Blood in the Water Read online

  In 1990, Sylvia was twenty-two. She had a communication disability that made it difficult for her to speak, particularly to those outside her family, and she tended to be reclusive. So when her parents and two sisters went to Port Hawkesbury on December 7 to do some Christmas shopping, Sylvia stayed home to watch movies by herself. The door was locked.

  When the family returned, they found the door splintered. Phillip had broken in and stolen a hunting rifle. Over the next couple of days Sylvia told the full story to her sister, who told it to their father, who called the RCMP. Phillip hadn’t merely broken in and stolen the gun: he had also raped Sylvia. Staff Sergeant Daniel Parent came to investigate, but by then two days had passed.

  “We investigated the scene and found no physical evidence,” Parent recalls now. “And I had difficulty communicating. I would get dribs and drabs from the sister but not from the victim. So, try to make a case out of that. But we got the psychologist to assess the victim and we also got some other people—a teacher, for one.

  “Talking to the teacher reinforced my belief in the victim, that she was being truthful. So we eventually decided to go to court. The Crown believed her, the teacher believed her, the psychologist believed her, we all did.” In court, however, things did not go well. Sylvia, who couldn’t appear in open court, testified through her sister via a TV link from an adjoining room. In the end, says Parent, “she failed to tell us what did happen to her. There was no way that the judge could make any finding.”

  But there was a second charge—break and enter with intent to commit an indictable offence—and there was solid evidence for that: Sylvia’s father’s gun had turned up in Phillip’s brother’s woodpile. On that charge the judge was able to put Phillip away for two and a half years. As Parent says, “We got rid of Phillip for a while, anyway.”

  After the trial, said Sylvia’s sister, “I honestly never saw Phillip again. I moved to Halifax and never lived in Petit de Grat again. I was angry for a lot of years. I couldn’t look at Sylvia without tearing up. She was never the same. And my mom…it broke her.”

  Aside from that rape case, says Daniel Parent, “I’ve never known Phillip to be actually violent. It was always by way of threats.” For Parent, though, threats are worse than an assault. “So I give you a punch in the mouth? After fifteen minutes it’s over.” But a threat works on your mind; you never know what’s going to happen. You can never relax. For Parent, a threat carries “much more weight than the actual violence.”

  Phillip actually threatened Parent himself—right in the police station.

  “I was interviewing him on break and enters, and he changed the topic and says, ‘Your daughter is pretty good looking. I met her last weekend at so-and-so’s house and I think I’m going to meet her again.’ It was a threat—not a direct threat but a veiled one. At that time I stopped the interview. I was going to strangle the bastard, I’m telling you. That was an indirect threat he made to me, and I can just picture him doing that to people from the area. It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t open, but it was a threat that he would come back at some point, harm your family, burn your property, or do whatever. It’s like he has access and can do it. But he didn’t actually say he was going to do anything.”

  I suggested to Parent that one of the key factors in this whole tragedy was Phillip’s repeated threats that he would burn down Dwayne’s and Carla’s house with their twin eight-year-old daughters inside it. Those threats never came out in public, largely because the courts refused to hear about the long and maddening background between Phillip and his killers. This refusal is based on the notion that “we can’t convict a dead man of crimes he was never charged with.” Within the narrow confines of the judicial process, that’s perfectly true—but it also means you fundamentally don’t understand the events you’re judging. That’s why the glib phrase “murder for lobsters” gained such currency. Poaching was the only motivation that the courts would allow themselves to hear about.

  Phillip’s history with the Twin Maggies’ crew wouldn’t necessarily have served the defence well either; it would have been a mitigating factor, but it would also have provided a credible motivation for murder. Better to be misunderstood and convicted of manslaughter than correctly understood and sentenced for murder.

  But Phillip’s threats against James’s grandchildren, Dwayne’s children, were well known in the community. I heard from at least four separate sources that he had actually tried to burn down the house, though I was never able to confirm it. It’s also well known that the couple repeatedly complained to the police about Phillip’s threats.

  “Oh, he threatened James and Dwayne’s kids before he died,” said Pierre la Moustache. “They were all threatened, everybody.” I told Edgar Samson at Premium Seafoods that I had heard Phillip had waved a knife at James and said he was going to burn down the house with his two grandchildren in it.

  “Yes, absolutely,” said Edgar. “James told me that himself.”

  Dwayne and James would have had to assess whether Phillip’s threats could safely be ignored, and whether they were willing to gamble with the lives of their children—and if not, what could be done about it. They clearly didn’t set out to murder Phillip that morning—but in the heat of a largely unexpected confrontation, with the two of them wound up as taut as fiddle strings, their frustration and fury simply boiled over.

  It wasn’t planned, said Ronnie LeBlanc, Dwayne’s brother-in-law, the man who presented the petition at Dwayne’s bail hearing. “If it was planned, it was the worst-laid plan in the history of planning—having something happen in broad daylight in the middle of the harbour in Petit de Grat where all the old-time fishermen are sitting in their window with binoculars watching the boats come and go every day. They might as well have videotaped whatever happened. No, it definitely was something that just got out of hand.”

  After decades of investigating crimes, Daniel Parent understands.

  “It could happen to anyone; enough is enough,” he said, reflecting on Phillip’s threats to his own daughter. “I would have felt that way. ‘You would not threaten me forever, buddy.’ I couldn’t stand for it. ‘I don’t need this, you bastard, and I’m going to get you.’ ”

  Possibly the best summary came from Lionel Boudreau, an electrician who lives in Petit de Grat: “If you’ve got a fellow in front of you waving a knife and saying ‘I’m gonna rape your daughter and I’m gonna rape your wife, and then I’m gonna burn your house down—and what’re you gonna do about it?,’ well, if it was me, and I was standing there with a gun, I’d have thought, ‘Well, maybe I’m gonna go to jail for a really long time—but you’re not going to do that.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  After Phillip disappeared, his boyhood friend Marcel Heudes spent days on the water helping in the fruitless search for his body—the same Marcel who’d given Phillip his only real break in recent years, flying him to Calgary in 2008, giving him a job and a place to live. By 2013, though, both Marcel and Phillip were living in Petit de Grat again. Why hadn’t they stayed in Calgary, where things had been working out well?

  Phillip’s mother had fallen ill, so Marcel had bought him a ticket home. And although Phillip later returned to Calgary, he remained worried about his mother. He wasn’t alone in this; Kim Heudes also missed her mother and wanted to go home. So in 2010 the Heudes family moved home to Petit de Grat, taking their construction company with them. Phillip moved home too.

  Back in Petit de Grat, Phillip worked with Marcel again for a time—but, said Marcel, “everybody was telling me, ‘If you don’t get rid of Phillip, you’re not going to get another job around here. Nobody wants a thief on your crew.’ I said, ‘What the fuck? He’s working now, he’s not stealing. I’m paying him per week and you guys are still saying if I don’t leave him go then I’m not going to get jobs. What kind of fucking community is this? What are you guys doing?’

 
; “But in the end that’s what happened. He was staying out of trouble, and he worked with me until May 2013. But then I thought, ‘I better leave Phillip go, ’cause I’m not getting the work just ’cause of Phillip.’ He wanted to go back to Alberta, and I told him, ‘Let me see what I can do, see if my brother can get you a job off the island.’ Gilles had him another job, too. He would’ve went back but it was a week too late. It was just before lobster season, and in June he got killed.

  “If I would’ve kept him, it wouldn’t have happened. If I would’ve kept him going he’d still be alive.”

  13

  COURTROOM 3: SENTENCING

  JANUARY 29, 2015

  TWO MONTHS AFTER THE VERDICT, the familiar cast reconvenes: Chief Justice Kennedy presiding, Shane Russell and Steve Drake for the prosecution, Luke Craggs for the defence, James Landry watching quietly as his fate is debated. What should James Landry’s sentence be?

  The Crown goes first. The difference between murder and manslaughter, Shane Russell notes, is the specific intent to murder, and the jury evidently didn’t find that James had that intent. Since the jury delivered its verdict without giving reasons, it will be up to the judge to determine what the actual facts are. The Crown contends that there is extensive and logical evidence that the shooting, the repeated ramming, and the gaffing did occur, that Phillip died in the water, and that the anchor was used to dispose of the body as part of an attempted cover-up. The Crown believes that these are the facts, and that these actions amounted to “vicious manslaughter, a continued series of assaults” and “an indignity to the body.”

  So what should the sentence be? Russell reviews two leading cases in Nova Scotia. In both, the court found that the primary consideration is to protect the public, either by deterring others from similar actions or by reforming the convicted killer, or both. The sentence needs to send a message that “vigilante justice is never justified.” James’s positive pre-sentence report notes that he is a productive and respected citizen with no criminal record; on the other hand, he really hasn’t accepted responsibility for killing Phillip, and he attempts to justify what he did, arguing that the authorities had failed to hold Phillip accountable.

  No matter, says Russell. The law is quite clear that citizens cannot take the law into their own hands. Phillip Boudreau had some issues, but he was a person with friends and a loving family, and he was “in no way deserving of the barbaric circumstances in which he died.”

  Manslaughter involves a sliding scale of sentencing based on “moral blameworthiness,” with the lightest sentences for actions that are little more than accidents and the heaviest sentences for actions that are “near murder.” The Crown sees James as “morally blameworthy in a high degree.” Yes, he’s an elderly man with a clean record—but he committed a protracted assault involving a series of violent acts; he used a firearm; he had opportunities to back off and cool down, but he didn’t. As for his intent and motivation, James said he wanted to kill Phillip, destroy him, get rid of him, cream him. He made efforts to thwart the investigation, notably by leading investigators to the wrong gun. His actions tore at the fabric of the community.

  Russell concludes that James should receive a sentence in the vicinity of fifteen years with credit for the time he’s already served. He should also provide a DNA sample and be barred for life from owning or using firearms. Furthermore, he should be ineligible for parole until he has served at least half of this sentence.

  Phillip’s sister, Margaret Rose, reads a compelling and eloquent victim impact statement. Phillip’s family can see from their home the spot where he died, “discarded as ‘old bait.’ ” They can see the beach where he used to walk his dog, and because the body has never been found, they have no closure. She directly addresses James, an old family friend who shattered the lives of Phillip’s family and his own. The death has isolated Phillip’s parents, aged seventy and eighty-eight, from the community. “To be present in court,” she says, “and hear about the last moments of my brother’s life, was cruel, appalling, frightening, and a damn nightmare.” But, she says, “we’ve learned to accept what is, let go of what was, and have faith in what will be.”

  Speaking for the defence, Luke Craggs reminds Chief Justice Kennedy of his often-expressed high opinion of the jury. In its verdict, Craggs says, the jury “spoke loud and clear. Listening to the Crown’s submission, I wonder whether the Crown heard what the jury said.” The Crown’s submission is just a repetition of their theory of the murder. “They’re asking you to believe everything that Craig Landry said, and they’re asking you to accept facts which clearly the jury did not.”

  Craig and James agree on a great deal, Craggs says, but their accounts diverge after the ramming. Craig’s account is much more colourful. The jury accepted the testimony that was shared, but “did not accept the uncorroborated, unconfirmed, and frankly fanciful testimony that involved the gaffing or the anchoring. Had the jury accepted that testimony, then they would have convicted James Landry of murder—but they didn’t.”

  The unlawful acts that could have led the jury to a verdict of manslaughter include firing the rifle and encouraging Dwayne Samson to run Phillip over. The ballistic evidence shows that four shots were fired, none of which seemed to have hit Phillip. All four penetrated the boat between the waterline and the rail; if one had hit Phillip it would likely have been in the lower leg, but his boots showed no bullet hole. In running over Phillip’s boat, Dwayne would have committed an assault with a weapon, and in abetting that act, James would have committed another offence himself.

  Pre-sentence reports, Craggs notes, often describe real criminals with terrible histories; reading them, you aren’t surprised that the guy eventually killed someone. James’s report, however, describes an individual who’s been a productive member of his community for his entire life. He has the support of his family, who are hardworking, law-abiding people. The report includes positive comments on how well he’s been doing in custody, including commentary from a supervisor at the correctional centre and from his teacher; James is a model prisoner who’s been working in the kitchen and has been upgrading his education while in jail. The report is peppered with positive comments from James’s previous employers and business connections.

  However, says Craggs, the Crown still thinks this is murder, and is ignoring the jury’s findings. But it’s important not to confuse anger with intent. Other recent cases of manslaughter suggest a sentence of about seven years, and that’s what the defence is proposing.

  It occurs to me that the jury may have believed Craig and yet also considered the consequences of their verdict—despite Justice Kennedy’s firm caution that consequences “are for me or for the courts.” But the courts have limited authority over a murder sentence; the mandatory minimum sentence for second degree murder is life in prison with no parole for at least ten years and possibly twenty-five. And James was sixty-seven. As a result of “one very bad day,” as Justice Kennedy put it, an otherwise productive citizen could spend every remaining day of his life behind bars. That might be sound law, but would it be justice? However it arrived at its verdict, the jury seems to have found a way to balance condemnation of James’s actions with recognition of his character.

  So what does Chief Justice Kennedy decide?

  On the facts, he accepts Her Majesty’s Story—Craig Landry’s story—almost completely. He accepts that James caused Phillip’s death or significantly contributed to it. He finds that James fired four shots, one of which hit Phillip; that James participated in the ramming and the attempt to tow Phillip’s boat; and that James also repeatedly gaffed and towed Phillip before tying him to an anchor and sinking his body. He repeats even such details as Phillip’s nakedness from the waist down when the Twin Maggies finally stopped.

  Recognizing that the protection of the public is a major objective in sentencing, His Lordship observes that the public is best protected by citizens�
�� respect for the rule of law. He also notes that moral blameworthiness is a key consideration, declaring that this particular homicide is on the “near-murder” end of the manslaughter spectrum. He understands that Phillip’s death has had powerful effects on the families involved, and that the manner of his death will have impacts on the community for decades. He also accepts, implicitly, that “murder for lobster” is what the case is all about; he says that there are six hundred ways that James could have addressed the loss of his lobsters, and that most observers would consider that, when Phillip was in the water pleading for his life, James had certainly succeeded in scaring him.

  On the other hand, James is sixty-seven, has no criminal record, and has been an exemplary prisoner, with little risk of reoffending. He’d like to fish again, “but that’s not likely to happen.” His Lordship will order that James give a DNA sample and be prohibited from using or possessing firearms or ammunition. He will leave the issue of parole in the hands of the parole board, and will award James 1.5 days’ of credit for each day he’s already served. Since James has been incarcerated for 601 days, that’s a reduction of 901 days in his sentence.

  And the sentence?

  “Considering the moral blameworthiness of Joseph James Landry’s acts, of the terrible series of assaults on Phillip Boudreau over a considerable time frame when he was vulnerable and defenceless, firstly in a small boat and then in the water, considering the message that I believe must be delivered to those who would take the law into their own hands—considering all of those factors, I sentence Joseph James Landry, on the charge of manslaughter, to a period of fourteen years in a federal institution.”

  ISLAND VOICES

  “How much did that trial cost? Couldn’t you have hired another cop for a lot less than that?”

  “I don’t care what anybody says, those guys were not murderers. They’re not murderers, that’s my opinion. I cried, I actually cried when they sent James to jail ’cause that is one of the nicest men I have ever met.”