Poison (45 page)

Sukhwinder Dhillon was brought into the courtroom, wearing the used blue sports coat Korol and Dhinsa had provided him in an
effort to remedy his odor the interpreter had complained about throughout the trial. He sat in the prisoner’s box. Judge Glithero entered. Stand, bow, sit, straighten ties, deep breath. The jury came in and was seated.

Korol and Dhinsa sat in the front row, staring straight ahead, their arms crossed in expectation. Dhillon stood. It was 4 p.m. Every day of the trial, the jury foreman had worn blue jeans and a T-shirt, looking like a guy on summer holiday. But on this day, he wore a suit. He stood up in the jury box, with nothing in his hands.

“Have your reached a verdict?” Glithero asked.

“Yes, Your Honor,” the foreman said. “We find the defendant—guilty, of first degree murder.”

Murder. Guilty.
Kasoorvar
. The words rippled through the courtroom like an electric charge. Dhillon’s face assumed the look he often wore, a mixture of confusion and surprise, eyes wide but with no tears, no emotion. He instinctively looked for an out. Dhillon knew that one man cannot convict him.

“They can’t do that,” Dhillon said to his interpreter. “It takes more than one guy.” Silverstein asked the judge to canvass the jury. Dhillon waited for one voice to speak out for him.

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

“Guilty.”

Judge Glithero pronounced the automatic sentence: life in prison without a chance for parole for 25 years. Korol and Dhinsa still sat with their arms crossed. Stay cool. Korol felt his throat tighten with joy. The previous summer, with the trial still a long way off, Korol and Dhinsa had been told they were being given
officers-of-the-month awards for their work on the case. Screw that, Korol had thought at the time. The true test of an investigation is a finding of guilt. Nothing less. Sitting now in court, Dhinsa felt a hand slip covertly under his elbow. It was Korol’s. Dhinsa took the warm, thick hand and squeezed it tight. A secret handshake. Korol whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

“Now we can accept that award, partner.”

Bentham, Leitch, Korol, and Dhinsa gathered a few minutes later in a small office in the courthouse. Away from the eyes of the public, the bear hugs began. Korol felt his jaw tighten, his eyes dampen, and the tears fall. Proving Dhillon’s guilt had been the biggest victory of any of their careers, but he had taken his pound of flesh from all of them. The emotion of the moment hit Brent Bentham with special force. He had suffered his own loss during the meandering course of the trial of his life. His father, RCMP man John Bentham, had been in poor health for some time and died young in Ottawa, at 67. His father would never know that his son gave a stirring closing address that brought jurors to tears and very likely turned the key on Dhillon’s fate. It was all too much now. In the little room, with just his friends and no one from the outside to see him, Bentham was the most emotional of them all. Cool Hand Bentham broke down.

Driving through the streets of Kitchener in Korol’s police pool van, the four men sang along to Beach Boys hits, the hymns of summer with universal lyrics that took each back to places and faces of the past. The van windows were down and the hot summer breeze messed their hair as they sang, their voices happily straining to reach falsetto notes.

The afternoon was cloudy, hazy, and hot. The staid Crowns and intense cops wore shorts and T-shirts for the victory celebration. Not far from the exit onto the 401, Korol pulled into a place called Moose Winnooski’s, a northern-lodge-themed roadhouse decorated with worn dark wood, Muskoka chairs, screen doors that evoked sounds of a summer cottage when they rattled shut, and signs pointing the directions to northern locales. They soaked up every bit of the over-the-top ambience. It was perfect. Bentham and Leitch gave Korol and Dhinsa a box of cigars each. They opened them right there and smoked the entire box that night, all 25 stogies, indulging themselves. Bentham was the only one of the four who didn’t enjoy an occasional cigar. But now, in victory, he surrendered and joined the others in lighting up. They laughed, teased, tossed their money around, their faces glowing with emotion, like giddy college kids
celebrating the end of exams, sore from smiling and numbed by the cold beer and shots of liquor they consumed. A few other lawyers drove up from Hamilton, a couple of other cops, too, and joined them on the patio in the still warmth of the evening. The sun sank, vanishing and reappearing between layers of cloud, a perfect burning sphere of gold sandwiched between the darkening purple above, and the hazy sky above the horizon shaded pink, pale blue, and tangerine.

From left: Warren Korol, Brent Bentham, Tony Leitch, Kevin Dhinsa

The guilty verdict was a conclusion, but not an end. There never seemed to be any end with Dhillon. When Brent Bentham was first assigned to the Dhillon case he was 38 years old. One week after the verdict, he turned 44. There was one more trial to go, for the murder of Ranjit Khela. And were there other skeletons, literally, in Sukhwinder Dhillon’s closet?

Pretrial motions in the Ranjit Khela case started November 26, 2001, in Hamilton, with Judge Glithero presiding. It had now been four years since Dhillon had been arrested. He was slimmer, his hair was now silver-gray. It helped soften his look but, in court, his eyes seemed as big as saucers, still possessing a wicked light. He rocked in his seat anxiously, rubbing his beard, looking side to side, behind him, to see who was in the courtroom.

Russell Silverstein and Dhillon wanted to change tactics for round two. They requested a trial by Judge Glithero only, no jury. But the Crown holds the option. Silverstein duly asked the Crown if they would agree. Bentham and Leitch refused.

“There’s nothing I can do,” he told Dhillon in court.

Dhillon repeated his demand.

“There’s nothing more I can do—we’ll talk about it later,” Silverstein said in a stern whisper.

Leitch, who was acting as the lead prosecutor in Ranjit’s murder, rose and launched into the Crown’s submissions. Leitch and Bentham weren’t about to let the issue of similar-fact evidence die. They wanted to bring the deaths of Ranjit and Parvesh together again, tell the jury that Dhillon had been convicted of killing his wife with strychnine. If Leitch won this argument, Silverstein knew, his client was doomed, again. Leitch was going for broke, trying to get Glithero to break new legal ground. Confession of guilt is accepted as similar-fact evidence. But Dhillon hadn’t confessed to killing Parvesh.

“I realize, Your Honor,” Leitch said, “that what I’m asking for hasn’t been granted in the past.” But he noted that Silverstein had “conceded that the cause of death for Mr. Khela is strychnine poisoning. And so, to prove that the accused had access to the murder weapon, the past murder conviction will go toward showing he had that access.”

If Glithero allowed the conviction as evidence, it would almost certainly guarantee victory for the Crown. Or would it? Leitch continued: “There is a danger for us, Your Honor. The Parvesh conviction is under appeal by the accused. If he is successful and is acquitted, then a conviction in the Ranjit Khela case, resting on the Parvesh conviction, would mean a new trial. But we are prepared to take that risk because the evidence is strong enough.”

Silverstein rose and argued that to allow the conviction as evidence was prejudicial to his client. Moreover, His Honor had already ruled long ago that the two deaths did not belong together. “The death of Parvesh Dhillon remains a distraction,” Silverstein said. “Now, it may seem an affront to common sense, to the person on the street who can’t believe I would say, ‘So what?’ regarding Parvesh’s death. But what is
the meaning of a jury verdict? Legally, it’s the opinion of 12 jurors.” There was not, he said, “a scintilla of law” to support Leitch.

Court retired for the day. As he had attempted to do in the first Dhillon trial, Silverstein would need to convince jurors it was possible that Khela could have accidentally poisoned himself. Or, if the death was indeed a murder, he wanted to point to other suspects, primarily Lakhwinder Sekhon, Ranjit’s wife, the one who had served Ranjit his last meal. She had motive, too. Lakhwinder could collect life insurance benefits. Moreover, their marriage had been stormy. Silverstein planned to enter evidence suggesting that Lakhwinder had reason to hate her late husband, while Dhillon and Ranjit Khela were the closest of friends.

Lakhwinder had plenty to be bitter about, Silverstein would argue. Ranjit had tricked her into signing divorce papers that gave him custody of their son. He had told her that the divorce would be on paper only so that she could marry and sponsor another of his brothers still living in India. Ranjit committed adultery soon after their 1992 marriage. He hit his wife and left her deaf in one ear. Another time, he cut her hair off in a rage. He forced Lakhwinder to have two abortions, the last one just weeks before his death. Silverstein also wanted to argue that other people in the Khela home on Gainsborough Road in east Hamilton had opportunity that June night in 1996 when Ranjit collapsed in strychnine’s death grip. Access to the murder weapon? Silverstein would use the Crown’s own globe-trotting research against it. The Hamilton police detectives had purchased strychnine in Punjab easily and had brought it into Canada. Well then, in point of fact anyone could do the same. Anyone.

Glithero asked if it was fair to leave the jury with the impression that members of Ranjit’s family had special access to strychnine but Dhillon—a convicted strychnine murderer—did not. The judge released his decisions on December 7, 2001. First, the trial would be held in St. Catharines, a city 45 minutes east of Hamilton, because the pools of potential jurors in Hamilton and Kitchener had been contaminated by media coverage. Second, Silverstein would not be permitted to point to an indefinite number of suspects in Ranjit’s death. He could use just one alternative suspect: Lakhwinder. As
for Tony Leitch’s attempt to once again link Parvesh and Ranjit in the trial, Glithero was not persuaded. As at Dhillon’s most recent trial, the two deaths would remain separate. The new jury in the Ranjit Khela case would know nothing of Parvesh or the fact that Dhillon had poisoned her.