They spoke at a London motel the morning Campbell was to take the stand. “Are you nervous?” Affleck asked.
“No.”
“Do you want some Valium?”
“No, I don’t take Valium.”
“I like to take them in court when I’m nervous.”
Campbell relented and took a five-milligram Valium. He took it to quiet Affleck, not to calm his nerves. “He was bugging me so much to take them. He handed me four. I said, ‘I’ll take one.’ ”
Campbell felt clean, even righteous, as he prepared to take the witness stand. If things went as planned, then the eight Choice members would walk free and Campbell would take all of the heat for the Matiyek shooting. “I didn’t feel I was doing something brave.… For me, it was the right thing to be doing because they [the accused] didn’t deserve to be there.… I was ready, willing and able to do life. It wasn’t all to protect them. It was just the right thing to do.”
Campbell wore a suit and tie into court, as Affleck had suggested. It was the black suit he sometimes wore to weddings and funerals, the ones he didn’t attend in his club colours. Aside from the clothing tip, there was no preparation for what would be Campbell’s first and only time testifying in court. None of the rest of the defence lawyers gave him any clue about what type of questioning to expect or what traps could be set for him. Most importantly, he wasn’t aware of the need for him to establish that Comeau had been shot that night. “When I was on the stand, I wasn’t nervous. I really wasn’t, and I wasn’t coached. Nobody sat me down and said, ‘These are the questions the Crown is going to ask.’ ” His previous training for dealing with the justice system had come from bikers. It was concise and easy to remember: don’t point fingers at anyone, especially a one-percenter; and when in doubt, answer a question with another question.
The jury heard that Campbell was testifying under the Canada Evidence Act, which meant he couldn’t be charged for any testimony he gave unless police could independently back it. The bikers already believed that some police were tampering with evidence and intimidating potential witnesses, so it wasn’t a stretch for Campbell too to suspect there was a strong chance he would be wearing handcuffs shortly after he left the courtroom.
Campbell testified that he’d been wearing a green parka at the bar. Witnesses had described the shooter as wearing a green parka. Comeau all but lived in his black leather jacket, which he had also worn that night and which had gone missing after his arrest.
Under questioning from Affleck, Campbell said he had been drinking at the Choice clubhouse in Toronto with Gary Comeau and Larry Hurren the night he got the call about trouble in Port Hope. He felt okay mentioning their names in court because they’d given him permission to do so.
As Campbell told things, what happened after he approached Matiyek’s table was very simple. “I pulled out my gun and I shot him … for my own protection. I didn’t want to get shot.”
“And where did you shoot him?” Affleck asked.
“In the head.”
Campbell made it sound painfully understandable: someone was going to die as soon as Matiyek went for his gun, and Campbell didn’t want that someone to be anyone with the Choice, including himself. “I do feel that if he had had a chance, I’d be dead right now,” he told the court.
Sauvé’s lawyer, Jack Grossman, used his examination of Campbell to attack the Crown’s theory that there had been a murder conspiracy. Plenty of violence was rightly associated with the Satan’s Choice, but meticulous planning was not the club’s strong suit.
“Did you agree with anyone to kill Mr. Matiyek?” Grossman asked.
“No.”
“And did you intend to kill Mr. Matiyek when you arrived at the hotel?”
“I had no such instructions.”
“And did anyone suggest to you, sir, that Mr. Matiyek should be killed?”
“No.”
Campbell told the court that he had carried a gun for about two years “because of propaganda about motorcycle clubs in the newspapers” and because “I didn’t want to be next.” This was his way of saying that he believed bikers had to worry about being shot by police as well as each other. What Campbell didn’t volunteer was that guns were also handy things to carry when collecting drug debts. He lied when asked where he got the gun he used that night, saying he bought it from someone in Toronto. He wasn’t about to point at whoever handed him the gun and drag someone else into the mess. Instead, he said that no one else knew he was carrying a gun. He also lied when he said he only recognized that Sonny Bronson and Fred Jones were Outlaws because of their distinctive skull-and-crossbones belts. Of course, Campbell didn’t need to look at their waists to know who they were. Bronson and Jones had been Satan’s Choice clubmates of Campbell’s until they patched over to the Outlaws. Again, Campbell was following the one-percenter code. Even the hated Outlaws shouldn’t be dragged into court cases.
Campbell lied again when he said he left the bar in Comeau’s car. In reality, he left with someone else, but didn’t want to give up that person’s name to authorities.
He fumbled when asked about the distance of his arm from Matiyek when he shot him. Decades later, he still doesn’t know the right answer to that question. “This thing happened so fast that I can’t remember truthfully how far I was away. It’s not like everything happened in five minutes. Everything happened in a split second.”
Kerbel asked Campbell about his client, Nutty Comeau, immediately after the shooting. Campbell replied that Comeau had been hurt. That wasn’t good enough for the judge to order the bullet removed from Comeau, so Kerbel pressed on.
“Well, what did you see?” Kerbel asked. “What is it that you saw?”
“Well, his coat had a hole in it and there was blood there.”
With that, the defence lawyers finally had the answer they so desperately wanted. Now they could push to have the bullet extracted from Comeau and entered as evidence. Campbell recalls: “People were full of anxiety, from what I understand, before I entered the courtroom. They were very attentive when I was answering questions. The lawyers were extremely anxious because I wasn’t answering the way they expected at first. I think a couple of them had to change their underwear when I was done.”
Not surprisingly, Meinhardt’s cross-examination was intense. When Campbell looked at him, he was reminded of a weasel in the Roger Rabbit cartoons, without the laughs. “He was pompous. Every time he’d ask me a question, he’d turn around and smile at the jury. That would make me mad.”
Meinhardt had plenty of smiles for the jury as he asked Campbell about his old perjury conspiracy conviction. In court, the word “perjury” is never a pretty one, unless you’re a Crown attorney cross-examining someone convicted of it.
“And so not only did you go into the box and tell a lie, you have somebody else go in for you to tell a lie?” Meinhardt asked.
“Yes.”
“And this was for a driving offence?”
“Yes.”
The implication was as clear as if Meinhardt had climbed up on a chair and screamed it into a megaphone: if Campbell would lie under oath about a driving offence, what might he do in a murder trial to save the skins of eight of his biker brothers?
Campbell recalls feeling calm on the witness stand, as he had stuck fast to the one-percenter code. That code hadn’t been explained to the jury. Perhaps if they’d heard it, they would have understood what Campbell was really saying. He was confessing as fully and honestly as he could while trying to limit the damage to just himself. They might even have admired him, since he was stepping up and trying to absorb all of the blame. “I believe I basically told the truth. Even about the gun. I have bought guns from Toronto before. You have to look at the bigger picture.”
When he was on the stand, none of the defence team had thought to remind the jury that Campbell was left-handed, just like the shooter described by Susan Foote and unlike any of the men in the prisoners’ box.
After h
is testimony, Campbell and Affleck were riding the courthouse elevator together when the door opened to a group of defence lawyers standing outside. It was then that Affleck said something that troubled Campbell for years. “He said I was on Valium when I was on the stand. It really hurt.”
At that point, it seemed to Campbell that Terry O’Hara, Blaker’s lawyer, turned against him. This gnawed at Campbell. He had plenty of respect for O’Hara and felt badly about what he perceived as O’Hara’s new, negative attitude. It was as though O’Hara were writing him off after hearing about it, even though he’d stepped up and confessed to the killing.
As a direct result of Campbell’s testimony, something happened in the seventh week of the trial that was worthy of the old Perry Mason television series. Nutty Comeau was led into Victoria Hospital in London under armed guard and on a heavy-duty leash. Under the supervision of court officers, a medical operation was conducted that could prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he wasn’t the shooter. A surgeon cut into Nutty’s side and pulled out a tiny piece of metal. Forensic testing concluded that it was a bullet from the same .38 handgun that killed Matiyek. Further forensic testing provided an added bonus: a bit of cloth stuck to the bullet fragment was from the coat that Matiyek had been wearing at the time he was shot. It had obviously hit Matiyek first since it came to a stop inside Comeau long with a bit of Matiyek’s coat. For the Crown’s murder scenario to be true, Comeau somehow shot Matiyek with the same bullet that hit himself. That was too absurd even to consider. When Campbell heard the results of the tests, he felt that a storm had passed. “The feeling was relief, because in all of our minds now it was clear that the witnesses, for whatever reasons, were wrong. It was physically impossible for Nutty to be the shooter. Therefore, there goes the Crown’s case.”
With their backs against the wall, the Crown became more creative and argued the possibility that there were two shooters. It was also noted that the bullet did conclusively place Comeau at the scene of the crime. All that didn’t get past the earlier testimony that there was only one gun. How—and why—two killers would shoot from the same gun within seconds was never explained. Nor was the fact that none of the witnesses had recalled two gunmen in the bar. And it was too late now for them to change their stories.
Campbell had been warned by his own lawyer, John Rosen, that he could be arrested after his courtroom confession, Canada Evidence Act or no Canada Evidence Act. The police just had to swear they were arresting him on other evidence than what he offered in the witness stand. For Campbell, it seemed that they had pulled witnesses out of thin air to implicate his brothers, so why would they not turn their sights on him now? That would take nine members of the Choice off the streets.
The Crown didn’t appear to have established much more than the bikers’ nasty images. In his closing arguments, Meinhardt claimed Campbell wasn’t even at the scene of the crime, and noted that witnesses didn’t place him in the bar. Meinhardt also asked the jury whether it was reasonable for grown men to run around with patches depicting Satan’s head on their backs. It was an interesting question—but who in their right mind had ever suggested that outlaw biker life is based on reason? As Meinhardt explained it, the shooting of Bill Matiyek was staged as a cold-blooded public execution to send a loud message about what could happen if you defied the Satan’s Choice. His comments about Campbell dripped with scorn. Nutty Comeau, Meinhardt claimed, matched the witnesses’ description of the gunman, not Lorne Campbell.
“It is my respectful submission that you should treat him with all the contempt that he deserves.… There isn’t an iota of evidence except from the lips of a convicted perjurer that the gunman was a dark-haired man with a goatee and an earring in his left ear.… All the evidence points to a blond-haired, blond-bearded gunman.”
Justice Coulter Osbourne also undermined Campbell’s testimony, albeit more subtly. The judge noted to the jury that he was testifying under the Canada Evidence Act, and also that Campbell had a criminal record that included a perjury conviction.
“That is for you to consider,” the judge advised.
Years later, the judge described Campbell as the worst witness he had ever seen on the stand. Campbell, meanwhile, has no bad words for the judge: “He was the boss. I thought he was the most intelligent guy in the room. He was calmer. Asking with a curious voice. Not like the Crown was.”
———
It was a complicated case involving multiple defendants, but the jury didn’t take long in their deliberations. After huddling for just a day, the jury found Comeau and Sauvé each guilty of first-degree murder. This meant they would receive automatic life terms, with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years.
McLeod, Hurren, Blaker and Hoffman were each convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to ten years in prison. Gordon (Dog Map) Van Haarlem and Armand (In the Trunk) Sanguigni, the man with the roughest reputation of the bunch, were each found not guilty and immediately released from custody.
Campbell was stunned when he heard the verdicts, but says he didn’t once second-guess his decision to come forward and testify. “I’ve always been old school. You always protect your brothers, and they didn’t deserve to be there. Anybody with any sense would understand that.”
Right after the verdicts were announced, Campbell felt the need to drop in on his father in Richmond Hill, north of Toronto, where he lived now with Doris.
His father had often been brutal in the past, but that day he was understanding and even gentle. “I read the papers and I don’t care,” his father said. “You don’t have to explain anything. But if you need anything, come here.”
Campbell took Charmaine with him when he went to visit his mother.
“I read the papers. What do you think my friends think?” she asked. “What do you think I’m going through?”
“You know what, Ma? I’m your son,” Campbell replied. “Charmaine, put your shoes on. We’re out of here.”
There were more visits to his father. “He was thin. He didn’t eat. It was terminal. Charmaine would rub his back when he was bedridden.”
It was such a contrast to the fear he’d inspired, and the power he’d radiated, when Campbell was a child, when a smack from him would send Campbell reeling across the floor. There was nothing threatening about him now. The cancer spread quickly, and on July 23, 1980, Lorne Campbell Sr. died in Doris’s home. “It wasn’t a shock or a surprise. It still hit me hard. It hit the whole family hard.… He was the youngest of the thirteen kids [in his family] and he was the first to go.”
Campbell had been working construction out of town and missed being with his father at his bedside during his final days. “I wasn’t there when he died. A lot of people didn’t forgive me for that.”
Campbell was visiting his friend Joe Napolitano at his lodge near Port Carling, north of Toronto, in 1982 when he heard the news about the appeal application. Napolitano was now out of tattooing and making big money in the construction business and real estate. “He was a little crazy, in a good way, and his brother John was crazier. Loyal friends, the pair of them.”
There was still the hope that the six Port Hope convictions would be overturned. The original decision seemed too crazy to remain intact, even if the jury discounted Campbell’s confession. For instance, how did they explain away the bullet extracted from Nutty Comeau, with cloth fragments from Matiyek’s coat on it?
At the time of the appeal, Campbell was lying low. He was wanted by the police for questioning after he put a severe beating on a man in an attempt to locate the man’s brother, Gerry, who had previously escaped from Campbell after being hunted “just for speaking bad about us.” Campbell recalls, “Gerry jumped off a third floor [balcony] to get away from me.” He’d turned to the friend who was with him and said, “Holy fuck. Did you see that?”
They looked over the balcony and Gerry was nowhere to be seen. A little later, Gerry phoned to taunt them, saying he had been hiding behind the bushes, laughing and
saying, “You didn’t get me.” So they decided to pound Gerry’s location out of his brother. “I kept him up all night and beat him. Kept him all day and beat him. Then I dropped him off at the hospital because I liked him.” In the end, Campbell bumped into Gerry at a booze can, but he spared him a beating because he heard Gerry’s son had just died of a drug overdose. He even offered to drive Gerry to the funeral, but when he showed up to give him a ride, Gerry said he was too hungover. “It’s your son, Gerry,” Campbell said, and drove off.
Particularly since the London trial, Campbell needed good friends like the Napolitanos. He had been drinking hard, bypassing the seductive charms of whisky for the near-knockout stupor of 95-proof alcool, which could become a torch with the drop of a match. The alcool did its job, and also left him with daily stomach aches.
Try as he might, Campbell couldn’t drink himself past the cruel irony of the case. He prided himself on being a club protector, and yet when he had stepped forward to sacrifice himself for the group, he failed miserably. He had followed the one-percenter code to a T while on the witness stand, and the result was a public disaster. The one time he testified in court was against himself, and he wasn’t believed. For all of Campbell’s noble intentions, a half-dozen of his clubmates were in prison for a crime he committed, while he remained a free man.
It would have been an easy time to quit the outlaw biker life, especially after he got news that the efforts to appeal the six guilty verdicts had quickly failed and his biker brothers could expect to remain in prison for a long, long time. He walked alone to the end of the wharf at Joe Napolitano’s lodge, stared out onto the waters and wondered how things could have gone so wrong after he stepped forward to tell the truth.
“I don’t mind telling you I cried over that one.”
CHAPTER 13
Free and Uneasy
Unrepentant Page 13