B.C.’s Court of Appeal has rejected the appeal of a man convicted in 2015 for the death of a B.C. girl in the 1970s.
Garry Taylor Handlen was indicted for murder in March 2015 for the deaths of Kathryn Hebert, who disappeared in 1975, and Monica Jack, who disappeared in 1978.
Justice Elizabeth Bennett, writing the unanimous Sept. 9 decision for the three-judge panel, said Handlen confessed to both murders during a police “Mr. Big” operation.
Bennett said the trial judge excluded the evidence of the confession in relation to Hebert, but admitted it in relation to Jack.
Handlen was tried by a jury and convicted of first-degree murder in Jack’s death.
He appealed that conviction, arguing that his confession should not have been admitted.
He also challenged the admission of the hearsay statements of four witnesses.
On Jan. 28, 2019, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Austin Cullen sentenced Handlen to life imprisonment without eligibility for parole for 25 years.
“This particular crime is among the worst of its kind and you are among the worst of offenders,” Cullen said at the sentencing.
“Your actions were certain to bring an innocent child terror and pain before her life was so savagely ended.”
Cullen called the crime “an unwelcome reminder that inhumanity still lurks in the psyche of some of those among us.”
The disappearance
Bennett said Jack, 12, was likely abducted on the evening of May 6, 1978.
She had been riding her bicycle home towards the Quilchena reserve, north of Merritt, B.C. along Highway 5.
A forestry crew discovered her remains 17 years later on June 2, 1995, in a remote area off a logging road on Swakum Mountain, west of Nicola Lake, several kilometres from the site of her apparent abduction.
Four eyewitnesses were located and statements were taken from them under hypnosis.
Bennett said previous Canadian jurisprudence says, “a witness who has undergone hypnosis cannot testify in relation to any event that was the subject of hypnosis because their memory of events may have become tainted, and it is impossible to determine what is a true memory and what is a false memory.”
Mr. Big
In the police operation starting in 2013, officers offered Handlen a role in a fake criminal organization.
In November 2014, an officer brought up Jack, saying police had DNA evidence but that he could help.
What followed was a confession where Handlen told the officer he thought he strangled Jack, and agreed she could have been 11 or 12 years old.
At one point, he took police to a place, likely the road pull-out where Jack was abducted.
During a closed-door trial and during the appeal process, the judge said Handlen claimed he’d made it all up from media reports.
Bennett said the evidence establishing the reliability of the confession and the re-enactment was very strong.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated in the headline Garry Taylor Handlen was convicted of killing two young girls.
