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Soon after juror Kathy Macdonald helped acquit
Shannon Murrin of a sensational child
murder,
she followed him to Newfoundland. Now
she's
cashed in her Kitsilano condo for a
trailer
in St. John's. They say it's love,
but that's
not all they want
By Shawn Blore
In St. John's, a
road-salt town of twisting, narrow streets, a mint-condition 1970 Monte
Carlo is an unusual sight. Add to that a front novelty licence plate
reading "Evil, Wicked, Mean & Nasty" and a driver who has shaved his
head bald in celebration of his return to Newfoundland, and the result is
a stare at every corner.
Not that Shannon
Murrin cares. This is his hometown. He's free. So he takes it slow with
the window down, pointing out the sights and giving a narrated tour of the
city's landmarks. "There's Signal Hill," he says. "That's Quidi Vidi Lake
there, where they hold the fireworks."
We come to a tall blue
wall topped by a guard tower. "There's Her Majesty's. I spent a few years
in there off and on."
Just outside the old
downtown we pull into a gas station. Murrin opts for full service, tells
the attendant to fill 'er up, then turns to Kathy Macdonald. "Get out the
credit card, woman," he says, adding to me, as she digs into her purse,
"Soon as the credit card's full, soon as her Visa's expired, that's it.
Out she goes." Macdonald gives him a good-natured laugh.
They're a curious
couple: a man who's just been through a six-month trial for the sex
slaying of eight-year-old Mindy Tran, and a woman who served on the jury
that set him free. Even they thought their relationship was odd at first.
"When we started going out and that," Murrin recalls, "I says, 'This
feels. . . . How does it make you feel?' And she says, 'A bit strange.'
And I said, 'Yeah, me too.' So we dealt with that for a while until we
realized that what we were doing was really normal."
That's not what a lot
of other people thought. When Murrin was found not guilty, his own cries
of justice gone wrong - of being the fourth "M" in a series that runs
Morin, Marshall, and Milgaard - received little attention. He'd been let
off, but a strong whiff of suspicion still hung over him. When it came out
that one of the jurors had followed him home to Newfoundland and was now
living with him, that got people talking again.
At first, Macdonald
protested that her relationship with Murrin was strictly business; the two
of them were writing a book together. Sure she was staying with him at his
mother's house in St. John's, but that was just down-East hospitality. It
was weeks before Macdonald and Murrin admitted what everyone else had
already assumed. They were a couple.
This was hardly a
reprise of the Gillian Guess saga, however. True, both Guess and Macdonald
are from Vancouver. And both are women of a certain age who elected to
start relationships with men accused of murder on whose juries they
served. But there are important differences. Guess started sleeping with
Peter Gill during the trial. Macdonald's relationship with Murrin began
only after he'd been acquitted. Guess ran around bragging about her
accomplishment and seemed to regard her obstruction-of-justice trial as a
springboard to kitschy celebrity. Macdonald has been cautiously
circumspect.
Yet to some extent,
the question remains the same. Given sanity, intelligence, and free will,
why would any woman choose to associate herself with a man police would
like to see put away in a small concrete cell?
Even if, in her
flakier moments, Macdonald will say she and Murrin were linked from the
start - born as they were within three weeks of each other in 1950 - their
backgrounds could hardly have been more different.
Murrin was a
hellraiser from the get-go, starting his criminal career with small
burglaries of summer cottages, always carrying a fishing pole along so he
wouldn't look suspicious. But he quickly graduated to bigger things. He's
proudest of his bank jobs, including, as he often mentions, "the biggest
bank job in the history of Newfoundland." That heist, in 1972, netted
Murrin about $70,000, plus some serious time in a federal penitentiary
after a former friend ratted him out. Less readily mentioned are his many
convictions for fights in bars and gas-station lots. (Absent from his
record is any conviction for a crime of a sexual nature.) Murrin also had
a respectable trade as an auto-body man, and, plying one skill set or the
other, he made his way over the years in and out of a marriage, several
prisons, and across the country. It was a spontaneous, unattached
existence, but one Murrin says he was happy with. "I wouldn't change one
thing I ever done. Not one."
Where Murrin was
content to drift, Macdonald took the opposite tack. "I've spent my life
trying to fit in," she says, "usually feeling like an oddball." It was
true in her family; it was true in the working world. After high school,
Macdonald got a job with the Toronto-Dominion Bank in Vancouver, fully
expecting within a year or so to be home raising children. A marriage duly
followed at the age of twenty-one, but then a divorce ensued two years
later.
Eschewing the
traditional tel-ler's wicket, Macdonald asked to be placed on the bond
desk. Over the course of several years, she became a certified general
accountant and picked up a broker's licence, becoming the first female
trader hired by Peter Brown, the dean of Vancouver's stock-market scene.
She made some money. The high point of her brokerage career occurred when
she took a company through a public offering and saw the stock take off.
She netted around $250,000. Then the oddball side of her character kicked
in once again. Most brokers, after making a pile of money, set out to make
more. Macdonald set out to find some meaning in her life.
She travelled to
Europe, a thirty-six-year-old woman schlepping around a backpack. She went
to Toronto, hung out, and tended bar for a time. She was back out west in
Calgary working for the Alberta Stock Exchange when the biological
imperative hit with a whump. She latched on to the first likely mate and
spent the next two years frantically trying for children.
But 1992 found
Macdonald still childless and again single, now persuing a general arts
b.a. at the University of British Columbia. As if being a
forty-two-year-old undergrad weren't enough, Macdonald liked to reaffirm
her outsider status by taking the right-wing Fraser Institute's line
during discussions with her classmates in women's-studies courses.
Hellraising, perhaps -
though of a safe, academic sort. Nothing that Murrin would have been
interested in. What eventually brought the two together was the
disappearance, on August 17, 1994, of eight-year-old Mindy Tran.
Murrin's wanderings
had by then brought him to Kelowna, B.C., where, having recently been laid
off from his auto-body job, he spent that day getting drunk. Sometime
before 6 p.m., he wandered back to the duplex on Taylor Road where he was
boarding, flopped onto his cot in the living room, and passed out.
By 8:30 that evening
he'd come to and was sitting in the carport of a friend's place - a burly
ex-Newfoundlander named Bob Holmes - having yet another beer. A police
cruiser pulled up to the curb and asked if they'd seen a missing girl
named Mindy Tran.
Murrin knew Mindy. She
lived just a few doors down. She sometimes came over to the duplex to play
with the daughter of his landlord. Murrin said he hadn't seen her, then
set out to help search.
Over the next several
days, more than 500 volunteers came out to poke into dumpsters and comb
through backyards and the nearby Mission Creek Park. It was the largest
search operation ever conducted in Canada, and it turned up absolutely
nothing.
The police
investigation was on a similar scale. Twenty-one officers were first
assigned, then thirty a week later. By September 14 there were forty-four
detectives working the Tran file. Heading the investigation was Sergeant
Gary Tidsbury, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the rcmp, and head of the
Kelowna detachment of plainclothes detectives.
On October 10, they
finally found Mindy's body, buried in a shallow grave in Mission Creek
Park, about two kilometres from where she was last seen.
Within days, police
had a scenario. Mindy had last been seen in the vicinity of Murrin's
duplex. Her bicycle had been found on its lawn. At some point, she was
seen going up his steps. Behind the door was a man with a long criminal
record. By late October, Tidsbury had come to the firm conclusion that
Murrin was guilty. Now it was just a question of proving it. Murrin
wouldn't be charged in the murder for more than two years, and he wouldn't
come to trial until 1999, but because of Tidsbury's suspicions he would
spend the next five years behind bars.
The call for jury duty
in the summer of 1999 caught Kathy Macdonald at a conveniently loose end.
Her fling with academia was over, culminating in a degree in classical
studies. She'd been wondering what to do next, so when the call came, she
thought, "Why not?"
She liked the idea of
public service. There were family expectations, too. Her sister, a prison
guard, made it clear what she expected of Kathy. "Your job is to give the
Tran family closure," she said. And then there was Kathy's unadulterated
curiosity.
Josiah Wood, the Crown
attorney, was a legal heavyweight, a former appeals-court judge who'd been
brought in especially to prosecute the Tran case. The Crown's theory, as
outlined during Wood's opening address, was this: Murrin had awoken about
the time Mindy came looking for her friend. Murrin let Mindy in, then
tried to rape her, in the process strangling the girl. He then stuffed her
corpse in a suitcase, ducked out the back door, jumped a few fences, and
walked to Mission Creek, which he hopped across on the exposed rocks
before burying Mindy in a heavily wooded patch. Then he ran back to his
buddy's place in time to be there when the police stopped by.
The problem was the
timing. Mindy had been seen alive as late as 6:45 p.m. At least one
witness insisted repeatedly that he saw Murrin at Holmes's house at 7
p.m., making it impossible for him to have committed the murder. Later,
however, that witness changed his mind about the time. In fact, many of
the witnesses at the trial seemed to reconsider testimony they'd initially
given police. In every case, the change in testimony favoured the police
case against Murrin. Often witnesses' memories seemed to improve after a
police officer had paid a visit. Often, that police officer was Gary
Tidsbury.
For Macdonald, the
most notable thing about the timing testimony was the confusion. "They had
him everywhere, all at the same time. He was dragging suitcases along the
street, he was dancing across the creek. I'm calling that chapter of my
book 'The Ubiquitous Shannon Murrin.' "
There was also a
problem with the so-called "suitcase witnesses." Ten people testified that
on the night of the disappearance they had seen a man with a suitcase
walking on the streets around Taylor Road. Some testified that the
suitcase seemed to be very heavy. Others said it was light. Unfortunately
for the Crown, weight was hardly the only difference between suitcases.
Witnesses recalled seeing soft-cover suitcases, hard-shell suitcases,
beige suitcases, navy suitcases, suitcases made of leather, cardboard, and
vinyl. So many types and sizes, in fact, that the suitcase witnesses
degenerated into a bit of a joke with the jury. When they assembled their
own luggage for transportation to the hotel, someone looked at the wide
variety of piled-up luggage and joked, "Ah, so there's the
suitcase."
The only other bit of
humour was provided by the testimony of an informant by the name of Doug
Martin. Just forty-three years old in 1995, Martin had in his thirty-year
criminal career amassed over 105 convictions, most of them for fraud or
deceit; one was for perjury.
Then in prison, Martin
had contacted police to offer his services as an informant. After talking
with Tidsbury twice, he was placed in a cell with Murrin, and within
ninety minutes, Murrin was giving Martin highly incriminating evidence
about the very things Tidsbury was most interested in. Or so Martin
claimed.
Martin had a
remarkable track record, including having been present for the confessions
of eight other accused killers. One of those was Thomas Sophonow. In June,
2000, after the Murrin trial was over, Winnipeg police apologized to
Soph-onow after dna evidence conclusively proved he had had nothing to do
with a killing Martin maintained he'd confessed to.
Even without that
information defence counsel Peter Wilson still managed, over the course of
a brutal three-day cross-examination, to thoroughly destroy Martin's
credibility. At times, Martin got so wrapped up in his own lies that
members of the jury seemed to be struggling to hold back laughter. By the
end, Macdonald explains, "I wanted to get up and cheer."
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