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The Ottawa man accused of trying to kill a decorated 101-year-old war veteran during a home invasion now is the prime suspect in the city’s most notorious unsolved triple homicide, the Citizen has learned.
Ottawa police homicide detectives are expected to arrest Ian Bush in connection with the killings on Friday, after a court orders his return to the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre from the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. Bush, 59, has been in custody and undergoing a psychiatric assessment at the Royal since Dec. 20, when his family turned him in to face charges that he tried to kill Second World War veteran Ernest Cote in an attack that shocked the country.
Police are now linking Bush to the heinous and high-profile slayings of retired tax court judge Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde, and their neighbour, Marie-Claire Beniskos, who were found dead eight years ago in the Garons’ home.
Despite dozens of detectives working it over the years, more than 1,000 interviews and one of the largest rewards for information in the city’s history, the case had stumped investigators – until DNA recovered in Cote’s luxury condo matched samples collected from the Garons’ home.
Bush’s arrest will come days after the Citizen uncovered a previously unknown link between the cases. Six years before Garon was killed, Bush sent him unnerving letter, summoning the judge to appear before a fake court at his Orleans home.
The break in this case, after years of chasing down leads that led nowhere, has also opened up the possibility of more charges to be laid against Bush.
The Citizen has also learned that police are now retesting evidence in the unsolved homicide of commissionaire Paul-Andre Simard, who was found dead in his Meadowlands Drive home just three months before the Garons and Beniskos were killed.
Police are also scouring cold cases in provinces where Bush has lived, searching for other DNA matches in homicides involving senior citizens with government connections that bear the signature of a man police now allege is a serial killer — a plastic bag placed over the heads of his alleged victims.
While those threads remain open, for police, Friday’s arrest will close a case that has haunted them for years, one that is expected to culminate Saturday when Bush is formally charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
Alban and Raymonde Garon were found dead in their home on June 29, 2007. Neighbour Marie-Claire Beniskos was also killed.
Raymonde Garon was startled when she heard a knock at the door of her luxury condominium on Riverside Drive on June 28, 2007.
All guests and visitors to the building, one of three in the gated community with an outdoor pool and impeccably maintained lawns, had to be let in through a buzzer system.
She walked to the door thinking the knock must be coming from a neighbour, but opened it to find a strange man claiming to be a delivery driver with a package for her husband. The man had no package in hand. Suspiciously, he said he forgot it but would be back the next day.
That evening, Raymonde told friends about the unusual encounter at a birthday party she and Alban attended at a Kanata Holiday Inn. As the party wound down, the couple got ready to head home around 10:30 p.m. Less than 12 hours later, they, along with friend and neighbour Marie-Claire Beniskos, were dead.
The crime wasn’t discovered until the next morning, when Raymonde’s brother, Jean-Pierre Lurette, who lived in the same building at 1510 Riverside Dr., found the bodies of his sister, brother-in-law and their neighbour, hog-tied, gagged and beaten inside the Garons’ 10th floor condo.
Their deaths sent shockwaves through the city and brought the number of people killed in June to six, the deadliest month in Ottawa’s history.
Police refused to publicly release the causes of death, but police sources in June 2007 told the Citizen what Lurette found when he walked into his sister’s home, a scene he later said he would be forced to relive “every day of the week.”
What the Citizen chose not to report at the time was that all three had plastic bags placed over their heads. They had died from suffocation – a key piece of information that police held back in the hopes of catching the killer.
Police believe the three were killed between 9 a.m. and noon on June 29, inside unit 1002. There were no signs of forced entry and high-end valuables remained in place, suggesting it was more than just a home invasion. Alban Garon’s credit card, however, was missing.
These were all details that would, years later, bear striking resemblance to another early-morning home invasion at a high-end condo with an elderly victim. These were details that put detectives on edge and set in motion weeks of accelerated investigation into a case grown very cold.
But, back in 2007, three unlikely victims, all senior citizens, and the specter of an unknown delivery man were all police had to go on.
On the surface, it made no sense. Homicide victims are normally known to their killers, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, but nothing in the victims’ backgrounds suggested an easy motive.
Alban Garon, 77, climbed the judicial ladder after working in the federal Justice Department in the 1950s. He was appointed to the bench in 1988 and became Chief Judge of the Tax Court in 2000. He was named Chief Justice of the same court in 2003, a position he held until his retirement in November the following year. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney awarded him the Merit of the Quebec Bar. Yet, for all his contributions to the legal field, family and friends remembered him most enjoying his time at the Garon cottage on Rheaume Lake in western Quebec, where he insisted all guests learn to water-ski.
His wife, Raymonde Garon, 73, grew up in Eastview, or what’s now considered Vanier, and had been a nurse at Montfort Hospital’s emergency ward. She met regularly with a group of friends who called themselves the Golden Girls. They lunched together and celebrated birthdays.
The Garons were devout Catholics whose funeral mass was presided over by the same priest who married them 36 years before.
Marie-Claire Béniskos, a widow, was an avid golfer and dedicated volunteer at The Ottawa Hospital.
Neighbour Marie-Claire Beniskos, 78, had been widowed since 1995 when her husband, Jean-Marie Beniskos, a University of Ottawa education professor, died. She was an avid golfer who helped plan church spaghetti dinners and volunteered at craft sale fundraisers for The Ottawa Hospital. Just a week before her death, Marie-Claire received a medal honouring her 20 years of volunteer service to the hospital. Friends said she moved into the building, called Riviera II, because she liked the security offered by video surveillance, gated entrances and several guards. She was too afraid of living on her own.
By all accounts, the three were more than mere neighbours. They attended the same Catholic church and lived on the same floor. The police theory has always been that Beniskos was killed because she somehow interrupted the killer in the act or disrupted a plan that hadn’t anticipated her presence. On that Canada Day weekend, she walked out of her condominium and went to the Garons’ to perform the most basic of neighbourly tasks – to tell them what time a movie they wanted to see was playing.
Police search the area around 1510 Riverside Drive on June 30, 2007.
In the weeks before the Garons and Beniskos were killed, a broken gate at the condominium complex forced all traffic in and out to be redirected through the front gate where a security guard was on duty 24 hours a day.
Inside the gatehouse, guards monitored a live feed on eight security video screens, but what would become unbearably clear in the course of the investigation is that not a minute of the surveillance footage had been recorded. Not only that, there were no cameras mounted in any of the hallways of the Riviera II. Not a single photo of anyone entering or exiting the building was captured either.
Settling in among the diplomats, hockey players and judges who called the complex home, a squad of homicide detectives established a command post in a vacant unit in the building itself. They began canvassing the neighbourhood, checking IDs at the security gate and processing a case that would both haunt and perplex them.
With no immediate list of people coming and going from the building, and no viable suspects, police turned to a possible motive to help them identify those who might have wished harm upon the Garons. Investigative avenues suggest that prime among those were greed and revenge.
Early suspicion fell on a woman the Garons regarded as a surrogate daughter.
Nearly three decades before their deaths, the Garons had invited an El Salvadorian woman named Maria Elena Duran into their home.
What was initially supposed to be a year’s stay to help them learn Spanish turned into 12. Duran lived with the Garons until she married in 1990 at the couple’s condo. Duran’s daughter with husband Michel Rochon, Marie Isabelle, was 15 when the Garons were killed.
All three were travelling in Spain at the time of the slayings, giving them alibis the morning of the crimes. They immediately flew home.
In the months that followed, police asked Duran and Rochon to take polygraph tests twice. They declined both times and denied any involvement in the killings. Rochon lashed out at what he thought were “Keystone Kops” asking him to be done in by junk science. The couple did, however, provide police with DNA samples and fingerprints, suggesting that police had recovered suspect prints and DNA evidence from the Garons’ home.
Police eventually ruled Duran and Rochon out as suspects.
Another early possibility was that Alban Garon’s peripheral role in a biker trial could have sealed his fate.
As a judge, he had a small role in a judicial disciplinary inquiry that upended a 2002 trial of 17 Hells Angels in Montreal. The inquiry led to the resignation of the presiding judge and ultimately to the conviction of Hells Angels boss Maurice “Mom” Boucher of murder.
It was a curious side story to the life of an otherwise inconspicuous tax judge that police had to take seriously.
Police toyed with the idea that a contract killer could have been hired to do the deeds, but the level of violence inside unit 1002 suggested the crimes were somehow personal.
Investigators routinely circled back to the delivery driver, the one tangible indication that something was afoot the day before the killings.
Police determined no courier or delivery company visited the building that day and found no evidence of the Garons ever receiving that supposed package.
In November, some five months after the homicides, and after Ottawa police detective Dan Brennan worked with a neighbour who saw the man in the elevator, police released a composite sketch. (Brennan is now the lead investigator on the file.)
Though they never publicly identified the man in the sketch as a suspect, the sketch remains on the police website, with police saying the man is key person they wish to identify in connection to the killings.
After the Riverside homicides, police interviewed more than 1,000 people. Then-lead detective Tim Hodgins, who now mans a staff sergeant’s desk in central patrol division, told the Citizen in 2010 that the suspect had gone after “affluent, retired, respected members of the community.”
It was a description that could easily apply to Cote, whose own home invasion had the likes of Prime Minister Stephen Harper wishing the D-Day vet well and praising Ottawa police.
But those who knew Garon dismissed the homicides being linked to his position with the Tax Court of Canada. It just didn’t compute.
The judges on its bench didn’t consider the stakes high – they were adjudicating facts to the letter of the law, but that law was the Income Tax Act and the loss of an appeal didn’t mean losing your freedom.
Police knew that no one could be sent to jail following an appearance in a tax case, but a financial punishment could have major consequences. They weren’t ruling out the connection but they were quick to point out that Alban hadn’t presided over an actual tax court case in several years before his death.
Security was never a pressing concern for Tax Court judges. Although unsuccessful litigants in tax cases would sometimes be angered by rulings, they tended to direct their frustration at the Canada Revenue Agency, not the judge ruling their case.
While the judge’s colleagues dismissed the possibility and police looked to other motives, troubling documents recently obtained by the Citizen and police show that Ian Bush directly contacted the judge and attempted to lure Alban Garon to his Orleans home six years before Garon was killed.
A fax sent by Ian Bush to Alban Garon summoning him to a fictitious hearing of the “Higher Court of Humanitarian Justice.”
In 2001, Garon received a bizarre fax from human resources consultant Ian Bush, printed on fabricated letterhead of something called the “Higher Court of Humanitarian Justice.” No such court exists.
The fax summoned Garon to appear at an address in Orleans, which was actually Bush’s home at the time, to review another judge’s decision to toss out Bush’s income-tax appeal.
Bush’s case in Tax Court began in 1999 in New Brunswick, where he launched an appeal of the CRA’s denial of deductions he tried to claim for losses to his human resources consulting firm and relocation costs when he moved from British Columbia to Ontario several years before in 1993.
After launching the appeal through a law firm in Fredericton, Bush moved to Ottawa sometime in 2000. He was granted permission to change the venue of the case.
But, he also tried to have his hearing date postponed. The court rejected that request and Bush failed to attend the scheduled January 2001 date. The case was tossed out.
In an inexplicable move that would leave a paper trail that directly linked Bush and Garon, months later in July 2001, Bush used his consulting company fax machine to send the strange summons, addressed to Garon in his capacity as chief judge of the Tax Court.
Citing Bush’s court file number, the memo advised Garon to “Take notice that a review of this decision has been scheduled to be heard on the 7th day of August 2001 at 9:30 a.m. at 1995 Boake Street in Orleans, Ontario.” The Boake Street address was Bush’s home at the time. And the number listed for the court was the one Bush was using for his consulting firm as recently as 2014.
Bush himself didn’t sign the letter. Instead, it bore the strained signature of someone named A.P. Day, “For the Registrar.” Bush’s company website lists an “Annette P. Day” on its management team of seven people who are supposed to be operating out of the rented home Bush shared with his wife and daughter before his arrest for the home invasion. No such person exists.
A handwritten note from a court clerk indicated that Garon himself instructed the fax be put in Bush’s Tax Court file.
There is no sign that Garon ever responded or attended Bush’s home, nor is there any indication the two men ever met, since Bush’s case was heard by another judge. But as early as six years before carrying out the attack, the man police now allege killed the Garons and Beniskos attempted to lure one of his alleged victims.
Police say Ian Bush forced his way into 101-year-old veteran Ernest Cote’s home and tied up the veteran before robbing him of a credit card on Dec. 18, 2014.
Police might still be searching for a suspect in the Garon case, had Ernest Cote not answered the lobby buzzer inside his Durham Private condominium on the morning of Dec. 18, 2014.
Police allege Bush was in the lobby and said he was a City of Ottawa employee who asked to be let in. Cote obliged.
Once at Cote’s door, Bush, carrying a black shoulder bag, allegedly demanded cash but Cote refused. Then, police say Bush forced his way in and tied up the veteran before robbing him of a credit card. Cote had his mouth and hands duct-taped, the latter to his walker, and a plastic bag placed over his head. Cote managed to free himself and called police, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to Friday’s arrest.
After testing samples from the Cote home, forensic investigators found DNA on a piece of duct tape that linked the two scenes.
Police are now waiting to see if the Violent Crime Linkage System, a police database that catologues details of crimes nationwide, will return any hits on cold cases in either New Brunswick, British Columbia or elsewhere Bush has lived.
Closer to home, police are looking into a homicide that occurred three months before the Riverside killings when another older man with government ties was killed during an Ottawa home invasion. The Citizen has learned that police have not yet ruled Bush out as a suspect in that investigation.
Paul Simard, a 63-year-old commissionaire was found tied up and face-down in the basement of his Meadowlands Drive in April 2007.
Police released images from a Rideau Centre security camera showing a dark-haired woman they said might have useful information about the Simard killing. They also released security camera images of people making purchases at local Home Depot stores, buying household items like duct tape. The Garons, Beniskos and Cote were all bound with duct tape.
The Simard case remains unsolved, but Ottawa police will be resubmitting evidence found at the scene for further testing to see if it matches the forensic patterns they’ve now identified. Police continue to offer a $50,000 reward for information in that case.
He has no criminal record in Ontario, British Columbia or New Brunswick, where he’s lived. A sole Ontario speeding ticket in 2002 is the only brush with the law the man has to his name.
The news of further charges hits at the image of a “strong family man” that Bush’s brother Norm Bush maintained he was after the alleged home invasion.
Bush and his wife Carrie Mortson have three adult children – two sons and a daughter. The couple rents the Valade Crescent home they live in, near Tenth Line Road, where police executed a search warrant in connection to the killings in late-January.
Son Brock called the six charges first laid against his father in connection to Cote’s home invasion – attempted murder, robbery with violence, forcible confinement, break and enter and two counts of using a credit card obtained by crime – a “total shock.”
The allegations were so difficult for them to fathom, at the very least, because Bush’s parents were both veterans of the Second World War.
Bush’s own words show a man with an adversarial relationship with government.
In 1997, while living in New Brunswick, Bush wrote an opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun newspaper criticizing then B.C. premier Glen Clark’s fishing policies. Bush was living in B.C. in the early ‘90s. He referred in the oped to efforts by the Clark to draw media attention away from “the devastation wreaked by years of NDP misappropriation of funds, favouritism and mismanagement.”
Bush also wrote a 1999 letter to the editor of the The Daily Gleaner, a newspaper in New Brunswick, where Bush lived in the late ‘90s before moving to Ottawa. The letter was written when he was already living in Orleans. In it, Bush wrote that the governments of Atlantic provinces had “sold their citizens into welfare slavery.” He called elected politicians and their actions “irresponsible” and “incompetent.” Provinces once “equal partners at Confederation,” were now nothing more than “territories administered by Ottawa.” Bush called it “disgraceful” and “a violation of the trust they hold with the great people of Atlantic Canada.”
In 2002, Bush wrote to the Citizen presenting a sarcastic letter to the editor that criticized the Liberal Party of Canada’s gender inequality. He wrote that Liberal backbencher Carolyn Bennett should have known her place in a party that rarely saw women reach high positions before attempting to take then Prime Minister Jean Chretien to task.
Bush’s social media accounts also provide of a glimpse of a man who questioned government authority, criticized the public service and believed in the rights of the taxpayer.
On Remembrance Day 2014, Bush’s account tweeted an angry response to a Globe and Mail reporter who noted that people had shouted “thank you” as a group of veterans marched.
“Thank-you? For what?” the tweet said.
He later accused another user of believing the “propaganda like a little Nazi.”
On the same day, the account tweeted, “The only argument for Nov. 11 being a national holiday is give civil servants more time off with pay.”
The HR consultant also posted frequently about “taxpayer monies” and “taxes” and lamented what he perceived to be their wasted use by governments.
When the home invasion charges were laid, Bush’s defence lawyer Geraldine Castle Trudel cautioned against a rush to judgment and said all that is known is the police version of events leading up to and following that alleged crime.
“It may not be correct,” she said. “People are innocent until proven guilty.”
Once the public learned his name and his family understood what police believe he did, Bush’s lawyer and others asked how it could be that a 59-year-old man suddenly turns to a life of crime? For police, the question is much the same. A DNA link has answered who, but for all, what remains is, why?
In the years since the homicides, police have offered a $100,000 reward, one of the largest in the city’s history, for any information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible.
They turned to a televised CrimeStoppers segment but stopped short of re-enacting the violent crime.
They’ve asked both the province’s chief forensic pathologist to examine the crime scene days after the killings and Ontario Provincial Police to review the case with fresh eyes in 2010.
They even formed the city’s first crime-specific task force to bring who police have always maintained was a cold-blooded killer to justice.
Saturday, eight years after the triple slaying of Alban and Raymonde Garon and Marie-Claire Beniskos, Ian Bush is expected to appear in court where he will be formally charged with their murders.
With files from Citizen staff
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Ottawa police homicide detectives are expected to arrest Ian Bush in connection with the killings on Friday, after a court orders his return to the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre from the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. Bush, 59, has been in custody and undergoing a psychiatric assessment at the Royal since Dec. 20, when his family turned him in to face charges that he tried to kill Second World War veteran Ernest Cote in an attack that shocked the country.
Police are now linking Bush to the heinous and high-profile slayings of retired tax court judge Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde, and their neighbour, Marie-Claire Beniskos, who were found dead eight years ago in the Garons’ home.
Despite dozens of detectives working it over the years, more than 1,000 interviews and one of the largest rewards for information in the city’s history, the case had stumped investigators – until DNA recovered in Cote’s luxury condo matched samples collected from the Garons’ home.
Bush’s arrest will come days after the Citizen uncovered a previously unknown link between the cases. Six years before Garon was killed, Bush sent him unnerving letter, summoning the judge to appear before a fake court at his Orleans home.
The break in this case, after years of chasing down leads that led nowhere, has also opened up the possibility of more charges to be laid against Bush.
The Citizen has also learned that police are now retesting evidence in the unsolved homicide of commissionaire Paul-Andre Simard, who was found dead in his Meadowlands Drive home just three months before the Garons and Beniskos were killed.
Police are also scouring cold cases in provinces where Bush has lived, searching for other DNA matches in homicides involving senior citizens with government connections that bear the signature of a man police now allege is a serial killer — a plastic bag placed over the heads of his alleged victims.
While those threads remain open, for police, Friday’s arrest will close a case that has haunted them for years, one that is expected to culminate Saturday when Bush is formally charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
Alban and Raymonde Garon were found dead in their home on June 29, 2007. Neighbour Marie-Claire Beniskos was also killed.
Raymonde Garon was startled when she heard a knock at the door of her luxury condominium on Riverside Drive on June 28, 2007.
All guests and visitors to the building, one of three in the gated community with an outdoor pool and impeccably maintained lawns, had to be let in through a buzzer system.
She walked to the door thinking the knock must be coming from a neighbour, but opened it to find a strange man claiming to be a delivery driver with a package for her husband. The man had no package in hand. Suspiciously, he said he forgot it but would be back the next day.
That evening, Raymonde told friends about the unusual encounter at a birthday party she and Alban attended at a Kanata Holiday Inn. As the party wound down, the couple got ready to head home around 10:30 p.m. Less than 12 hours later, they, along with friend and neighbour Marie-Claire Beniskos, were dead.
The crime wasn’t discovered until the next morning, when Raymonde’s brother, Jean-Pierre Lurette, who lived in the same building at 1510 Riverside Dr., found the bodies of his sister, brother-in-law and their neighbour, hog-tied, gagged and beaten inside the Garons’ 10th floor condo.
Their deaths sent shockwaves through the city and brought the number of people killed in June to six, the deadliest month in Ottawa’s history.
Police refused to publicly release the causes of death, but police sources in June 2007 told the Citizen what Lurette found when he walked into his sister’s home, a scene he later said he would be forced to relive “every day of the week.”
What the Citizen chose not to report at the time was that all three had plastic bags placed over their heads. They had died from suffocation – a key piece of information that police held back in the hopes of catching the killer.
Police believe the three were killed between 9 a.m. and noon on June 29, inside unit 1002. There were no signs of forced entry and high-end valuables remained in place, suggesting it was more than just a home invasion. Alban Garon’s credit card, however, was missing.
These were all details that would, years later, bear striking resemblance to another early-morning home invasion at a high-end condo with an elderly victim. These were details that put detectives on edge and set in motion weeks of accelerated investigation into a case grown very cold.
But, back in 2007, three unlikely victims, all senior citizens, and the specter of an unknown delivery man were all police had to go on.
On the surface, it made no sense. Homicide victims are normally known to their killers, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, but nothing in the victims’ backgrounds suggested an easy motive.
Alban Garon, 77, climbed the judicial ladder after working in the federal Justice Department in the 1950s. He was appointed to the bench in 1988 and became Chief Judge of the Tax Court in 2000. He was named Chief Justice of the same court in 2003, a position he held until his retirement in November the following year. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney awarded him the Merit of the Quebec Bar. Yet, for all his contributions to the legal field, family and friends remembered him most enjoying his time at the Garon cottage on Rheaume Lake in western Quebec, where he insisted all guests learn to water-ski.
His wife, Raymonde Garon, 73, grew up in Eastview, or what’s now considered Vanier, and had been a nurse at Montfort Hospital’s emergency ward. She met regularly with a group of friends who called themselves the Golden Girls. They lunched together and celebrated birthdays.
The Garons were devout Catholics whose funeral mass was presided over by the same priest who married them 36 years before.
Marie-Claire Béniskos, a widow, was an avid golfer and dedicated volunteer at The Ottawa Hospital.
Neighbour Marie-Claire Beniskos, 78, had been widowed since 1995 when her husband, Jean-Marie Beniskos, a University of Ottawa education professor, died. She was an avid golfer who helped plan church spaghetti dinners and volunteered at craft sale fundraisers for The Ottawa Hospital. Just a week before her death, Marie-Claire received a medal honouring her 20 years of volunteer service to the hospital. Friends said she moved into the building, called Riviera II, because she liked the security offered by video surveillance, gated entrances and several guards. She was too afraid of living on her own.
By all accounts, the three were more than mere neighbours. They attended the same Catholic church and lived on the same floor. The police theory has always been that Beniskos was killed because she somehow interrupted the killer in the act or disrupted a plan that hadn’t anticipated her presence. On that Canada Day weekend, she walked out of her condominium and went to the Garons’ to perform the most basic of neighbourly tasks – to tell them what time a movie they wanted to see was playing.
Police search the area around 1510 Riverside Drive on June 30, 2007.
In the weeks before the Garons and Beniskos were killed, a broken gate at the condominium complex forced all traffic in and out to be redirected through the front gate where a security guard was on duty 24 hours a day.
Inside the gatehouse, guards monitored a live feed on eight security video screens, but what would become unbearably clear in the course of the investigation is that not a minute of the surveillance footage had been recorded. Not only that, there were no cameras mounted in any of the hallways of the Riviera II. Not a single photo of anyone entering or exiting the building was captured either.
Settling in among the diplomats, hockey players and judges who called the complex home, a squad of homicide detectives established a command post in a vacant unit in the building itself. They began canvassing the neighbourhood, checking IDs at the security gate and processing a case that would both haunt and perplex them.
With no immediate list of people coming and going from the building, and no viable suspects, police turned to a possible motive to help them identify those who might have wished harm upon the Garons. Investigative avenues suggest that prime among those were greed and revenge.
Early suspicion fell on a woman the Garons regarded as a surrogate daughter.
Nearly three decades before their deaths, the Garons had invited an El Salvadorian woman named Maria Elena Duran into their home.
What was initially supposed to be a year’s stay to help them learn Spanish turned into 12. Duran lived with the Garons until she married in 1990 at the couple’s condo. Duran’s daughter with husband Michel Rochon, Marie Isabelle, was 15 when the Garons were killed.
All three were travelling in Spain at the time of the slayings, giving them alibis the morning of the crimes. They immediately flew home.
In the months that followed, police asked Duran and Rochon to take polygraph tests twice. They declined both times and denied any involvement in the killings. Rochon lashed out at what he thought were “Keystone Kops” asking him to be done in by junk science. The couple did, however, provide police with DNA samples and fingerprints, suggesting that police had recovered suspect prints and DNA evidence from the Garons’ home.
Police eventually ruled Duran and Rochon out as suspects.
Another early possibility was that Alban Garon’s peripheral role in a biker trial could have sealed his fate.
As a judge, he had a small role in a judicial disciplinary inquiry that upended a 2002 trial of 17 Hells Angels in Montreal. The inquiry led to the resignation of the presiding judge and ultimately to the conviction of Hells Angels boss Maurice “Mom” Boucher of murder.
It was a curious side story to the life of an otherwise inconspicuous tax judge that police had to take seriously.
Police toyed with the idea that a contract killer could have been hired to do the deeds, but the level of violence inside unit 1002 suggested the crimes were somehow personal.
Investigators routinely circled back to the delivery driver, the one tangible indication that something was afoot the day before the killings.
Police determined no courier or delivery company visited the building that day and found no evidence of the Garons ever receiving that supposed package.
In November, some five months after the homicides, and after Ottawa police detective Dan Brennan worked with a neighbour who saw the man in the elevator, police released a composite sketch. (Brennan is now the lead investigator on the file.)
Though they never publicly identified the man in the sketch as a suspect, the sketch remains on the police website, with police saying the man is key person they wish to identify in connection to the killings.
After the Riverside homicides, police interviewed more than 1,000 people. Then-lead detective Tim Hodgins, who now mans a staff sergeant’s desk in central patrol division, told the Citizen in 2010 that the suspect had gone after “affluent, retired, respected members of the community.”
It was a description that could easily apply to Cote, whose own home invasion had the likes of Prime Minister Stephen Harper wishing the D-Day vet well and praising Ottawa police.
But those who knew Garon dismissed the homicides being linked to his position with the Tax Court of Canada. It just didn’t compute.
The judges on its bench didn’t consider the stakes high – they were adjudicating facts to the letter of the law, but that law was the Income Tax Act and the loss of an appeal didn’t mean losing your freedom.
Police knew that no one could be sent to jail following an appearance in a tax case, but a financial punishment could have major consequences. They weren’t ruling out the connection but they were quick to point out that Alban hadn’t presided over an actual tax court case in several years before his death.
Security was never a pressing concern for Tax Court judges. Although unsuccessful litigants in tax cases would sometimes be angered by rulings, they tended to direct their frustration at the Canada Revenue Agency, not the judge ruling their case.
While the judge’s colleagues dismissed the possibility and police looked to other motives, troubling documents recently obtained by the Citizen and police show that Ian Bush directly contacted the judge and attempted to lure Alban Garon to his Orleans home six years before Garon was killed.
A fax sent by Ian Bush to Alban Garon summoning him to a fictitious hearing of the “Higher Court of Humanitarian Justice.”
In 2001, Garon received a bizarre fax from human resources consultant Ian Bush, printed on fabricated letterhead of something called the “Higher Court of Humanitarian Justice.” No such court exists.
The fax summoned Garon to appear at an address in Orleans, which was actually Bush’s home at the time, to review another judge’s decision to toss out Bush’s income-tax appeal.
Bush’s case in Tax Court began in 1999 in New Brunswick, where he launched an appeal of the CRA’s denial of deductions he tried to claim for losses to his human resources consulting firm and relocation costs when he moved from British Columbia to Ontario several years before in 1993.
After launching the appeal through a law firm in Fredericton, Bush moved to Ottawa sometime in 2000. He was granted permission to change the venue of the case.
But, he also tried to have his hearing date postponed. The court rejected that request and Bush failed to attend the scheduled January 2001 date. The case was tossed out.
In an inexplicable move that would leave a paper trail that directly linked Bush and Garon, months later in July 2001, Bush used his consulting company fax machine to send the strange summons, addressed to Garon in his capacity as chief judge of the Tax Court.
Citing Bush’s court file number, the memo advised Garon to “Take notice that a review of this decision has been scheduled to be heard on the 7th day of August 2001 at 9:30 a.m. at 1995 Boake Street in Orleans, Ontario.” The Boake Street address was Bush’s home at the time. And the number listed for the court was the one Bush was using for his consulting firm as recently as 2014.
Bush himself didn’t sign the letter. Instead, it bore the strained signature of someone named A.P. Day, “For the Registrar.” Bush’s company website lists an “Annette P. Day” on its management team of seven people who are supposed to be operating out of the rented home Bush shared with his wife and daughter before his arrest for the home invasion. No such person exists.
A handwritten note from a court clerk indicated that Garon himself instructed the fax be put in Bush’s Tax Court file.
There is no sign that Garon ever responded or attended Bush’s home, nor is there any indication the two men ever met, since Bush’s case was heard by another judge. But as early as six years before carrying out the attack, the man police now allege killed the Garons and Beniskos attempted to lure one of his alleged victims.
Police say Ian Bush forced his way into 101-year-old veteran Ernest Cote’s home and tied up the veteran before robbing him of a credit card on Dec. 18, 2014.
Police might still be searching for a suspect in the Garon case, had Ernest Cote not answered the lobby buzzer inside his Durham Private condominium on the morning of Dec. 18, 2014.
Police allege Bush was in the lobby and said he was a City of Ottawa employee who asked to be let in. Cote obliged.
Once at Cote’s door, Bush, carrying a black shoulder bag, allegedly demanded cash but Cote refused. Then, police say Bush forced his way in and tied up the veteran before robbing him of a credit card. Cote had his mouth and hands duct-taped, the latter to his walker, and a plastic bag placed over his head. Cote managed to free himself and called police, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to Friday’s arrest.
After testing samples from the Cote home, forensic investigators found DNA on a piece of duct tape that linked the two scenes.
Police are now waiting to see if the Violent Crime Linkage System, a police database that catologues details of crimes nationwide, will return any hits on cold cases in either New Brunswick, British Columbia or elsewhere Bush has lived.
Closer to home, police are looking into a homicide that occurred three months before the Riverside killings when another older man with government ties was killed during an Ottawa home invasion. The Citizen has learned that police have not yet ruled Bush out as a suspect in that investigation.
Paul Simard, a 63-year-old commissionaire was found tied up and face-down in the basement of his Meadowlands Drive in April 2007.
Police released images from a Rideau Centre security camera showing a dark-haired woman they said might have useful information about the Simard killing. They also released security camera images of people making purchases at local Home Depot stores, buying household items like duct tape. The Garons, Beniskos and Cote were all bound with duct tape.
The Simard case remains unsolved, but Ottawa police will be resubmitting evidence found at the scene for further testing to see if it matches the forensic patterns they’ve now identified. Police continue to offer a $50,000 reward for information in that case.
He has no criminal record in Ontario, British Columbia or New Brunswick, where he’s lived. A sole Ontario speeding ticket in 2002 is the only brush with the law the man has to his name.
The news of further charges hits at the image of a “strong family man” that Bush’s brother Norm Bush maintained he was after the alleged home invasion.
Bush and his wife Carrie Mortson have three adult children – two sons and a daughter. The couple rents the Valade Crescent home they live in, near Tenth Line Road, where police executed a search warrant in connection to the killings in late-January.
Son Brock called the six charges first laid against his father in connection to Cote’s home invasion – attempted murder, robbery with violence, forcible confinement, break and enter and two counts of using a credit card obtained by crime – a “total shock.”
The allegations were so difficult for them to fathom, at the very least, because Bush’s parents were both veterans of the Second World War.
Bush’s own words show a man with an adversarial relationship with government.
In 1997, while living in New Brunswick, Bush wrote an opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun newspaper criticizing then B.C. premier Glen Clark’s fishing policies. Bush was living in B.C. in the early ‘90s. He referred in the oped to efforts by the Clark to draw media attention away from “the devastation wreaked by years of NDP misappropriation of funds, favouritism and mismanagement.”
Bush also wrote a 1999 letter to the editor of the The Daily Gleaner, a newspaper in New Brunswick, where Bush lived in the late ‘90s before moving to Ottawa. The letter was written when he was already living in Orleans. In it, Bush wrote that the governments of Atlantic provinces had “sold their citizens into welfare slavery.” He called elected politicians and their actions “irresponsible” and “incompetent.” Provinces once “equal partners at Confederation,” were now nothing more than “territories administered by Ottawa.” Bush called it “disgraceful” and “a violation of the trust they hold with the great people of Atlantic Canada.”
In 2002, Bush wrote to the Citizen presenting a sarcastic letter to the editor that criticized the Liberal Party of Canada’s gender inequality. He wrote that Liberal backbencher Carolyn Bennett should have known her place in a party that rarely saw women reach high positions before attempting to take then Prime Minister Jean Chretien to task.
Bush’s social media accounts also provide of a glimpse of a man who questioned government authority, criticized the public service and believed in the rights of the taxpayer.
On Remembrance Day 2014, Bush’s account tweeted an angry response to a Globe and Mail reporter who noted that people had shouted “thank you” as a group of veterans marched.
“Thank-you? For what?” the tweet said.
He later accused another user of believing the “propaganda like a little Nazi.”
On the same day, the account tweeted, “The only argument for Nov. 11 being a national holiday is give civil servants more time off with pay.”
The HR consultant also posted frequently about “taxpayer monies” and “taxes” and lamented what he perceived to be their wasted use by governments.
When the home invasion charges were laid, Bush’s defence lawyer Geraldine Castle Trudel cautioned against a rush to judgment and said all that is known is the police version of events leading up to and following that alleged crime.
“It may not be correct,” she said. “People are innocent until proven guilty.”
Once the public learned his name and his family understood what police believe he did, Bush’s lawyer and others asked how it could be that a 59-year-old man suddenly turns to a life of crime? For police, the question is much the same. A DNA link has answered who, but for all, what remains is, why?
In the years since the homicides, police have offered a $100,000 reward, one of the largest in the city’s history, for any information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible.
They turned to a televised CrimeStoppers segment but stopped short of re-enacting the violent crime.
They’ve asked both the province’s chief forensic pathologist to examine the crime scene days after the killings and Ontario Provincial Police to review the case with fresh eyes in 2010.
They even formed the city’s first crime-specific task force to bring who police have always maintained was a cold-blooded killer to justice.
Saturday, eight years after the triple slaying of Alban and Raymonde Garon and Marie-Claire Beniskos, Ian Bush is expected to appear in court where he will be formally charged with their murders.
With files from Citizen staff
syogaretnam@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/shaaminiwhy
gmcgregor@ottawacitizen.com
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