Hamilton police make arrest in murder of innocent bystander
An arrest has been made in the shooting death of a Mohawk College student who police say was caught in the crossfire of a 'violent altercation' in Hamilton that involved multiple vehicles.
At around 7:30 p.m. on April 17, police said Harsimrat Randhawa, a 21-year-old international student from India, was fatally struck by a stray bullet while waiting for a bus near the intersection of Upper James Street and South Bend Road.
Police said the victim, who was not involved in the altercation, had just left a local gym and was heading home when she was hit by a single bullet during an exchange of gunfire between two groups.
Speaking at a news conference on Thursday, police said shortly before the gunfire erupted, a dispute had broken out in the area.
'It had been going on for a few minutes and then had culminated with the shooting that happened when she arrived there,' Acting Det.-Sgt. Daryl Reid told reporters Thursday.
On Aug. 5, police said 32-year-old Jerdaine Foster was arrested in Niagara Falls in connection with the deadly shooting. He faces one count of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder.
'Investigators know that there were at least seven people involved in this argument, this dispute, that resulted in the death,' Reid added.
He said investigators are still working to identify the other suspects who were there that day.
'The investigation is still ongoing and we will do everything in our power to identify, locate, and arrest all of these people that are involved,' Reid said.
'We do believe there are more people out there with information that we need to know.'
The accused, Reid noted, has ties to Halton, Hamilton and Niagara, and moved around though short-term rentals in the regions.
Police would not provide any information about what may have led to the dispute between the two groups.
'The motive behind that dispute, that is a major part of the court process,' Reid said.
With files from the Canadian Press
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Play Video Article content On Nov. 30, 1983, the burned and bloodied body of George Leeman, a down-and-out plumber, was found in a park in Saint John, New Brunswick. Remarkably, six months later — record timing — Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie, two men from the rough side of the city, were found guilty of Leeman's murder and sentenced to prison for life in May 1984. The only problem was, they didn't do it. Gary Dimmock has investigated the case, first with the Telegraph-Journal, and now with the Ottawa Citizen, since 1996. Innocence Canada's Jerome Kennedy, who was instrumental in getting their convictions quashed, credited Dimmock's reporting with helping to get Bobby and Wally exonerated in 2024 — 40 years later. SAINT JOHN, N.B — 'People ask me what it's like to do a life sentence,' says Robert Mailman. 'You go home and stay in there for 20 years, and that's what it's f**king like.' On Jan. 4, 2024, Mailman sat outside Courtroom No. 14 of the Saint John's Courthouse, waiting for the end of a 40-year battle to prove his innocence. 'This is going to be my last fight,' he whispered. Mailman, aged 76, was bone-thin and weak from terminal cancer, but remained confident that the hearing would go his way. 'All the king's horses, and all the king's men couldn't bring down a small man named Bob,' he joked on the drive to the courthouse. For a long time, it had seemed that they really couldn't bring Mailman down. Back in the 1970s and '80s, the Saint John police department kept building weak cases against Mailman only to lose at trial. He was acquitted in the attempted murder of a police officer — one of their own — and later beat three murder trials in the killing of a local hoodlum. For a while it was like Mailman was untouchable. Some overzealous detectives wanted him so bad they could taste it. But in 1983, police began investigating the murder of George Leeman, a down-and-out plumber found dead in Rockwood Park. Mailman and his drinking buddy, Walter Gillespie, were investigated for the crime. Mailman's name came up in the investigation and detectives pulled out all the stops to make the case stick, even though they had nothing beyond rumour and suspicion against a backdrop of tunnel vision. There was no physical evidence against Mailman or Gillespie, and the two had a strong alibi placing them at a car parts dealership at the time of the murder. The police case, later prosecuted by Stephen Wood and James McAvity, was anchored in the testimonies of two witnesses: a troubled 16-year-old boy — who was paid cash before, during and after the trials — and a single mom originally charged in the murder who said the police threatened to take her kids away if she didn't play along. She acted as a paid police informant, assigned to hang around Mailman and Gillespie to get incriminating evidence against them. They both later said they lied on the stand under police pressure. None of this evidence, which would have undermined the witnesses' credibility, was disclosed to defence lawyers, let alone the jury at either trial. The inspector, who was second in command of the detective squad, admitted years after conviction that Mailman belonged in prison, but 'not for this one.' Mailman and Gillespie were charged with the murder in January 1984. Their first trial for the murder of Leeman ended in a hung jury on March 30, 1984, and in record speed, they were tried again just two months later and convicted of murder in the second degree on May 11, 1984. The two were condemned to Dorchester Penitentiary, one of Canada's oldest prisons. Built in the 1870s, the prison rises on a hill like an old workhouse, complete with its own graveyard. The police finally got Robert Mailman off the street. Mailman did 18 years, and Gillespie 21. The only problem was they didn't do it. Saint John Courthouse, Jan. 4, 2024 Bobby Mailman and his longtime girlfriend Brenda were the first to arrive at the hearing. They waited across from the locked courtroom on the fifth floor as family, friends and supporters crowded the hallway. When Wally Gillespie arrived, he looked like he had just stepped off a sailboat. He wore a bright white jacket with bee-striped cuffs over a red shirt, and patent leather shoes to boot. Hands in his pockets, he walked down the wintry streets of this seaport town like it was just another day. Lawyers from Innocence Canada, a legal nonprofit that assists the wrongfully convicted, wrote in an application for a review of the case submitted to the federal justice minister in December 2019, that Gillespie was 'simply collateral damage in the police pursuit of Mr. Mailman.' At 80 years old, Gillespie had spent half his life fighting to prove he had nothing to do with the murder. Now all that was left was the waiting. Gillespie stood away from the crowd, checking his phone to see if his only daughter, Patsy, was going to make the 1:30 p.m. hearing before Chief Justice Tracey DeWare. 'I thought she was going to be here,' Gillespie said as he looked down the hallway. Patsy had wanted to be there, but ultimately couldn't make it. She didn't want to be let down again after enduring many disappointments in the fight for her father's exoneration. Patsy was 12 when her father was convicted of murder. At 14, she started reading the trial transcripts, referencing flaws in the case. At 16, her grandmother gave her an electric typewriter for Christmas, and Patsy lugged it around, using it to type letters to anyone she hoped would listen. Few did. Mailman's sons, Jeffrey and Bruce, both died in awful ways before they could witness the end of their father's case. One died in an accidental shooting, the other of an overdose in a Saint John police cell after cops arrested him because they thought he was drunk. On Dec. 22, 2023, then justice minister Arif Virani ordered a new trial for Mailman and Gillespie following an extensive review of the case. Innocence Canada was instrumental in advocating for the two men. The organization filed a 253-page brief documenting the police's botched investigation, their failure to disclose evidence to the defence, and both star witnesses' confessions that they lied at trial. The court hearing on Jan. 4th was originally scheduled as a case management conference for next steps. *** The courtroom lights came on, and after staff unlocked the doors, Mailman and Gillespie walked in. They sat together in the front row of the packed courtroom. Their supporters had come from across the country. Several were wrongfully convicted men, including Ron Dalton, who is now the co-president of Innocence Canada. Dalton did time with Mailman and Gillespie and fought for their innocence, both during his prison term and in the decades after his exoneration. Dalton sat in the left flank of the gallery and kept his eye on Mailman. 'I feared he wouldn't be able to stand up on his own when the judge called him,' he said. In court, Innocence Canada's Jerome Kennedy did most of the talking, detailing the facts of the case and the struggles that Mailman and Gillespie endured in prison. King's Court Chief Justice Tracey DeWare didn't waste any time and launched a new murder trial on the spot. Mailman and Gillespie stood up and loudly pleaded not guilty. The judge asked prosecutors to call their first witness, and the Crown said they weren't presenting any evidence. With that, the judge acquitted the men of murder. Her written decision, filed the next day, included a sincere apology on behalf of the system for failing both men. 'I must infer that serious mistakes were made and the miscarriage of justice that occurred as a result of these mistakes have had the direst of consequences for these two men,' DeWare wrote. Finally innocent, the men faced a customary press scrum outside the courthouse with their lawyers standing firmly behind them. Gillespie spoke briefly, thanking everyone and saying he felt good. Mailman, exhausted and in pain, didn't say a word. Once known for bar brawls, he now spends his days inside his sixth-floor apartment on a hill overlooking St. Joe's cemetery, where his sons Bruce and Jeffrey are buried. Mailman went home and Gillespie met up with some friends for Subway — his first meal in 40 years as an innocent man. Sandwiches were far from his favourite, but he was hungry. 'It hasn't really sunk in yet. Bobby's the same way. I'm just a free man and glad we're free and not on parole. That's the big clincher,' Gillespie told me at lunch that day. Gillespie has always said if it weren't for Bobby's reputation, the case would never have gone to court. 'They put our lifestyle on trial, not the facts,' he told me. The day after he was vindicated, on Jan. 5, Gillespie picked up what little he had left in life and moved out of the halfway house he'd been living in and into a bachelor apartment — he called it his cell. It was $800 more than the rent-free halfway house that came with a job as a cleaner. Everything he owned after 40 years of living as a convicted killer amounted to a handful of boxes, three bags and a TV. Gillespie felt lonely once released from the halfway house. 'I don't know anyone here. I just keep to myself, I don't really talk to anyone. It's not that I don't want to talk to anyone, I just don't know them,' he said about his new home. He spent his days walking to the library to rent movies and to Walmart for groceries. It was an hour walk there and back. When I asked Gillespie why he hadn't found a better place, he said he was still waiting on the money to come in from the government. He died on Friday, April 19, 2024 — before receiving financial compensation for his wrongful conviction. Gillespie had lived only 106 days as a free man. The wrongfully convicted I started talking to Robert Mailman on the phone in 1996. The first time I met him was in a small interview room in prison, a year later. Mailman walked into the room as if trying not to wake a sleeping child. He was prison-pale, his frame small and lean. His voice was calm and lacked bitterness. He had been in prison as a wrongfully convicted man for 14 years. 'If it hadn't been for my reputation,[the case] would never have gone to court,' said Mailman. After all, Mailman had been charged with and acquitted of the attempted murder of a Saint John police officer in 1977. He said the police would rather see him go to jail than admit they got it wrong. Robert Mailman's life began in working-poor Saint John. His grandmother took him in when his family fell on hard times. By 14, Mailman had dropped out of school and a year later, he left home. He worked odd jobs and helped his family pay bills when he could. He shoveled snow at the old railway station and washed cars for $20 a week. Sometimes he loaded boxcars at the port. Then, hanging around in a gang, he found himself fighting with rivals from the other end of town. No matter how much he drank the night before, Mailman always made it to work on time. He says it was a good life, until it wasn't. Mailman turned to stealing and landed in jail for assault. In the 1970s, he was tried for the attempted murder of Saint John police officer Warren VanWart. In 1982, he was acquitted, after three trials, of the murder of Stanley Whittaker. Mailman often fought in bar brawls and, in time, became one of the most feared men in town. After beating the murder charges, he figured that was it. It was time to keep his head down and stay away from street life. But on Jan. 20, 1984, Mailman found himself running from the law again. When Mailman saw a police cruiser parked in front of his home, he figured he was about to be arrested for drug trafficking. The police knocked at his front door, but he left out the back and went to a friend's place out of town. That night, while nursing a beer, he saw his face flash across the television news. The police had turned to the media for help in tracking Mailman down for the murder of George Leeman. The broadcast used footage from the old murder trials of Mailman walking out of court in handcuffs. 'There's one murder they can't pin on me,' he thought. But in the back of his mind, Mailman went on high alert. The next morning, he drove back to town and headed straight for the home of his lawyer, Wilber MacLeod. The lawyer let him in and Mailman phoned his family to say he was OK. The same morning, he turned himself in at the police station. That night in his jail cell, Mailman's thoughts turned to his family. They were about to go through yet another ordeal — his fifth trial in a small town. Mailman would sit through two more trials in four months. Finally, at 3:00 p.m. on May 11, 1984, he watched the jurors file in with a decision from his second trial. Their heads were down. 'This doesn't look good,' he thought. The foreman stood and pronounced him guilty of the murder of George Leeman. That night, Mailman lay awake. He phoned his family the next day, told them not to worry and said that things were going to work out. He told them he didn't do it. Mailman spent the first year of his life sentence in disbelief. He struck out at the system and became a prison leader, his reputation affording him easy acceptance among prisoners. Mailman even orchestrated work stoppages, some lasting six weeks. 'They were wild times,' he recalls. On June 22, 1991, Mailman made a collect call home to his 22-year-old son Jeffrey. Moments before the call got through, his son pressed a handgun to his head, flashed a smile to friends and squeezed the trigger. He didn't realize the gun was loaded. Jeffrey's fiancée broke the news to Mailman. The death changed Mailman's life forever. He just wanted to prove 'that I'm not the same guy I was.' He decided to enter solitary confinement, where he stayed for seven months. He kept himself out of prison politics, quit using booze and drugs, and went on to earn an escorted temporary day pass. In the summer of 1993, two guards drove him to St. Joseph's Cemetery in Saint John. His legs shackled and his hands chained to a body belt, Mailman hobbled out of the security van, a bouquet of flowers held awkwardly in his hands. Mailman stood alone at his son's grave and promised to change his ways. Slowly, he crouched down and laid the flowers. His youngest son, Bruce, stood off in the distance, watching his father's every move. 'I saw his look of deep hurt and pain. I'll never forget that look,' Bruce told me in 1998. Mailman spent his days in prison working out, and at night, he read spy thrillers. He also sought counselling at the prison chapel. Some nights, he had dreams of freedom: he would return to the streets of Saint John, walk down King Street, run into friends. Even while asleep, he knew it wasn't real. The first time I visited him in prison, Mailman said he took all the programs because he wanted to walk out a changed man. In the same breath, he acknowledged that day may never come. 'I know that innocent people do not get out of prisons — meaning you admit to the crime or you're going to stay here,' he said. 'I think I'm going to have a real hard time from here on in because I won't admit to the murder.' Mailman was 49 when I first visited him and he never stopped fighting for his innocence. He's now 77 and dying from terminal cancer. Walter Gillespie had lonesome eyes when I visited him at Dorchester Penitentiary. He cut a gaunt figure and his clothes were well worn. Born on Aug. 31, 1943, Gillespie was raised in a violent home. At 17, he lost his father, a shipyard worker, to a heart attack. With his mother and six siblings left penniless, Gillespie quit school and took a job delivering groceries on his bicycle for a stand on the corner of Duke Street West. He made $20 a week and gave every dollar to his mother. But by 20, Gillespie was running wild. He worked as a labourer at the dry dock by day and drank away his wages at night. As his drinking got worse, he turned to crime for fast money. He pushed bad cheques for almost a year before landing in jail. On Nov. 2, 1963, Gillespie was returning from his work at the prison's farm when another inmate told him there had been a fire at a Garden Street tenement in Saint John. Gillespie was called to the warden's office. The night before, fire had ripped through his family's Saint John flat. Gillespie lost his mother, brother and four sisters. Their bodies were found huddled in a bedroom. There was no fire escape. Jail officials arranged for him to attend the funeral. He shed no tears upon hearing the news, nor at the ceremony. 'I was stunned. I just couldn't believe it.' The quiet prisoner had learned to hide his feelings. Once out of jail, Gillespie, then 21, got hooked on lemon gin. He worked on and off, long enough to get money for booze. One day ran into the next. He mastered pushing cheques, often defrauding banks for hundreds of dollars at a time. There was a long trail of break and enters. Gillespie had no fixed address. He lived where he could and usually slept on a friend's couch. In 1975, Gillespie was sentenced to three and a half years for fraud, his first federal term. In the years that followed, he was charged with 51 crimes, mostly break and enters. He served a staggering 21 provincial and federal jail terms. Once out of jail, Gillespie returned to his old ways, drinking and scraping up what money he could. By the fall of 1983, the city's gritty North End was his home. Gillespie lived with a girlfriend, Janet Shatford, then a 29-year-old single mom on welfare. Their relationship lasted only two weeks before Gillespie, then 39, began living with a new girlfriend. Still, Gillespie returned to Shatford's apartment now and then for a night of drinking with buddies. He recalled meeting his friend Robert Mailman at the apartment for some Christmas cheer on Dec. 21, 1983. Then, one night, police hauled Gillespie in to question him about the recent murder of one of his drinking buddies, George Leeman. 'I just told them I didn't know what they were talking about,' Gillespie recalled. He said he didn't ask for a lawyer because he had nothing to hide. The police let him go after an hour. The next time the police picked him up, they wanted him to make a statement against Robert Mailman. Again, Gillespie told them he wasn't there and that he didn't think his friend was either. Gillespie said the detective told him that Janet Shatford and John Loeman Jr. were in another interview room and had given statements implicating him and Robert Mailman. Again, the police officer asked him to confess. 'He said all they'd charge me with was aiding and abetting and that I'd only get two years.' He refused. 'I told him I wasn't going to admit to something I didn't do.' Gillespie said the police officer then told him that if he was protecting Mailman, he'd go down with him. 'I'll never forget those words.' His refusals angered the detective, he recalled. He was now facing second-degree murder. He knew there was a chance he'd be convicted, but he also had faith in the justice system. 'When you're innocent, that's going to go through your mind all the time,' Gillespie said. That night, after police questioning, Gillespie was arrested for murder. It was months later when the foreman pronounced the guilty verdicts. Gillespie's knees buckled. 'I felt weak.' The jail guards, fearing he'd kill himself, put him on 24-hour watch. Gillespie spent the first three years of his life sentence at Dorchester Penitentiary, earning the nickname 'Fox' for his money-making schemes. Back then, Dorchester was an 'open joint' — meaning prisoners could pretty much do as they pleased. The prison was packed with inmates who were either drunk or stoned on contraband. They spent most of their time gambling — an industry that Gillespie would soon run to finance his and Mailman's campaign to prove their innocence. Gillespie began running poker games: two tables in the gymnasium and one in the kitchen. The games ran night and day, and he made sure inmates paid up when they lost. He raked a cut from each hand for running the game and managed, over the years, to make a $4,000 profit which helped pay some legal fees. He spent half of his prison days at school and the other half working in the carpentry shop. Gillespie struggled to cope with life behind bars. The fire that swept away his family crept into his mind. In his dreams, he would see his mother's face, her jet-black hair pushing just past her shoulders. The faces of his four dead sisters were hard to picture, but Gillespie could hear their voices, asking him to pray for them. Sometimes he thought about killing himself. But on the outside, he kept a low profile. Gillespie's files at the prison show he was considered quiet and mild-mannered by staff. He quit drinking and completed several educational programmes while incarcerated. 'We are now at a point where we have almost nothing to offer him in the way of needed programming and it seems futile to offer programs of which he has little or no need simply to look like we are doing something,' read a 1997 parole board report. An earlier report, dated Oct. 29, 1990, described him as non-violent and noted it was highly doubtful he would ever try to escape, saying it would defeat his efforts 'to prove his innocence.' 'I don't think they really had any evidence against us at all,' said Gillespie. 'I think they were just going by Mailman's reputation. They just wanted him off the street … They were going to any extent to get him and they weren't letting him off the hook.' The Victim The corpse, burned and bloody, was lying at the foot of a small birch tree in a remote section of Rockwood Park in Saint John on Nov. 30, 1983. The body was identified as George Gilman Leeman, a 55-year-old down-and-out plumber. Today, his grave in Calais, Maine, is easy to miss. Marked only by a small cast-iron American Legion stake — the standard issue for U.S. veterans — it is in the last row of plots next to a patch of forest that divides the cemetery from the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers. Leeman's life was eclipsed by the trials of his suspected killers, and later, their 40-year fight for exoneration. There are few surviving photographs of him. In court, he was portrayed as a rooming-house drunk who owed money to sleazy hoods. Born on Feb. 8, 1928, Leeman lived life from one adventure to the next. When things got boring, the mechanic-turned-U.S. Marine would spin tales of being a CIA operative in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. The truth was that Leeman despised being a Marine and lasted only one year. He got an honourable discharge on Aug. 20, 1951, after complaining that he couldn't live without his wife at the time, Ruth Sherrard. 'He was never in the Bay of Pigs. He couldn't stand the Marines,' Sherrard once told me at her home in Maine. Leeman also told stories of being a prize fighter with ties to New Jersey crime families — but, his wife said, it was all just fun and games. Leeman worked as an oil burner mechanic at the Dead River Oil Company in Calais, and Sherrard worked as a secretary. Their marriage was troubled from day one. Leeman had an appetite for adventure and often had terrible mood swings because of his heavy drinking. Leeman's wild side landed him in jail a few times on minor charges, including possession of a handgun. Still, his wife always seemed to give him a second chance. Once, returning from New Jersey, he convinced her to move there with him, saying he was running a successful plumbing company. Sherrard joined her husband in New Jersey, only to find him flat broke. 'I could never say no to those big brown eyes,' she says. Over time, their marriage crumbled. Leeman fell in love with his second wife, Laura. He worked as a foreman at the pulp mill in Calais, where he earned a reputation for brawling in bars. His nephew, John Sherrard — who was town mayor in the late 1990s — told me that Leeman had fought off three men at once. Again, Leeman's marriage failed, so he moved to Saint John, where he worked as a plumber in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He met his third wife, Marjorie, while on a plumbing call at an accountant's office. A mother of two boys, Marjorie was 18 years younger than Leeman but fell for him. To her, he seemed worldly and knew when to listen. They were married on March 3, 1980, and Leeman became a father to two stepsons. Leeman was an avid reader and loved westerns. He seemed to turn his hand at anything — pipefitting, plumbing, cutting wood. Later, he bought a boat and a commercial fishing license. By all accounts, he was generous with the little money he had, sometimes giving needy families half of his groceries. 'He'd give you the shirt off his back,' his nephew, Michael Sherrard, once told me. 'He was the kind of guy everyone liked when he was sober, but he couldn't live without adventure and in the end, I suppose it got him.' Months after his third marriage, Leeman's health took a turn. He complained of breathing problems and frail bones. In 1982, the former Marine admitted himself into a veteran's hospital in Tagus, Me. Back in Saint John, he told his wife that doctors didn't know what was wrong with him. Marjorie figured he just didn't want her to worry. His health failing, the plumber began drinking heavily again, ruining his third marriage. The two separated but lived together on and off when he wasn't drinking. Leeman spent the last weeks of his life drinking hard and kept a small apartment on Paddock Street. On Nov.30, 1983, his landlord, Raymond Roy, got a call from the police and identified his tenant's body at the morgue. On Dec. 5, George Gilman Leeman's remains were cremated. His first wife, Ruth, drove back to Calais alone, the ashes in a container on the passenger seat. She dropped in on their nephew Michael Sherrard, saying, 'Come on, we're going to drive your uncle around town one last time.' Slowly, they drove the length of the U.S. border town and then pulled into the local cemetery. When the case went to trial months later, Leeman's family never felt a sense of justice, not even after the guilty verdicts. His family doubted the testimony of the two witnesses and asked police for an independent investigation but were refused at the time. PART TWO As day turned to dusk on Nov. 30, 1983, Robert Burke went for a jog in the Saint John woods. Moments later, he spotted the charred body of a man lying at the foot of a small birch tree in a remote section of Rockwood Park and went in for a closer look. He nudged an arm with his foot to see if it would move, but the body was stiff. Burke ran home, called the police and led them to the scene. Police took 14 photographs and headed for the morgue. There, they secured items from the body — three keys on a small ring, a brown paper bag containing 66 cents, and a single hair found in the man's right hand. The body was identified as George Gilman Leeman. The pathologist, Dr. Syed Khaliq, concluded the victim died from blows to the head and was later dumped in the park and set on fire. Khaliq said the time of death was about 24 hours earlier. For seven weeks after Leeman's murder, the Saint John police made no arrests. They didn't even know where the murder happened. Then, suddenly, detectives presented two witnesses who would fill in all the pieces. These witnesses played a crucial role at both trials — the first ending in hung jury despite the absence of any physical evidence to implicate the two men; the second ending in the murder convictions of Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie. The first witness was John Loeman Jr., who sometimes babysat for Janet Shatford, the second witness, and knew Mailman and Gillespie from the neighbourhood. He was 16 years old at the time of the murder. Loeman Jr.'s life so far had amounted to a series of stints in youth jail and foster homes. He quit school in Grade 9, took a job as a labourer and spent his nights in Saint John's rough North End. He would soon find himself stealing to feed his habits. The first time police approached him about the murder, Loeman Jr., told them he didn't see a thing. The second time they came calling, they showed him the back seat of the police cruiser and told him to start talking. It ended at the station with a full witness statement after an hour-and-a-half interview. As a star witness, Loeman Jr. went from public housing to hotel rooms. The police sweetened the pot and gave the boy cash payments before, during and after the trial. In all, the police gave him around $1,000. It was a sweet ride for a kid who didn't have a whole lot. All he had to do was say he witnessed a murder. Loeman Jr. said he saw the murder from a steep embankment overlooking the backyard of a rowhouse on Coronation Court. He placed four people at the murder scene: Leeman, the victim; Robert Mailman; Walter Gillespie; and Gillespie's former live-in girlfriend Janet Shatford, then 29. Days later, Mailman, Gillespie and Shatford were all arrested for murder. Two weeks before the trials began, the prosecution's hopes of winning convictions against the trio hinged entirely on the word of a troubled 16-year-old boy. But right before trial, police and prosecutors got an unexpected edge in the case when Shatford gave a confession and agreed to testify against her accused accomplices. In the weeks leading to her arrest, Shatford had denied any part of the murder in lengthy interviews with the police. The police had approached her two days after the murder when they found a key to her house on the body of the dead man. They questioned her day after day, sometimes for hours at a time. In 1998, detective Al Martin, who investigated Leeman's murder in 1984, was interviewed by the federal Criminal Conviction Review Group (CCRG). He said the only information Shatford had given the police in their early conversations was that she heard a rumour that Mailman and Gillespie were involved. That story changed on the eve of the first trial, when Shatford was offered a plea bargain dropping her murder charge in exchange for testifying in the trials of Mailman and Gillespie. She told the police she had assisted with the murder, but only after being pressured by the two men. Shatford pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter and received a sentence of 13 years, reduced on appeal to six. She served three years in a federal prison for women. In direct examination, prosecutor Stephen Wood moved to establish why Janet Shatford had guarded such a terrible secret. 'Why did you wait so long to tell anyone, Janet?' he asked. 'I didn't know how to tell anybody, and I was scared,' she answered. 'I was scared for my kids.' She said she finally got up the nerve to tell her lawyer, David Lutz, before trial. Star witnesses Shatford's account of George Leeman's murder raised a few eyebrows. At the first trial, held in March 1984, she said she saw Gillespie, Mailman, and Leeman drinking beer in a 1972 Buick Skylark on the day of the murder. The car was parked across from her cousin's home. Shatford said that she joined the men in the car and that everything seemed quite normal. But at the second trial, held two months later, she told the court things were anything but normal, this time recounting that Mailman pulled a switchblade on Leeman while talking about the plumber's debts. Shatford then testified that Leeman left the car and went to relieve himself behind a row of townhouses. She said she went around to see what was keeping him and stumbled across a vicious murder. Her friend Leeman lay on the ground. Mailman stood over him with a shotgun in hand, bashing away at Leeman's head with the stock. An interesting way to collect debts, Justice J. Paul Barry noted. Then Shatford said Mailman addressed her: 'He owes you money, you might as well have a few whacks too.' She said she was scared of Mailman when she picked up the axe and started swinging at her friend's head. Shatford then told the jury that after she helped kill a man, she walked home to get supper ready. She said her cousin was inside her home when she and her children arrived. (She also testified she never had a chance to invite her cousin over for supper, and that the doors to her house had been locked that day. Her cousin was never called to testify.) Loeman Jr.'s account was equally troubling. He said he had gone to Shatford's home looking for his girlfriend, whom he often met there. Shatford's young daughter told him her mother had gone to visit a cousin some four blocks away in the public housing project. 'There's no question in your mind that the little girl answered the door?' defence lawyer Wilber MacLeod asked in cross-examination. 'I hope not,' the boy replied. But Shatford testified her children, including her daughter, were at the community centre at the time. Loeman Jr. told court he then took a run up the street and, once there, heard a yelp from behind the row of houses. Out of curiosity, he said he ran around the houses and up a steep embankment. There, from the cover of brush some 40 feet away, the boy said he saw Robert Mailman bash in a Leeman's head with the butt of a shotgun. Then he said Shatford picked up an axe and began swinging it at Leeman's face. Loeman Jr. said Mailman's drinking buddy, Walter Gillespie, stood a few feet away holding a container filled with a golden-coloured liquid. Loeman Jr. testified the weather was clear, and that the sun caused a glare on the fluid in the bucket. (Weather records show the sky was clouded over and it rained all that November day.) At the preliminary inquiry, a hearing held to determine if there is enough evidence to warrant a trial, the boy testified that George Leeman lay on the ground, 'supposedly not moving.' Mailman's defence lawyer, Wilber MacLeod, pounced on the boy's comment. 'The word 'supposedly,' it doesn't sound like you saw anything, it sounds like somebody told you about it.' The boy said he fled on foot, running all the way uptown. He later summoned enough courage to launch his own investigation, telling the jury he searched Shatford's house for clues on Dec. 3 or 4. Loeman Jr. said that he waited until Shatford was downstairs on the phone and then went upstairs to her bedroom closet to find a bloody axe, a shotgun and a pail. Police searched Shatford's house on Dec. 19, and found nothing to corroborate the boy's story, but they presented him as an eyewitness just the same. In fact, the police never recovered a murder weapon, nor any physical evidence linking Gillespie and Mailman to the murder. A detailed search of the car police believe was used to dump the body two kilometres away in Rockwood Park also turned up nothing — not a single hair or stain of blood. The police also neglected to consider other suspects. Shatford told the jury Leeman owed around $2,800 to a local pimp and bootlegger. This alleged creditor was never considered a suspect or called to testify. Detective Willard Carr, one of the police officers assigned to Leeman's case, confirmed in a 1998 interview with federal investigators that Leeman owed a gangster a large sum of money and that the gangster was never investigated. Carr described the man as a good informant. The alibi The afternoon of Nov. 29, 1983 — the day George Leeman died — was hard to remember, even though Robert Mailman's and Walter Gillespie's freedom depended on it. In the three months between the murder and the trial, Mailman and Gillespie could do little to prove their innocence from behind bars. Then, two days into the first trial, Gillespie's live-in girlfriend produced a receipt for an inexpensive car part, bearing the same date as the murder. Suddenly, months after the murder, the accused men could now account for their whereabouts on the afternoon of Nov. 29, 1983. Both men testified that at the time of the murder they were at Centennial Motors, picking up a part for the windshield wiper motor of the car that Gillespie shared with his live-in girlfriend, Marjorie Mills. Several other witnesses testified on their behalf. Mills said she had called ahead for the part around 4:30 p.m. Both men, she said, were busy tinkering under the hood at home. Wayne Costello, a friend of Mailman, testified that he had driven Mailman and Gillespie to Centennial Motors to pick up the part. (Mailman says they went in Costello's car because it was raining and they needed working windshield wipers.) Mills testified she had later found the receipt under her refrigerator, and her nephew testified he moved the fridge after dropping vinyl cleaner behind it. The jurors struggled to make sense of the evidence before them. At the first trial, the jury was deadlocked after eight hours of deliberation. Justice Robert Higgins sequestered the jury overnight and ordered them to continue deliberations the next morning. After two hours of discussion, the jury still could not deliver a verdict. It was a hung jury. The second trial began on May 7, 1984, and lasted five days. In his closing address, defence lawyer MacLeod insisted the two eyewitnesses had fabricated their 'incredible' stories. He then moved to shift blame from the accused men: 'I suggest to you that Shatford was going to try and divert attention and suspicion from her.' He reminded the jury that the police homed in on Shatford early on after finding one of her house keys on the body of George Leeman, a close friend who often stayed at her place. The lawyer then mounted the defence of alibi one last time. 'Mailman wasn't there. He didn't do it. Gillespie wasn't there. He didn't do it. You know Janet Shatford was there and she did do it.' MacLeod ended his closing address to the jury by hammering away at the inconsistencies in the testimony of the two eyewitnesses. J. Anderson Ritchie, Gillespie's defence lawyer, also emphasized the bizarre contradictions in the prosecution's case — including the fact that the two witnesses placed the murder at different spots in the backyard. 'Now, you'd think if they saw that, they'd remember where it happened,' said Ritchie. He urged the jury not to let Robert Mailman's notoriety cloud the facts. The testimony of the eyewitnesses was conflicting from beginning to end, he said. 'They can't both be telling the truth.' Even the very nature of how the receipt surfaced spoke volumes about its authenticity, Ritchie added. 'Would you expect that it be under the fridge if the idea was for it to be planned as an alibi? Here's our alibi for this murder, we'll stuff it under the fridge and hope someone finds it while we're sitting at our murder trial. Is that reasonable?' Yet the prosecutors, James McAvity and Stephen Wood, had a retort to every point. Wood told the jury the inconsistencies in their testimony were minor and should be considered acceptable. 'If they did make up this whole story, they did a pretty good job,' the prosecutor said. On the question of the alibi, the prosecutors said they felt 'ambushed' by the alibi because it was presented midway through the first trial. Now in the second trial, prosecutors dismissed the alibi as a desperate fabrication. There was no timestamp on the receipt, and prosecutors called two witnesses whose numbered invoices were issued after the receipt in question. Both estimated they bought parts between 3:00 and 4:35 p.m. Their testimonies were used to try to establish the accused men were actually at the parts dealership earlier than they said. Prosecutor Wood then refuted the defence theory that Janet Shatford did the killing alone, telling the jury it defied logic. 'Why would Janet Shatford travel three or four city blocks, kill a 200-plus pound man behind somebody's house, and without a car, dispose of the body two kilometres away? 'How could she do it, let alone why would she do it?' The prosecutors finished by painting the accused as low-life rounders who had criminal records and spent most days drinking at a bootlegger's on Horsfield Street known as The Joint. Prosecutors dredged up criminal records dating back 20 years. Wood told the jury not to take their duty lightly. 'If you don't carry out this function and … if this duty or judgment is not carried out in a proper fashion, society becomes lawless. 'The system of justice breaks down.' The verdict The presiding judge, Justice J. Paul Barry, ended his charge to the jury around 12:30 p.m. on May 11, 1984 — a Friday afternoon. The judge told the jury someone had to be lying. 'I've heard lots of cases,' said Barry. 'If Ms. Shatford and Jack Loeman are lying, of course, the case for the Crown falls to the ground … if they are [lying], they're sure telling whoppers.' Barry instructed the jury to treat two key witnesses' testimonies 'with prudence,' but also suggested at several points that he found their accounts credible. 'The accused say [they] weren't even there, that Mrs. Shatford and Loeman [Jr.], dreamt it all up,' Barry went on to add. 'Well, if they did, it was some dream to be able to tell the story they did.' Barry went on to question the credibility of Gillespie and Mailman. 'Look at their criminal records and say, are they the kind of people that we believe normally?' Innocence Canada was instrumental in advocating for Mailman and Gillespie. A 253-page brief documenting the failures of the police investigation and trial and submitted to then federal justice minister Arif Virani in December 2019, was key to opening an extensive review of the case. The brief from Innocence Canada argued that Barry's conduct in the trial was 'improper … even by the standards of that time' and 'stemmed from an obvious belief in the guilt of [Mailman and Gillespie].' The brief also noted that Barry had presided over Mailman's trial and acquittal in the murder of Stanley Whittaker in 1982, just two years prior to the trial for George Leeman's murder. The jurors deliberated for just two hours and 25 minutes before trooping back into court to deliver the verdict. 'We find the accused guilty as charged,' the foreman pronounced. The judge told the court that murder in the second-degree carried an automatic life sentence. He looked at the men in the prisoner's dock and told them it was his duty to ask if they had anything to say. Mailman stood and said: 'Just that I'm not guilty, your honour.' Moments later, Gillespie got to his feet and repeated the claim, 'Just that I'm not guilty.' The judge then recited their long criminal records, saying, 'I don't know what the point is of rehabilitation.' Barry sentenced Mailman and Gillespie to life in Dorchester Penitentiary, one of Canada's oldest prisons, with no chance of parole for 18 years. One month later, Mailman wrote to the prosecutor, Stephen Wood. 'It is sincerely hoped that you will not object to my taking the liberty of writing to you,' the letter reads. 'And my reason for the taking of this liberty, sir, is that I now stand convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a murder which I did not commit.' The letter went unanswered. Tunnel vision The Saint John Police department targetted Mailman right from the start. Problems with their investigation went far beyond non-disclosure of evidence. In 1998 interviews with federal criminal conviction review group (CCRG) investigators, retired Saint John police officers who worked on the case made some astonishing admissions. Detective Lenny Tonge was the main contact for witness Janet Shatford. He told the investigators Mailman and Gillespie were the only ones he was zeroing in on. He admitted he gave Shatford money to drink with Mailman and Gillespie with the hopes of getting information about the case, and that he was spending his own money because the department wouldn't authorize the expense. He also said the Saint John Police force was 'a dog eat dog' unit. 'You could be working on something and not know everybody that was working on it. Regular f**k up at times.' Retired detective Willard Carr was Tonge's partner. Carr recalled Tonge becoming obsessed with the case and conducting most interviews and interrogations by himself. Tonge wouldn't take notes during these conversations, relying instead on Carr to type up the paperwork based on Tonge's memory of what witnesses had said. Carr said he was concerned about his partner's fixation, even reporting his concerns to deputy police chief Charlie Breen. These concerns went unresolved. Carr also admitted they zeroed in on Mailman and Gillespie, even though they had no concrete evidence they were involved. Retired detective inspector Al Martin was second-in-charge of the team investigating Leeman's murder. He first publicly questioned the investigation in a 1998 interview with the Telegraph Journal. When he was later interviewed by the CCRG investigators, he said he didn't believe Mailman was involved in the murder of Leeman. 'I don't have any sympathy for Bobby Mailman. I believe that he's where he should be. But not for this murder. That is my feelings,' Martin said. He described the police pursuit of Mailman as 'overzealous.' Martin said that the police were eager to catch Mailman because of their failed attempts to put him away for the murder of Stanley Whittaker. He was also critical of the two witnesses, describing Loeman Jr. as a 'loose cannon' and recalling that Shatford was 'in la-la-land all the time.' 'It is astounding that the Crown could be so blind to the difficulties with the credibility and motives of (the star witnesses),' said the brief from Innocence Canada. 'However, this attitude is easily explained by an absolute belief in the guilt of (Mailman and Gillespie). 'This is the very essence of Crown tunnel vision.' A review of the original investigation by the Saint John Police, released earlier this year, came to a similar conclusion: 'The failure of this investigation is largely attributed to police tunnel vision, defined as a negligent and narrow focus that distorts the interpretation of evidence and actions. The detectives relied heavily on a witness whose cooperation and statements were inconsistent and lacked corroboration.' The prosecutors For years, prosecutors and the police tried vigorously to preserve the convictions. In a 1993 affidavit to the Supreme Court of Canada about the all-important Centennial Motors alibi receipt, McAvity wrote it had been destroyed. He claimed 'extreme prejudice' against the Crown's case if there was a new trial without the receipt. This statement ignored the fact that the receipt's destruction would be crushing to the defence. Remarkably, 26 years later, the alibi receipt was found in police files at the Saint John Police headquarters. Then-Innocence Canada counsel Bhavandeep Sodhi identified the receipt during a visit on Nov. 28, 2019. The Innocence Canada brief said it's unclear how McAvity could claim, under oath, that the evidence no longer existed. Other key exhibits were destroyed or lost by the police. Leeman was clutching a hair in his hand when police first arrived at the scene of the murder, but Innocence Canada lawyers noted that this hair 'does not appear to have been sent to the Forensic Lab' and was not discussed in the trial. 'The police never followed up on this piece of evidence,' the Innocence Canada brief noted. After Leeman's death, the police collected the clapboards from a building near the alleged scene of the murder. The boards were allegedly stained with human blood, according to a federal serologist, and the prosecution used this evidence to support their story of the murder. The brief from Innocence Canada noted that the clapboards were likely destroyed in 1990. While rules around retention of evidence were unclear at the time, lawyers at Innocence Canada said that the blood on the clapboards could have been tested for DNA had evidence been preserved. The pathologist Dr. Syed Khaliq was declared an expert witness in the trials. When the judge outlined the witness list for the jury, he told them the pathologist's testimony wouldn't take up too much time. 'Dr. Khaliq, he is going to give his evidence, and it is not going to be very long, cause, you know … who is going to argue with the pathologist?' the judge told the jury. The defence didn't object to or ask any questions about the pathologist's qualifications, training or experience in forensic pathology. Dr. Khaliq was hired as the forensic pathologist for New Brunswick in 1983, the year of the homicide. According to his CV, the doctor's only training in forensic pathology before his autopsy of George Leeman was a five-day course in San Francisco in 1980. The pathologist played a key role in the wrongful convictions of Mailman and Gillespie. The police built their story of the murder around the pathologist's timeline and made sure that the witnesses' accounts fit neatly into that story — even when their initial statements clearly differed. The last person to see George Leeman alive was Nellie Clark, a parcel car operator with Vet's Taxi. She told police she had seen him alive on the evening of Nov. 29, several hours after the police said he was murdered. The police mentioned this to the pathologist and then they interviewed the cabbie again, and she agreed she could have been off by a day. She changed her story to the one the jury heard. But in her initial statement to the police, Clark had said she was confident of the date because her husband had travelled with her the evening before. Her original statement was kept from the defence. In closing arguments, prosecutors told jurors their witnesses' accounts were 'amazingly consistent with pathology.' Khaliq's account was a repeated theme in the closing address, with Stephen Wood telling the jury that if they were looking for corroboration for Loeman Jr. or Shatford's accounts, they could 'go to pathology again.' Innocence Canada picked a highly qualified forensic pathologist to review the pathology from the investigation. Dr. Peter Markesteyn, the former Chief Medical Examiner for Manitoba, had worked as a forensic pathologist in Atlantic Canada before the 1983 autopsy in question. He knew the accepted practices and standards of forensic pathology, not only at the time, but in smaller venues on the East Coast. Markesteyn said Khaliq did not correctly examine or autopsy the body, and that his estimate of Leeman's time of death had no evidentiary value. 'The opinion of (Khaliq) regarding instruments, likewise regarding the time of death, is no more than an educated guess and the jury should have been informed about the degree of certainty of that opinion,' Markesteyn said in his 2019 report. According to Innocence Canada, 'the evidence given by Dr. Khaliq contributed to the miscarriage of justice' in Mailman and Gillespie's case. Exoneration On Jan. 5, 2024, the day after he was vindicated, Walter Gillespie picked up what little he had left in life and moved from his halfway house into a bachelor apartment — or, as he called it, his cell. Everything Gillespie owned after 40 years of living as a convicted killer amounted to a handful of boxes, three bags and a television. 'Don't f**king break the TV,' he told me as we entered the old, converted hotel room. The judge's full decision was released right after Gillespie moved in. The historic decision ricocheted through the country's legal circles and into the dark apartment. I read the decision to Gillespie from my phone. The judge, Tracey DeWare, said the system not only failed Mailman and Gillespie, but also family and friends of the victim, who were deprived of answers about his killing. 'None of this can be accepted in a free and democratic society based upon the rule of law. As Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench of New Brunswick, I can only at this juncture express my most profound regret … that these events unfolded as they did. 'Hopefully their acquittals to the charge will provide (Mailman and Gillespie) a sense of peace accompanied by the public recognition that they have been found not guilty of this crime,' said DeWare. She said lessons from the case will benefit the justice system as a whole and acknowledged the recognition 'is little comfort for the decades they spent under the shadow of a murder conviction.' DeWare offered her 'sincere apology' to Mailman and Gillespie on behalf of the court. *** Robert Mailman, 77, once known for his bar brawls, has become frail from illness and spends most of his time inside his sixth-floor apartment. His home is on a hill overlooking St. Joseph Cemetery in Saint John, where his sons Bruce and Jeffrey are buried. Mailman's greatest wish was to be vindicated while he was still alive, and he's deeply grateful to everyone who supported his exoneration. Mailman is especially grateful to Innocence Canada and Jerome Kennedy for taking on the case. The overview of Kennedy's successful 2019 application to the federal justice minister is aptly titled 'The ends justify the means' and highlights all the markings commonly found in wrongful conviction cases: police tunnel vision, non-disclosure of evidence, recantations by the two key Crown witnesses, collusion between the police and Crown witnesses, judicial bias and the destruction of key exhibits after trial. 'The egregious actions of the police and the Crown's improper reliance on evidence gathered have resulted in two innocent men being convicted of a murder they did not commit,' Kennedy wrote in the 2019 application. Nineteen months after his exoneration, Mailman continues to battle terminal cancer. Short and tough as nails, he does his own IV drugs at home to be spared the hospital. 'I grew up in the streets. I had a good temper, and I stood. But with this cancer, I can't get up. I can't fight back. I'm beat … There's no off-ramp here except the graveyard,' he said. Mailman wants to spend every waking moment with his girlfriend, Brenda, and never, ever, wants to talk about the case again. Leeman's murder has run through his mind for the last 40 years and he's tired of it. Still, Mailman is clear that he wants the public to know about the corruption in the system. 'Prosecutors are supposed to be pillars of the community. I'm from the street, I'm the one who's supposed to be the bad guy. The system owes me my life back.' gdimmock@ Illustrations: Brice Hall/Postmedia The Citizen newsroom is proud to uncover and report important stories like this one. I f you would like to support longform, deeply-reported journalism, please purchase a digital subscription: Find more Ottawa Citizen longreads here, and thanks for reading. Share this article in your social network Comments You must be logged in to join the discussion or read more comments. 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