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Wade Skiffington
Mounties use elaborate
sting to get confession in murder case
The News speaks to convicted
killer Wade Skiffington in an exclusive prison interview
By Darah Hansen (dhansen@richmond-news.com),
March 10, 2004
What does it take for a man
to confess to a murder he later says he didn't commit?
Wade Skiffington, a federal
prison inmate serving a life sentence for shooting his girlfriend,
Wanda Lee Martin, six times with a 9-mm
handgun, says he knows the answer.
In January 2001, Skiffington
told an undercover police officer how he killed Martin on Sept.
6, 1994, at a Richmond apartment. It was a confession six years
in the making; the result of a complex undercover operation involving
dozens of specially trained RCMP officers posing as underworld
thugs.
"They set me up big time,"
says Skiffington.
The props were elaborate: limousines
and Lear jets, strippers, booze and thousands of taxpayer dollars.
Over the course of three months,
the sting travelled across the country, culminating in a $1,000-a-night
Halifax hotel room where Skiffington told in detail how he shot
Martin for allegedly having an affair.
The confession - which included
where he purchased the gun and how he got rid of the blood-soaked
evidence - was all captured on a surveillance videotape and,
last October, it was shown in B.C. Supreme Court.
With little other forensic
evidence to connect him to the crime, the conversation on that
tape, along with testimony from undercover police and other independent
witnesses, was enough to convince a jury that Skiffington was
guilty.
For his part, Skiffington now
maintains his innocence. He didn't take the stand during the
trial because his lawyer thought he would lose his temper, he
says.
"I've got a lot of bitterness,"
he says today of his lingering hostility directed at the police.
But Skiffington now wants the
public to hear his side of the story and how the police landed
the confession. Speaking to the News last month from a small
interview room at Matsqui prison in Abbotsford, Skiffington says
he made the confession because he was terrified for his life.
"All I was thinking was
that I was going to get bricks tied around my ankles and thrown
into a river," he says. "I wanted it over with. I wanted
out of there. I was frightened to death."
Boyfriend arrested in
Richmond murder
Vancouver Sun, Feb. 11,
2000
The former boyfriend of a 20-year-old
woman shot to death in a Richmond apartment in September 1994
has been arrested in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Wade Skiffington, 33, has been
charged in connection with the slaying of Wanda Lee Martin, who
moved from Newfoundland to attend the University of B.C. just
six weeks prior to her death.
Skiffington was arrested Wednesday
and charges against him were sworn Thursday in Richmond.
Police reports at the time
said Martin was living in Burnaby with Skiffington but had gone
to a girlfriend's apartment with their 18- month-old son.
She was shot and killed while
her friend was absent from the apartment. Police said any visitors
to the apartment would have had to announce themselves before
being buzzed in.
Skiffington, a carpet cleaner,
left the Lower Mainland following Martin's death and returned
with the child to Newfoundland.
- Accused murderer:
'I just lost it'
- B.C. Supreme Court jury
in Vancouver hears Wade Skiffington confession on videotape
By Darah Hansen (dhansen@richmond-news.com),
March 10, 2004
The only sound in the courtroom,
save for a muffled sob from a woman in the front seat of the
gallery, comes from the voices on a television set up on a stand
in the centre of the red-carpeted floor.
In the subdued light of the
window-less room, the images projected are deceiving in their
calm.
It's a tight shot of two men
seated next to each other in a hotel room in Nova Scotia. One
man, the bigger one, stretches casually back in his chair. The
smaller, dark-haired man leans forward, his hands cupped around
a glass of dark rum and coke. Ice cubes can be heard cracking
when the conversation lapses.
This is no ordinary video.
It is a secretly recorded police
surveillance tape. And the talk of the night is murder.
"Was it love or lust?"
the bigger man asks.
"I thought she was, or
found out she was (messing) around on me a few times," the
smaller man answers. "Just pissed me off."
"Where? On the Rock or
in Vancouver?"
"On the Rock and I think
there, too."
"Is that why you whacked
her?"
"Yeah. That's _ more or
less. I just lost my temper. I just lost it," is the answer.
"How many bullets did
you shoot?" asks the bigger man.
"Half dozen, maybe five,"
the second man says. Then, later on, he adds about the gun, "I
squeezed it until it was empty."
"I'm scared," the
smaller man says before the meeting draws to a close, "because
I've never told anyone this before."
---
It's been seven years since
the murder of 20-year-old Wanda Lee Martin, a pretty young mom
from the small town of Manuels, Nfld.
Martin was found dead Sept.
6, 1994, on the bedroom floor of a friend's apartment on Bath
Road in Richmond.
There was no question it was
murder. Martin had been shot six times. Any one of four of those
wounds, a jury would later hear at the second-degree murder trial
of the man accused in the killing, would have killed her.
Two shots had been fired at
point-blank range into the back of her head.
Besides the killer, Wanda's
son, then an 18-month-old toddler, was the only witness to the
crime. Luckier than his mother, the boy was left unharmed in
the attack.
From day one, police suspected
Wade Skiffington, Wanda's boyfriend of three years and the boy's
father.
According to the Crown counsel
who tried the case, Skiffington appeared to have the only motive.
He was a jealous man who was insecure in the relationship and
afraid she was going to leave and take their son with her.
When Skiffington showed up
at the crime scene outside the apartment on the afternoon of
her death Richmond RCMP remember him showing little emotion.
"He wasn't crying. He
was speaking in very calm, low tones," one officer recalled.
"He said, 'You know, I should be bawling my eyes out, but
it's just not sinking in.'"
---
The last few months of her
life were not happy ones for Wanda Martin.
She'd left her home in Newfoundland
in July to join Skiffington on the West Coast where he'd landed
a job cleaning carpets and upholstery. They lived in a basement
suite in Burnaby, while their friends lived upstairs.
Wanda was homesick.
In interviews with police following
her murder, Skiffington said he'd found her crying on a couple
of occasions.
She took a job with Blockbuster
Video but left it after only a month because she had no car and
found it difficult to transport her son to daycare while she
worked.
She was wary of the big city
and of talking to strangers. She rarely went out, and when she
was home, she would deadbolt the doors and windows so she was
safe.
The couple also fought.
Skiffington told police their
arguments were about "silly stuff."
"We argued like everybody
else," he said. But he loved Martin, describing her as a
real homebody who liked to watch soap operas, read paperback
romances and listen to country music.
Friends of the couple said
their relationship was much darker.
They remembered conversations
where Skiffington regularly put down Martin in public, telling
her her breasts were saggy, that she smelled bad, and that she
was a terrible cook. He hit the roof one night when she joked
about becoming a phone-sex operator and he brooded after they
ran into an old boyfriend of hers on a downtown street, the week
before her death.
"Jealousy is a worm that
will eat into the very heart of a relationship," Crown counsel
Mike Luchenko would later tell a jury in the case. "Once
jealousy reaches its peak, there is no limit to the rage one
will mete."
---
It took the police six years
to bring Skiffington, now 35, to trial on a charge of second
degree murder. The case opened in the B.C. Supreme Court in downtown
Vancouver Sept. 18.
It was a tricky investigation.
No murder weapon was ever found. No fingerprints. No forensic
evidence of any kind to tie Skiffington, or anyone else, to the
scene.
What police needed was a confession.
And, after months of working
undercover in B.C., Newfoundland, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, they
got it in February, 2000.
The police undercover sting
was elaborate. So much so, Skiffington's own defence lawyer,
Mark Hilford, commented to the jury during his closing remarks
last week, "I suspect most of you in your wildest dreams
never thought they (undercover investigations) were this well
done."
"Just look at the complexity,"
he said of the months-long operation. "The police did an
amazing job of creating a completely fictitious world, a complete
lie."
To protect the officers involved
and their techniques used, B.C. Supreme Court Mr. Justice Warren
has ordered a publication ban covering the details of the police
undercover work and the identity of the officers involved.
The job culminated in a pricey
hotel room in St. John's, Newfoundland with Skiffington confessing
to his new boss_- an undercover officer - how he killed Wanda
Martin.
That conversation was recorded.
And earlier this month, from
their seats to the right of the judge, the 12 members of the
jury got their first look at the videotaped evidence.
What they, and others in the
court room, saw was a nervous Skiffington telling the man how
he bought the gun for $50. How he had dropped Wanda and the baby
off in Richmond on his way to work. How he doubled back later
in the afternoon, parked his van nearby and waited until he was
sure she was alone before heading up to the apartment through
a broken basement door.
She had been fooling around
on him, he said, and taking their son with her.
He only meant to scare her,
he said. But they got in a fight and he just started firing.
"We just started arguing
about something. I don't know, from then on it was just blank."
He said he fired five or six
shots into her upper body. He remembered the room was small and
that his son was asleep when it happened.
As for other witnesses, "I'm
almost positive no one saw me," he said as he fled the building.
He threw the gun - a 9 mm handgun
- into the water (what police believe was the South Arm of the
Fraser), along with his bloody shirt and shorts. He had a fresh
change of clothes in the van, he said.
Then he went back to work.
As the conversation wraps up,
he leans forward and tells his companion he never wants to handle
a gun again.
"Even though I did that,"
he says, "I'm not really like that. I never was a violent
person."
---
Mark Hilford, Skiffington's
lawyer, told the jury yes, his client said he killed Wanda Martin.
But "that's only the beginning
of the discussion."
Skiffington is a liar, Hilford
said. He lied to the undercover officers repeatedly throughout
the sting. And he was lying when he said he killed his girlfriend.
It was a false confession made
because he was afraid for his life.
Skiffington isn't the sophisticated
killer the Crown has alleged, Hilford said. He couldn't be.
In one conversation with an
undercover officer, Skiffington was asked if he had a "heater."
His answer? "I have a hair dryer."
"Now does that sound like
a master-minded criminal to you?" Hilford asked the jury.
---
On Thursday, Oct. 18, the judge
gave the jury his final charge - a brief lesson on legal terms
like "reasonable doubt" and "burden of proof."
By Friday, the courtroom was
empty, save for the quiet movement of court clerks and sheriffs,
as the jury deliberated on their verdict.
Nearby, at an unknown location,
Skiffington was waiting with his mother and father to learn of
his fate.
In earlier interviews during
the trial, he was friendly, but declined to talk about the case
until it was over.
"I'm fighting for my life
here," he said in his thick Newfoundland accent that had
become familiar through the police tapes presented in the trial.
Wanda's mom and dad, Bev and
Doug Martin, were also waiting anxiously close by.
The Martins had attended every
day of the trial and the preliminary hearing before that in support
of their daughter. Wanda's younger brother Darryl had also come
out from Newfoundland. And the family was always surrounded by
a rotating army of friends and relatives.
They wore buttons on their
jackets that featured pictures of Wanda: at her high school graduation
in a beautiful white gown; smiling in a red sun-dress after the
birth of her baby.
The photos weren't welcome
in the courtroom, the judge told them early on, because they
might unduly influence the jury. But the family would pin them
back on as soon as they walked out of the room.
Like Skiffington, the Martins
wouldn't discuss about the case. But they were happy to talk
about Wanda herself: how she was a loving mother, how she was
studying to become a math teacher and sang in the church choir
back home.
The two families had been separated
by court sheriffs during breaks and there was palpable tension
between parties. But besides quiet talk out in the halls about
the evidence presented, and whispers in the courtroom, there
were few emotinal outbursts from anyone.
They all said they just want
to go home. Skiffington back to Paradise to take care of his
son. And the Martins back to Manuel to finally lay their daughter
to rest.
A verdict in the case was not
returned by presstime. Watch the Richmond News for more news
on this trial as the matter continues.
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell