October 4, 1984

The prosecutor leaned over to me as the witness left the courtroom, surrounded by a phalanx of police detectives, each of them with their hands on weapons under their jackets,

“Dead man walking.” he whispered as the witness passed.

I was a defence lawyer in one of the most dangerous and intense trials of my entire career. My client, Roch ‘Rock’ Pelletier, a French Canadian was charged with first degree murder and attempted murder. The co-accused Ian MacAskill and Pelletier had been charged in BC after an exchange of Uzi machine guns for heroin had gone terribly wrong. The two men were Hell’s Angels associates and had travelled to BC with eight Uzi’s and thousands of rounds of ammunition. They arranged to meet the heroin dealers, a man and a woman in the parking lot of the McDonald’s in Chilliwack. By the time the dust had settled the heroin dealer had been shot dead with one of the Uzi’s. His companion had survived but only barely. She had been shot but survived the initial wounding. When they realized she was still alive, MacAskill and Pelletier stopped in a gravel pit near Maple Ridge and tried to beat her to death with a tire iron which they had found in the back of the vehicle. I am not telling you these details to horrify you but only to have you understand how evil these men were. If it’s any consolation those are most of the gory details.

The trial was set in Supreme Court in New Westminster in a specially fortified courtroom. We were told from day one that police had intelligence warning of a hitman coming from the US, to kill the Crown’s principal witness. Each day we were frisked and entered through guarded doors and metal detectors. To say the tension in the courtroom was palpable doesn’t quite capture it; the tension was as thick as cheese would be more like it. This was one of the few trials my wife Mac ever came to. She picked a good one.

MacAskill and Pelletier had separate lawyers, not unusual in cases like this. They might after all, from time to time, have competing defences such as, ‘I didn’t do it. He did it.’

On the other hand in this case, we needed to work together if at all possible. Self defence was the obvious and only defensible position. The case for the Crown was overwhelming. It was largely circumstantial and supported by volumes of forensic evidence tying both defendants to the vehicle used that night. There were no weapons and no trace of the heroin but the police were on the case. It was a circumstantial case save for two witnesses who would prove to be vital; the female companion of the heroin dealer and a secret Crown witness who we later learned would testify against the defendants.

The basic self defence argument on the facts of this case actually had merit. All four of the occupants of the vehicle were armed, not perhaps surprising given their line of work.

But getting those facts to support self defence in a first degree murder and attempted murder case was going to be a stretch.

I’ll never forget the woman on the witness stand. She understood the rules of the game. If she testified against either MacAskill or Pelletier, HA associates, she was as good as dead. On the other hand “those fucking bastards” had left her for as good as dead in a Maple Ridge gravel pit, her chest caved in from the blunt force of a tire iron. She had thought she was a goner at the time. After the shooting in the car MacAskill and Pelletier had stuffed them both in the trunk, thinking they were dead. At some point the two men realized she had survived her gunshot wounds and decided they had to ‘finish her off’. She testified that she could hear them discuss what to do and then check her pulse to see if she was dead. And through all of that, her sense of humour survived. A brave funny woman took the witness stand.

“Did you carry a purse that day?”

“Well yes counsellor of course I did. What woman leaves home without a purse?” she responded, with a coy twinkle.

We saw an opening and of course knew the answer to the next question. I had to get it into evidence.

“Would you tell this Court what you had in your purse that day in the car.”

“Sure. I had my lipstick, my money, my pot and …” she paused for effect, “My gun. The usual purse things.”

It may not read that way but in that moment, in that courtroom, after weeks of tension, it was pure slapstick. And she nailed it. Mr. Justice Patrick Dohm, a larger than life barrel chested judge who I always enjoyed doing trials in front of, burst into uncontrollable laughter.

The judge laughed, the sheriff laughed, the court clerk laughed, the gallery laughed, I laughed. Rock Pelletier didn’t laugh. MacAskill didn’t laugh. But damn it was funny. I have often thought of that woman. I will never know how she found her courage and I do not know if she survived much longer. But courage she found and if she did survive I would tell her she made a difference.

And bonus.  By the time she left the stand I had my self defence. She was the missing piece in creating this tapestry of violence, an image where the air was thick and malevolent and dangerous and where everybody, all four occupants of that vehicle had their weapons out and their fingers on the trigger, ready to shoot. It was an occupational hazard in that line of work.

“Show me the heroin!” ordered MacAskill.

“You show me the fuckin’ Uzi’s.” came the reply.

Tensions increased with each exchange, all four of them expecting that the deal could go sideways at any moment. MacAskill and Pelletier were in the front seat of the car as they drove down the backroads of Fraser Valley farm country. Pelletier was driving. When I interviewed him he told me that he had no idea what MacAskill was going to do when things got heated. He had known MacAskill for two years and they had partnered up on many previous occasions. When I suggested to Pelletier that we could turn on MacAskill as a defence, he stopped in his tracks,

“No way man, no way! Even if it works I’d be a dead man back in the penitentiary. They kill snitches there. And I’ll tell you this. You don’t want to be the lawyer doing that to MacAskill.”

And that was ‘the MacAskill’ in the car driving down the backroads of the Fraser Valley.

“You wanna see an Uzi?! You wanna see a fucking Uzi!” he menaced the pair in the back seat. Everybody went for their guns.

“I’ll show you a fucking Uzi. This is a fucking Uzi!”

And with that MacAskill reached over the seat, pulled the trigger and sprayed both victims with bullets. The man died instantly. Pelletier told me they were silent for several minutes,

“I even thought MacAskill was going to shoot me. It was crazy man. I was terrified.”

After a few minutes they pulled the car off the road near Cultus Lake. They put both bodies into the trunk and tried to clean the blood off the inside of the vehicle. Then they drove off looking for a gravel pit to dump the bodies. Later on at an abandoned gravel pit near Maple Ridge, they opened the trunk to take out the bodies, the woman groaned. MacAskill picked up a tire iron and slammed it into her chest until they were sure she was dead. Then they buried both bodies under a pile of sand and fled the scene. They weren’t to learn for months, sometime after they were arrested and charged that the woman had somehow survived. In fact incredibly, she had stayed conscious throughout her ordeal and the moment they drove off she had clawed her way out of the sand pile. She was found early that morning and taken to hospital.

Eight months after the two men had returned to Quebec, Pelletier and MacAskill were arrested and held in Laval, a federal penitentiary, until they could be transported to BC.

It was there that they made their second big mistake.

Watch for Dead Man Walking 2