“Really, what could Judge Thackray do but grant him the time?” Arnfield said. “But then he turned to Darrill [Prevett] and said, ‘You need to check into this.’ That’s when Darrill turns to Shelley and says, ‘Find out what Cooper is doing in Ontario.’”
Back in Port Alberni, Arnfield began making phone calls. Allegedly, Cooper was in Hamilton, Ontario, testifying in two criminal cases, one of which was an impaired driving charge. “I phoned the Hamilton Crown [counsel] office and explained my situation, trying to track down these cases that Dr. Paul Cooper is involved in—he’s a defence witness. They said, ‘We don’t know who defence witnesses are. We don’t have that information. We can’t help you.’”
Arnfield then decided to try Cooper’s home number. Perhaps his wife knew where to find him, she thought. “So I phoned his home in Victoria [BC], and this man answered. I said . . . ‘Dr. Cooper?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Dr. Paul Cooper?’ ‘Yes.’ I identified myself. I said the judge was asking what these court cases were that he was going to be appearing at in Hamilton. And meanwhile, he’s supposed to be there [in Ontario]. Heller said he had spoken to him as he was getting on the plane. [Dr. Cooper] said he couldn’t tell me about any of these cases because he didn’t want to jeopardize any cases he was appearing on.”
At this point, Arnfield knew it was a case of contempt of court. “I got off the phone, called Dave [Kidd], and said, “You’re not going to believe this. I just spoke to Dr. Cooper. He’s in Victoria.’” Kidd immediately asked Arnfield to write an affidavit spelling out the details of her conversation with the errant expert witness.
“Dan [Smith] and I went . . . to Cooper’s house. We informed him that he was being investigated for contempt of court, read him his rights. We didn’t arrest him; we just informed him that he was being investigated.” As Arnfield explained, and as was later summarized in the contempt document, “He was having marital problems. He had met this other woman, and he was going to Ontario to see if it would work out. And he jeopardized a murder trial for that.” Prevett and Kidd contacted Justice Thackray to advise him of Cooper’s deception.
Arnfield then had to take the unusual step of taking a statement from a defence attorney in the middle of an ongoing murder trial. The conversation took place in the hallway outside the courtroom. In part, the informal conference was to determine whether Heller had any idea what his expert witness had perpetrated. Despite the customary wariness between defence lawyers and police officers, Arnfield was convinced that Heller had no idea that Cooper wasn’t in Ontario. “He said he didn’t [know], and I have no reason to disbelieve him. I think Cooper just lied to him. I don’t think it was a ploy on the defence’s part . . . [Heller] was visibly shaken by this. I don’t believe that he knew what Cooper was up to.” Arnfield’s information forced Heller to scramble for a new expert witness—one who would corroborate the contention put forward by Cooper and, more importantly, who was available to take over on short notice.
Smith said while Heller had thrown the courtroom into shock with his opening statement, in hindsight, it should have been a little easier to predict. “Again, the DNA warrant was pretty bulletproof. By now, we’d gone through the trial-by-fire with Dhillon, so we were well aware that the consent sample could be an issue.” At the same time, he reflected nearly sixteen years later, he wished he had been able to follow the plan originally set out by Dale Djos. “I still think that, but for that confession, we would have been in sad shape.” Even at that, the confession was obtained thanks to the cold DNA hit. “By this time, we’ve got experience in writing DNA warrants. In fact, we’ve got DNA warrants that stood the test in the Supreme Court of BC.”
THE LSD DEFENCE
On Monday, June 25, Roddy Patten took to the stand in his own defence to describe a terrifying drug experience, fuelled by his acquisition of a huge quantity of blotter LSD, in which he was (almost) as much a victim as the defenceless girl he raped and murdered. Patten testified that he had acquired the money to purchase the LSD by raiding an outdoor marijuana grow-op. In his report published the next day, Richard Watts, the Victoria Times Colonist reporter, captured the guts of Patten’s testimony in a one-sentence lede: “One moment Roderick Patten was ‘God,’ wolfing down LSD, the next he was in a horrifying world where trees and faces kept melting and he was covered in blood.”
Patten testified that it wasn’t until the following day, after he met up with several associates, that he realized he had killed a little girl. On the day of the crime, he testified, he had been drinking and smoking marijuana and hashish with friends in his apartment. When the blotter acid appeared, he began to portion it out to his friends and took about four or five “hits” himself. At this point, he testified, somebody dared him to take the remainder, between twenty and thirty hits. “I said ‘Sure I could, I’m God, I can do it all.’ So I just took it,” Patten told the jury.
Patten then provided a detailed odyssey of the next few hours as he fled his apartment after the walls began to melt, then blundered around in the street, raving and getting into confrontations with strangers. “Somebody came over to me and put his arm around me. I remember I looked at him and his face, it was like all these wax drops,” he said.
Eventually, Patten testified, he found himself sitting at a picnic table across the street from Recreation Park, “watching trees melt around him.” A person approached and began speaking to him as he lay on the ground, terrified, after a flock of birds triggered a panic attack. “That’s when the person I know now was Jessica came over. I think all she wanted to do was help me up,” Patten told the jury. “I think I pulled her pants down [when I was] getting up. I don’t know why I did that. I was on my hands and knees. I hit her.”
Patten testified he did not remember having sex with the unconscious girl, but he remembered having a stick in his hand. He “may have” stabbed her in the head with it. He recalled being covered in blood. Patten told the jury that he then went to his mother’s house and soaked himself, fully dressed, in the bathtub. He later threw the wet clothing into the garbage and disposed of it. (This is likely the genesis of the rumour that Alma Patten knew of the killing and covered it up.)
The next day, Patten said, he met with a friend and they made plans to get more drugs and alcohol. But later, when he met up with the people he’d taken acid with the previous night, they kept talking about a girl who had gone missing at the ballpark. Patten testified that, at this point, he realized the girl at the picnic table hadn’t been just another hallucination. In the ensuing days, Patten said he tried twice to commit suicide: once by hanging (he was unable to jump off the chair) and once by drinking snail poison (he only threw up). More frightening, he said, was that anyone who mentioned the crime said they would like to kill the person who did it. When he was later asked by police to provide a DNA sample, Patten said he readily agreed, hoping it would lead to his arrest.
On cross-examination, Prevett attacked Patten’s colourful version of the events of July 31, 1996. He reminded the accused that he had given a specific and detailed description of the initial attack with the bottle, followed by the sexual assault and the stabbing with the stick. Could he produce anyone who would back up his story about consuming all that LSD, Prevett asked.
Patten said he could not. “With the crime I’m in jail for now, there is nobody who wants anything to do with me,” he said. Prevett continued his cross-examination the following day, demanding to know why the accused had said nothing about LSD in his confession. He pointed out that at the end of the interview, Dan Smith had asked him if he had anything to add. “That would have been an open invitation for you to talk about the LSD you are now saying you took, wouldn’t it?” Prevett said, adding that the accused had not offered “one whistle” to police about drugs.
Prevett accused Patten of trying to evade responsibility for his actions by claiming impairment by drugs. At this point, Patten angrily denied Prevett’s accusation. “I took responsibility. That’s why I’m sitting here today,” he
snapped back.
PRIOR TO PATTEN’S testimony, there had been no indication that the accused suffered from any intellectual deficiencies. His adult court record for property crimes and assault did not raise any such speculation. And yet, suddenly, Arnfield said, on top of the “too-stoned-to-know-better” defence, Patten was playing the part of an extremely unintelligent person. “He was portraying himself as being quite mentally deficient. I had known Roddy long enough to know that certainly wasn’t the case. He was playing a part.” She still bridles when she recalls Patten’s testimony before the jury. “Roddy . . . [tried] to paint himself as [mentally incompetent]. They were talking to him about what month something had happened. He said, ‘Ah, I don’t know the months of the year . . .’ I’m sorry, Buddy—the stupid act ain’t flying.”
Arnfield was asked if she believed Patten had managed to manipulate the defence team into believing he was mentally deficient. “Any time I had dealt with him, prior to this, the one thing I can say about him was that he was totally lacking in empathy in regards to anything —and that is basically the definition of a sociopath. No empathy whatsoever. So did the defence believe he was this mind-numbed individual who doesn’t know the months of the year? I don’t know. I’m not going to put myself in defence counsel’s head and say what they believed or didn’t believe.” Arnfield said he had managed to avoid exposing himself to law enforcement as a potential murder suspect for three years, and that was no easy feat.
One thing she still finds hard to believe, however, is that, following Dan Smith’s testimony, the lead investigator had been sent home. “They—the money people in Port Alberni, I guess—told Dan that he was finished in Victoria,” Arnfield said. In hindsight, Smith said that while the Patten prosecution was of consuming interest to him, personally and professionally, it was probably logical to have him get back to his other files. “Essentially, it was more of a matter of cost for hotels and such. I was there as the file coordinator and dealing with the family, as a contact person,” he said. “And I was there for the verdict,” he added.
ON JUNE 27, Heller’s substitute drug expert took to the stand to make the case for diminished capacity as the result of excessive drug consumption. Simon Fraser University professor Dr. Barry Beyerstein, who was recognized as an expert on the effects of drugs and alcohol on the brain, testified that LSD is one of the most unpredictable psychoactive drugs. Beyerstein said he was stunned when he heard that the accused had allegedly consumed up to thirty hits of LSD. The expert testified that the drug could be dangerous for first-time users who aren’t ready for the effects. But experienced LSD users can also suffer severe effects if they consume a larger dose than they are accustomed to, he noted. Beyerstein pointed out that Patten’s medical record included a history of epilepsy, seizures, and head injury. “You can expect there might be a bigger effect of a drug in a person who has suffered brain damage before,” he said.
The Crown’s own expert witness, Dr. Paul Janke, took to the stand the following day to refute Beyerstein’s testimony. Janke, a forensic psychiatrist with extensive experience treating young drug users, said Patten’s testimony indicated that he was fully aware of his environment and “was engaged in activity with a goal in mind.” Janke cited Patten’s courtroom description of how he had stabbed Jessica with a stick, then covered her body with bark and forest mulch. Factor out the alleged hallucinatory images and this was not a person detached from reality, he explained. The accused saw something that needed to be hidden—a body—and he took detailed steps to conceal it.
In his testimony, Janke refuted Beyerstein’s contention that the accused’s history of childhood seizures and head injury would exacerbate the effects of a hallucinogenic drug. According to Patten’s medical records, his last recorded seizure had taken place in 1994, two years before the crime. Since that time, he had, by his own admission, consumed both alcohol and cocaine, which would typically trigger seizures in epilepsy-prone individuals. But those seizures did not take place, Janke told the court.
Following Janke’s testimony, the Crown introduced Wayne Jeffrey, head of the toxicology unit at Vancouver’s E Division forensic laboratory. Jeffrey testified about the physical and psychological effects of LSD. On the subject of LSD dosage, Jeffrey explained that a low dose typically produces illusions. A high dose produces intense hallucinations. But a dose of LSD in the quantity described by Roddy Patten on the day of the crime would most likely result in hospitalization, Jeffrey told the jury.
It all came down to final summations on June 29. Prevett hammered home the two salient points surrounding the crime. The Times Colonist reporter, Richard Watts, who had covered the entire trial, summarized Prevett’s message in a one-sentence lede: “Sexual desire triggered the attack on Jessica States, fear of getting caught then drove Roderick Patten to kill her, court heard Friday.” Prevett told the jury that, according to all of the evidence, Patten had two clear goals when he encountered Jessica States that fatal night: “sex and silence.”
“He hit her so she would be incapacitated so he could have sex with her,” Prevett said. “Mr. Patten, motivated by lust, intentionally killed eleven-year-old Jessica States to silence her in an attempt to escape detection for his horrendous crime.” Prevett reminded the jury that the accused said nothing about consuming LSD when he gave his detailed confession to Corporal Dan Smith. After introducing the account of the drug-saturated party when he was dared to consume thirty hits of blotter acid, Patten was unable to produce a single witness to corroborate his story. That included the person he claimed provided the LSD, a one-legged high school wrestler he knew only as “Lefty.”
“You would think by now he might have discovered the name of the only one-legged wrestler in Port Alberni,” Prevett suggested. (It should be noted that, in the mid-1990s, there was a member of the Alberni District Secondary School wrestling team who had considerable success despite wrestling on just one leg. He was never implicated in the crime.) Then Prevett reminded the jury that Patten’s account of how he financed the LSD purchase with an outdoor marijuana grow rip-off was clearly “contrived,” because outdoor marijuana is worthless in June; the plant doesn’t flower until much later in the summer.
Fighting back, Heller maintained that if Patten should have been able to provide witnesses to the that LSD binge of July 31, then so should the RCMP have been able to locate witnesses. In an echo of the Dhillon trial, Heller suggested that they didn’t bother to try once they had the DNA match and the videotaped confession. The RCMP developed tunnel vision, he suggested, focussing solely on the guilt of the accused and not on the possibility of extenuating circumstances.
Heller suggested the LSD-nightmare scenario was the only plausible explanation for how a young man with a criminal record limited to property offences and common assault could commit such a horrific crime. “It just invites the question in lay people: ‘What is going on?’ ‘Is this guy some kind of a monster?’” Heller demanded. “Or is there something else that must have happened to explain this ugly thing?”
Once again, however, Heller reminded the jury, his client had accepted responsibility for the killing and fully accepted that he would be convicted. But that conviction should be for manslaughter, not first-degree murder, he maintained. “No one—not Mr. Patten nor myself—are asking you to let Mr. Patten go,” he concluded.
Following closing arguments, Judge Thackray excused the jurors for the Canada Day long weekend. On Tuesday, he would deliver his instruction to the jury prior to deliberation.
THE VERDICT
In the end, the jury took just three hours to find Roddy Patten guilty of first-degree murder. Because he was seventeen at the time of the crime, he would be eligible for parole after ten years, not twenty-five, had he been one year older.
For Shelley Arnfield, one of the most emotional moments took place outside the courtroom, just prior to Tuesday’s session. Rob States had prepared a victim impact statement, to be read before the jury at the time of sentencing. But
States felt he would be unable to read the statement, so the task fell to David Kidd. Kidd gathered members of the team, including Dan Smith, in the Crown office so he could rehearse his presentation, which would take place after the jury brought in a verdict. “David wanted to get some practice so he could get through it. Oh, lord—he practised reading it to us in the Crown office,” Arnfield said. “And when he got up in front of the jury to read it . . . I still cannot . . . David’s reading it, and he got to the line where Jessica said to her father, ‘Is there such a thing as monsters?’ Her father said, ‘I told her, No, Honey—they’re just make believe.’ I didn’t know how wrong I was.’ And David’s voice cracked. I had tears streaming down my face.”
The Times Colonist account of the hearing, which was co-bylined by reporters Richard Watts and Kim Westad, began with Kidd’s presentation to the court. Following his conviction, Patten was asked if he wished to address the court, and Patten said he wanted to apologize.
“I would really like to apologize about what has happened. I’m very ashamed,” he said, before turning to Rob and Dianne States and starting to say he hoped the healing could begin for the family. That was when it became a little too much for Rob States, according to Arnfield.
“The States . . . were absolute grace under pressure. They were the most dignified people throughout that trial. They conducted themselves with absolute dignity. But when Roddy turned around while he was on the stand—‘apologizing’—Rob said, ‘Don’t talk to me, you bastard. You address the court.’”
DRUG EXPERT FOUND IN CONTEMPT
On July 4, 2001, one day after the conviction of Roddy Patten, Justice Thackray found Dr. Paul Cooper guilty of contempt and issued a fine of $2,500. In his ruling, however, Thackray suggested the monetary penalty would prove secondary to the damage he had surely inflicted on his professional reputation.
The Bulldog and the Helix Page 20