CALGARY — Coroners and medical examiners used to say they “speak for the dead” to protect the living, and that may be so still.
But DNA, the genetic blueprint of all living things, well, DNA shouts.
And Tuesday at the trial of Douglas Garland here, the DNA evidence was devastating, both in its emotional power and in its effect upon the presumed innocence of the 57-year-old man in the prisoner’s box.
Garland is pleading not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the June, 2014 disappearance of Kathy and Alvin Liknes and their five-year-old grandson Nathan O’Brien, who was having a sleepover at their Calgary home.
Their DNA was all over the farm near Airdrie, north of Calgary, where Garland then lived with his elderly parents.
The bodies of the three have never been found, but what they left behind on the acreage – in the genetic material discovered in all manner of unlikely and troubling places – was compelling.
After weeks of hearing about suspicious stains that looked like blood or tested presumptively positive for blood, jurors finally got the definitive word from Vivian Mohrbutter, a diminutive forensic specialist and scientist from the RCMP lab in Edmonton.
She was qualified by Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Judge David Gates as an expert in the examination of human biological material, DNA typing and the interpretation, comparison and statistical analysis of DNA results.
It is the theory of prosecutors that Garland “violently removed” the Likneses and Nathan from the grandparents’ Calgary house in the wee hours of June 30, killed them at the farm and burned their bodies.
Using a scientist’s careful and neutral language, Mohrbutter told prosecutor Shane Parker about the places where she matched DNA to the Likneses’ and Nathan.
At the grandparents’ Calgary house, which was splashed with blood, their DNA was collectively found on everything from dumbbells in the garage to bedding and mattresses to door jambs and walls.
The jurors already knew, this from Jennifer O’Brien, Nathan’s mother and daughter of the Likneses, that the evening of June 29 was a bittersweet one: Jennifer’s parents were moving to the Edmonton area, they’d had a feast of Chinese food after a contents sale, her dad had toddled off to bed and she and her mother and Nathan and his baby brother were piled onto a pull-out couch in the basement.
Nathan asked if he could stay over – his grandmother just lit up whenever she saw him, Jennifer said – and on the spur of the moment, she decided they’d all stay.
But when she took baby Max to bed, he wouldn’t settle, and she decided to head home with him instead.
The last she saw of Nathan and her mom, they were still cuddling on the pull-out, Nathan in a pair of pink jammies; he liked pink and the colour made him giggle.
While DNA from all three was found throughout the house, Nathan’s and his grandmother’s were both found on a small bed in the spare room.
A logical inference is it that when Kathy Liknes went to bed that night, she may have slept beside the little boy she loved, and there, on the sheets and mattress and quilt, they spilled blood together.
At the sprawling, 40-acre Garland farm, Kathy Likneses’ DNA was found in a swab from the box of Garland’s truck (a Calgary Police officer testified earlier this week that surveillance video showed the truck arrived near the Liknes’ house empty and left with what appeared to be a white tarp in the bed), in a corner of the truck’s license plate, from fragments of cloth discovered near a burn barrel and, most dreadfully, from a meat hook seized in an out building.
Alvin Liknes’ DNA was found in fragments from a different fire pit on the property, on a hacksaw latch and a blade, Nathan’s on the handle of the same hacksaw.
The DNA of all three was discovered in a pair of black rubber boots which also revealed, on the inside of the boots, Garland’s DNA.
Except for identical twins, no two people on the planet have the same DNA, and so the random statistical probabilities of another’s DNA matching ranged from one in 150 quintillion to one in 170 billion to one in 9.3 quintillion.
Sometimes, because the quantity of genetic material was small or the sample was degraded, the matches were less rare. But even at the low end, the numbers were staggering: one in 510,000.
The very lowest “inclusion probability”, as Mohrbutter put it and if my notes are accurate, was one in 19,000 – this on the sheet on the spare bed where Kathy Liknes’ and Nathan’s DNA were found. But on other places on the same sheet, the odds were super-high again, such as one in 130 billion.
Defence lawyers Kim Ross and Jim Lutz conceded Mohrbutter’s expertise. Lutz’s cross-examination of her lasted 39 minutes and, but for underlining the fact that his client’s DNA wasn’t found at the Liknes’ house, was unremarkable.
As the prosecutors’ case draws to a close, in other words, there appears no obvious defence on the horizon — not, of course, that an accused person ever has to offer one, but in the face of such overpowering evidence, some explanation might be helpful.
• Email: cblatchford@postmedia.com | Twitter: blatchkiki
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