When Smith confirmed his identity, the ranger advised that he had an important message. “I can’t remember the exact message, but he said, ‘There’s been a hit,’ or ‘There’s been a development in one of your files. You need to get back to Port Alberni right away.’”
While Smith had a number of active files in process, he knew there was only one case that would move his colleagues to tear him away from a long-needed vacation. Smith said he doesn’t even remember if he folded up his tent properly. “I threw everything in my truck and roared back and got the news,” he said. “We delved into it. That was better than any vacation. Shortly after I got called back, I spoke to Hiron Poon. He told me about the match with the consent sample. And he said, at that time, the odds were 1.9 trillion to one. That’s eleven zeros after the 1.9.” Legally speaking, odds of over a thousand to one is considered “very strong evidence,” Smith explained. “This is 1.9 trillion to one. That’s ‘unbelievably strong evidence.’” But there was still a lengthy process that analysts and detectives had to undertake before Roderick Patten could be arrested and charged with murder.
NOW, WITH THE suspect identified, strategy became critical. Before he transferred out to the Campbell River detachment a year earlier, in July 1998, Dale Djos had put an operational plan in place to be followed when a killer was identified. Smith had officially taken over as lead investigator in the Jessica States case, but he fully expected to roll out the operational plan as laid down by Djos.
The plan was a modified version of the Mr. Big Sting that has since fallen into disrepute because of the number of false convictions the tactic has produced. Briefly, it works like this: Undercover officers “befriend” a suspect, in some instances paying him to perform certain tasks, not always illegal. Once the suspect is drawn in, he meets the mysterious Mr. Big, who is yet another undercover officer. Mr. Big demands that the suspect reveal his criminal credentials in detail if he is going to be elevated to a higher, more lucrative role in the “organization.” Mr. Big wants to know, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Ideally, the suspect confesses to the specific crime that police are investigating. Prodded for more information, he provides details that would be known only to the perpetrator and the investigators can build a bulletproof case against him. The “confession” is but one part of an unshakeable chain of evidence leading to a conviction. The confession itself becomes the single most important piece of evidence against them and is sufficient to bring about a conviction. Justice is done. But faced with a one-time opportunity to make easy money with a certain amount of protection, suspects subjected to the Mr. Big scenario are easily swayed to make detailed confessions to crimes they did not commit.
In this case, Smith already had the DNA evidence indisputably linking Roderick Patten to the crime scene. Or at least, he had the proof of guilt. But only if he could put it before a court of law. “By this time we had a lot of experience dealing with DNA evidence,” Smith said. “We had already lost one consent sample in the Dhillon case. If the consent sample does not go in—if the suspect says ‘somebody threatened me to get the sample,’ we’ve got nothing.”
In the modified Mr. Big scenario, investigators would attempt to obtain a confession as grounds for a DNA warrant while collecting cast-off DNA from their suspect. “At the time the cold hit came up, Patten was already in jail on the B & E charges, and he wasn’t due for release for months, so we had all the time we needed to set it up.”
There was a second prong in the campaign to obtain a DNA warrant for Patten, and it was based on a fundamental eccentricity within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter will protect you from unreasonable search and seizure of DNA if you are an accused criminal. But it has nothing to say if you are not accused of any crime. Smith said he could not take credit for the tactic that subsequently secured the DNA warrant. In a reprise of the reconstruction of Carolyn Lee’s DNA profile through the profiling of her parents, when the crime lab reported the cold hit on Roderick Patten, Smith and his team launched a DNA collection on Patten’s parents, Alma and Roderick Patten Sr. On July 25, just two days after the cold hit, a female officer from Courtenay collected a castoff DNA sample from Rod Sr.
“We had previously obtained a birth certificate for Roddy Patten from the provincial government. From there, we found both his parents living in Port Alberni. That was through the police database. The father lived in a trailer that was for sale. We had [the undercover officer] meet him to look at the trailer. Then she took him out for coffee over at the Barclay Hotel. While they’re there, he’s smoking and drinking coffee. We took the cigarette butts and the coffee cup and extracted his DNA.”
The next day, Arnfield and Smith met with Patten’s mother and sister, Alma and Michelle. In the years after the trial, rumours swirled around suggesting that Alma Patten had known about the killing and shielded her son from police, but both Dan Smith and Dale Djos have categorically rejected the idea that Alma had any knowledge of the crime. At the time of the cold hit, Alma Patten and her daughter, Michelle, lived in the South Port area, next door to a known female drug dealer who was under police surveillance. This was fortuitous because Smith had a legitimate reason to arrange an interview with the two women—to learn more about activities around the drug house next door to them.
Smith could not just drop by the Patten house, even in plainclothes and driving an unmarked police cruiser. A visit from police could conceivably put the mother and daughter in jeopardy from their neighbour and her associates. Smith and Arnfield arranged to meet the Pattens at Tim Hortons, located well on the other side of town.
During the conversation, Alma Patten momentarily threw the two investigators into a quiet panic when she mentioned that “she had thirteen foster children. Our hearts just sank at that moment because we’re thinking, ‘Oh no—is [Roddy] one of the foster children, and was this not on the birth certificate?’ But then, she talked about her three [biological] children—Michelle, Jennifer, and Roddy Patten.”
“At that point, Roddy was in jail on B & E charges,” said Smith, “and [Alma] felt terrible about that. I felt bad for her that we were putting her in this spot [when] she alluded to how she still had hope for him, that he could still turn his life around. But the essential element was that she explained that ‘her only son who she gave birth to’ was Roddy. So we were okay. And we also knew there were no brothers we were dealing with. After they left . . . we put on gloves, and then bagged up their cups.”
Smith sent the samples to Hiron Poon at the forensic lab in Vancouver. “I gave them a table of statistics saying that, from the DNA obtained at the crime scene, this is the probability that it came from the offspring of the . . . family,” Poon said. Poon was asked if, had it later been proven that Rod Sr. was not the genetic father of Rod Jr., could the composite family profile have excluded the suspect? “If [Rod] Sr. was not the dad, we would have been able to tell right away,” he explained. “In this particular case, everything did match up.” Had it not, Poon said having the linkage through the mother was more critical. “The number would not be as good as having both of the parents. But in this case, everything worked out well. So we could say that, ‘Yes. There is a very high probability that the person who left the biological sample at the crime scene is the offspring of these parents.’ With that, you can get a warrant.”
And for Smith, obtaining that warrant was the priority. “We got our match. He established odds of 14.9 million to one that the male DNA from the chewing gum was from a biological child of Alma and Roderick Patten Sr. That’s for the Caucasian population. It increases to 333 million to one for the Coastal Salish population. Patten has some Salish ancestry.” The findings would subsequently provide “reasonable and probable grounds” for a DNA warrant.
“On a warrant, you’re looking for ‘reasonable and probable grounds,’ not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ so this was a very high standard. Based on that, we went ahead to get the DNA warrant.” Smith said the
original consent sample had been collected when Patten and his associates came under suspicion. However, should the consent sample have been tossed out, that would have broken the chain to the DNA warrant, had the DNA sampling of Alma and Rod Patten Sr. not been conducted. By definition, that sampling was not a “search,” and therefore, no one’s Charter rights were being violated. A citizen does not have a Charter standing in a case in which they are not a suspect, he explained.
Arnfield said that by now, she and her colleagues had become quite adept at collecting cast-off samples. “Terry [Horrocks] wasn’t even working one day . . . when he sees the guy that we know we need a sample from. He followed the guy into Tim Hortons and grabbed a spoon.” Another potential suspect was sampled at a Tim Hortons in Courtenay. “He was having coffee and he wiped his nose with a napkin and left it on a tray. When they left, Dan and I sat down in their seats, put on the gloves, and packed it up.” A sample collected discreetly like this allowed the investigators, under the Charter of Rights, a to build a DNA profile that would hold up in court when Jessica’s killer finally came to trial.
INTERRUPTION: KILLER ON THE LOOSE
While Smith may have intended to pursue a careful, measured strategy as the three-year anniversary of Jessica States’s murder approached, a double homicide threw local investigators into a frenzy during the final week of July 1999.
On the night of Sunday, July 25, in an apparent drug rip-off, two suspects entered an apartment building in the Glenwood neighbourhood at about 10:30. One male victim was beaten over the head with a claw hammer before being shot, while a second man was also shot.
Monday night was a regularly scheduled city council meeting, so I worked a split shift that day. Despite my good working relations with local RCMP, they weren’t revealing much that morning about the assaults on Sunday evening. By deadline I had found out independently that a firearm had been used, but no one at the detachment would confirm it. The names of the victims had not been released, but that was pretty standard. I wrote a short summary of the “serious assault” with the information provided by the RCMP, and a roundup of events from the weekend, before heading home at lunchtime.
On a normal council night, I would have headed to city hall and compiled enough material to keep me going for a few days. I would intersperse infrastructure expenditures, zoning amendments, and water main repairs amid the tire slashings, kitchen fires, and prize pumpkins of small-town life. But some time just before five that afternoon, my publisher called me at home. He had heard something on the police scanner. All he knew was that every available police and ambulance unit had just converged on the 3000 block of First Avenue, less than ten blocks from where I lived. I grabbed my camera bag and was there in minutes. I parked outside the police tape cordon and loaded a fresh roll of colour film into my camera.
After three years on the job, I had been to plenty of crime scenes and knew what to expect. I approached the police cordon at a steady pace with the Nikon at waist level, set at wide angle. When I came close to the scene, I started snapping frames, swinging from left to right, fully expecting to catch the sequence where the cop barges in, waving his arms and telling me “no pictures.”
It didn’t happen. With half a roll left, I snapped a few shots of the emergency vehicles parked in front of a small wood frame house on the east side of the street. I zoomed in on a couple sitting on the curb: a young woman, obviously distraught, and a young man, obviously her partner, comforting her. I soon learned there were two dead bodies in the home and that the young woman, who lived in the home, had discovered the crime scene. There was already suspicion that the shooting was related to the incident of the previous night.
By now, both the Vancouver and the Island District Serious Crimes units had arrived on the scene, which would make getting official information a little more difficult. What I knew by deadline: the victims were a young man and a young woman. The distraught young woman I’d take a photo of was the sister of the dead woman, and police confirmed that she was a resident of the home. She was taken to the RCMP detachment to make a statement and to receive counselling from the Victim Services Program. Neither the names of the victims nor the manner of death had been released, and autopsies were to be performed later in the day. Police now reported that one of the victims in the Sunday night shooting had been airlifted to Victoria in serious condition and investigators were trying to determine whether the two crimes were related.
The next morning, after I wrapped up and sent my copy to the editor, I got a whispered call from the front desk. The parents of the murdered woman were in the office to put together an obituary. I asked the editor to hold the front page in the event I could pick up something useful.
Their names were Don and Lillian Campbell, and from what they told me, I was able to put together a detailed story. Their murdered daughter, Lorinda, was twenty years old, and her deceased partner was Michael Walker. The girl on the curb had been Lorinda’s eighteen-year-old younger sister, Angel, and her boyfriend, Brent LaFlamme. LaFlamme owned the home where the couple was killed. Don and Lillian owned the home directly across the street. They were out of town at the time of the shooting. “We had to go to the morgue this morning to identify our daughter,” Don Campbell told me. He also confirmed how the two were killed. “She was shot. I saw her.”
Campbell acknowledged that there was drug activity in the LaFlamme house and police were having a difficult time with potential witnesses. “They say they’re not getting very much cooperation,” he said. “It seems that some people don’t want to mention things for fear of implicating themselves in other crimes . . . This is a murder—that’s our daughter lying there in the morgue. Everybody loved Lorinda. If they were her friends, they should come forward. That would be the best way they could pay their respects, to tell police everything they know.” For the waiting editor, I packaged their call for cooperation with a photo of the distraught parents taken on the spot.
On Wednesday, July 28, police revealed that Walker and Campbell were both shot in the head, “execution-style.” I learned that Walker was known as a very tough guy who collected drug debts for local dealers. Once I had finished for the day, I headed over to the Campbell residence. Campbell was frankly worried for his surviving daughter’s safety, and there had been speculation that police had spirited Angel and Brent out of town for their own protection. Don’s public appeal, however, had inspired otherwise reluctant people to come forward with information.
On Tuesday, August 3, an RCMP team led by Dan Smith apprehended Allan Larry Thomas, a close acquaintance of Walker and the Campbells, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. That morning, Susan Roth, who occasionally did freelance photography for the Times, was at the home of a friend who lived across the street from Thomas. When police vehicles suddenly appeared in front of the house across the street, she quickly pulled out her camera and shot a sequence of photos as the Emergency Response Team members smashed through the front door of the Thomas house.
But even more devastating for the Campbells was the arrest of Brent LaFlamme on charges of robbery and using a firearm in the course of a robbery, in connection with the July 25 shootings. As it transpired, LaFlamme not only took part in the Sunday night robbery, but he was also on hand early the next morning when Thomas gunned down Campbell and Walker. After the killings, the two walked to a nearby bar and had several drinks. They later drifted up to Walker’s home, where they drank the last beers in the refrigerator and made several long-distance phone calls. When the bodies hadn’t been discovered by late afternoon the next day, LaFlamme sent Angel into the house, knowing she would be met with a scene of utter horror.
Once again, within days Port Alberni RCMP had captured a killer whose crimes shocked the city. The case served as a reminder that there was still a child murderer out there, and an entire community was waiting for him to be brought to justice.
“DON’T LOOK FOR A MONSTER”
On July 31, the three-year anniversary of t
he Jessica States murder, Dan Smith spoke with Louise Dickson, a reporter for the Victoria Times Colonist, expressing his confidence that Jessica’s killer would be caught “because police discovered a DNA sample left behind by the killer.” Smith noted that investigators had taken four hundred DNA samples from people in Port Alberni and the Indigenous community of Ahousaht. “Police have even gone so far as to take DNA samples from people who have died suddenly, in case death would conceal the killer’s identity,” the article continued.
Dickson also contacted Dale Djos at the RCMP detachment in Campbell River. Despite transferring up-Island with a promotion the previous year, Djos was still emotionally invested in the case. She also noted that “the investigation was delayed this week by a shooting and double slaying believed to be drug-related.” Smith said, “I want the community to bear with us. We will catch this person and they can rest easy that we will.”
With a killer on the loose in those last days of July and a full-blown homicide investigation taking up much of my time the previous week, I hadn’t written anything to mark the three-year anniversary of the Jessica States murder. But when I finally sat down with Dan Smith, I didn’t know that he already had the killer’s identity established, and in hindsight, I appreciate the legal tightrope he was walking while waiting to establish grounds for a warranted DNA sample.
My contribution to the article, co-written with reporter Karen Beck, began with a nod to the genetic manhunt being conducted in science labs across North America. This was Dan Smith’s opening gambit both in preparing the suspect for future interrogation and to encourage potential witnesses to recall any involvement they may have had with him, criminal or otherwise: “At this stage, investigators say they are looking for the usual suspect in long-standing murder investigations: the one ‘nobody ever would have suspected,’” I wrote.
The Bulldog and the Helix Page 16