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In anticipation of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations, the Citizen’s Bruce Deachman has been out in search of Ottawans — 150 of them — to learn their stories of life and death, hope and love, the extraordinary and the everyday. We’ll share one person’s story every day until Canada Day.
“Before I became senior in the RCMP, I worked investigations. And there was one that covered my rank from corporal to superintendent. And when I became commissioner, the murderer sent me a Christmas card.
“We never found the victim’s body, but we were able to convict him without it, which is rare. It’s also one of the few cases — you know how on TV the witness is testifying and the accused says ‘I’ll kill you!’ Well, that happened to me with this guy.
“The guy’s name is David Pritchard. He died a year ago. He was your textbook psychopath. He’d insert himself into the drug trade, work his way up the point he got comfortable, then he’d arrange a deal, kill the dealer, take the drugs and live the big time.
“So he did this to a dealer in northern B.C., in a place called Topley. Myles Skolos was a very nice man, a farmer, but he also was a marijuana trafficker who had this exclusive relationship with this grower from Penticton who sold only to Myles. And Myles had a very tight clientele. It was good dope and people were pleased. Everything was fine until Pritchard showed up with one of Myles’s direct dealers and put it all together in his head.
“Abe Wall was the direct dealer, from Burns Lake, and Abe’s brother was Bill Wall. And Bill Wall had the misfortune of being social with Pritchard. They would hunt longhorn sheep together, and in fact, if Pritchard was good at anything other than killing people and ripping off drugs, it was hunting.
“Bill and Dave were tight, and they went out to visit Abe. Pot came up in conversation and they went out to Myles’s farm to meet Myles, and Dave put it all together.
“So one day in 1995, Myles’s brother, who lives on Vancouver Island, died. So Myles had to go to the funeral. Now Myles’s wife, Pirkko Skolos, who was loved by all the people in the community, stayed at home when Myles went off to his brother’s funeral. And when he comes back, his wife is gone. She’s just gone.
“There’d been a snowstorm and he sees tracks leading out to the woods where their stash of pot is kept, and tracks coming back to the ATV, and that’s it. So he calls the police.
“So Myles gives us the whole story EXCEPT for what was out there. He says ‘I deal pot,’ but he’s not giving up who his sub-dealers were.
“I tried to impress upon him, ‘Somebody knew that this pot was here and how it arrived.’ So over the next couple of days he starts to give it up, because he gets the consent of all these people and because I’m persuasive in saying I’m not interested in the pot dealing. So I meet his grower, who had a distinctive way of packaging his dope and putting it in trunks with this meticulous wrapping and bags. There were two trunks at the Skolos farm. One was gone and one was empty, with all the wrapping all thrown around the stash site. But no body and no blood.
“So the only path to figure out who did it was through his sub-dealers. And that’s how we get to know Abe Wall. And Abe talked about having been to the farm in the summer with his brother Bill and this crazy guy named Dave.
“So I interviewed Dave, an exploratory interview. Meanwhile, my partner interviews this other woman, Kim McCarthy, who we find out is Dave’s girlfriend.
“I’m interviewing Dave in what we call a non-custodial interview. I’m being very systematic, because he’s not quite a suspect, but he’s a person of interest. So we start having a little talk, and I realize ‘Oh, I’m into something big here with this guy,’ to the point where I shift gears and I go accusatory, thinking that somehow I’m going to persuade him to tell me about it because it’s quite clear to me that this is the guy. And at one point when I’m accusing him, he gets so mad he gets up and he’s going to punch me in the head, but I don’t fight back; I just get ready to take it in the head, but he comes to his senses.
“So he leaves, and we debrief McCarthy. She gives a very unhelpful interview, but it’s clear that she knows something about this.
“Now on the day that Pirkko goes missing, Dave’s wife, not his girlfriend, is in the hospital having her second child. Dave visits his wife that evening, then leaves. McCarthy is in the hotel around the corner from the hospital. And she says that Dave leaves for the evening and doesn’t come back til the early morning. But he does have a trunkful of marijuana, and they go on this big spree. They buy a truck in Edson, Alberta, and go around selling marijuana and having a big time living off the proceeds. And so far we have a very strong foundation to suspect Dave, but we don’t have any real evidence.
“But McCarthy calls us back the next day to say ‘I forgot to tell you something. There’s a little berm out of a rise coming out of Edson where we stopped one day and threw the trunk, because we had all the pot in the truck.’ So off to Edson we go, where we recover the trunk, and we’re able to take the plastic wrapping there that had been cut from the same roll – and there was a physical match to the plastic that’s at the stash site back at the Skolos farm.
“So it’s coming together. But do you think I could get anybody to take this on as a murder trial? Because we don’t have a body and we’ve got a lot of work to do. And in fairness, it is a stretch.
Convicted murderer David Pritchard in 2014, when, due to his terminal cancer, he was granted parole from prison. He was 51. He died last year.
“I’d run a wiretap on this guy, but it wasn’t getting us anything. Whoever put the microphone in the place put it right by the furnace, and it was wintertime, so about every three or four minutes, whatever you were listening to was gone.
“But Dave is mad at McCarthy, and we hear on the wire that he’s trying to figure out how he can kill her, because she’s a witness and a liability, she’s a loose end. So I do a search warrant on his house to get his firearms. I knew that would make him crazy, plus it’s in the public interest that he not have weapons because he wants to kill McCarthy. And he comes home and we’re listening to him on the wire, and he’s going nuts.
“So he pages me, and I call and he says ‘I understand you and the boys were by the house today.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we were. You weren’t there. Were you hiding, Dave?’ He says, ‘I wasn’t hiding from you,’ and then he says something like ‘If you guys come around here you’re going to need bullet-proof balaclavas, because I’m going hunting.’ Just crazy stuff like that.
“So we get into this pissing match, and I say ‘Well, this coming from a guy who kills grandmothers?’
“‘Yeah, that’s right, Paulson, I kill everybody, don’t I?’
“’Well, you killed a grandmother here, Dave.’
“And he goes, ‘Yeah? Well, prove it,’ and hangs up the phone.
“So I run over to hear what he’s saying to his wife, and he starts crying. He’s breaking down. And he says, ‘You know, it’s just like in killing Ed, too’ — because there was another guy he killed that we could never prove because he ripped him off in the same way for a bunch of coke — he says ‘Just like in killing Ed, you know, I must’ve gone bad when I was a kid,’ and he starts crying and telling his wife about this, and she says ‘What is it?’ And he says, ‘Well, I shot two people.’ And with that audio, I think to myself, ‘Yes!’
“But nobody will take the prosecution on the basis of that audio. First of all, it’s hard to hear, although we eventually ran it at trial. Nobody will charge him with murder, so we charge him with theft of marijuana, and it’s built on the evidence platform of recent possession of the plastic connecting in a temporal way back to the event.
“So we go to trial on theft of dope, and we convict him. And he gets a good whacking, like three or four years in federal penitentiary.
“Finally I get a prosecutors to agree to go to trial on murder. But just before we start the trial, his counsel says that Dave is prepared to cooperate and he wants to enter into a limited immunity agreement. So we write this agreement because he’s about to pin it all on Bill Wall. He gives this big long statement, and I had said it would be contingent on getting the body back and contingent on him being truthful and cooperative. So we do that; the trial is put off, the jury is dismissed, and we’re supposed to go and get the body.
“So we go up in the middle of the woods and he can’t remember where the body is. His story is that on the night that he goes to the hospital, he meets Bill Wall, and Wall says ‘Yeah, I’m going to kill the Skoloses tonight and take all their dope.’ And supposedly Bill goes out there, and then on the way back he called and says ‘You’ve got to help me,’ and so Dave goes out to meet him. They do a body transfer and Dave brings poor Pirkko back to Prince George and buries her in a hole that he’d pre-dug for another guy he was going to kill. It was all nonsense, so we had to disprove that.
“So we excavated this field, and no body. So we’re able to rescind the agreement and go back to the prosecution. We went to Prince George and ran a trial, and convicted him of first-degree murder. I was on the stand forever; it was me and him locked in this mano-a-mano thing. And at the end of it, everybody’s forgotten about the story; when I go up and watch the trial, there’s only one guy in the audience, and it’s me. Occasionally, Pritchard’s wife would be sitting there.
“So he’s convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. And I go out into the foyer of the Prince George courtroom, and I’m talking to the Crown and a couple of other people, and the jury, which had been released, comes down, and they all come over and they surround me. And they thank me. And they say ‘Holy cow, we had no idea what kind of rigmarole you have to go through to get somebody convicted.’ And they shook my hand. It was one of the best moments of my service.
“So anyway, I tracked him. I wrote to prisons and I said, ‘This guy cannot be released, and if he is released, you’ve got to let me know. And when I got the Christmas card, in 2011, it said ‘Hey, Bobby, I see you made it to commissioner. I always thought you would. You’re one of the best cops I ever met. But I’ve still got a few secrets left in me, like where’s Pirkko?’
“And that’s the textbook psychopath. It’s not whether he’s guilty or innocent, but do you have a game to play? Are you pulling somebody’s chain? And he pulled it right until the end.”
— RCMP commissioner Bob Paulson, Headquarters Building, Leikin Drive, June 19, 2017.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
“Before I became senior in the RCMP, I worked investigations. And there was one that covered my rank from corporal to superintendent. And when I became commissioner, the murderer sent me a Christmas card.
“We never found the victim’s body, but we were able to convict him without it, which is rare. It’s also one of the few cases — you know how on TV the witness is testifying and the accused says ‘I’ll kill you!’ Well, that happened to me with this guy.
“The guy’s name is David Pritchard. He died a year ago. He was your textbook psychopath. He’d insert himself into the drug trade, work his way up the point he got comfortable, then he’d arrange a deal, kill the dealer, take the drugs and live the big time.
“So he did this to a dealer in northern B.C., in a place called Topley. Myles Skolos was a very nice man, a farmer, but he also was a marijuana trafficker who had this exclusive relationship with this grower from Penticton who sold only to Myles. And Myles had a very tight clientele. It was good dope and people were pleased. Everything was fine until Pritchard showed up with one of Myles’s direct dealers and put it all together in his head.
“Abe Wall was the direct dealer, from Burns Lake, and Abe’s brother was Bill Wall. And Bill Wall had the misfortune of being social with Pritchard. They would hunt longhorn sheep together, and in fact, if Pritchard was good at anything other than killing people and ripping off drugs, it was hunting.
“Bill and Dave were tight, and they went out to visit Abe. Pot came up in conversation and they went out to Myles’s farm to meet Myles, and Dave put it all together.
“So one day in 1995, Myles’s brother, who lives on Vancouver Island, died. So Myles had to go to the funeral. Now Myles’s wife, Pirkko Skolos, who was loved by all the people in the community, stayed at home when Myles went off to his brother’s funeral. And when he comes back, his wife is gone. She’s just gone.
“There’d been a snowstorm and he sees tracks leading out to the woods where their stash of pot is kept, and tracks coming back to the ATV, and that’s it. So he calls the police.
“So Myles gives us the whole story EXCEPT for what was out there. He says ‘I deal pot,’ but he’s not giving up who his sub-dealers were.
“I tried to impress upon him, ‘Somebody knew that this pot was here and how it arrived.’ So over the next couple of days he starts to give it up, because he gets the consent of all these people and because I’m persuasive in saying I’m not interested in the pot dealing. So I meet his grower, who had a distinctive way of packaging his dope and putting it in trunks with this meticulous wrapping and bags. There were two trunks at the Skolos farm. One was gone and one was empty, with all the wrapping all thrown around the stash site. But no body and no blood.
“So the only path to figure out who did it was through his sub-dealers. And that’s how we get to know Abe Wall. And Abe talked about having been to the farm in the summer with his brother Bill and this crazy guy named Dave.
“So I interviewed Dave, an exploratory interview. Meanwhile, my partner interviews this other woman, Kim McCarthy, who we find out is Dave’s girlfriend.
“I’m interviewing Dave in what we call a non-custodial interview. I’m being very systematic, because he’s not quite a suspect, but he’s a person of interest. So we start having a little talk, and I realize ‘Oh, I’m into something big here with this guy,’ to the point where I shift gears and I go accusatory, thinking that somehow I’m going to persuade him to tell me about it because it’s quite clear to me that this is the guy. And at one point when I’m accusing him, he gets so mad he gets up and he’s going to punch me in the head, but I don’t fight back; I just get ready to take it in the head, but he comes to his senses.
“So he leaves, and we debrief McCarthy. She gives a very unhelpful interview, but it’s clear that she knows something about this.
“Now on the day that Pirkko goes missing, Dave’s wife, not his girlfriend, is in the hospital having her second child. Dave visits his wife that evening, then leaves. McCarthy is in the hotel around the corner from the hospital. And she says that Dave leaves for the evening and doesn’t come back til the early morning. But he does have a trunkful of marijuana, and they go on this big spree. They buy a truck in Edson, Alberta, and go around selling marijuana and having a big time living off the proceeds. And so far we have a very strong foundation to suspect Dave, but we don’t have any real evidence.
“But McCarthy calls us back the next day to say ‘I forgot to tell you something. There’s a little berm out of a rise coming out of Edson where we stopped one day and threw the trunk, because we had all the pot in the truck.’ So off to Edson we go, where we recover the trunk, and we’re able to take the plastic wrapping there that had been cut from the same roll – and there was a physical match to the plastic that’s at the stash site back at the Skolos farm.
“So it’s coming together. But do you think I could get anybody to take this on as a murder trial? Because we don’t have a body and we’ve got a lot of work to do. And in fairness, it is a stretch.
Convicted murderer David Pritchard in 2014, when, due to his terminal cancer, he was granted parole from prison. He was 51. He died last year.
“I’d run a wiretap on this guy, but it wasn’t getting us anything. Whoever put the microphone in the place put it right by the furnace, and it was wintertime, so about every three or four minutes, whatever you were listening to was gone.
“But Dave is mad at McCarthy, and we hear on the wire that he’s trying to figure out how he can kill her, because she’s a witness and a liability, she’s a loose end. So I do a search warrant on his house to get his firearms. I knew that would make him crazy, plus it’s in the public interest that he not have weapons because he wants to kill McCarthy. And he comes home and we’re listening to him on the wire, and he’s going nuts.
“So he pages me, and I call and he says ‘I understand you and the boys were by the house today.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we were. You weren’t there. Were you hiding, Dave?’ He says, ‘I wasn’t hiding from you,’ and then he says something like ‘If you guys come around here you’re going to need bullet-proof balaclavas, because I’m going hunting.’ Just crazy stuff like that.
“So we get into this pissing match, and I say ‘Well, this coming from a guy who kills grandmothers?’
“‘Yeah, that’s right, Paulson, I kill everybody, don’t I?’
“’Well, you killed a grandmother here, Dave.’
“And he goes, ‘Yeah? Well, prove it,’ and hangs up the phone.
“So I run over to hear what he’s saying to his wife, and he starts crying. He’s breaking down. And he says, ‘You know, it’s just like in killing Ed, too’ — because there was another guy he killed that we could never prove because he ripped him off in the same way for a bunch of coke — he says ‘Just like in killing Ed, you know, I must’ve gone bad when I was a kid,’ and he starts crying and telling his wife about this, and she says ‘What is it?’ And he says, ‘Well, I shot two people.’ And with that audio, I think to myself, ‘Yes!’
“But nobody will take the prosecution on the basis of that audio. First of all, it’s hard to hear, although we eventually ran it at trial. Nobody will charge him with murder, so we charge him with theft of marijuana, and it’s built on the evidence platform of recent possession of the plastic connecting in a temporal way back to the event.
“So we go to trial on theft of dope, and we convict him. And he gets a good whacking, like three or four years in federal penitentiary.
“Finally I get a prosecutors to agree to go to trial on murder. But just before we start the trial, his counsel says that Dave is prepared to cooperate and he wants to enter into a limited immunity agreement. So we write this agreement because he’s about to pin it all on Bill Wall. He gives this big long statement, and I had said it would be contingent on getting the body back and contingent on him being truthful and cooperative. So we do that; the trial is put off, the jury is dismissed, and we’re supposed to go and get the body.
“So we go up in the middle of the woods and he can’t remember where the body is. His story is that on the night that he goes to the hospital, he meets Bill Wall, and Wall says ‘Yeah, I’m going to kill the Skoloses tonight and take all their dope.’ And supposedly Bill goes out there, and then on the way back he called and says ‘You’ve got to help me,’ and so Dave goes out to meet him. They do a body transfer and Dave brings poor Pirkko back to Prince George and buries her in a hole that he’d pre-dug for another guy he was going to kill. It was all nonsense, so we had to disprove that.
“So we excavated this field, and no body. So we’re able to rescind the agreement and go back to the prosecution. We went to Prince George and ran a trial, and convicted him of first-degree murder. I was on the stand forever; it was me and him locked in this mano-a-mano thing. And at the end of it, everybody’s forgotten about the story; when I go up and watch the trial, there’s only one guy in the audience, and it’s me. Occasionally, Pritchard’s wife would be sitting there.
“So he’s convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. And I go out into the foyer of the Prince George courtroom, and I’m talking to the Crown and a couple of other people, and the jury, which had been released, comes down, and they all come over and they surround me. And they thank me. And they say ‘Holy cow, we had no idea what kind of rigmarole you have to go through to get somebody convicted.’ And they shook my hand. It was one of the best moments of my service.
“So anyway, I tracked him. I wrote to prisons and I said, ‘This guy cannot be released, and if he is released, you’ve got to let me know. And when I got the Christmas card, in 2011, it said ‘Hey, Bobby, I see you made it to commissioner. I always thought you would. You’re one of the best cops I ever met. But I’ve still got a few secrets left in me, like where’s Pirkko?’
“And that’s the textbook psychopath. It’s not whether he’s guilty or innocent, but do you have a game to play? Are you pulling somebody’s chain? And he pulled it right until the end.”
— RCMP commissioner Bob Paulson, Headquarters Building, Leikin Drive, June 19, 2017.
bdeachman@postmedia.com
查看原文...
