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A man with a bitter hatred of the tax system has been convicted in the brutal killings of a retired tax judge, his wife and their neighbour, in one of Ottawa’s most high-profile slayings.
Ian Bush has been found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in the slayings Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde, and their neighbour, Marie-Claire Beniskos.
The verdict was delivered Wednesday in an Ottawa courtroom.
In 2007, the three were beaten and suffocated to death with plastic bags in the Garon’s Riverside Drive condo.
The 77-year-old former judge, his 73-year-old wife and Beniskos, 78, were found in a pool of blood on the living-room floor the day after the killings by a worried relative. Alban Garon had a plastic bag over his head, and a hangman’s noose around his neck.
After linking Bush to the killings in 2015, police searched his home and seized a toolkit for murder, which included duct tape, rubber gloves, a sawed-off rifle, ammunition and plastic bags.
Ottawa police also found a handwritten journal, anchored in the ramblings of a man who wrote that tax collectors were the “lowest form of humanity” and likened them to extortionists.
During the trial, the jury — 11 men, one woman — heard that Ottawa police found DNA evidence at the crime scene that they matched to Bush years later.
Police found a hair in the Garon’s home that Bush later admitted was his.
An expert testified in court that the most likely way the hair would have come free was during a physical struggle. Police also found blood with a DNA sample in which Bush couldn’t be excluded as a contributor — what Crown prosecutor James Cavanagh said was the unexpected result of Bush using a bar to repeatedly bludgeon Alban Garon in the head after the man tried to fight back and broke his restraints.
Cavanagh said he believed the case against Bush was so strong that entire portions of the evidence could be ignored and Bush could still be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
That evidence included video footage of Bush getting off a bus carrying a bag and walking toward the Garons’ building on the day of the killings.
Notebooks and a novel that were seized by police after Bush’s arrest show that Bush tried to rewrite reality in an effort to transform himself from a “brutal thug” into some kind of a hero, Cavanagh said during trial.
“What the evidence really tells you is Mr. Bush, out of anger and greed and bottomless self-pity … decided he had the right to kill and try to take back money,” said Cavanagh.
Cavanagh argued that the accused killer was “sinking in a rising flood of failure and humiliation,” the result of a “perfect storm” of events in the weeks before the triple killing. Bush owed his mother $60,000. He had been forced to “borrow and beg money from his own mother” to pay his debt to the government, Cavanagh said.
His children and wife knew he had nothing, and he was angry at Revenue Canada for holding back money he thought he was owed when he decided to “lash out at those he held responsible.”
Cavanagh said that’s when Bush plotted the murder of Alban Garon and his wife. Garon had been identified as the “focal point” for his anger six years earlier in a bizarre fax that Bush had used to try to summon the senior tax court judge to his home. It was, for Bush, a “day of reckoning” with Garon as a figurehead of the tax court.
The Garons’ neighbour, Beniskos, likely heard the sounds of her friends and neighbours being killed, Cavanagh said. It was enough to draw the 78-year-old, in just her nightshirt, to wander over that morning. Cavanagh said the knots used to bound Beniskos showed signs of disorganization and haste.
“A third person has come in and he’s got to kill again,” the prosecutor charged. “There would be no other witnesses.”
Bush’s defence lawyer, Geraldine Castle-Trudel, tried to argue that police had “tunnel vision” after identifying Bush as a suspect and ignored evidence. During closing statements, she called it a “dangerous rush to judgment.”
Castle-Trudel asked the jury to question how the hair that Bush admits is his might have found its way to the bloody crime scene, pointing to testimony from an expert who explained how someone’s hair can end up in places they’ve never been.
Bush’s rambling journal writings were not unlike what Canadians hear in the House of Commons, in political science classes or spoken by politicians on the election trail, Castle-Trudel argued. There was no mention of Garon in any of his writings, she said.
“Ian Bush is not the first person and certainly won’t be the last who thinks he is paying too much taxes or there is too much red tape in government,” said Castle-Trudel.
But what Castle-Trudel dismissed as run-of-the-mill bitterness against the tax man, Cavanagh painted as something sinister, malicious and downright murderous.
And on Wednesday, the jury agreed.
With files from Andrew Seymour and Shaamini Yogaretnam
查看原文...
Ian Bush has been found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in the slayings Alban Garon, his wife, Raymonde, and their neighbour, Marie-Claire Beniskos.
The verdict was delivered Wednesday in an Ottawa courtroom.
In 2007, the three were beaten and suffocated to death with plastic bags in the Garon’s Riverside Drive condo.
The 77-year-old former judge, his 73-year-old wife and Beniskos, 78, were found in a pool of blood on the living-room floor the day after the killings by a worried relative. Alban Garon had a plastic bag over his head, and a hangman’s noose around his neck.
After linking Bush to the killings in 2015, police searched his home and seized a toolkit for murder, which included duct tape, rubber gloves, a sawed-off rifle, ammunition and plastic bags.
Ottawa police also found a handwritten journal, anchored in the ramblings of a man who wrote that tax collectors were the “lowest form of humanity” and likened them to extortionists.
During the trial, the jury — 11 men, one woman — heard that Ottawa police found DNA evidence at the crime scene that they matched to Bush years later.
Police found a hair in the Garon’s home that Bush later admitted was his.
An expert testified in court that the most likely way the hair would have come free was during a physical struggle. Police also found blood with a DNA sample in which Bush couldn’t be excluded as a contributor — what Crown prosecutor James Cavanagh said was the unexpected result of Bush using a bar to repeatedly bludgeon Alban Garon in the head after the man tried to fight back and broke his restraints.
Cavanagh said he believed the case against Bush was so strong that entire portions of the evidence could be ignored and Bush could still be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
That evidence included video footage of Bush getting off a bus carrying a bag and walking toward the Garons’ building on the day of the killings.
Notebooks and a novel that were seized by police after Bush’s arrest show that Bush tried to rewrite reality in an effort to transform himself from a “brutal thug” into some kind of a hero, Cavanagh said during trial.
“What the evidence really tells you is Mr. Bush, out of anger and greed and bottomless self-pity … decided he had the right to kill and try to take back money,” said Cavanagh.
Cavanagh argued that the accused killer was “sinking in a rising flood of failure and humiliation,” the result of a “perfect storm” of events in the weeks before the triple killing. Bush owed his mother $60,000. He had been forced to “borrow and beg money from his own mother” to pay his debt to the government, Cavanagh said.
His children and wife knew he had nothing, and he was angry at Revenue Canada for holding back money he thought he was owed when he decided to “lash out at those he held responsible.”
Cavanagh said that’s when Bush plotted the murder of Alban Garon and his wife. Garon had been identified as the “focal point” for his anger six years earlier in a bizarre fax that Bush had used to try to summon the senior tax court judge to his home. It was, for Bush, a “day of reckoning” with Garon as a figurehead of the tax court.
The Garons’ neighbour, Beniskos, likely heard the sounds of her friends and neighbours being killed, Cavanagh said. It was enough to draw the 78-year-old, in just her nightshirt, to wander over that morning. Cavanagh said the knots used to bound Beniskos showed signs of disorganization and haste.
“A third person has come in and he’s got to kill again,” the prosecutor charged. “There would be no other witnesses.”
Bush’s defence lawyer, Geraldine Castle-Trudel, tried to argue that police had “tunnel vision” after identifying Bush as a suspect and ignored evidence. During closing statements, she called it a “dangerous rush to judgment.”
Castle-Trudel asked the jury to question how the hair that Bush admits is his might have found its way to the bloody crime scene, pointing to testimony from an expert who explained how someone’s hair can end up in places they’ve never been.
Bush’s rambling journal writings were not unlike what Canadians hear in the House of Commons, in political science classes or spoken by politicians on the election trail, Castle-Trudel argued. There was no mention of Garon in any of his writings, she said.
“Ian Bush is not the first person and certainly won’t be the last who thinks he is paying too much taxes or there is too much red tape in government,” said Castle-Trudel.
But what Castle-Trudel dismissed as run-of-the-mill bitterness against the tax man, Cavanagh painted as something sinister, malicious and downright murderous.
And on Wednesday, the jury agreed.
With files from Andrew Seymour and Shaamini Yogaretnam
查看原文...
