The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “I don’t think it will be enough,” Dorkin said. “There’s too much prejudice against Williams because of his being a Zombie. I think that it’s going to be very difficult for him to get an impartial hearing from any jury up there, or anywhere else for that matter.”

  “I take it that you are convinced that Williams is telling the truth,” Meade said. “Have you ever really seriously considered the possibility that he may not be?”

  “Whenever I’ve talked to him it always comes out the same. I don’t think he’s capable of being that good a liar.”

  Meade considered, shifted a pencil around on the desk. For the first time, Dorkin caught a flicker of irritation in his manner, but when he spoke, his voice was still level and reasonable.

  “Bernard,” he said, “I have great admiration for you, and I respect your concern for Williams and your energy in doing what you believe is right. But in the time that remains, I want you to confine yourself to your proper duties as a defence counsel and to stop acting as if you were a private investigator. I don’t like doing it this way, but in view of the representations that have been made to me from higher up, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to put that in the form of an order. Even if you were a civilian defence counsel, some of your approaches would have been a little improper. But you are an army officer, and in addition to the normal considerations, you also have to take into account the obligations you have not to do anything to bring your uniform into disrespect. You should not be roaming the countryside in a staff car knocking on doors and fishing around for the local gossip about Daniel Coile and his family.”

  He stood up and held out his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but these things had to be said. I would have had to say them even if I didn’t want to because of the directive I’ve been given. I hope that it will not cloud our good will towards each other.”

  “No,” Dorkin said. “Of course not. I understand your position.”

  “Do your best,” Meade said, “as I’m sure you will. And remember that a lawyer is a little like a doctor. He can’t save everybody, not even everybody who is saveable, and if he can’t accept that, he’d better get out of the profession or he’ll go crazy.”

  He came around from behind the desk and put his hand on Dorkin’s shoulder and walked with him to the door. As Dorkin emerged into the outer office, the CWAC corporal studied him from over her typewriter, briefly, but in a way that made him feel that she was looking for bruises. Or burns. In a phrase that had made its way from the RAF through every branch of the forces, he had just, however politely, been shot down in flames.

  After leaving Meade’s office, Dorkin had driven downtown, parked his car, and walked the city for almost two hours—one hour while Meade’s dressing-down in all its implications sank in and another hour while he came to terms with it as best he could.

  Now it was ten o’clock and dark, and he sat in his office with only the old army-issue gooseneck lamp on his desk turned on. The papers he had been through so many times were neatly piled in their place in front of him. Beside them lay the stone he had picked up from Sarah’s shallow grave at the gravel pit.

  It was a flat oblong of grey and white sandstone, half an inch thick, an inch and a half long, almost perfectly symmetrical, rounded at the edges and polished as smooth as any craftsman could have done. He picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand. Somewhere, perhaps a hundred million years ago, the sand it had been made of had been laid down at the edge of some shallow sea, then buried, compressed, hardened, pushed up, twisted, broken, shattered into innumerable pieces of which this was the remains of one. Then sometime, perhaps about the time of the first Homo sapiens, it had been picked up by a glacier, ground along, dropped as the glacier retreated and for thousands of years rolled back and forth in a stream or on some shore. Finally it had been buried in the deposit of gravel that had been dug into twenty or thirty years ago to make the pit where Sarah was to be found.

  Turning it over in his palm, closing his fist on it, he had an abrupt, vivid sense of the immensity of time and of the brevity of the tiny spark of the individual human life and of its piteousness and sanctity. He found himself remembering the photograph that MacMillan had shown him of Sarah as a child standing beside an enormous dog in the sunlight of that one unique day. Her face floated before him, alive and dead, followed by other faces. Louie. Daniel Coile. Whidden and McKiel, Grant and Drost, for whom it was all a game, a competition to be won for the gratification of their egos. Meade was probably right in suggesting that perhaps he wasn’t cut out for this.

  Meanwhile, there was this. There was Sarah and Louie and Daniel Coile. And poor, dumb Williams. He would have to fight it out in court, but one way or another he was going to win. He was going to put Daniel Coile behind bars.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  At two o’clock on the first day of the case of the King v. Owen Thomas Williams, Dorkin sat at his long oak table in the Central Court Room of George County. Beside him sat Private Smith, the keeper of his papers. To his right at the other long oak table sat H. P. Whidden and Donald McKiel. And beside them sat their much grander establishment of junior counsels, secretaries, factotums, dogsbodies—a force that seemed to Dorkin grotesquely excessive in terms of the objective it had been assembled to crush.

  Dorkin had not succeeded in getting Williams a new battle dress uniform. The best he had managed was to get him a new shirt and tie and to have his work uniform cleaned and pressed. This was what he now wore as he sat, well-groomed, clean-shaven, but cowed and bewildered, like a delinquent schoolboy, between Carvell and a strange Mountie in dress scarlet who had been brought from Fredericton to be his keeper during the trial.

  Facing Williams across the courtroom, in two rows of seats banked one above the other, sat the twelve men who were to pass judgement on him. As Dorkin had noted them down that morning during the selection process, they consisted of three farmers, two store clerks, the owner of a furniture store, a carpenter, a bookkeeper, a truck driver, a sawmill hand, a stable keeper, and a man of general business. They were all dressed in dark suits, their expressions solemn, as if in church. The two businessmen, the clerks, and the bookkeeper looked at ease in such clothes. The rest looked awkward and nervous, their voices hardly audible when they were polled.

  Behind Whidden’s entourage sat two rows of newsmen, more even than Dorkin had feared, for in the minds of many it was not just Williams who was on trial but Zombies in general—the cowards, the slackers, whom the public was paying to hang around and screw the girls whom the real men had left behind. And, for Williams, the news from overseas was not being very helpful. By now it was obvious that the Allied attack on Arnhem had been a catastrophe and that there was going to be no quick and elegant end to the Germans in the west. The Canadians were going to continue dying in the canals and ditches of the Lowlands, and as the lists of casualties continued to roll in, the conscription crisis was once more making its way to the front pages of the newspapers, as Meade had forecast.

  It was this patriotic consideration, and not just the fascination of a sex-murder, that had brought out such crowds of people. They filled every seat on the floor and in the gallery above, those in front leaning forward with chin in hand, looking down over the balustrade at the arena. Even without turning around, Dorkin had a vivid sense of them, pressing down on him, heavy and malevolent. He had a vivid sense also of a little block of half a dozen men in a back corner of the room in rough, plaid mackinaws and cowhide jackets. One of them was Daniel Coile. He was there today by choice, but in two or three days he would be there because Dorkin had secured a subpoena requiring him to appear as a defence witness.

  Before all these at his raised bench, in front of a portrait of the King in naval uniform, sat Judge Percy Dunsdale, who for some reason unfathomable to Dorkin had been chosen to try this case. Once a hack lawyer with a dismal trade in mortgages, foreclosures, and torts, a bagman and general errand-boy for the Conservati
ve Party, he had been paid off by being appointed to the bench when the last Conservative government was in its feeble death throes. Now in his sixties, he had had a decade of presiding over inconsequential trials for assault, break and entry, car theft, horse theft, boat theft, deer jacking, salmon poaching. He had never in his life presided over a murder trial.

  The mills of the law grind always exceeding slow, and with Dunsdale in charge they ground more slowly still. Deeply impressed with the solemnity of what was taking place, he had that morning examined every scrap of paper that had come before him with a furious intensity of concentration like that of a drunk man trying to eat peas.

  When the preliminaries finally were over, Whidden rose, bowed ceremoniously to Dunsdale, made his way with a measured pace to the middle of the court, paused, and then began.

  “Your Honour, gentlemen of the jury, I will be brief. It is the intention of the Crown to prove that the accused, Owen Thomas Williams, did on the night of July 1, 1944, accompany Sarah Elizabeth Coile from a dance at The Silver Dollar and did brutally murder her and leave her body in the gravel pit where it was found some four days later. The evidence which we will bring to substantiate this charge is largely circumstantial, but we believe that it will establish the guilt of the accused beyond any reasonable doubt.”

  Whidden sat down, and it was McKiel, tall, suave, and clinical, who was given the task of handling the early witnesses. He began with Corporal Drost and Staff Sergeant Grant, both resplendent in dress scarlet. With the help of a large map, they told of the discovery of the body of Sarah Coile and the questioning and arrest of Private Williams. Following the transcript of the preliminary hearing, Dorkin saw that they were repeating almost verbatim their earlier evidence. Not for them the fatal shift of a detail.

  Halfway through Drost’s testimony, the brown envelopes with the terrible photographs of Sarah Coile’s body were put into evidence. Watching closely, Dorkin saw that as the photographs passed from hand to hand through the jury, each juryman in turn looked up at Williams.

  Dorkin had also virtually memorized the transcript of the preliminary hearing, and he had come with his own careful agenda. His first objective was to hammer away as best he could at the weaknesses of the prosecution’s case. He still did not believe that he could win by fighting on that ground alone, but he could sow the beginning of doubt at least in the minds of the jurors, softening them up in preparation for the real attack in two or three days’ time.

  When McKiel had finished leading Drost through his testimony, Dorkin rose and moved out to the centre of the court, disguising as best he could the sudden nervousness that he felt as a lone figure under the scrutiny of so many eyes.

  “Corporal Drost,” Dorkin said, “when you first questioned Private Williams, did you caution him that what he said might be used as evidence against him in a criminal trial?”

  He watched Drost’s eyes flicker past him to the prosecutors, then back.

  “No,” Drost said curtly. “There was no reason to. At that time, I thought we were dealing with a simple case of a missing person.”

  “Nevertheless, no caution was given?”

  “No.”

  “Let us suppose,” Dorkin said, “that Private Williams is innocent of Sarah Coile’s death but that after leaving the dance hall, they stopped somewhere in the woods together, if you understand what I mean. Now, since you had given him no reason to believe that any-thing serious was at issue, do you not think it possible that Private Williams didn’t tell you about stopping with Sarah Coile simply because he was embarassed and told you only what he thought was relevant to your inquiry—which was that he had left Sarah Coile that night, alive and well, and had not seen her since?”

  “I don’t know,” Drost said. “I would prefer not to speculate.”

  “Tell me, Corporal Drost, when you questioned Private Williams did he seem panic-stricken?”

  “He seemed nervous.”

  “I feel sure he did, but you know, and I’m sure the members of the jury know, that whenever anyone, however innocent, is questioned by the police, they tend to be a little nervous. But Private Williams wasn’t so nervous that you felt any suspicions about him at the time?”

  “No,” Drost said, after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Here is a person,” Dorkin said, “whom you believe has brutally murdered a girl just four days before. Yet when you arrive without warning to ask him about that girl, he behaves exactly the way you would expect any innocent person to behave in the circumstances. Don’t you think that remarkable?”

  “Guilty people behave in different ways.”

  “Do you really think that if he had murdered that girl, he could have behaved as calmly as you describe?”

  “I have no way to judge that.”

  “If you had sensed that Private Williams had been guilty of some criminal act in relation to Sarah Coile, you would have immediately instituted a more energetic search for her and investigated Private Williams’s story more closely. But you did neither of these things because, as an experienced police officer, you sensed nothing suspicious in Private Williams’s manner. Is that not so?”

  “I suppose,” Drost admitted grudgingly.

  With Grant, Dorkin tackled the question of the propriety of Williams’s interrogation.

  “Tell me, Sergeant Grant,” he said, “how many were present at the questioning of Private Williams?”

  “There were five: myself, Corporal Drost, and Constables Hooper, Reynolds, and Kroll.”

  “And Private Williams was accompanied by whom?”

  “By no one.”

  “He had no legal counsel, no source of advice?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ask him if he wanted legal counsel?”

  “I believe I did.”

  “Private Williams does not seem to remember being asked this,” Dorkin said.

  “Perhaps he did not understand.”

  “Perhaps he was not meant to understand.”

  “I resent that imputation.”

  “No doubt,” Dorkin said. “Nevertheless, however it came about, Private Williams was subjected to a long interrogation late at night by five officers without benefit of any legal advice.”

  “He was warned that anything that he said might be used as evidence against him and that he had the right to remain silent.”

  “Do you recall at what point that warning was given?”

  “Not exactly. It was quite a long interrogation.”

  “You make it clear in your testimony that Private Williams was confronted with his earlier statement to Corporal Drost.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though that statement had been made without any warning that it might be used against him.”

  “At the time, there was no reason for a warning.”

  “But you were nevertheless now using it against him,” Dorkin said.

  “It was the investigation of a very serious criminal offence. If we took some liberties in order to get at the truth, we considered them justified.”

  “Did you suggest to Private Williams that if he now altered his original informal statement, he would be guilty of perjury?”

  “I don’t recall anyone saying that.”

  “I suggest to you that Private Williams was subjected to an ex-tended grilling until late at night by a team of five RCMP officers without the benefit of any legal advice, that he was confused and unnerved, and that he was bullied into repeating a statement which he had made earlier when he had not been given any legal warnings and when he did not understand that anything criminal was at issue.”

  “That is a distortion of what took place,” Grant said.

  “As I understand it, you are suggesting that Private Williams deliberately lied in his initial statement in order to cover a criminal act?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, Sergeant Grant,” Dorkin said, “it wasn’t a very clever lie since it could so easily be checked and disproven, as indeed it was. On th
e other hand, if Private Williams had told you that he and Sarah Coile had stopped somewhere along the way to the Hannigan Road, as we shall see that they did, the time which you so alertly discovered had not been accounted for would have been taken care of. If he had really murdered Sarah Coile, do you not think that is what he, or anyone with a grain of sense, would have done?”

  “Not necessarily,” Grant said. “Criminals often panic and say things to incriminate themselves.”

  “But we have just heard Corporal Drost testify quite emphatic-ally that Private Williams was not panic-stricken when he made that statement and that there was nothing in his behaviour to suggest that he had done anything wrong. I suggest to you, Sergeant Grant, that the only reason Private Williams is in this courtroom now is that when first asked about Sarah Coile he was too embarrassed to admit that he had stopped in the woods with her after they left the dance.”

  Grant was followed by the manager of The Silver Dollar, who testified that the time of the intermission at the dance was ap-proximately ten-thirty, by Mrs. Clark of The Maple Leaf canteen who testified that Williams arrived at the canteen at ten to twelve, and by Maclean, who told about the grass and dirt on Williams’s uniform.

  Maclean had never got in touch with Dorkin, and after his interview with Meade, Dorkin had made no attempt to get in touch with him. When he was seated, he glanced at Dorkin and almost imperceptibly shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, what can a man do? Dorkin felt sure that after their talk someone had given him a hard time.

  The final witness of the afternoon was the pathologist, Dr. Pierre Bourget, impeccably dressed now that it was autumn in a darker suit than he had worn in July. Like Drost and Grant, he repeated his earlier testimony virtually without alteration.

  “I would like the jury to be absolutely clear about one point,” McKiel said. “It is your testimony that Sarah Coile had lost virtually no blood, that there were no signs that she had struggled, and that her assailant could therefore have emerged from the en-counter without any incriminating signs either on his person or on his clothes. In other words, the fact that your laboratory found no incriminating evidence on Private Williams’s clothing does not preclude the possibility of his having murdered Sarah Coile.”