Shayne Morrow - The Bulldog and the Helix: DNA and the Pursuit of Justice in a Frontier Town

Copyright 2019 Shayne Morrow

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, audio recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.

Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd. heritagehouse.ca

Cataloguing information available from Library and Archives Canada

978-1-77203-250-5 (pbk)

978-1-77203-247-5 (epub)

Edited by Susan Safyan and Lenore Hietkamp

Proofread by Warren Layberry

Cover and interior design by Jacqui Thomas

Cover photographs: girl, by Alex Potemkin/iStockphoto.com; street scene, courtesy of Alberni Valley Museum

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

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Contents

Introduction

WHEN I MOVED to Port Alberni in early 1994, I had no idea that my adopted hometown had already become Canadas proving ground for forensic DNA law and technology. A brutal child sex slaying in April 1977 would become Canadas 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 mens 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 moleculethe 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 RCMPs 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 Dhillons conviction on December 3, 1998.

Following the Dhillon trial, I decided that one day, when Jessicas 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 Albernis history, beginning with Jan Petersons The Albernis: 18601922 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.