Poison (43 page)

“I’m not asking you about what he was writing. I’m asking what he asked you.”

“I don’t remember whether he asked me or not. I’ve never heard about
kuchila
.”

“Your Honor,” Bentham said to Glithero, “at this point I would like to address a matter with you. Perhaps it would be beneficial if we were to take an early lunch.”

With the jury absent, Bentham asked Glithero to allow him to use a statement from Dhillon in his first interview with Korol and Dhinsa in October 1996. At that time, the detectives had specifically asked Dhillon about
kuchila
. Silverstein objected to introducing the statement. But Glithero sided with Bentham. With the jury back, Bentham confronted Dhillon with his lie.

“Detective Dhinsa told you that
kuchila
is a name for strychnine back on October 8, 1996?”

“Yes. I heard that from him.”

“And I’m going to suggest to you that on March 17, 1997, you knew the police were searching your home for poison.”

“Yes.”

“And you understood that they suspected you at that time, March 17, 1997, of poisoning Parvesh?”

“I didn’t give anything to Parvesh.”

“But police thought you did.”

“Police?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“And you mentioned nothing to Detective Dhinsa about your wife taking
desi
medicine?”

“It was not in my mind, so I didn’t say anything.”

Bentham’s message to the jury was clear: Dhillon knew he was suspected of poisoning his wife. If Parvesh really had taken homeopathics, he likely would have told Dhinsa about it. And then Bentham produced the ace card, the videotape that Warren Korol had brought him, the relevant portions spliced together. It was the TV interview with Ben Chin. Silverstein objected to playing the tapes for the jury. The judge sided with Bentham. Korol grinned.

“I don’t know his name,” Dhillon said in the witness box. “He was a Chinese guy.”

“You talked to Mr. Chin for about 45 minutes in total.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew you were being filmed at the time.”

“Yes. They told me they were making some movie.”

Bentham played two tapes of interviews with Chin. Dhillon said nothing on tape about Parvesh taking homeopathic medicine.

“There was an opportunity for you to tell Mr. Chin that your wife, Parvesh, was taking
desi
medication. An opportunity to tell the public, not a police officer, that your wife had been taking
desi
medication.”

“Didn’t come through my mind.”

Bentham said that strychnine was detected in Parvesh’s tissue in November 1999.

“You knew that?” he asked.

“Yeah, last year they told me,” Dhillon replied.

“That’s something you learned in November of 1999. Correct? And it’s since then you’ve come up with this story about Parvesh taking
desi
medication?”

“I didn’t make up the story. She told me. I don’t know what’s in there. I’ve never seen strychnine. I’ve never seen
kuchila
.”

“But you told no one about this
desi
medication until they found strychnine in her tissue samples?”

“I haven’t seen anything like strychnine.”

“But you told no one about this until strychnine was detected in her tissue samples?”

“It was never in my mind.”

“And you told no one before you learned that strychnine was detected in Parvesh’s tissue samples?”

“Maybe I did mention it,” Dhillon said, “to somebody that, that ladies, Indian ladies take herbal medicine. I forgot. I don’t know.”

“Who did you mention it to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Names. Who?”

“I don’t know. It’s been four years I’ve been inside.”

“You told no one about
desi
medicine until after you learned Parvesh’s tissue samples had strychnine in them.”

“In 2000 I was in jail and only then I found out. You think I, I was going to tell that to white people in jail?”

Bentham paused. “Those are my questions, Your Honor.”

“They don’t understand me, I don’t understand them,” Dhillon said.

The closing addresses began on Wednesday, July 25. Silverstein had to go first. Sukhwinder Dhillon was, Silverstein conceded, a flawed man. Not the best husband. Not the brightest man. But he did not kill his wife. And that’s all that matters. Silverstein acknowledged his client lied in order to receive an inflated GST claim. He lied to the Workers’ Compensation Board. That didn’t make him a killer.

“It would be tempting to conclude that because Mr. Dhillon has a history of dishonesty, his testimony is all false and when he says he didn’t kill his wife, it means he must have. Please don’t say, ‘Well, he lied to the WCB, so he is a big fat liar. He tells us he didn’t kill his wife. Well, because he’s a liar, we don’t believe that.’ Not everybody who cheats WCB, who has done some dishonest things, is a killer.” Making such a leap, he said, “is a most specious and improper way to approach this case.”

The financial motive? Not strong enough. Dhillon was not in desperate need of cash. He stood to gain from her death, the lawyer continued, “and I suppose we all stand to gain from the death of anyone for whom there is life insurance where we’re the beneficiary. But not everybody who has insurance on one another runs around killing each other. Sure. Sure. He was $200,000 better off after her death. But that’s it. That’s the extent of the evidence of motive in this case. And when he got the money, he didn’t go to Hawaii or buy a fast car. He deposited it in accounts for his daughters.”

Parvesh may not have even died from strychnine poisoning, Silverstein told the jury. She had a troubled neurological history and might have died from a brain hemorrhage. Parvesh also took homeopathic remedies. She might have accidentally killed herself. Contamination: Parvesh’s tissue had been stored at the CFS on a shelf beside the samples of strychnine police had brought back from India. He held up the clear plastic bag holding the strychnine samples.

“It sat beside the tissue blocks in a refrigerator. And a technician opened the bag and then leaves it in the fridge, unsealed. And there it sits for two years, that’s 27 months this sample of
kuchila
is in the same toxicology section as the Parvesh Dhillon samples.… Only a fool would suggest that the laboratory findings wouldn’t have an effect on your thinking. But the findings are not reliable. There’s no doubt that strychnine was found in Parvesh’s tissue samples. The issue, however, ladies and gentlemen, is how did it get there?”

He paused. Silverstein always tried to engage the jury in a closing statement, to avoid the legalese, to speak to them in a way anybody could understand.

“Contamination is a funny thing. It’s like trying to prove a negative. I mean, it’s very difficult to do. If I could prove contamination, well, wouldn’t that be wonderful? What I want to show you is how unreliable this finding is.… This is not the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill or dropping a quart of milk on the kitchen floor. We are talking about a trillionth of a gram of strychnine.”

He turned his attention to Dhillon’s reaction to his wife’s death. Bentham had portrayed the behavior as callous.

“There’s a claim by Mr. Bentham that Mr. Dhillon ran off to India so he could—let’s see if I understand this correctly—so that he could have sex, could find a young girl to have sex with. Well, does it make sense to spend money on three return airline tickets to India just to have sex? You don’t have to fly to India to have sex. Not if you live in Hamilton.”

Silverstein was almost finished. Had he planted doubt in the minds of the jurors? He appealed to their curiosity, their sense of the possible. Do not decide with emotion, based on a marriage videotape, or Dhillon’s fraudulent finances. Play “medical detective,” he said, to come to your own conclusions about contamination of the samples. Dispassionately consider the differences between Sikh and Western culture when it comes to marriage. Do not impose your own Western values and emotions.

“You know, the Crown would have a better chance of trying to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she killed herself. I mean, that’s the more likely scenario. Oh, Mr. Bentham will say, ‘Ignore all the doubts, the holes in the case. Look at Mr. Dhillon. He is a tax evader! Mr. Dhillon, he filed a false claim to the WCB!’ Yeah. Killed his wife because he had insurance on her. Beyond a reasonable doubt. Ladies and gentlemen, you are all immensely more intelligent than that, and your common sense must scream out that that’s just not so. And then factor in the whole question of whether she even died of strychnine poisoning. You see, you have to worry about that, too. And you’ve got all this medical evidence and all these doctors saying, ‘No, it could have been this and it could have been that,’ and you have the tests with all their attendant problems. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve heard it all. You’ve heard the evidence. Mr. Dhillon didn’t kill Parvesh Dhillon. Thank you.”

Brent Bentham and Tony Leitch had long before started crafting the closing address, building the portrait of Dhillon they wanted the jury to see. The night before his close, Bentham huddled with Leitch in a hotel down the road from the courthouse. Leitch wrote out portions of the address, touching on medical and forensic evidence. Later that evening, Bentham sat at a desk in the hotel room, alone with his thoughts. So much about Dhillon had been left unsaid. The jury knew so little about the evil he had done. He had to hit the right notes to linger in the jurors’ minds. He worked late, writing out his thoughts, dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. Bentham had Leitch’s typed passages in front of him. He wrote out his sections in pen, in point form.

There had been precious few witnesses who took the stand and spoke on behalf of Parvesh, who could talk about her life. Her parents, Hardial and Hardev, had passed away in the years following their daughter’s death, but before Dhillon’s trial. The truth. The truth. It came to him. The clock showed 2 a.m. He turned out the light and turned in, eight hours before he was to rise in court to try to put Sukhwinder Dhillon in jail for life.

On Wednesday, May 16, the jury entered the room and took their seats. Judge Glithero spoke.

“Mr. Bentham?”

“Thank you,” he said, rising from his chair in his black robe and moving to the lectern. “Good morning, members of the jury.”

“Good morning,” several replied in concert.

First, he built the entire case against Dhillon once more, brick by brick: the medical evidence, the motive, the circumstances. Russell Silverstein had been the performer in court, working the floor, making his points with intonation and hand gestures, ad-libbing, making conversation. Bentham stood behind the lectern like a professor, his serious voice intoning on issues of law and fact. But he also personalized the case. Five minutes into his address, Bentham reintroduced the jurors to Parvesh Dhillon—her life, her work, who she was. He urged them to examine the wedding portrait of Dhillon and Sarabjit, the young woman he
had arranged to marry in India within a few weeks of Parvesh’s death and an innocent victim of his schemes.

“Ask yourselves,” he said, “does he appear to be a crushed spirit devastated by the death of his wife?” He reminded the jurors that within minutes of Parvesh collapsing in convulsions, and before the ambulance had arrived, Dhillon had phoned two people and lamented that he was “ruined,” and that his children would no longer have a mother.

“In my submission, ladies and gentlemen, these are the words of Parvesh Dhillon’s killer who, being fully aware of the lethal properties of the poison he has tricked her into taking, is now prematurely pronouncing her death.”

Bentham attacked the theory that Parvesh had accidentally poisoned herself with homeopathic remedies. That suggestion was an “eleventh-hour smoke screen” put up by Dhillon, who had never mentioned the remedies to anyone until after strychnine was found in Parvesh’s tissue samples almost five years after her death. Bentham used Leitch’s words to attack Silverstein’s suggestion that the tissue samples had been contaminated in the CFS laboratory. Rather than quickly dismissing the notion, he hammered on it, trying to overwhelm any doubt. Bentham said the precautions taken to prevent contamination of the samples were like “a wall.” His assault on the contamination argument was not unlike the “magic bullet” theory in the assassination of John F. Kennedy as he ridiculed Silverstein’s argument.

“You must ask yourself, members of the jury, in assessing the likelihood of contamination, how the strychnine products escaped the interior drug lab, then the exterior Ziploc bag, made their way to a separate part of the refrigerator, through the box and through the plastic bag that contained Parvesh Dhillon’s tissue samples. Ask yourself how, if this unlikely event did occur, the ethanol sprays used to remove surface contamination failed, how the fresh gloves used to handle the samples failed, how the clean bench failed, how the clean scalpel used to cut the tissues failed.”