Dead Ends (24 page)

Peter Gill and Bindy Johal, his brother-in-law, were at the centre of the gang world.

Police believed Johal, Gill, and four others were behind a machine-gun attack that killed Jimmy Dosanjh in February 1994 and, a few months later, another attack that got his brother Ronny. Gill and Johal, police believed, feared the Dosanjh brothers were coming after them and decided to strike first.

The investigation into the Dosanjh murders involved 150 officers and cost more than $1 million. The trial cost another $1.5 million.

So when Gill, Johal, and the others walked, police and prosecutors were embarrassed and angry. Defence lawyers accused police of using paid witnesses who lied. (The well-rewarded witnesses did appear to be making some of their evidence up as they went along.)

And Guess appeared on the
TV
news criticizing the police. Her face was blurred and her voice distorted, but anyone involved with the case knew it was her.

Police and prosecutors were desperate to know why they lost a case they thought they should win.

And they started looking at Guess, a thirty-nine-year-old divorced mother of two who had worked as a crime-victim counsellor in the North Vancouver
RCMP
detachment while studying for a master's degree.

Project Elvira, they dubbed the investigation. That was one of the nicknames courtroom staff gave Guess during the trial, a reference to a campy, bosomy character who hosted horror movies on
TV
as “Princess of the Dark.”

Wiretaps and bugs placed secretly in her home—including her bedroom—gathered evidence. Police ended up recording some 18,000 conversations, and interviewed court staff, friends, and family.

In April 1997, Guess was charged with obstruction of justice for pushing the jury to a not guilty verdict.

And for the next eighteen months, British Columbians didn't need reality television. They had “The Gillian Guess Show.”

Most defendants listen to their lawyer's orders and clam up. Not Guess. She had a steady stream of outrageous comments and quotes, and happily shared them.

The tone was set in an impromptu press conference after her first appearance on the charge. With her children—a son and daughter—by her side, Guess attacked and titillated. “They bugged my bedroom and they're bringing in evidence of Peter Gill and I having sex,” she complained. “They spent hundreds of hours taping us having sex.” (Later, Guess told a reporter she meant to say the police had spent hundreds of hours listening to the tapes. “I don't want to sound like I'm oversexed.”)

“Who I sleep with is nobody's business,” she said. “I'm afraid of the cops. They're absolute pigs.”

That was just day one.

Court staff testified they had never seen anything like the flirting between Gill and Guess. “She would smile coyly and look seductive. It was a friendly, perhaps inviting look,” a clerk said. Gill returned the attention, “almost seductive.”

The relationship was so obvious that when Gill's wife, “Go-Go,” came to court, she complained to a sheriff about the goo-goo eyes Guess was making at her husband.

Guess, twelve years older than the twenty-seven-year-old IndoCanadian gangster in designer suits, was even spotted talking with him outside the courtroom during a lunch break. Staff eventually took concerns to the judge. He raised the concerns with lawyers and defendants—but not with the jury.

Guess claimed innocence. She didn't have sex with Gill during the trial. No one said jurors couldn't have relationships with the defendants. And she did her job as a juror impartially. (She had at least one point. The juror's oath is an incomprehensible jumble of archaic legalese—“Do you swear that you shall well and truly try and true deliverance make between our Sovereign Lady the Queen and the accused at bar, whom you shall have in charge, and a true verdict give, according to the evidence, so help you God?”)

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But the evidence against her was overwhelming. A former friend said Guess confided that she was having an affair with Gill during the trial, sleeping with him in her North Vancouver home when her children were with their father. Gill called her from nightclubs and invited her to join him, the friend said, and they even met at the hotel where the jury was sequestered to reach a verdict. (The friend, a legal secretary, said she didn't come forward earlier because “Bindy Johal has a very bad reputation.”)

Other jurors testified about their deliberations, unprecedented in a system that maintains absolute confidentiality about the jury process.

Guess was the only one who voted not guilty in their first straw poll, they said; four voted guilty and seven were undecided. Guess pushed for a not guilty verdict throughout the seven days of deliberations. She “was determined that they were all not guilty from Day 1,” a juror testified. “If you did not agree with her opinion, heaven help you.”

It looked at one point like the jury might not be able to reach a verdict, which could have resulted in a retrial. Guess claimed—falsely—that if the jury couldn't reach a verdict, then each juror would have to stand up in court and say how he or she voted. A chilling prospect in front of gangsters.

The trial was the best show in town, and Guess was the star both inside the courtroom, where she sometimes shouted at the prosecutor if she didn't like his questions, and outside, where she kept up a running, sometimes risqué, commentary. She even started her own website, with daily commentary on the trial, until the judge told her to knock it off.

It was hardly surprising that she paid attention to Gill, she told reporters. “After eight months, even the trial judge started looking good.” Anyway, she announced, it was irrelevant whether she slept with Gill as long as she did her work as a juror properly. “It didn't matter if I had sex with all the accused and everyone in the public gallery—it's nobody's business.”

For reporters, it was a gift that kept on giving. While the tapes of her and Gill having sex were never played in court, Guess offered a scoop to a news cameraman. “I've listened to the tapes and, you know, I'm pretty good.”

On another lunch break, Guess compared herself to United States President Bill Clinton, then ensnared in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. If he could run the country given “his social life,” she could be a good juror.

Even when she was found guilty of obstructing justice on June 20, Guess claimed her time on the evening news, defiant to the end.

“I have not committed a crime,” she told reporters. “I fell in love, nothing more. At no time did I obstruct justice. You can't tell your heart how to feel.”

The case was made for media. Guess knew it. “It's the original story of creation, it's about forbidden fruit. Then there's the interracial angle, the age difference, an older woman and a younger man, the element of danger, fear, sex, highly-charged emotions, murder, fashion, it's all there.”

The two months between guilty verdict and sentencing were crammed with media coverage. Prime-time U.S. news
shows, tatty daytime talk shows where the audience yelled at her son, magazines, film producers looking to buy the rights—the phone kept ringing.

And mostly, Guess said yes.

On August 20, she was sentenced to eighteen months in jail.

“May God forgive you,” she dramatically said to the judge.

But the publicity never stopped. Guess served just thirteen weeks behind bars before being released on day parole. She posed for a magazine in her bathtub, shaving one raised leg, her electronic monitoring bracelet banding her ankle.

Two months later, Gill survived a drive-by shooting outside his house on a Sunday morning. He was eventually sentenced to six years for obstruction of justice for his relationship with Guess, based largely on her testimony.

Bindy Johal was gunned down in a nightclub five days before Christmas that year. His killers were never found.

None of the five surviving defendants in the Dosanjh murders was retried.

T
wo bodies were sprawled in blood in the kitchen of the upscale Tsawwassen home. Doris Leatherbarrow was sixty-nine. Her daughter, Sharon Huenemann, was forty-three. Both had been hit in the head and their throats cut. The killers had covered the women's faces with dishcloths.

The crime scene made no sense. The home had been ransacked. But jewelry and cash were left behind. There were no signs of forced entry.

Four dinner places were set on the kitchen counter, with servings of lasagna in the microwave, ready to be heated.

The victims clearly knew their killers.

It was October 6, 1990. Police had two grisly murders and no obvious suspects, motives, or physical evidence like fingerprints.

They started talking to people. Leatherbarrrow ran four successful women's clothing stores. She had been involved in one serious dispute with a supplier, but there was no evidence linking him to the crimes.

Sharon Huenemann lived in Victoria, in beautiful and exclusive Ten Mile Point, with her husband Ralph, a University of Victoria professor. He had no obvious motive.

That wasn't the case for Darren, their eighteen-year-old son from Sharon's second marriage. His grandmother had done well in business, and in her will she split a $4 million estate between Darren and his mother. His mother's will left him everything. If both women died, Darren would be rich.

Darren was polite and charming, an A student and good-looking in a clean-cut teen kind of way. He was an enthusiastic actor in his high school theatre group, slated to play the lead in
Caligula
, the Albert Camus play about a Roman emperor who becomes a bloody murderer and abandons concepts of good and evil.

He had a rock-solid alibi. He had been home with girlfriend Amanda Cousins. His stepfather and Amanda both vouched for him.

And Darren didn't need the money. His grandmother was generous. When he was sixteen, she gave him a sporty $30,000 Honda Accord, and he had some $30,000 in the bank.

Police could only plod on as the trail grew colder, interviewing anyone who might help unlock the puzzle.

Almost three weeks after the murders, they got a break.

Officers interviewed Toby Hicks, a grade twelve classmate. Darren was obsessed with money, he said, always talking about his rich grandmother. He knew about the wills.

“If I kill granny, I get half her money, and if I kill my mom also, I get the other half,” he had said to Hicks and others.

The perfect, polite teen became the prime suspect. The problem was his alibi.

If he was at home, who killed the two women?

Police started looking harder at Darren's friends. The students talked about him, and each other. David Muir, sixteen, and Derik Lord, seventeen, began to attract the officers' attentions. They were good students. There was nothing obvious to make police think they were capable of cold-blooded murder. But classmates mentioned that both collected knives, throwing stars, and other exotic weapons. The three played Dungeons and Dragons together, a role-playing fantasy game of exotic characters, plots, and battles.

Lord and Muir had alibis. They told police they were wandering around Victoria's small Chinatown the night of the killings, until Darren and his girlfriend, Amanda Cousins, picked them up. Darren and Amanda confirmed the story.

Police weren't satisfied. They traced the route Lord and Muir would have taken if they had travelled to Tsawwassen
and killed the women, showing their pictures along the way. Both were distinctive, Muir with a square face and small features, Lord strikingly skinny and young looking.

It worked. A taxi driver said he might have seen Muir that night. Two boys had been playing football in a yard next door to the death house. One said he had seen Muir and Lord on the street that evening.

It wasn't much, but it was enough to get court approval for wiretaps on the three suspects. Once the phones were bugged, police went to Muir and told him they had witnesses putting him at the murder scene.

Then they waited.

It didn't take long for panicky, incriminating phone calls to start. “They know where we were on the 5th,” Muir told Lord. “We've got to change our story.”

They came up with a new alibi. Lord and Muir said they had gone to Tsawwassen, but just to buy knives to resell at school. They lied because they didn't want their parents to know they had left the island without permission. Huenemann and Cousins were just being good friends by lying for them. Very good friends, considering it was a murder investigation.

But things were unravelling. Police pressed Muir, who confessed everything. His signed statement was never used in court, because prosecutors decided police had offered him too good a deal. He would have served just three years for murder under the agreement police made.

But the statement let them increase the pressure on Amanda Cousins, Darren's girlfriend at the time of the killings. She had already been caught in lies, and police knew she had driven out to the ferry with Darren to pick up Muir and Lord when they came back from the killings. They threatened to charge her as an accessory to murder, and offered witness protection and a monthly $800 allowance.

And then the story came out.

Huenemann's talk about killing his mother and grandmother seemed like a joke to some people, but not a funny one.

With Lord and Muir, it became serious. Darren had big plans for the money, including making the school production
of
Caligula
more spectacular. Arranging the murders would help him understand the character, too, he enthused.

They struck a deal. Muir and Lord would follow his careful plan for murdering his mother and grandmother. Once Huenemann collected the $3 million, he would buy Muir forty hectares of land and Lord a house. Each would get a $1,000 a month allowance.

Huenemann coached them through the plan and bought them crowbars and gloves. They should use the knives in the kitchen, he said, so it would look more like a robbery.