Poison (39 page)

“I am declaring a mistrial,” Glithero said. “A new jury will have to be chosen and the trial will begin anew.”

He ruled the new trial would move from Hamilton to Kitchener, in order to select an unprejudiced jury pool. Dhinsa stood up and walked out of the courtroom. He approached the thin man with the turban sitting on a bench in the hallway. It was 2:17 p.m.

“Rai Singh Toor, I am arresting you for conspiracy to obstruct justice. It is my duty to inform you that you have the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay.”

Back at the central police station, Dhinsa interviewed Rai.

“It is 14 November 2000. I am Detective Kevin Dhinsa. I am a police officer. Do you know where you are?”

“In court?” Rai asked.

“No, you are in a police station.”

“I don’t have anything to do with this, I am not going to touch it.”

“You knew that these wrong people were not Ajmer Singh and Budram Singh. What were you thinking—they would give false evidence and escape?”

“It was not in my mind. I thought they were joking. I want to go. No one else wants to go. I will go.”

“How did they come with you?”

“God knows. What can I tell you?”

“What?”

“God knows.”

Kushpreet’s death was off the table, but the Crown still had the Parvesh and Ranjit murders together. Would that change, too? Judge Glithero faced, in mid-December, his biggest decision of all. He sat in his office at home in Cambridge. He had carefully considered arguments from the Crown and the defense. Bentham and Leitch had argued that the similar-fact nature of the deaths of Ranjit Khela and Parvesh Dhillon justified trying them together. Glithero had come to a decision. He cleared his throat. He often dictated his decisions on tape for his assistant to transcribe later.

The recorder started. Glithero, his voice grainy from years of failed attempts to quit smoking, spoke.

“Ruling number 6. Severance application. The applicant accused moves for an order severing the two-count indictment and directing separate trials on each count. Period.”

Glithero glanced at notes on the legal pad on which he had scribbled when Russell Silverstein and the Crown lawyers made their cases before him.

There were quotes from the lawyers, thoughts of his own, reminders to check case law.

“Section 591 (3) gives the court the discretion to order that the accused be tried separately on each count.”

He looked at the direct reference.

“Where it is satisfied that the interests of justice so require, the onus is on the applicant to show on a balance of probabilities that the ends of justice require severance.”

Glithero had consulted the case law on similar-fact evidence.

“In determining whether to admit similar-fact evidence, the basic and fundamental question that must be determined is whether the probative value of the evidence outweighs its prejudicial effect.”

He read from paragraph 50 in
Regina v. Arp
.

“There may well be exceptions, but as a general rule if there is such a degree of similarity between the acts that it is likely that they were committed by the same person, then the similar-fact evidence will ordinarily have sufficient probative force to outweigh its prejudicial effect and may be admitted.”

The big question for Glithero was, were the Ranjit and Parvesh killings similar enough to be kept together in one trial?

“The Crown submits that the evidence demonstrates a system or pattern of conduct such as to demonstrate that the accused is responsible for the two deaths.”

Glithero agreed the manner and symptoms of the Parvesh and Ranjit deaths were similar. But when Kushpreet’s similar death was removed from the equation, the link between the other two deaths was weakened.

“Now that I am dealing with two deaths, in the same city as the accused lived, and that the accused had routine association with the two victims, I am less impressed with the association of the accused with each victim as an item of similarity and consider it less relevant to the improbability of coincidence.”

The judge felt that “mere opportunity” for Dhillon was not enough to link the deaths of Parvesh and Ranjit before a jury. In Parvesh’s murder, Sukhwinder Dhillon had motive and opportunity. In Ranjit’s murder, the only evidence of opportunity was from his widow, who claimed Ranjit told her Dhillon had
given him a pill. She was a flawed witness, Glithero thought. He dug an old case out of his files, from 1952.
Harris v. D.P.P.
It said that “evidence of other occurrences which merely tend to deepen suspicion does not go to prove guilt.” Time to sum up. Glithero turned on the recorder again.

“In my opinion, the evidence of the similarities in the manner of commission of the two deaths (assuming that of Parvesh Dhillon is a homicide) is not such as to make it likely that both were committed by one person.”

Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon was getting a lifeline.

“I would not admit the evidence on each count as similar-fact evidence on the trial of the other.”

Later, after Glithero made revisions, the assistant transcribed the ruling. Fifty pages even. Glithero read it over once more before sending it to the lawyers. His conclusion would rock the case: “I am satisfied that the accused has demonstrated on a balance of probabilities that the interests of justice require that the accused be tried separately on each count of the indictment. I order that the counts be severed.” Glithero’s eyes went to the bottom of the last page. He filled in the date, December 19, 2000, and signed his name.

Everything had changed. Now Dhillon had a chance at acquittal, a good one. Russell Silverstein knew it was an entirely new situation. Two trials, two juries, two separate bodies of evidence heard in isolation from each other. The first trial would begin in March. For the Crown lawyers, losing the evidence about Kushpreet was tough enough to swallow. But severing Parvesh and Ranjit? Common sense said they belonged on the same ticket. Two healthy young adults living in the same neighborhood die from a rare poison, and one man has the motive of insurance money in each death. Warren Korol felt as if he had
been punched in the face. If those deaths weren’t “strikingly similar,” in legal jargon, then what the hell was? How could the trials possibly be severed? Korol thought back to the impostors and Rai Singh. And now the severance. Dhillon suddenly had a helluva chance to win. How could a case that had as many as five deaths on the ticket, be reduced to—in terms of what any jury would hear—just one?

Lead Crown prosecutor Brent Bentham outwardly kept his even keel. Sure, he wanted to keep the deaths together. The Crown’s best case was showing the improbability of coincidence of two strychnine deaths in Hamilton’s east end with the accused the financial beneficiary of each. But Bentham was philosophical. You have to live by the rulings. You don’t like it, but you do the best you can. He reminded the others they still had the two poisoning cases. The severance wasn’t fatal to their case. And, regardless of Glithero’s ruling, they could still attempt to bring the victims together again.

Over the course of the prosecution, Tony Leitch would argue before the judge to revisit the issue several times, raising it whenever he could. Leitch figured that if they lost and appealed, the severance and the Crown’s protest of it would be on the record repeatedly. But even Leitch, with his confident, youthful manner, felt his optimism flag.

With the nexus between Parvesh and Ranjit gone, the Crown needed a stronger motive in the killing of Parvesh than just insurance money. Leitch thought about the case every spare moment. Driving to work or in the shower, he considered tactics. Financial motive? Dhillon’s financial situation prior to Parvesh’s death was not good. But it was not grave. It didn’t justify murder. Silverstein would surely make hay with that. Motive? Two hundred thousand dollars? A substantial sum of money, granted, but is that enough of a motive to kill your wife? My client is no saint, Silverstein could say, but is that enough motive for this man to kill the woman he loved, the mother of two beautiful young girls?

Young girls. Yes. Leitch remembered the evidence stuffed in the cardboard boxes in the Crown’s office. Men wield the power in Indian culture. Everyone wants male children. The Dhillons had
wanted a boy. Parvesh had had one abortion, maybe more, after determining she was carrying a girl. Was that Parvesh’s decision? Not likely.

Once the trial began, Korol, Dhinsa, Leitch, and Bentham drove to Kitchener each day in a van. They talked strategy. One day Leitch mentioned his theory of a new motive. “What about the male child?” he asked.

There was the time the Dhillons went to a lawyer to see about adopting a son in India. “So who really wanted to have a male child in that cultural circumstance?” Leitch wondered.

Think about it: Dhillon kills Parvesh for insurance money and as a bonus gets to arrange to marry a younger woman with whom he can have a male child. Presto: a double motive. Korol grinned. Chalk one up to the Law-Talkin’ Guy.

Bentham and Leitch had a big decision to make. The new trial for Dhillon was scheduled to begin on Monday, March 19, 2001, in Kitchener. It was the Crown’s prerogative which death was tried first. They wanted to lead with their strongest case. If they lost the first trial, Dhillon could be freed on bail, forcing them to appeal, slowing down the process, destroying any chance of linking the two deaths in future. Which case was stronger? Toxicology tests had proved strychnine killed both Parvesh and Ranjit—although the evidence was a little trickier for Parvesh with the four-year delay between her death and the discovery of the poison in her tissue.

Korol and Dhinsa thought Parvesh was a stronger case for a jury. Dhillon had opportunity, was the only adult with her the day she collapsed. And jurors understand that some men kill their spouses. Bentham and Leitch leaned toward Ranjit Khela’s case: incontestable evidence of strychnine in the blood; the unusual arrangement where Dhillon was the life insurance beneficiary; Lakhwinder’s testimony that Ranjit told her Dhillon gave him a pill. Yes, there were problems with Lakhwinder as a star witness, but still, it was direct evidence.

The prosecutors decided to start with Ranjit’s murder. But as with all things involving the Dhillon case, nothing happened the way it was supposed to. On Friday, March 16, Bentham received word that eight witnesses from Ranjit’s family—several of whom had been in the house the night he died—were no longer in Hamilton. They were in India, and there was no sign they would return in time to take the stand. Dhillon’s curse had struck again. The case against him in Ranjit’s murder was now in jeopardy. If the Crown led the case without the Khelas, what would the jury think? Perhaps they’d draw the conclusion that one of the Khelas killed Ranjit, not Dhillon. Why else would they all take off for India with a trial looming for the man who allegedly had murdered their beloved Ranjit?

On Monday, March 19, with the jury excused, Tony Leitch rose before Judge Glithero and requested arrest warrants for the eight witnesses. Russell Silverstein agreed to the application. The judge ruled the family members were in contempt of court and issued the warrants. Three days later, Glithero adjourned the trial until May. Dhinsa called the Khelas in India. They agreed to return earlier than they had planned. Their flight landed in Toronto a few days later. Waterloo Regional Police and Canada Customs officers boarded the plane and identified the eight family members. They were all taken to a secure area. Suddenly, Piara, Ranjit’s grandfather, clutched his chest, suffering an apparent heart attack. Family members simply looked on, not rushing to his aid.