquarters had already been set up, just blocks away from the Alberni Valley Times office. Reporter Karen Beck, whose eleven-year-old son, Gordon, knew the missing girl, attended the scene, and later accompanied members of the Alberni Valley Rescue Squad in one phase of the ground search in the gully.

  The missing child was Jessica States. She was eleven years old and lived in the immediate neighbourhood. That week, the city was hosting a fast-pitch tournament at Recreation Park. Jessica, a talented multi-sport athlete, was a familiar figure around the ballpark. With her light brown hair cropped short and her choice of clothes, Jessica was often mistaken for a boy. Described as being “very energetic and lively,” she was also possessed of a fiercely independent spirit, which her parents, Rob and Dianne, nurtured. As later revealed, both of those factors would play out tragically in the minutes leading up to her death.

  Karen Beck reported that Jessica had last been seen during a game between Quality Foods and the Southwind Brewers, which ended just before 9:00 PM. When Jessica failed to come home by 9:15, Rob and Dianne States began a frantic search in the area surrounding the ballpark. By 11:15, they contacted the RCMP, and in an echo of that spring night of April 14, 1977, police and volunteers launched a hasty search effort that ramped up progressively as word spread and pagers went off across the Alberni Valley.

  Complicating the picture was the fact that Jessica’s blue Super Cycle mountain bike was nowhere to be seen. Given her independent streak, searchers believed it was entirely possible she may have ridden away from the scene the previous evening, only to get into trouble elsewhere.

  CONSTABLE SHELLEY ARNFIELD was on the day watch on August 1. Arnfield had arrived in Port Alberni in May 1991 with her partner, RCMP dog handler Bruce McLellan. When the police chief looked at the five-foot-six Mountie with obvious scepticism, Arnfield knew she was going to have to prove that a female police officer could handle herself on the streets of a tough mill town.

  It didn’t take long. With five years of schooling in the same Prince George school of street policing as Dan Smith, Arnfield had already proven she could handle herself in a tight situation. With the endorsement of both Dan Smith and Dale Djos, she would eventually earn a slot in the GIS. “At first, I thought I would have to go in and break up a barroom brawl singlehanded in order to be taken seriously. But it didn’t happen. I just had to do my job.

  “I had only been on the section two weeks when I found out I was pregnant. So I went to Dan [Smith] and Dale [Djos] and said I was expecting. I thought they’d say, ‘See ya!’ But they said, ‘Congratulations. Lovely.’ They said if I was willing to do it, they had no problem with it.” Smith and Djos also cautioned her not to get into any potentially dangerous situations. “Of course, you never know when that is going to happen,” she added. For the next six months, Arnfield did stakeouts, surveillance, and, most effectively, tailed suspects. “Send the pregnant lady out,” she recalls them saying. “Nobody’s going to think she’s a cop.” She proved to be a valuable asset to the team.

  “I came in at seven in the morning [on the day after Jessica’s disappearance], and we’ve got a missing child. I got assigned to go with the helicopters. We flew around for hours, looking for the bicycle.” It was slim chance, but it was one of the few options available for a wide air search. But the terrain wasn’t promising, since the starting point at the ball field was on the edge of dense bush. Arnfield said the searchers were not using any high-tech tools like Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) to detect the presence of heat (such as emanates from a body).

  The bicycle proved to be a red herring. At 11:30 that morning, the bike was located in a storage room at the park, where the grounds-keeper had placed it the night before after finding it in the picnic area on the boulevard across the street fro
m the ballpark. “When we came down for a bathroom break . . . that’s when we knew that her bike had been found,” Arnfield said. “We didn’t go back up.”

  Beck, the Times reporter, had spent part of that morning with Jessica’s parents, Rob and Dianne States, who by then were operating in a daze. “Will you put something in the paper for me? Something big enough that it can be seen?” Dianne tearfully asked Beck. And at that moment, she handed Beck the iconic school photograph that would haunt the pages of BC newspapers for the next five years.

  The face that grinned back in the picture was quintessential tomboy, a T-shirt with just the eyes and ears of a cartoon wolf visible above the bottom of the frame. Had her life not ended so early and so tragically, one could almost envision, nearly twenty years later, Dianne States brandishing a faded photo to her grown daughter, affectionately noting, “You were a handful!”

  Dry Creek Park was far from a foreboding place that parents told their children to stay out of. It was used as a living classroom for Port Alberni schoolchildren, and walkers used it as a shortcut. The civic horseshoe-pitch grounds are located across a lane from the campground site. But this is no manicured city playground. In some spots, especially in the steepest stretch of the gully near Ninth Avenue, a few steps off the walking trail takes you into thick brush. That was the terrain that search and rescue volunteers had to contend with as the first day of the search wore on.

  WHEN BECK DASHED back to her desk to write the day’s lead story, her newsroom colleagues at the Alberni Valley Times, including me, maintained a presence at the search headquarters, cycling through until Beck could resume her lead role. She arrived back at the scene in time to join a shoulder-to-shoulder grid search down the ravine.

  In the summer of 1996, the Times reporters processed and printed their own photos in a black-and-white darkroom. Each morning, one reporter would take on darkroom duty, developing negatives and printing photos for production. Darkroom duty also included loading the refillable film cassettes with bulk Kodak Tri-X Pan 400 film. One could load up to thirty-six frames for shooting sports with a motor drive or as few as a dozen for a quick shoot, but on average, the reloader put twenty-four turns on the hand crank with a few frames on either side for leader. But unless you reloaded and marked your own rolls, you could never be completely certain where your frame-counter was going to stop dead. And those final two or three frames were probably useless—exposed to room light during the reloading process. If you had flown back to the office on a hot deadline, churned out your top-of-page-one story, grabbed whatever rolls of film were sitting on the darkroom counter with leaders sticking out of them, and rushed back to the scene of the action, you were taking your chances.

  Beck descended the hill with the searchers, snapping frames as she went. In these days of digital photography, it is sometimes hard to remember that right through to the end of the twentieth century, there was no instant replay on the camera, so when you found yourself in challenging light conditions, you shot lots of frames, bracketing your exposure times, and hoped that at least one shot would turn out. For a news photographer, it couldn’t get much more challenging than shooting through dense brush in a steep gully, three hours past high noon on a midsummer day. Shortly before 2:00 PM, the frame advancer stopped dead on the last roll of film in Beck’s camera bag. Frustrated, Beck rushed back up the hill to see if she could find another roll of film in her car or if another Times reporter was on station at the search headquarters. She had just reached the parking lot when she heard shouting from the searchers in the gully.

  The area had been traversed by searchers many times already. But at this stage, Alberni Valley Rescue Squad members were conducting a slow, methodical, metre-by-metre probe of the bush adjacent to the trail. At about 2:05 PM, while climbing over a log, Rescue Squad member Stephen Adams noticed some strips of bark that had been freshly peeled from a nearby tree. Adams flipped one piece of bark off the pile and saw something pale and white underneath. The body of Jessica States had been deliberately buried under a mound of bark and forest debris. “If I hadn’t moved the bark, I would have walked past it completely,” Adams would later testify at trial.

  Similar to the Carolyn Lee case, Jessica’s body was discovered, relatively quickly, almost by chance. Dale Djos noted that, had Lyle Price not conducted a sweeping search of his farm, and had he not spotted the tire tracks that shouldn’t have been there, Carolyn’s body may have remained exposed to the elements (and scavenging animals) for months. Had Price not followed his instincts and avoided close contact with the crime scene, critical evidence may have been compromised. The discovery could well have fallen to a party of teens descending on the site for a summer drinking party.

  In Jessica’s case, the murder scene was just a short hike from both the ballpark and the campsite. Djos said it was fortunate that it was a trained search and rescue volunteer who first located the body. He acknowledged that deploying a civilian team in an active crime search does present hazards, especially when the suspect is still at large. “When you go into it, the search is (hopefully) for a sick or injured person, even when you strongly suspect this is a homicide,” he said. The Alberni Valley Rescue Squad was recognized as an effective unit with solid training, unlikely to trample over a potential crime scene. “You had confidence that, if they found something, they would . . . stop immediately and report it. Which is exactly what they did.”

  Constable Arnfield recalled that while the discovery of the body was horrifying, it was not unexpected. “Everybody had a bad feeling. [RCMP dispatcher] Carol Corder took the call the night before, when the Stateses called her in as missing. And Carol has always said, ‘I knew, as soon as I took that call, that . . .’”

  PARALLELS

  Dale Djos assumed the role of lead investigator. Despite the number of high-profile investigations on his resumé, the sheer violence of the killing still haunts him. (And two decades later, the coroner, Gillian Trumper, is still visibly reluctant to discuss what she witnessed at the murder scene.)

  As lead investigator, Djos was required to manage a growing team of investigators, to meet, comfort, and at the same time obtain evidence from distraught parents and family, and to act as the detachment spokesperson for a legion of local, regional, and, soon enough, national media. “Scene control is one of the most important [priorities], right off the bat,” Djos said. “Having one person who documents every person coming and going at that scene. Otherwise, you can get all kinds of contamination.” Even during the heat of an active investigation, chain of evidence is paramount. “Every item of physical evidence, when it moves, is documented. And a homicide investigation can produce hundreds of items of evidence. Each one must be accounted for at all stages of the investigation.”

  Constable Terry Horrocks was appointed scene manager. Horrocks visited the Dry Creek campsite and recorded every person who had been staying at the site, as well as the physical location of their tents or campers. Constable Todd Robertson was designated to identify all of the ballplayers from the tournament and to request that they provide DNA samples. The search also focussed on potential transients who may have been staying in the park.

  The crime scene was just a few hundred metres from the Alberni Valley Times office, which was located between Third and Fourth Avenues on Napier Street. It didn’t take long for local and outside media to make the connection to another horrific child slaying. “The parallels to the Carolyn Lee killing were obvious, especially to the investigators who were still putting the case together,” Djos told reporters.

  The reporter from the Vancouver Province, Greg Middleton, had once covered the ongoing Lee investigation as a reporter for the Alberni Valley Times and knew the territory well. Middleton was teamed with veteran reporter Barbara McLintock for this story. In their August 2 report, headlined “Girl’s Murder Shocks Alberni,” they cited a local ballplayer, Larry Hodgson, who said that, at about 7:00 PM, Jessica had asked if she could serve as batgirl for his team. When Hodgson told
her the job was taken, she reverted to her standby role, retrieving foul balls for a dollar apiece. He was one of the last people to see her alive. “This is a big-town crime in a small town,” Hodgson told the reporters. “We still haven’t gotten over the last one.”

  On August 4, under the headline “Like a Replay of ’77 Slaying,” Middleton and McLintock expanded on the similarities with the Carolyn Lee case: “The murder of Jessica States is like a replay of the 1977 killing of Caroline [sic] Lee. The suspect in that 19-year-old killing lives a block from the victim of last week’s tragedy.” The RCMP E Division spokesman, Sergeant Peter Montague, advised that police did not consider Dhillon (who was not named) a suspect “at this time.” The reporters noted that Carolyn had been abducted “a few blocks” (actually about ten) from the spot where Jessica’s body had now been found. Middleton and McLintock gave a brief synopsis of the Lee case, referencing Sharon McLeod’s statement to police six years after the crime. “The man apparently has a history of sexual assaults and a nasty temper,” they wrote, and confirmed that the suspect had provided a DNA sample under the 1995 law.

  UNLIKE THE KILLING of Carolyn Lee on an abandoned railway spur next to a potato farm, Jessica’s murder took place in a very public place. Once again, members of the Alberni Valley Rescue Squad had pushed their boundaries by conducting a search for a crime victim with a suspect still at large. At the time Jessica was killed, there were hundreds of people, both local and from out of town, attending the fast-pitch tournament at Recreation Park.

  In addition to the fast-pitch tournament, the annual Tlu-Piich Games, hosted by the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations, had also drawn hundreds of participants to Port Alberni. The Tlu-Piich Games included a range of sports held at venues across the region, and many of the participants were camping at the Dry Creek Campground, just metres away from the crime scene. Dale Djos would have to locate and interview virtually anyone who had been in close proximity to the park.