The Bulldog and the Helix

by Shayne Morrow

  “‘Don’t look for a monster,’ said investigation coordinator Cpl. Dan Smith. ‘It’s normal to expect that someone who does something terrible will look the part. But most often, somebody who does something terrible goes back to looking and acting normal again.’”

  Smith told me that after years of conducting successful interrogations, the “no monster” approach was his most frequently used technique. “The one I preferred allows a person to confess to a crime and still save some face. In other words, nobody is going to yell at them that they are a child-killer who sexually molests children. But they might confess to doing that in a way that makes it understandable to a greater number of people.”

  Smith had fully intended to follow the strategy laid down by Dale Djos in the event the killer was identified by a cold DNA hit. But inexplicably, especially in light of the double homicide investigation still underway, Smith’s RCMP commanders decided to toss that strategy out the window.

  Smith said he made his objections to the change in strategy clear. If Patten were able to invalidate the consent sample taken in September 1997, the entire chain of evidence would fall apart. Recalling the events when talking with me fifteen years later, the tension was still palpable. “I am directed to go to the jail where he is being held, in the Fraser Valley, and arrest him for the murder. I did not want to do it. I had to be ordered to do it,” he said tersely. “I was of the view that we should stick with the original operational plan, which would almost certainly yield the results that we wanted, based on our past understanding of the law.” But Smith, accompanied by an RCMP constable from the Courtenay detachment, apprised Patten of the case against him and made the arrest. Patten was transported to the Maple Ridge RCMP detachment for the initial interview where he was represented (by telephone) by Port Alberni lawyer John Bennie.

  Smith said that Patten refused to make a statement, but in the course of the initial visit, he did say something that suggested he’d been thinking about a possible legal defence. “He said something like, ‘Oh man. I’m going to get twenty-five years to life for something that I didn’t do the worst part of,’ implying that someone else did the crime and he’d just left his DNA there.”

  Patten was flown to Port Alberni by helicopter, where he engaged local defence counsel Charles Beckingham to represent him. Once again, he refused to cooperate with the RCMP. That left Smith with DNA from a consent sample as the only tangible evidence of Patten’s guilt. He felt he needed to build a much more substantial case against him just in case the sample was thrown out of court. More specifically, he wanted to establish grounds for a warranted DNA sample that did not flow from the cold hit. But on paper, the Mounties had their man and they weren’t about to keep it quiet, especially after three years of frustration and a thousand DNA samples. They chose the morning of Tuesday, August 10, 1999, to make the announcement.

  ARREST OVERSHADOWS HEROISM

  As the result of unusually large snow packs from the previous winter, water levels in the Somass River had been much higher and temperatures much colder than usual throughout the late spring and summer. And this led to a tragedy that would be sadly overshadowed by the momentous news about the States case.

  Just after dinner on August 9, I received a call at home from one of the Times mailroom crew who lived on the river near the Riverbend (Orange) Bridge. Police and Alberni Valley Rescue personnel were gathered on the beach near the foot of the bridge, and I was told to check it out.

  Corporal Dave Finnen, now serving as watch commander, filled me in. A sixteen-year-old girl, later identified as Alisha Smith, had been swimming at Papermill Dam, just upriver from the bridge, with her six-year-old brother and a girlfriend. When her little brother slipped out of his float tube, Alisha, an outstanding athlete, swam out into the fast-flowing water and pulled him to shore. But just as she pushed him into waiting hands on shore, her clothing became entangled in a mass of floating log debris, and she was dragged to her death.

  The next morning, I wrote about the drowning with an emphasis on safety. I quoted Finnen extensively on the dangers posed by the unseasonably high waters and treacherously unpredictable currents. The story was set for the top of the front page. Then, just before eleven, I got a phone call from Sergeant John Van Schaik, asking me to come over to his office.

  “We’ve got something to share with you. It should only take about fifteen minutes.” I made some calculations. Five minutes to the RCMP detachment to find out what they wanted. The editor has to send page one in by 11:30 that morning. My story was wrapped. Anything I picked up now would run tomorrow, unless it was very short and red-hot. At the RCMP detachment, the receptionist buzzed me in. “They’re in John’s office. They’re waiting for you,” she said. I knew the way to the GIS office.

  The police chief, Lou Racz, was seated next to John Van Schaik, the head of the GIS. Both wore an expression similar to the one they’d had when they admonished me about entering the scene of the China Creek Apartment bust. What the hell did I do this time? I thought.

  “It’s Jessica . . .” said Van Schaik.

  MY HEAD WAS still spinning as Racz and Van Schaik filled me in on the details. The suspect was twenty years old and had been charged with first-degree murder but could not be named yet because he was a young offender at the time of the crime. The Crown would apply to have him elevated to adult court. He was currently in custody on unrelated charges.

  I made the short drive back to the Times office, trying to figure out how we could get this news story on the front page, which might already be on the press. I stumbled past the reception desk and down the hall into the newsroom. The editor was just about to send the last page. All eyes looked up as I stood in the doorway and croaked: “Hold page one!” That set off a storm of indignation, as expected. As the initial wave of “What the fuck?” died down, I said the magic two words: “It’s Jessica . . .”

  All arguments ceased. The editor cleared the bottom of the front page and moved the tragic drowning down-page. (All these years later, I still feel a pang of regret that this heroic young girl’s sacrifice went “below the fold.”) I had a red-hot story to write, and Racz had advised that he wasn’t going to issue a media release until we went to press, so I banged out a report in the accepted Canadian Press style: a one-sentence lede announcing the arrest, one three-sentence paragraph outlining the suspect, the charges, and his young offender status, and a quote to begin the third paragraph:

  “We’ve known his identity for about a month and a half, but it’s taken a lot of determined police work to provide confirmation,” Van Schaik advised. I recounted the bare facts of the crime and the principal investigators and cited Dan Smith’s thoughts from the previous week. It was just over four hundred words and ran with the now familiar school photo of Jessica. We were already well past deadline by the time I finished, and the press crew was waiting for the plates, but this was one of those days where there was no question about dishing out overtime. I had one more person to quote, though.

  As lead investigator in the Jessica States investigation, Dale Djos had driven himself to the limit. Even after transferring to Campbell River, he had maintained close contact with investigators on the case, and with Jessica’s parents. Fortunately, I was able to catch him at his desk, and we spoke briefly. “It was unfinished business,” said Djos. “I still have Jessica’s picture on my desk blotter as a constant reminder. We had a tour come through here, and one of the visitors asked who the little girl was. I guess it’s more common to have pictures of your own kids on your desk.”

  Rob and Dianne States had been located at their campsite on nearby Great Central Lake and informed of the arrest. Later that day, the Times received a handwritten press release from the States family:

  At this present time we’re all feeling overwhelmed and have many mixed emotions. We do want to express our appreciation to the police for their compassion, kindness, understanding & most of all their hard work & dedication. We are also thankful to our friends,
family, media & to the community with a heart for their kindness & support.

  We are hopeful that justice will prevail. Please remember Jessica for who she was—her bubbling personality and her outgoing nature. Regardless, nothing is going to bring Jessica back, but perhaps now she can rest in peace.

  Speaking to the Victoria Times Colonist, Dianne States expressed her relief. Rob called it the light at the end of the tunnel. “It’s been hard on the three of us,” Rob said. “If anything, it has brought us closer together, not torn us apart.” Regarding the suspect, Rob expressed disgust. “For starters, the fact that he is a man makes me ashamed to be one.” Jessica’s grandfather, eighty-year-old Bob States, was asked what he would say to the suspect: “If I could, I wouldn’t say anything to him. I’d just wring his neck.”

  ON AUGUST 11, Patten made his first appearance at a court in Port Alberni. The States family and their supporters were seated in one front row, accompanied by an armed and uniformed police officer. Also seated in the gallery were John Van Schaik and Dan Smith, both in plainclothes.

  In the opposite front row, a full contingent of Alberni Valley Times reporters and out-of-town media members waited for their first look at the suspect. Security was tight. Allan Larry Thomas, the suspect in the recent double homicide, was scheduled to make an appearance in the afternoon session, along with a twelve-year-old charged with arson. Ten additional sheriff’s deputies checked bags, and anyone entering Courtroom 2 had to pass through a metal detector.

  The mood was tense. One well-known Vancouver reporter who had written extensively on the investigation attempted to take a seat on the front bench. “Reserved for media,” one of my burly young Times colleagues snarled at him.

  “What do you think I am?” the interloper asked.

  “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” my colleague growled. The Vancouver reporter took a seat in the second row.

  At eleven o’clock, following the morning recess, Roddy Patten was led into the prisoner’s dock by an armed sheriff. Carol Lazar, the presiding judge, read the charge for which Port Alberni residents had been waiting for more than three years: “You are charged with the first-degree murder of Jessica Dianne States under Section 235 of the Canadian Criminal Code.”

  Patten slumped visibly in the dock as Lazar read the charge against him. Charles Beckingham, his defence counsel, immediately asked for a publication ban on evidence released during the hearing as well as a six-week adjournment. Lazar questioned the need for the publication ban, as neither side was presenting prejudicial evidence during the brief court appearance, but she did grant the six-week adjournment.

  The judge then directed her remarks to the accused in the dock. “This matter will proceed in adult court unless you make application to the Attorney General’s Office to be heard in youth court,” she advised. Speculation was that the accused would have little chance of having his case heard in youth court.

  Following the court appearance, the States family members were escorted out of the building. Rob States later told the Times Colonist that he “came close” to bolting over the bar and into the prisoner’s dock, but he was able to restrain himself. Asked what he was thinking during the appearance, he replied, “The first thing that came to my mind was to piss on his grave.”

  For his first court appearance, Patten was conducted back and forth to the courthouse in a police car, rather than in the sheriff’s van. In part, that was to maintain continuity with the suspect, Smith explained. Had Patten decided to make a confession out of the presence of the police, it may have created some legal difficulties about its admissibility as evidence.

  THE CONFESSION

  Now Smith was able to collect the all-important warranted DNA sample. “At this point, we’ve all been taking DNA samples for a long time, and I was confident that we would be deemed capable of doing that within the legal parameters of the Criminal Code. But nonetheless, to be ultra-sure—because I’m getting a little spooked now about the consent sample—I found a member, [Constable] Shelley Birston, who was also a registered nurse . . . She said she had taken over four thousand blood samples without difficulty. In a warrant, you have to name the person who is going to take the blood samples, and they have to be, by virtue of training and experience, doing it safely.” With this overabundance of caution, Smith and Birston collected the sample at the Port Alberni cellblock.

  Smith walked into the interview room with his “no monster” opening strategy, and it paid off immediately. The confession, when it came, was abject, and it was detailed.

  “We had been working eighteen-hour days. We were kind of burned out and frazzled. I thought it worthwhile to give him one last effort to confess.” Smith said he conducted Patten from the cellblock to the interview room in the GIS office. “This is very fresh in my mind because this is a highlight in my career. It really stands out,” he said. “I had arranged to have [police] standing at each of the three doorways in which a person could exit our building, between the cellblock and the interview room, just to prevent any chance to escape.”

  The first step, he explained, was to set up a positive confrontation. “Part of that positive confrontation is letting him know that I know—there is no one else involved. Just him.” That was calculated to shut down the avenue Patten had tried to open with his spontaneous statement that “I didn’t even do the worst part.”

  “I had the stack of files sitting there. I wanted him to know that we had investigated all of the people he associated with and that he implied were involved in the murder.” When Smith made his first approach, Patten did not have counsel in the room, so any comments or admissions the suspect made would be subject to legal examination. That tactic gives the interviewee a slight margin of error in the event of any unplanned utterances.

  “I said, ‘You know, everybody in Port Alberni thinks that the person who did this is a monster—someone who lies in wait for little children so they can rape and murder them. I don’t think that’s what happened. I think that this was a momentary loss of control. Five minutes before this, you wouldn’t have done it; five minutes after this, you wouldn’t have done it. For that very short period of time, you lost control and you did something you regret. If I’m right, I’d like to hear that from you. But if I’m wrong—if you are that kind of person—if you are that monster lying in wait for little children, then maybe the best thing to do is say nothing.’”

  At that point, Patten must have realized the weight of evidence against him. But with years of experience before the courts, both as a young offender and as an adult, Patten also knew how the system worked. “I want to tell you what happened,” he told Smith, “but I want my lawyer present.” Smith called a break while he contacted Charles Beckingham’s office. The lawyer arrived and was apprised of his client’s intention to confess.

  From Patten’s description of the chain of events leading to Jessica States’s death, it was heartbreakingly obvious that the very qualities that made the eleven-year-old so unique—her fearlessness, her fierce sense of independence, and even her boyish appearance—had placed her in harm’s way. According to Patten, when Jessica encountered the burly young man in the woods adjacent to the ballpark, she didn’t run away. “He confessed to, at first, thinking that Jessica was a boy, and said, ‘How’s it going, little man?’” Rather than letting a chance comment from a complete stranger simply pass, Jessica apparently felt a need to let him know who he was dealing with. It was a tragic miscalculation. “She said, ‘I’m not a man. I’m a girl,’ and showed him the waistband on her panties.”

  Patten confessed that this simple revelation of prepubescent feminine underwear was enough to trigger a savage rape response. Patten immediately punched the girl on the head, which was likely the cause of significant brain stem injuries, as later corroborated by the coroner’s report. In the course of the interview, he told interrogators that he was a pretty fearsome fighter and that, even as a teenager, he had knocked out grown men with a single punch. “He decided he
wanted to have sex with her, so he punched her. He didn’t give her a chance to say no. He had sex with her. And when she wouldn’t stop moving, he killed her,” Smith said.

  Smith explained that, according to the medical examiner, the injured girl was likely unconscious and undergoing convulsions as a result of the initial blow to the head. “That squares with the autopsy results—because of damage to the upper central nervous system,” he said.

  Smith said while there was no “silver lining,” he was later able to comfort Jessica’s parents, somewhat, by telling them their daughter was almost certainly unconscious from the first moments of the assault. That information, however, was classified as “holdback” evidence, and was not made public, even to the family, until the trial finally went to court. At this point, however, the facts of the matter were incontestable.

  “He admitted killing her. He admitted most of the damage that he did. He admitted having sex with her.” Smith said despite being ensconced in the interview room, there was one outside interruption recorded on the interview videotape. “He was sobbing during the interview. At one point, right at the critical moment, a motorcycle drives by the detachment and it sort of drowns out what he’s trying to say. You can hear through it, but it makes it more difficult—which is unfortunate.”

  Smith said he gave Patten every opportunity to offer any mitigating circumstances. “At the conclusion, I asked him of there was anything important that we hadn’t talked about. And he said no.” Smith said the significance of this was that, at trial nearly two years later, Patten would provide an elaborate story of ripping off an outdoor marijuana grow-op to purchase a large quantity of LSD, which subsequently rendered him legally incapable of forming criminal intent. The drug-defence testimony would later generate major headlines. But police had already established that, at the time of the confession, Patten made no effort to explain his behaviour.