I published this blog early on and it has not been widely read. When I reread it recently it took back to an amazing ‘John Grisham’ time of my life (if you’re a fan of fictional stories centred on a defence lawyer, that will make sense to you). What always amazed me about these true crime stories was that they happened while the rest of us were going about our everyday business, completely unaware of the drama unfolding sometimes right beside us. A McDonald’s parking lot in Chilliwack BC was were the four ‘bad guys’ in this story first met. It was mid afternoon.

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, a small town in the Fraser Valley. MacAskill and Pelletier drove up in their car and nodded at the other two to get in. By the time the dust had settled one heroin dealer had been shot dead with one of the Uzi’s. His companion, a woman, 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 fuckin’ Uzi!” he menaced the pair in the back seat. Everybody went for their guns.

“I’ll show you a fuckin’ 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.

‘Loose lips sink ships.’ Wartime propaganda posters urged citizens to keep their mouth shut; you just never knew who you were talking to. Pelletier and MacAskill didn’t get the telegram in Laval, a mistake they would come to regret at trial.

The prosecutor wouldn’t reveal the name of their key witness, a rare tactic in criminal trials and one that is typically overturned by the trial judge. The defence has a right to know what witnesses will be called and what they’re going to say but in this case the prosecutor refused and the trial judge rejected my motion to force the Crown to reveal his name, saying that it was clear the witness may not survive in jail if his name was released.

Three weeks into the trial the prosecution was nearing its close.

“One more witness m’Lord” and we all turned to see who it would be. The doors opened and a man strode in shackled and dressed in prison fatigues, surrounded on all sides by a phalanx of RCMP officers dressed in civilian clothes. Underscoring the tension, each of the police officers had one hand on the prisoner, the other under their civilian jackets on their weapons, safety off. We had been told that a man sitting at the back of the court in the gallery was the hitman we had been warned about early in the trial. Beside him, another four cops, all of them turned toward him. I’d never experienced anything like it.

“What is your name Sir?” the prosecutor began.

This was the witness the Crown lawyers had held back. He had been a cellmate of Pelletier and MacAskill and was about to testify that our clients had told him about the night they had killed two people in BC, in detail.  Obviously hearsay and inadmissible, you say. And you might be correct except for one small issue. Typically hearsay evidence, is regarded as unreliable and not allowed into evidence in a criminal trial; what someone testifies what another person told them about what they had done as proof of the facts is classic hearsay and this witness was about to do just that. But the rule against hearsay has exceptions, one of them being hearsay may be permitted if it is ruled to be a ‘declaration against interest’. The assumption is a defendant wouldn’t say inculpatory things, negative things, about what he or she had done unless they were true.  Telling their cellmate about killing two people in BC was clearly a declaration against interest. Loose lips sink ships. They had not known of course that the woman in that car was still alive. They boasted how they had blown them both away, replaying the moment MacAskill had pulled the trigger and how they had to use the tire iron on the woman. His testimony was devastating. They had convicted themselves with their own words.

Most things in life are monetized and this kind of testimony was no exception. The witness had bargained his testimony in exchange for the Crown agreeing to drop over one hundred and twenty fraud related charges. He had spent months living the high life at fancy hotels and restaurants and nightclubs on dozens of stolen credit cards. The agreement called for him to testify against Pelletier and MacAskill, be given a new identity and a monthly allowance for the next two years. It was a stunning bargain which had been approved at the highest levels of the federal government.

I have often wondered what was going through that witnesses head. He had to have known he had struck a deadly deal in return for his freedom. To rat out on men like MacAskill and Pelletier always had consequences. It was the law of the their jungle. We were told, as a matter of our own personal safety, that the hitman we had been warned about was going to be in court when this witness testified. Extra precautions were put in place and security in and out of the courtroom was tightened. When the day came the hitman appeared at the doors of the courtroom. He was unavoidable. He sat down at the back of the courtroom surrounded by police officers in civilian clothes. They didn’t take their eyes off, watching for any movement. He was a large black man whose menacing air was intimidating. The witness saw him and must have known at that moment that he may have exchanged his freedom with his life.

The witness testified for two days and both lawyers tried to attack the obvious weakness suggesting that none of this had happened and that he had made it all up in order to secure his freedom. That was all we had. At the end of the second day he was escorted out of the courtroom, his protective legion having never left his side for a single minute. It was a scene out of a Bruce Willis movie, the witness in chains on the stand, one armed police officer at each corner of the witness box, unavoidable eye contact with the hitman at the back. If the witness had ever thought he had struck a good bargain with the prosecutor he must have thought otherwise as he was escorted out that day.

“Dead man walking.” the prosecutor leaned over and spoke quietly in my ear. I’ve never forgotten the echo of those words. Three months later that witness was dead, shot gangland style. He was a Dead Man Walking.

We couldn’t put our clients on the stand and we had enough facts to argue self defence so the decision was made to close our case. It didn’t take long for the jury to convict both men of first degree murder and attempted murder and an even shorter time for them to receive their mandatory life imprisonment.

But this remarkable case still had one more surprise waiting in the wings. I needed to meet with Rock in the holding cells after the verdict, so I waited in the courtroom, for the sheriff’s approval.

As I was waiting Rock’s girlfriend who had been present throughout the trial, approached me with a sealed packet of cigarettes,

“Could you give these to Rock for me?”

“No problem” I said, knowing they would be welcome. I found a sheriff and handed them over. A few minutes later the sheriff returned, a police officer with him.

“Come with us please,” the tone decidedly insistent. I was escorted to an interview room.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You have tried to pass heroin to your client!” came the stern accusation. I laughed out loud which no doubt did not help my cause, in that moment.

“Are you crazy!? What are you talking about?”

It turned out that the sealed package of cigarettes was not sealed at all. When I gave the packet to the sheriff he had inspected it and the cellophane cover had slipped down. Inside he found twenty cigarettes. Twenty heroin cigarettes. The tobacco had been removed and carefully replaced with pure heroin. The sheriff was one of those who despised defence lawyers and everything we stood for and he had quickly jumped to the conclusion I was trafficking in heroin in this attempt to pass ‘cigarettes’.

My reaction must have infuriated him. There I was ‘dead to rights’ and I laughed at him, I was mocking him. And he was right, I was and he deserved it. Besides, I was exhausted. The trial was over and I had lost. It was time to go home.

Pelletier and MacAskill were returned to Quebec to serve their terms in Laval Penitentiary, one of Canada’s most notoriously dangerous prisons. Two years later Pelletier escaped with four other notoriously violent inmates at Laval. They were eventually recaptured but not before terrorizing a number of innocent victims. That also led to one of the most chilling phone calls I had ever received.

“Mr. Peyton?”

“Yes it is.”

It was late at night and my wife and I were both sound asleep.

“My name is Inspector Ramsden with the RCMP Major Crimes Unit in Vancouver. You were the defence lawyer for Roch Pelletier weren’t you, back a couple of years on that first degree trial in Surrey?”

“Yes, I was Inspector. What’s this about?”

I had never shaken the dark feeling I had from the moment I first met Rock and this phone calling brought it all surging back. I was newly married and we were planning a family and I knew that I was flying close to the flame defending criminal clients at this level.

“Well Mr. Peyton, Pelletier has escaped from Laval in Quebec and I’ve been asked to make you aware. For your own safety.  I know he was convicted of first but did your relationship end up okay, with him?”

And there it was. The unstated risk I was taking defending a man like Pelletier. To assume his darkness would never ‘touch’ me had been naive from the beginning. Don’t get me wrong. I was an intense, committed and aggressive criminal lawyer and good at what I did but every once in a while in that line of work, you get reminded that it can wash over everything in your life. Everything important. And this was one of those moments.

“Far as I remember Inspector. I fought hard for him and we lost. Rock had been realistic about his chances from the beginning. So yeah, I think we’re good. Thanks for the heads up.”

“Okay, well good then. If you think anything is suspicious you have to contact the Kelowna RCMP immediately. Anything. I’ve transferred your file to Major Crimes in Kelowna and I’ll send you the direct contact.”

And with that, he was gone.

Mac leaned over,  half asleep, “Who was that honey?”

“Oh, nobody. I’ll tell you in the morning. Go back to sleep.”

I lay awake for the rest of the night.

Pelletier was recaptured after a few weeks on the lam and I was never contacted by him. Two years later I learned that Pelletier had been killed in Laval. Four months after that another call let me know that MacAskill had met the same fate in prison.

Live by the sword.

As a footnote the key crown witness did not survive. He was killed gangland style within a few weeks of the trial ending. The prosecutor’s foreboding words had proven prophetic: Dead Man Walking.

It was without a doubt the most disturbing criminal trial I was ever involved in. Even the worst of us have redeeming values, even the worst of us seek relationships and family but not those two; Rock Pelletier and MacAskill were evil men, living evil lives, inevitably to die violent deaths.