Poison (47 page)

Russell Silverstein did not question the cause of Ranjit Khela’s death, but Tony Leitch called forensic evidence on the issue to show the jury how rare, and tortured, his death was. Poison expert Dr. Michael McGuigan took the stand. He was one of several witnesses in the trial who had also appeared at Dhillon’s first murder trial. Leitch asked him how rare strychnine deaths were in his experience.

“How frequently have you encountered cases of strychnine poisoning?”

“In 20 years in Toronto, I saw maybe two or three cases,” McGuigan answered.

Warren Korol stopped typing on his laptop and peeked over his reading glasses. He looked at Dhinsa and smirked. Two of those cases were Dhillon’s victims. Korol shook his head. If only the jurors knew the truth.

The Crown’s star witness bowed to Judge Glithero. It was Thursday, October 17, 2002. Lakhwinder Sekhon, who normally dressed in Western-style clothing—jeans, leather jacket—today wore a flowing Indian dress. Through the interpreter, Brent Bentham
questioned her. He slowly led her through her personal story, the first arranged marriage she had never wanted, then her relationship with Ranjit. Bentham aired her past, painting her as a flawed and fearful woman who ultimately found the courage to tell the truth. The next day, Lakhwinder dropped the bomb, pointing at Dhillon as her husband’s killer. And she said Ranjit’s family had remained silent in exchange for some of the insurance money.

Lakhwinder testified about Ranjit’s last words. Just before he went into convulsions, she told the jury, Ranjit told her Dhillon had given him a pill. The pill, Dhillon had told Ranjit, would help his back pain and improve his sex life. Dhillon “told him that it’s a strong pill, once you take it, the pill will send you flying,” Lakhwinder said.

Dhillon muttered to himself as Lakhwinder spoke. She talked about how Ranjit’s family reacted when she woke them to tell them he was sick. She recounted that Ranjit’s uncle, Paviter Khela, phoned Dhillon.

“And what did he say?” Bentham asked.

“Paviter was saying, ‘What has happened to him? What did you give him?’ And then, after Paviter listened to Dhillon, he said,‘Ranjit has told everything to his wife, so what is going to happen now?’”

Silverstein rose to cross-examine. His goal was to undermine the notion that Dhillon had given Ranjit any pill and, at the same time, to point the finger at Lakhwinder as the killer. Silverstein turned the heat up on her and did not let up.

“I’m going to suggest to you, Miss Sekhon, that Ranjit never told you anything of the sort. And you never told his family or anyone else anything like that.”

Silverstein grilled her about her inconsistent statements, about lying under oath on a variety of matters, and in particular about the fact she did not tell police about Ranjit’s final words until more than a year after his death. She had not mentioned any pill until August 1997. Why did she finally tell the police, he asked, after three interviews?

“I respected the police, they were like God,” Lakhwinder replied.

Perhaps the meaning of her words was altered in the translation, but Silverstein pounced.

“Like God? Like God!” he said, voice booming in the courtroom, raising his hand in a heavenly gesture. “They were like God to you. And yet still you did not tell them the alleged truth until a year after Ranjit died?”

Silverstein focused on Lakhwinder’s often stormy marriage to Ranjit. She had reason to dislike her husband, even hate him, Silverstein argued. The relationship was not merely bumpy, but horrific at times. The forced abortions, the abuse, the sham divorce. As he questioned her, Lakhwinder finally broke down, sobbing. Had Silverstein’s line of questioning gone too far in the eyes of the jurors? Or had he unmasked a suspect?

“All I want,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks, “is for Ranjit to come back so he can tell you what happened. I am not making anything up. Whatever has happened, that is what I’m telling you.”

At his desk, Tony Leitch made notes. Later that day, with the jury out, Leitch made another pitch to bring Parvesh into the trial. The defense had crossed the line, Leitch said. In assassinating Lakhwinder’s character, Silverstein had painted her as the kind of person who could kill her husband—even as the jury could not know about Sukhwinder Dhillon’s character. The defense had invested in Lakhwinder a disposition to murder, Leitch said. That wasn’t fair, not when the jury didn’t know about Dhillon’s proven disposition to murder. He had done nothing of the sort, Silverstein countered. It was a tough debate: Leitch building his case point by point, citing case law, Silverstein using few notes and employing his best courtroom rhetoric, spiking his comments to Glithero with phrases such as “it is elementary.” Silverstein won the battle. Glithero decided to keep Dhillon’s conviction out of the mix. The defense, Glithero said, had done what defense lawyers do: vigorously cross-examined a star witness on the facts of her testimony. To allow Dhillon’s conviction as evidence would prejudice his right to a fair trial. The fact is, Glithero said in his ruling, “there are warts on this witness.”

Korol and Dhinsa looked on, grim-faced. Warts? Korol leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and hung his head slightly.
“Wouldn’t want the jury to know about Dhillon’s past, though, eh?” he muttered. Korol understood the system. He knew that Glithero would never let the jury hear about Dhillon’s past, not unless Silverstein made some big slip-up. On an intellectual level, Korol could accept that. But in his heart he knew it wasn’t right, damn it. The jury should know the truth.

Silverstein chose not to cross-examine most of the Crown witnesses, or did so very briefly. It was as though he was willing to let the Crown tell the story, then let contradictory testimony and the alleged scheming of Ranjit’s family create reasonable doubt. He did not want the jury thinking that police had paid any special attention to Dhillon following Ranjit’s death.

On Friday, November 15, insurance investigator Cliff Elliot took the stand. Elliot had to be careful not to let slip any mention of having had any dealings with Dhillon prior to handling the claim on Ranjit. Before Elliot took the stand, with the jury out of the room, Silverstein objected to Bentham’s intention to have Elliot say that he phoned police about Dhillon. Silverstein argued that mentioning police in the context of a routine insurance investigation was prejudicial to his client. It suggested that Elliot had reason to suspect Dhillon. “If a 90-year-old man dies, and the wife collects the life insurance claim, would the insurance investigator phone police? I would think not,” Silverstein said.

Glithero ruled in favor of the Crown. Elliot could mention the phone call to police. “The jury won’t hear the real reason for Mr. Elliot’s suspicion,” Glithero noted. Elliot took the stand. He told the jury of Dhillon’s strange behavior, his lack of emotion, during the interview about the claim on Ranjit Khela.

“Those are my questions,” Bentham concluded. Then, almost before he had uttered the last word, Silverstein stood up and sat down in one fluid motion, interjecting, “No questions, Your Honor.”
Get the man off the stand.
The trial adjourned for lunch. Out in the hallway, Tony Leitch shook Elliot’s hand. “I thought you handled the cross-examination quite well, Cliff,” Leitch said with a broad smile.

The Crown had a third key witness, a man named Inderjit Singh Mangat. Mangat told the jury what he had told Dhinsa and Korol five years earlier, that when he went to the Khela home a few days after Ranjit’s death to offer condolences, Lakhwinder had told him and a few other people that Dhillon had given her husband a pill before he died. Mangat said that Dhillon had overheard Lakhwinder, and then denied giving his young friend anything. With the Khela family contradicting Lakhwinder’s story, Mangat was essential to the Crown’s case.

Testimony from Ranjit’s grandmother, Surjit, proved equally important. Surjit had contradicted Lakhwinder’s account of the night her grandson died. Nothing had been said about Dhillon giving her grandson a pill, Surjit said. But now, on the stand in front of Bentham, Surjit seemed to support Lakhwinder’s testimony that the family had in fact confronted Dhillon and asked him what he had given Ranjit. Then Surjit tried to back away from her concession. Dhillon was her “special boy,” she said, because he was Ranjit’s good friend. The only reason her family questioned him was because Dhillon had been with Ranjit all day and into the night. Why then, asked Bentham, did Uncle Paviter phone Dhillon that night?

“Because he had been with Ranjit.” But so had another of Ranjit Khela’s friends, and nobody had phoned him, Bentham pointed out. Why not?

“I don’t know.”

The damage was done. Surjit’s testimony suggested that Lakhwinder had told the truth, and that the Khelas had, in fact, suspected Dhillon that night. It lent more credibility to Lakhwinder, while damaging that of the Khelas and, more importantly, Dhillon.

The Crown wrapped up its case by calling detectives Dhinsa and Korol. When Dhinsa entered the witness box, Dhillon grew restless. “Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

Dhillon grumbled at his seat. Warren Korol was the last witness. Like Dhinsa, he explained how easy it had been to buy strychnine in India and bring it back into Canada. With the Crown’s case finished, Silverstein rose.

“No evidence, Your Honor.”

He had reversed his strategy from the first trial. He would keep Dhillon off the stand, and hit cleanup with the jury, speak to them after the Crown in closing remarks. This time, he would get the last word.

At 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, November 27, Tony Leitch rose to continue polishing his closing words on his laptop. Leitch had worked late and slept poorly, thanks to the cold he was fighting. That morning, Leitch’s wife, Joanne, drove down to St. Catharines to watch her husband in action in the courtroom for the first time. She was tired herself, having been up and down all night looking after their two young children, who also had colds.

Court was about to begin. The jury would be seated soon. Russell Silverstein walked past Korol and Dhinsa to speak with Dhillon, who was sitting in the prisoner’s box. Both Silverstein and Dhillon appeared to have new haircuts.

“Hey, Russell,” Korol said, “you guys get your hair cut at the same barber?”

Silverstein said nothing.

The jury quietly entered. They were dressed casually in sweaters, vests, flannel shirts, jeans; there was the petite woman with blond hair in the second row, the earnest woman who took notes on her clipboard each day, the young guy in front who always looked uninterested. Leitch fought through his cold and began his address at the podium. He was methodical going through the evidence, on occasion raising his voice, speaking faster and with more emotion than Bentham had in the first trial. The Crown doesn’t need to prove motive, Leitch said, it must only prove that Dhillon was responsible for Ranjit’s death by strychnine. But the motive was there in any event: “need and greed.”

Dhillon needed money to expand his “shiny new car business. The accused took advantage of Ranjit Khela’s trust.” Then he showed the jury Ranjit’s checkbook. It had been found in Dhillon’s home when the police searched the place. Ranjit had paid for the insurance policy on his own life, perhaps from this very account. “Tragically, Ranjit was duped into signing his own death warrant,”
Leitch said. He spoke of the conspiracy of silence between the Khela family and Dhillon.

“Here is the conspiracy in black and white!” he said, voice rising as he held up the copy of the form enlisting the help of a lawyer. The sheet had the names of several members of the Khela family, and Dhillon’s. Leitch was already into his address when Lakhwinder entered the courtroom. Did her presence in court to watch help her credibility with the jury? As Leitch recounted what had happened the night Ranjit died, Lakhwinder broke into tears and had to leave the room.

Leitch knew Silverstein would attack Lakhwinder in his closing address. So he praised her. She had acted strangely for a woman trying to pocket insurance money, he said. Ranjit’s former employer even had to track her down to pay her his workplace life insurance. “That’s odd behavior for a woman who killed her husband to get money,” Leitch said. He paused. Did he have the jury’s attention? He looked into their faces, saw the young guy in the front row who seemed uninterested. Don’t worry about it, Leitch thought. The guy always looks like that. Leitch rattled off Dhillon’s lies to Cliff Elliot. “Lie number 1…lie number 2…There they are, 13 proven lies.”