|
 January 25, 2005: The Federal government
released the
first national examination of the reasons for so many wrongful
convictions in Canada. This should be required reading for every prosecutor,
cop and criminal defence lawyer in the country. News
reports
Robert Mailman
and Walter Gillespie
A quarter
of a century later: If the Crown is serious about preventing
wrongful convictions in the future why don't they fix this one
from the past?
 
Witnesses lied at murder
trial
By Gary
Dimmock, Ottawa Citizen, Fall 1998
as formerly
found in the
A key prosecution
witness in a 1984 murder trial that condemned two New Brunswick
men to life in prison has admitted that he lied at trial, claiming
pressure by police.
John Loeman
Jr., 32, was only 16 years old when prosecutors presented him
as an eyewitness.
He told a Saint
John court that, from the cover of brush, he watched in horror
while a friend's father was bludgeoned to death with the butt
of a shotgun. His account, and the testimony of a woman originally
charged in the killing, put Bobby Mailman, then 36, and Wally
Gillespie, then 40, in prison for life.
Janet Shatford,
a 42-year-old welfare recipient, agreed to testify against the
men after prosecutors dropped the murder charge against her on
the eve of trial.
No physical
evidence has ever linked the men to the Nov. 29, 1983 killing,
and both had an alibi putting them elsewhere around the time
George Gilman Leaman, a 56-year-old plumber, was bludgeoned,
doused in gasoline and set on fire.
Sixteen years
later, the men are still in prison and refuse to admit guilt
to win early parole.
Our investigation,
drawn from confidential Saint John police reports and federal
Department of Justice files, taped interviews with Mr. Loeman,
Ms. Shatford, senior detectives who worked with the case and
witnesses known to police but never called to court, shows:
* John Loeman,
who was paid a living allowance by police in the weeks leading
to the trial, says he never witnessed the killing. He said he
succumbed to police pressure to ``embellish his story in order
to ensure a conviction.''
* Information
obtained by police and favourable to the accused was not disclosed
to the defence. The defence lawyer says he first learned of the
confidential police reports when we contacted him.
In a confidential
Department of Justice investigation, a man interviewed by police
in 1983 has told federal investigators that he was told to stay
away from court during the trial because his testimony wasn't
worthwhile. The potential witness was never identified to the
defence.
* A source,
kept anonymous by police in their reports, was paid by police
to get incriminating statements from the accused over beers.
In fact, the source was Janet Shatford, the woman later charged
in the murder.
* One of the
lead detectives who investigated the murder did not keep notes.
Two detectives have told federal investigators that they were
acting only on ``suspicion'' and had no ``concrete'' evidence
against the convicted men during their investigation.
* Some police
files, including the charts of polygraph tests given to Mr. Loeman
and Ms. Shatford, and a sales slip that puts the accused men
across town about the time of the killing, have been destroyed.
* A courier
called by the prosecution to discredit the defence alibi revealed
on cross-examination that he was only guessing about times, by
looking at the delivery company's logbook. In an interview with
federal investigators, Janet Shatford, who testified against
the men in exchange for a plea bargain, has changed parts of
her story -- including how she happened by the murder and the
description of the murder weapons.
* Police never
found the car that had allegedly been used to transport the dead
man's body.
* A forensic
search of a car, driven by Mr. Gillespie, turned up no evidence.
Another car linked to the case was never searched thoroughly,
and police have no record of its make, model, or licence plate.
This car was never registered after the murder, and never reported
stolen or missing, according to the Department of Transportation
and police records.
* For the past
16 years, the Saint John police department has refused to disclose
police reports to the accused men though it stands by the conviction.
It has now released the reports to federal investigators reviewing
the case.
* Police reports
show no physical evidence linked the convicted men to the killing.
* A senior
detective who worked closely on the case says other detectives
were ``a little bit overzealous'' to get Bobby Mailman, a known
criminal, off the streets because he had earlier been acquitted
on murder charges.
* Eight years
after their convictions, independent polygraph tests concluded
the imprisoned men told the truth when they said they had nothing
to do with the murder.
The federal
Department of Justice has launched its own probe after the accused
made an application for review.
Under Section
690 of the of the Criminal Code of Canada, a law to remedy miscarriages
of justice, the minister is empowered to send the case back to
trial or appeal court.
A draft of
the confidential departmental investigation has been complete
since May 8, but federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan has yet
to make a decision.
The department's
criminal conviction review group has declined to comment on the
case because it is still investigating.
To this day,
the Saint John police department stands by its work and has always
opposed parole for the convicted men.
Butch Cogswell,
a polygraphist who witnessed John Loeman's 1984 statement, is
now the police chief and says the right men are in prison.
Prosecutors
Stephen Wood and James McAvity also stand by the convictions.
They also say they disclosed all the evidence they had.
Contacted this
week, defence lawyer Wilber MacLeod insisted he did not get full
disclosure. ``This is the first time I'm hearing about evidence
that would have helped our case. There's no doubt in my mind
that, if we would have had all the facts, there would have been
a different outcome at trial,'' Mr. MacLeod said.
From the beginning,
Bobby Mailman and Wally Gillespie have claimed their innocence.
Their first
trial ended in a hung jury. At a second trial, they were convicted
by the testimony of John Loeman Jr. and Ms. Shatford, even though
their accounts contradicted one another and were riddled with
inconsistencies.
Today, Mr.
Loeman says he lied at both trials, but ``the lie I am living
can not go on.''
Mr. Loeman
says he had been a troubled boy looking for attention. Later,
he says, he turned to drugs to escape the lies and found himself
in and out of jail, mostly on fraud charges.
He says he
tried to come clean years ago but deserted his conscience after
police threatened to pursue him for giving perjured evidence
at the trials.
In a 1998 letter
to the Department of Justice's criminal conviction review group,
Mr. Loeman inquires about the legal consequences of his perjury:
``I need to know what will happen to me, because I am a victim,
too.''
Mr. Loeman
has told Department of Justice investigators that Saint John
police officers pressured him, saying he might go to jail for
the murder if he didn't help convict the accused.
Mr. Loeman
now says he did not actually witness the murder but thinks he
might have arrived shortly after the killing. All he saw was
the convicted men standing beside a station wagon, drinking beer
with Ms. Shatford.
Mr. Loeman
has also told federal investigators that two police officers,
both since retired, persuaded him to embellish his story to help
ensure convictions against the accused men.
``I never seen
half the stuff they told me to say basically ... for the jury
so they'd find them guilty, you know, just on what I seen alone
wasn't enough to put him -- them -- them people away, and they
knew it,'' he said.
``Well, I told
them what happened, and then he told me what might have happened.
`Could it have been this way, John: You were up there standing
there and seein' these guys hit George with a rifle butt and
they go like that. Well, would you, mind sayin' that in court
if you ever gotta go to court. Well, John, if you don't do exactly
what we tell you to do, you could be a big problem, you know.
We could charge (you) with this murder 'cause you were there,'''
says Mr. Loeman.
His false testimony
haunts him and he has written apologies to the condemned men,
both of whom testified at trial. ``My conscience has eaten away
at me ... and I cannot accommodate the thought of keeping this
to myself for the rest of my life,'' he says.
Incredibly,
Mr. Loeman began recanting his testimony 15 years ago. On Oct.
24, 1985, he phoned defence lawyer Wilder MacLeod at home.
With his father
present, Mr. Loeman told the truth for the first time.
``Everything
I said at the trials was a lie,'' he said. ``I can't carry the
burden around.''
Mr. MacLeod
asked the boy why he came forward.
``I can't see
two men doin' life in prison for somethin' they didn't do,''
was the reply. Mr. Loeman swore to his taped statement in an
11-page affidavit, dated Nov. 25, 1985.
Eight months
later, Mr. Loeman wrote a letter to Saint John police, stating
the sworn statement he had given Mr. MacLeod was not true.
On Feb. 10,
1998, the New Brunswick Court of Appeal, in a unanimous ruling,
decided against hearing Mr. Loeman's 1985 sworn statement saying
the witness was not credible.
Since 1979,
there have been several court rulings and recommendations concerning
the admissibility of fresh evidence on appeal.
One of the
most recent interpretations is found in Recommendation 86(a)
by the Commission on Proceedings involving Guy Paul Morin.
This standard
does not require the court to find the recantation believable,
rather the court must determine whether the new testimony could
reasonably be expected to have changed the results of a trial.
Doubts about
the recanted testimony should also prompt the court to question
the veracity of the witness's original testimony.
By 1984, Bobby
Mailman had been in and out of jail for theft and a series of
assaults, earning him a reputation as one of the most feared
criminals in Saint John's rough-and-ready North End.
During the
1970s, he was acquitted of attempted murder of a Saint John police
officer and was tried three times -- two hung juries and an acquittal
-- for the murder of a local hoodlum.
In June 1984,
Mr. Mailman wrote to Stephen Woods, the Crown attorney.
``It is sincerely
hoped that you will not object to my taking the liberty of writing
you. And my reason for the taking of this liberty, sir, is that
I now stand convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a murder
which I did not commit.''
Mr. Mailman
is 52 now and a grandfather, playing out the remaining years
of his life sentence at the Westmoreland Institution in Dorchester,
N.B. Every day, he plays the trials over in his mind:
``The system
owes me back my life. It's as simply as that. There was nothing
that even so much as pointed to me and I believe that, if it
hadn't been for my reputation, it would never have gone to court.''
Says Wally
Gillespie, now 56: ``They put our lifestyle on trial, not the
fact. We didn't do anything wrong.''
Mr. Gillespie
also grew up in a poor Saint John family, worked as a labourer
at the dry dock by day and drank his wages at night.
As his drinking
got worse, he started pushing bad cheques. By 1984, he had been
charged with 61 crimes, mostly fraud and break and enter. He
had served 21 provincial and federal jail terms.
Because the
booze blurred their memories, one day ran into the next for the
drinking buddies. The afternoon of Nov. 29, 1983, the day George
Leaman, a down-and-out plumber, was killed, would be hard to
recall.
He was beaten
to death between a row of clapboard homes at the end of a dead-end
street in a public housing project.
His body was
dumped and set on fire at the foot of a small birch tree in a
remote section of Rockwood Park, about two kilometres from where
police say the murder happened.
His body was
found on Nov. 30 by Robert Burke, who phone police and led them
to the scene.
Police took
14 photographs and headed for the morgue, where they secured
a few items from the body: three keys on a small ring, a brown
paper bag containing 66 cents, and a single hair found on the
right hand.
The hair sample
was mentioned once during the preliminary hearing. Its existence
was never raised at either trial.
A police search
of Mr. Leaman's apartment revealed a telephone number of Roy
Thomas, Janet Shatford's brother.
Mr. Thomas
was staying at his sister's house at the time, and he used her
address as his own. When police went looking for him, they found
his sister.
Police reports
obtained by the Citizen, some of them marked ``This Information
is Not To Be Given Out,'' document that she was questioned almost
daily for weeks and routinely given money, out of pocket by a
detective, to drink with Mr. Mailman and Mr. Gillespie in hopes
of obtaining incriminating evidence.
Ms. Shatford's
brother, Roy Thomas, had made a statement to police in 1983 but
was never called to testify.
Mr. Thomas's
ex-girlfriend, Norma Wilson, was not called to trial, either.
She says she told police that a station wagon, jointly owned
by her and Mr. Thomas, went missing on the day of the murder.
She said she
loaned it to Janet Shatford to go shopping that day.
``I'm still
waiting for my car back,'' Ms. Wilson told the Citizen.
She says she
was told the car had been dumped in the Saint John River.
There is no
record in police files that she had ever been interviewed.
A confidential
Department of Justice brief states: ``Ms. Wilson also recalled
that she had answered a lot of questions down at the police station
during the murder investigation. She was shown photographs of
people and asked to identify them. She remembered that she was
asked about her missing car as well.''
Mr. Thomas
told Department of Justice investigators that he had owned a
brown Ford station wagon but that it had been stolen. He said
he received $600 from the insurance company. Saint John police
have no record of the car's being reported stolen or missing.
Fowler Insurance
Ltd. records from that time have been destroyed.
According to
the New Brunswick Department of Transportation, the car in question
has been registered since.
During her
meetings with detectives, Ms. Shatford, a single mother on welfare,
continually denied any involvement in the murder.
She named several
people to whom the victim owed money -- his biggest debt, $1,500,
was to John Beale Sr., describing him as a Saint John bootlegger.
She also revealed
an alleged motive, saying the accused men had gone to collect
a debt owed to Mr. Beale. Mr. Beale, who has since died, was
never called as a witness, let alone charged in the killing.
In fact, George
Leaman owed money to Janet Shatford. She testified that he owed
her $400 in long-distance phone bills.
Willard Carr
and Lenny Tonge, the lead detectives, worked for seven weeks
on the case and got nowhere.
Bobby Mailman
and Wally Gillespie were their only suspects, and the detectives
had turned up nothing on them.
In a taped
statement to the Department of Justice, retired Det. Tonge says:
``And, like I say, it was (sighs) ... I ... I don't believe there
was any other suspects in my mind at that time. That'sall we
had to go on. And that's who we were working on. Hoping that
(Janet Shatford) would give us some information on it. But, like
I say, well I guess she did in the long run. But not to us.''
(Laughs)
His partner,
Det. Carr, also retired, now says that before the statements
by Ms. Shatford, they had nothing.
``Prior to
that, we didn't have anything concrete. We have suspicions, but
we never had anything concrete that Gillespie and Mailman did
it,'' Mr. Carr told the Department of Justice investigators.
The detective
also said he never trusted Janet Shatford.
``It were more
than a gut feeling I had that, you know, she wasn't, she wasn't
up and up. Because she, you know, she came back and wanted money
for this and wanted money for that. And (Det. Tonge) was giving
it to her. And I said to him, `Why are you giving this woman
money?' `Oh, she'll get the information for us.' And she never
really did get information for us. She gave us bits and pieces.
But never gave us what we're lookin' for.''
Then, after
seven weeks, other detectives took over the case. Overnight,
they obtained the case-breaking statement from Mr. Loeman and
declared the murder solved.
Mr. Loeman's
statement is dated Jan. 18, 1984, and witness ed by then-Det.
Butch Cogswell, who was not a lead detective on the case but
a polygraphist who had administered lie-detector tests to a number
of witnesses.
In the statement,
John Loeman Jr. said he heard a scream coming from behind a house.
He said he went into the woods and watched in horror as Janet
Shatford, armed with an axe, and Bobby Mailman, wielding a shotgun,
were ``practically taking turns, but Janet was hitting him more.
She was going right crazy.''
The boy also
placed Wally Gillespie at the scene, holding a butter pail ``of
something.''
He also said
that, while at Janet Shatford's home, he found a shotgun, axe
and pail in a closet and that Mr. Leaman owed money to the bootlegger
John Beale Sr., who was also a secret police informant.
Mr. Beale was
never called to testify at trial. (By the time the case went
to trial, Mr. Loeman changed butter pail of ``something'' to
``gasoline.'' He said he was sure it was gasoline because of
the glint from the sun. He said the late November killing happened
just before dark. Weather records also show the area was overcast
all day long. There was no indication of how the open pail of
gasoline ended up being used to burn the body some two kilometres
away.)
The day after
police secured Mr. Loeman's statement, Janet Shatford was arrested
on charges of murder. Mr. Mailman and Mr. Gillespie were arrested
as accomplices.
For two months,
Ms. Shatford told police she had nothing to do with the murder.
Then, on the eve of her trial, she changed her story. She admitted
to hacking at Mr. Leaman with an axe. in her confession, which
was also witnessed by polygraphist Butch Cogswell, she portrayed
herself as a reluctant killer, urged on by Bobby Mailman.
In exchange
for her testimony against Mr. Mailman, whom she knew only by
reputation, and Mr. Gillespie, a onetime boyfriend, the murder
charge was dropped. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was
sentenced to three years in prison.
In court, she
testified that she watched Mr. Mailman bludgeon George Leaman
to death with the butt of a shotgun while his slack-eyed drinking
buddy, Wally Gillespie, stood a few feet away, a butter pail
of gasoline in hand.
The murder,
according to her story, happened in the backyard of a public
housing unit in the city's north end.
She also revealed
an alleged motive, saying the accused men owed to a bootlegger,
Mr. Beale, who was not called to court.
Ms. Shatford
testified that she helped kill Mr. Leaman, then dropped the axe,
and went home to put supper on for her children.
Her account
is steeped in contradiction, from the very reason she said placed
her at the murder scene to the description of the weapons to
where her children had supper that night.
In an interview
two years ago, she said that she told police early in the investigation
that she never witnessed the murder but that, over time, she
was manipulated.
``I kept telling
them I didn't do it. They had me in the lockup for three months.
They were just telling me that I was there and that I did this
and I did that.
``I didn't
see nobody get killed, and I wasn't there. They told me that
they would take my kids away and I'd never see them again if
I didn't tell them what they wanted to hear,'' she recalled.
``They told
me I was there. I couldn't prove I wasn't. I was just a welfare
bum.''
Later, in recounting
her version of evens to federal investigators, she disputed what
she had said in the earlier interview and returned to the story
she told at the trials. But this time, there were significant
discrepancies.
``It is also
significant,'' a federal investigation brief says, ``that Ms.
Shatford described the shotgun used by Mr. Mail-man on the day
of the murder as being a sawed-off, double-barrelled shotgun.
At no other time as either Janet Shatford or John Loeman Jr.
ever described the firearm as sawed-off or double-barrelled.''
It should also
be noted that, for the first time, in 1998, she said the murder
weapons were stored in a five-gallon pail that Bobby Mailman
retrieved from the trunk of a car.
At both trials,
defence lawyers waded through all the inconsistencies in the
eyewitness testimony, including the fact that they had placed
the murder at different spots in a backyard and recalled the
dead body lying in different positions.
As well, Ms.
Shatford had changed the number of times she swung the axe.
``They lied,
said things that can't be, certain can't be in agreement -- they
can't both be telling the truth,'' defence lawyer J. Anderson
Ritchie said during the trial.
The difficulty
in trying to fabricate a story is that you may be able to tailor
a lie to fit another lie, but you can't tailor a lie to fit the
truth, and that's where the inconsistencies come from, because
beyond the concoction, they're on their own.
``And their
stories don't jibe.''
For months
after the murder, the accused could not remember where they were
on the afternoon of the killing. But at the trials, Wayne Costello
testified on their behalf, saying that he had driven them to
a car-parts dealer that afternoon.
Days into the
trial, Marjorie Mills, a close friend of Wally Gillespie, came
forward after finding a sales slip, dated the day of the murder,
while sweeping under her refrigerator. She could now account
for the accused, who had apparently spent the afternoon trying
to fix the windshield wiper motor on Ms. Mills's car. The defence
said the accused had been at the car-parts dealer at around 3:30
p.m.
Since the sales
receipts did not show the time, the crown called customers who
held receipts numbered both before and after the accused, in
an attempt to discredit the timing of the alibi.
Wayne Lackie,
a delivery man, testified that he purchased a gasket o9n the
same afternoon. his sales receipt was Number 33439 -- police
have since destroyed the alibi receipt, Number 33438 -- and Mr.
Lackie testified that he had to have been there between 3 and
3:30 p.m. since he had to deliver the part to NB Tel before it
closed at 4 p.m.
This would
put the accused men at he car parts dealer earlier than they
contended.
But Mr. Lackie
never actually made the delivery to NB Tel. He says he had only
guessed about the times by looking at someone else's logbook.
The first trial
ended in a hung jury. The second trial began on May 7, 1984.
It lasted five days, beginning on Monday morning and ending on
Friday afternoon.
Again, defence
lawyers hammered at the inconsistencies of the witnesses, claiming
they were lying.
Prosecutors
painted the accused and defence witnesses as low-life rounders
who had criminal records, lived on welfare, and spent most days
drinking at a bootlegger's.
The presiding
judge, the late Mr. Justice J. Paul Barry, ended his charge to
the jury around 12:30 p.m. on May 11, 1984. He said someone wasn't
telling the truth. If they were lying, he said, the prosecution's
case ``falls to the ground.''
``But if they
are, they're sure telling whoppers. They're not any third-rate
ones.''
And he said
he didn't feel like taking the time to recite Mr. Gillespie's
lengthy criminal record.
The jury retired
at 3:35 p.m. and took two hours and 25 minutes. The foreman pronounced
the guilty verdict twice.
The judge said
second-degree murder carried an automatic life sentence. He then
looked at the men in the prisoners' dock and asked whether they
had anything to say.
Bobby Mailman
stood and calmly protested: ``Just that I'm not guilty.''
The judge then
recited their lengthy criminal records -- ``I don't know what
the point is of rehabilitation'' -- and sentenced them to life
in prison at Dorchester Penitentiary, the country's oldest prison.
Today, Bobby
Mailman and Wally Gillespie are still waiting for the truth.
Still waiting to clear their names.
- Says Mr. Mailman:
``If you look at everything in our case, it's easy to prove that
we are innocent. The only thing keeping us from clearing our
names is someone who is not afraid to exercise their power and
let the truth come out.''
-
-
The convictions in question
By Don Cayo, The
Globe and Mail Metro, April 20, 1998
SAINT JOHN
-- MYTHS, at least here in the Maritimes, need not agree with
the facts. Or with each other.
For example,
Maritimers are as prone as other Canadians to believe that crime
in our streets is getting worse. Yet at the same time we hold
dear the old chestnut that really bad stuff can't happen here.
In the first case, never mind statistical reality. In the second,
never mind the gritty reality we see from time to time on the
front page.
Feeling both
falsely threatened and falsely secure at the same time -- that
requires deep belief. But folks here are born knowing that small
is beautiful, and that what passes as a big city in these parts
really isn't. So, sure we have some bad guys, but we're protected
by our small-town values, small-town neighbours, small-town cops.
If that faith
isn't also rattled by contradictory concerns, it should be. Just
ask Clayton Johnson.
He's a 52-year-old
man from Shelburne, N.S. -- a nice man, by all accounts but the
one that was told in court seven years ago and that netted him
a life sentence for murder. The problem is -- as has been well
told in a number of news stories, none better than Kirk Makin's
compelling accounts in this newspaper three weeks ago -- that
he's probably innocent. Not only are there real questions about
whether Mr. Johnson killed his wife, but it's doubtful that anyone
did. It looks like she died in a fall.
Nor is Mr.
Johnson the region's only jailbird held on iffy evidence. Donald
Marshall, the young Micmac who spent 11 years locked up for a
murder he didn't commit, is a Nova Scotian. And Robert Mailman
and Walter Gillespie, now 14 years into questionable life sentences,
are from New Brunswick.
Mailman, you
say? Gillespie? It's no surprise if you don't know the names.
Yet the Mailman-Gillespie
story was told in masterly detail six weeks ago by The Telegraph
Journal (the newspaper from which I am currently on leave) here
in Saint John. These men were convicted, on flimsy circumstantial
evidence and the word of two shaky witnesses, of beating a man
to death. Both the woman and the boy who testified against them
have since admitted, most recently in interviews with the newspaper,
that they caved in to police pressure to lie on the stand. Several
impressive experts think the conviction stinks. And Gary Dimmock,
the reporter who unearthed all this, has followed up with several
more stories, one of them on a new witness who says he saw someone
else do it.
It's compelling
stuff -- a case crying to be re-opened. But it hasn't attracted
much ink or air time, except in The Telegraph Journal. A full
report in Ottawa's newspaper, a six-week-late interview on local
CBC Radio, briefs in a couple of Maritime newspapers -- that,
as far as I know, is it.
WHY so little
interest? Well, unlike Mr. Johnson, these aren't nice men. By
all accounts, they're thugs. One of them in particular was "known
to the police" in 1983 when George Leeman, a hapless down-and-outer,
was found bludgeoned to death and burned. Mr. Mailman, with a
string of convictions for violence, was an instant suspect. Saint
John policemen remembered all too well that he had beaten previous
charges of killing two people, one of them a fellow cop.
Then, too,
there's the way the story unfolded. At The Telegraph Journal,
a newspaper legendary for giving writers time and space for exhaustive
coverage of subjects it deems important, Mr. Dimmock stands out
for his tenacity, skill and vigour. And length. His first story
sprawled over 13 pages of the newspaper's weekend magazine. It
didn't lend itself to a quick, convenient rewrite.
And the usual
way stories move from one newsroom to another doesn't work with
Telegraph Journal exclusives. It is an oddball among newsrooms:
It doesn't belong to The Canadian Press, the news co-operative
that serves as a medium of exchange for stories from different
parts of Canada.
Another reporter
could still seek to match or beat Mr. Dimmock's story, but, given
the extent of the original coverage, that would be daunting.
A new writer would be starting from scratch, tracking down and
cultivating sources, chasing documentation, the whole nine yards.
The odds of finding a new angle are low.
Newsrooms are
notoriously loath to openly quote each other -- to give credit
for exclusive work. So most ignore this story. It's a pity. These
guys don't have Mr. Johnson's charm, but the principle at stake
is as important to nasty people as to nice ones.
And the Mailman-Gillespie
case serves as well as the Johnson one to illustrate the dark
side of living somewhere small: that things can go just as horribly
wrong in a place where everybody knows everybody else, and everybody
else's business, as in a place where no one knows your name.
All material
copyright Thomson Canada Limited or its licensors. All rights
reserved.
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