THE RING IN THE SNOW: THE MURDERS OF MARIEA DICK AND LIZ ZESCHNER

This episode contains descriptions of the murder of two 14-year-old girls, sexual violence, and graphic evidence given in open court. If any of that is hard for you to hear right now, please take care of yourself and feel free to skip this one.

A note on sources. The names and physical descriptions of the undercover officers in this case are covered by a court-ordered publication ban that remains in force. In the reasons of the Court of Appeal they appear only as "Buck" and "D." That's how I'll refer to them.

INTRODUCTION

Picture it.

It's a Thursday afternoon in February 1975. You're a delivery truck driver named Ralph Sanders. You grew up in Richmond, British Columbia, back when Richmond was still mostly farmland and ditches and long flat roads that went nowhere in particular.

You've got a bag of garbage in the truck. And out past Westminster Highway, up near Graybar Road, there's a stretch of open pasture that people have quietly turned into an unofficial dump. Old appliances. Junk. A sawdust trail running through the grass toward an electricity tower.

So you pull over. You get out. And you start walking.

The ground is covered in snow.

And then something catches the light.

A ring. Just a small flash of something sparkling, where nothing should be sparkling.

You walk closer. You get to within about 6 feet of it. And you see that the ring is on a finger, and that the finger is not covered in skin anymore, and that there is bone showing through the snow.

There are two of them, lying side by side beneath the tower.

Ralph Sanders told a courtroom 30 years later that at that moment he became very nervous and very scared, and that he could not get out of there fast enough. He drove to the nearest telephone and called the police.

He was 1 of the few people who would carry that afternoon for the rest of his life. He was not the only one. Because for the next 27 years, members of his own family quietly wondered whether he'd had something to do with it.

I'm your host, Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Today's story starts in a snowy Richmond field in 1975 and runs all the way to a Court of Appeal judgment in 2008. In between you get almost everything that makes a cold case a cold case. Two 14-year-old best friends who called each other sister. A pair of brown suede shoes that sat in an exhibit locker for 26 years while the science slowly caught up to them. Two families who were told, wrongly, that the man who killed their girls was already behind bars. A truck driver living under a cloud he never earned.

And one of the most controversial investigative techniques in Canadian policing. An 8-month undercover operation that cost $324,000, included a staged beating of a woman, dangled $80,000 in a safe deposit box, and ended with a videotaped confession in a hotel suite in Whistler.

Here's what makes this episode different from the ones you're used to hearing. The judge in this case did not tell the jury that the confession was reliable. He told them the opposite. He told them that confessions produced by an operation like this one are inherently unreliable. He told them not to assume people only confess to crimes they've actually committed. He told them to be slow to conclude this man had confessed to something he'd really done. He even told them, in his own words, that the accused had gotten a key detail wrong.

And then they convicted him anyway.

This is the case of Robert Bonisteel.

CHAPTER ONE: THE GIRLS WHO CALLED EACH OTHER SISTER

Mariea Dick was 14 years old. Her father, Harry Dick, was a member of the Mount Currie band near Pemberton. When he spoke to reporters three decades later, he was 67 years old and he described his daughter in five words. A happy little girl.

Her younger sister, Faith Peters, was 6 when Mariea disappeared. Six. Think about what that means. Faith grew up with a hole in the family that she was too young to understand at the time, and then spent her adult life waiting for someone to explain it. She would later tell reporters that Mariea was a loving, caring person, full of life. A daughter, a sister, a friend. That she could have been a wife, a mother, a grandmother. That she was never given the chance.

Liz Zeschner was also 14. Her mother, also named Elisabeth, was still living in Maple Ridge in 2005 and could not bring herself to attend the trial. She told a reporter she didn't want to hear the details. She didn't even want to see the man. She said it didn't change anything for her anymore, and that all those years hadn't made it any easier. Her brother John said the family just wanted it over and done with, and wanted to be sure police had the right man.

Both girls were about 5 feet tall. Both weighed about 95 pounds. Liz had black hair and brown eyes.

They were best friends. Reporters covering the trial kept using the same phrase over and over, because it was the phrase the families used. They were like sisters to one another. They called each other sister.

On the night of January 19th, 1975, Mariea and Liz were staying at the home of Mariea's aunt, at 41st Avenue and Nanaimo Street in east Vancouver. They left the house to walk to a nearby convenience store.

That's the last confirmed sighting of either of them alive.

They were 14 years old, on a January night, in a city that was about to stop looking for them.

CHAPTER TWO: THE CHRONOLOGY

Before we go further, I want to lay this out in order, because the case spans 33 years and it is very easy to lose the thread.

January 19th, 1975. Mariea Dick and Liz Zeschner leave her aunt's house at 41st and Nanaimo in Vancouver, headed for a convenience store. They are never seen alive again.

February 6th, 1975. Ralph Sanders finds their bodies in an open field north of Westminster Highway near Graybar Road in east Richmond, partly covered in snow, lying side by side beneath an electricity tower. At 6:00 pm that evening, police issue a press release about the discovery.

The next morning, February 7th, 1975. Robert Bonisteel leaves the Burnaby apartment he shares with his wife and their infant son. He takes the family car and drives east across the Prairies. He leaves a note in a kitchen drawer saying he loves them both but he has to go. His wife will testify there were no marital problems.

Over the following week. Bonisteel commits 2 rapes. One in Saskatchewan. One in Manitoba. He is arrested and held in police custody in Winnipeg. He will later plead guilty to both.

February 14th, 1975. He telephones his mother-in-law in Winnipeg, tells her the family Fiat is in a parkade there, and asks her to return it to his wife. She asks where he is. He says, far away.

February 20th, 1975. Corporal Don Brown of the Richmond RCMP learns that Bonisteel is in custody in Winnipeg and arranges for the car to be seized. A forensic examination finds small amounts of human blood inside it.

February 21st, 1975. Corporal Brown goes to the Burnaby apartment. With the permission of Bonisteel's wife, he searches it and seizes a pair of brown suede shoes that appear to be stained. An RCMP serologist tests them and concludes human blood is present.

Late February and March 1975. Richmond RCMP officers, including Brown, travel to Winnipeg and interview Bonisteel. He is interviewed by the RCMP several more times over the following years.

1975. He is sentenced to 20 years for the rapes. He serves that time in Prince Albert and is released in the mid 1990s.

1984 and 1988. The shoes are examined again. Neither examination produces a usable profile.

2001. The shoes are examined a fourth time. Advances in DNA technology finally succeed.

March to October 2002. An RCMP undercover operation runs against Bonisteel, who is now living in Kitchener, Ontario. Operators make 5 trips there over that period.

September 14th, 2002. The first of two videotaped meetings with "Buck," an undercover officer posing as the head of a criminal organization.

September 18th and 19th, 2002. The Toni scenario. I'll come back to this. It matters enormously.

October 25th, 2002. Bonisteel watches $80,000 go into a safe deposit box he is told he'll have access to once the job is done.

October 26th, 2002. The second videotaped meeting, at Whistler. He confesses.

October 2002. He is arrested. The charge is initially second-degree murder and is later elevated to first-degree on both counts.

Spring and summer 2005. A 12-week trial in B.C. Supreme Court before Justice Stewart and a jury of 8 men and 4 women.

July 9th, 2005. The verdict.

September 9th, 2008. The Court of Appeal for British Columbia rules on his appeal.

CHAPTER THREE: WHAT THE AUTOPSY FOUND

I'm going to handle this carefully, but I'm not going to skip it, because the nature of these injuries becomes the single most contested fact in the entire case.

Both girls died of multiple stab wounds.

Mariea Dick had 9 stab wounds, in her chest, breast and abdomen.

Liz Zeschner had a cut to her neck and 25 stab wounds, in her chest and abdomen. Trial testimony from the retired exhibits officer described the neck wound as running from beneath her chin through her windpipe, and described a slash across her abdomen measuring 38 centimetres.

Nine, and 25.

Remember those two numbers. Write them down if you have to. Everything that happens in 2002 and 2005 comes back to them.

One of the first officers at the scene, retired Staff Sergeant Stephen Fairbridge, testified about what he found. One girl lying on her left side, arms over her head, a blue parka covering her head, her lower legs bent in a crouched position, her sweater and bra pulled up around her neck. A ring on her right index finger. Gouges out of several of her fingers, which are defensive injuries. Snow and ice covering both bodies. He said he couldn't make out any facial features.

The retired exhibits officer, Dale Dichrow, told the jury that the way the clothing on both bodies had ridden up around the shoulders and head was, in his words, very consistent with the girls having been dragged there by their legs.

Hold on to that. Dragged feet first, clothing bunching up over the head. In 1975 police deliberately kept it out of the newspapers.

In police work we call that hold-back evidence. Information only the killer and the investigators would have. Thirty years later it became 1 of the two things the whole trial turned on.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: I want to point out something about that field. It wasn't a hiding place. The bodies were left in tall dead grass beside a sawdust trail, in a spot where people already came to dump garbage, roughly 10 feet off a road. Snow fell and covered them, and that's likely the only reason they weren't found for 18 days. Nobody buried them, weighed them down, or drove them into the bush. They were dragged by the feet from a car to the base of a pylon and left. That tells you something about state of mind. This wasn't somebody carefully managing risk. It was somebody who didn't much care whether they were found, as long as he wasn't standing there when it happened. In my experience that kind of indifference is more dangerous than cunning, because it means the offender isn't weighing consequences the way you assume everyone does.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE SHOES

Now I want to talk about a Mountie named Don Brown, because this entire conviction traces back to two days in February 1975.

Bonisteel had come onto the radar fast. A Burnaby man who abandoned his wife and infant son the morning after 2 bodies turned up in Richmond. A week later he was under arrest in Winnipeg for 2 rapes committed in 2 different provinces.

On February 20th, Brown learned where he was and had the car seized. A forensic examination found small amounts of human blood inside it.

On February 21st, Brown went to the apartment. Bonisteel's wife let him search it. He seized a pair of brown suede shoes that appeared to be stained, and an RCMP serologist confirmed the stains were human blood.

In 1975, that was almost the end of the line. There was blood typing, and blood typing needs a decent sized sample, and what was on those shoes was not a decent sized sample. Dichrow acknowledged under cross-examination in 2005 that in 1975 there were no protocols for handling DNA evidence at the Richmond detachment, or at any other police force in the country, for the simple reason that DNA evidence did not yet exist as a concept.

So the shoes went into an exhibit locker.

They came back out in 1984. Nothing usable.

They came back out in 1988, when they were examined by a University of British Columbia master's student named Dr. Lori Bonnycastle, who by 2005 was working for the United States government. She testified that she wore gloves, but that she did not change them unless there was a visible sign of contamination. The same went for the paper coverings on the table where the evidence was laid out.

That single answer became the spine of the defence case.

I'll note something else the jury heard. The Crown tried to have Bonnycastle qualified as a DNA expert and failed. Justice Stewart ruled the Crown had not satisfied him on that point. The technique she had used was, by 2005, outdated, and she'd since moved into a different field.

The shoes came back out a fourth time in 2001.

And this time the science had arrived.

An RCMP forensic laboratory in Vancouver developed a profile from a stain on the left shoe. Joy Kearsey, a research technologist at the lab, testified that the exhibits reached her in properly sealed packaging, that they were in reasonably good condition, and that she saw no loose material. She said she has refused to process exhibits that arrive improperly sealed. She had no concerns about contamination.

The profile matched Mariea Dick.

The Crown put the frequency at 1 in 14 billion.

Bonisteel's own profile, for comparison, was developed from a cigarette butt and a blood sample.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: This is the part of the story I'd put in front of every new investigator in the country. In February 1975, Don Brown had no DNA science, no lab that could help him, and no reasonable expectation that a few specks on a suede shoe would ever mean anything. He seized them anyway. Twenty six years later, the Crown prosecutor stood up after the verdict and said that without that basic, solid police work the case would never have been cracked. He's right. You are not always going to know why you're seizing something. Seize it, package it properly, seal it, and log it, because the technology 20 years from now is going to be able to ask questions of that exhibit you cannot imagine today. And notice something else: what saved this case in 2001 wasn't just the seizure. It was the sealing. The single fact that let the Crown beat the contamination argument was a lab technologist being able to say the bag was intact when it reached her.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE CIRCUS ROOM

By 2002, Robert Bonisteel was living in Kitchener, Ontario, with a young family. He was in his mid 50s. He'd served his 20 years in Prince Albert and had been out for roughly 7 years. He had a day job he felt underpaid him, no driver's licence, and a lot of free time at a bar.

In March 2002, he met some new friends there.

What followed is what the RCMP calls a major crime technique and everyone else calls Mr. Big. Undercover officers build a fictional criminal organization around a suspect, bring him inside it over months, make him feel valued and paid and needed, and then confront him with the problem of his own past. The pitch is always the same. We can fix this for you, but first you have to tell me the truth.

The operation ran from March to October 2002. Operators made 5 trips to Kitchener. The total cost was $324,000.

They spent time in his bar. They worked to create the impression that they were involved in criminal activity. The principal operator, known in the court record only as D., built a relationship with him and started offering him work.

He acted as a lookout. He watched vehicles. He conveyed bags. He counted cash. The individual jobs paid anywhere from $20 to $400. At one point he counted a bundle amounting to $100,000. He deposited thousands into a bank account. He unpacked a bag of guns.

He was asked what he thought of the work. He said it was great, but that he didn't want to know the nature of the business. He repeated that theme constantly, telling them he preferred not to know so he could stay out of jail.

And here is a detail from the court record that the newspapers didn't have, and it matters. The organization didn't have to recruit him.

He asked them for a full-time job.

D. told him there was a boss, a man called Buck, who would want to look into his background. Bonisteel volunteered that he had done time. Later, when D. asked about it, he said he'd served 20 years in Prince Albert after being caught with one woman and the RCMP bringing up another.

CHAPTER SIX: THE JOB INTERVIEW

On September 14th, 2002, Bonisteel sat down with Buck for the first time. Hidden camera running.

Buck framed it as a job interview. He told Bonisteel he needed to know everything, and that he could and would check every word of it.

Bonisteel told him about the 20 years and the 2 rapes. Buck observed that the sentence seemed heavy for those offences.

And this is the moment I want you to sit with, because it is not what you'd expect.

Bonisteel volunteered the murders himself.

He explained that the sentence was so heavy because he was on the suspect list for killings in British Columbia. He said his wife had told the RCMP something that made them think he might be involved. He said he'd been questioned about it when he was arrested for the rapes.

Buck asked him what the police thought he'd done.

He said it was a prostitute and two kids. He said he got the impression it was some kind of serial thing. He said he didn't know anything about it, that the police were on a fishing expedition, and that the only thing that ever got him in trouble was something his ex-wife said.

He added that if Buck could get hold of his police file, he'd be interested to see it.

Later in the same meeting, Buck asked whether there was anything in his past that could hurt the organization. Bonisteel said the only thing he'd ever gotten away with was dealing drugs. Nothing else.

So as of September 14th, he had put the murders on the table and flatly denied them.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE TONI SCENARIO

Four days later, the operators did something I need to describe carefully, because it is the single most important fact in Bonisteel's defence, and it never made the newspapers.

On September 18th and 19th, 2002, they ran what the defence would later call the Toni scenario.

They showed Bonisteel a fake police report. It indicated that Toni, a female undercover operator he knew, had lied to the group about what happened during a drug deal.

D. asked Bonisteel to talk to her. To persuade her to tell the truth, meaning the version in the police report.

Bonisteel spoke with her. She refused to change her story.

Later that night, D. and Toni went into a motel room and made shouting and thumping noises, staging a beating, while Bonisteel waited nearby.

The next day he met Toni. She was wearing makeup designed to look like she'd been beaten.

Five weeks later, in a hotel room in Whistler, Buck told Bonisteel that he had checked him out, that he knew he'd killed the girls, and that he needed to hear the details.

Under cross-examination at trial, Bonisteel told the jury he was well aware there were similarities between what had happened to Toni and what was happening to him in that room.

That is the entire architecture of his false confession defence, in one staged beating. The operation had shown him, in person, what it looked like when somebody in this organization stuck to a story the boss didn't want to hear.

I'm going to give you the Crown's answer to that later. But I want you to be holding it when we get to Whistler.

CHAPTER EIGHT: WHISTLER

Between October 2nd and 26th, 2002, Bonisteel travelled around the Vancouver area and Vancouver Island with D. and other operators, taking part in activities connected to what he was told was a large drug shipment coming ashore.

On October 25th, the day before the second meeting, he went with D. to a bank. Eighty thousand dollars was deposited into a safe deposit box. D. told him he'd have the key, and access to the $80,000, once the job was done.

On October 26th, 2002, he sat down with Buck for the second time.

Buck told him there was a problem. That he'd done a lot of checking, and what he'd found was that Bonisteel had killed the two girls.

He told him police had forensic evidence and new technology that would prove it. He showed him a fake police document naming him as the suspect and describing advances in DNA testing that would let police examine exhibits previously too small to test.

Then he offered the way out. He said he knew a man in Millhaven penitentiary who owed him a favour, who was dying, and who would confess to the murders.

He said he needed the details of what actually happened.

Bonisteel's first answer was that he'd pretty much covered everything he could imagine last time, and that he wasn't sure what Buck was referring to.

Then he told him.

He said he saw the girls hitchhiking on Kingsway, and that they said they wanted to go to the airport to spend time at the arcade. He said he picked them up and drove to Richmond. He said he parked on a dirt track leading to a garbage dump.

He said he stabbed them. And then he said the words that would occupy the next 6 years of litigation.

He said he stabbed one girl once, and the other twice.

Buck pushed him on it. Asked him where he'd stabbed them. Bonisteel described the girl in the back seat, heavy set, and said he went up through her, left the knife in for 5 minutes or so while she was still alive, and that when he pulled it out an artery had been cut and she died quickly. He described the second girl in the front seat, scared, and said he went to make the same cut up across the ribs on her left side, missed, hit bone, and then put the knife through her throat.

Buck asked him directly whether he remembered exactly how many times he stabbed them.

He said he stabbed one twice and the other once.

Buck asked if he was sure.

He said yes.

He also told Buck it was at least 4 or 5 weeks before the bodies were found. It was 18 days.

He described the girls as dark haired, one heavy set and pudgy, the other thin, and volunteered that police had told him one of them had a nickname at school. He said he dragged them into tall dead grass near a high-tension pylon. At trial, evidence was led that he also described pulling them feet first, causing their clothing to bunch up over their heads, which was exactly what the scene showed and exactly what police had held back. He drew a map.

Buck asked about the prostitute. Bonisteel said he didn't kill her and knew nothing about it. Buck asked if there had been anyone else. He said no.

Then Buck made an observation that opened a door. He suggested Bonisteel must have decided he didn't like killing people, since he hadn't killed the women he raped.

Bonisteel agreed, and then explained himself.

He said that at the time he was feeling mean and nasty about the world. He said his marriage was falling apart. He said he killed the girls to see whether it would change how he was feeling.

And he said he committed the rapes intending to get put in jail, so that he could get himself back together.

That is a motive, a timeline, and an explanation for his own flight across the Prairies, all in a few sentences. It is also directly contradicted by his ex-wife, who testified there were no marital problems at all before he walked out.

There was one more thing. Buck asked whether he'd ever told anyone else about the murders.

Bonisteel named his lawyer from the Winnipeg days, Hersch Wolch, and said Buck was the only person outside of Wolch who knew, and that Wolch didn't know any details.

The Crown would later put it to the jury that this line was itself a confession. The defence fought hard to have it cut out of the tape, and lost, and made it a ground of appeal.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: People hear about Mr. Big and picture intimidation. A dark room, a threat, a frightened man saying anything. That is not mainly what this technique is. The engine of a Mr. Big scenario is belonging. You take a man who has nothing, no status, no money, no respect, a job he resents, and you spend 8 months giving him a seat at a table he desperately wants to sit at. He asked for a full-time job. There was $80,000 waiting in a box with his name on it.

But I'm not going to stand here and pretend the fear side isn't real, because in this operation the police manufactured it deliberately. The Toni scenario exists for exactly one reason: to show the target what happens to somebody who doesn't come clean. You can argue that's legitimate pressure on a guilty man. You cannot argue it isn't pressure. And that's precisely why the confession, on its own, was never going to be enough.

CHAPTER NINE: THE TRIAL

The trial ran 12 weeks through the spring and summer of 2005, in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver, before Justice Stewart and a jury of 8 men and 4 women.

Bonisteel was 57. Reporters noted how little he resembled photographs taken a few years earlier in Ontario. The crew cut and clean-shaven look were gone. He now had a full head of white hair, a long white beard, and round wire-rimmed glasses. One reporter wrote that the lines on his face made him look a decade older than he was.

The Crown was Hank Reiner and Elizabeth Campbell. The defence was Jim Millar and Karen Bastow. The proceedings had to be moved to a larger courtroom to hold all the family members, reporters and members of the public.

Campbell opened by telling the jury to pay close attention to Bonisteel's demeanour and emotion during the taped confession.

In the gallery sat Harry Dick, who'd driven down from Mount Currie. He told reporters it hurt to sit and stare at the man in the box, but that as the judge had said, he couldn't assume him guilty. He said they'd see when the time came at the end.

Faith Peters drove down from Lillooet. In the courthouse she met Ralph Sanders for the first time. The little sister and the man who found the bodies had never laid eyes on each other. They shared a long, tearful embrace.

Sanders testified about that afternoon in the snow. Outside court, he and his brother were quietly raising money for memorial benches at the site. The benches were expected to cost about $5,000. The brothers had each put in $200 to start. They'd also pledged a donation in the girls' memory to Nova Transition House, a shelter for battered women and children. He talked about the 25 years in which nobody knew anything, and called it a cross he carried.

Sharon Lynn, Bonisteel's ex-wife, testified that there had been no marital problems before he walked out on February 7th, 1975. She found his note in a kitchen drawer. She said the date was fixed in her mind forever, because when you're a new mother you measure everything by the age of your baby, and she remembered being left with a 5-week-old.

She also told the jury that before he left, he'd mentioned keeping a knife in the family Fiat. In a sheath, in the driver's door pocket. About 8 inches long. He never explained why.

Then the Crown played the tapes.

The defence called exactly 2 witnesses: a DNA expert, and Bonisteel himself.

The DNA expert was Dr. Don Riley, who runs a research laboratory in Washington state. He testified that the partial profile from the shoe was not very reliable, that he wouldn't consider it scientifically significant without a lot of corroborating evidence, and that it is easy to contaminate a sample containing a very small amount of DNA. He said it happens in many labs, including his own. He criticized a centrifuge step performed with the caps off the tubes.

Under cross-examination he conceded he was not aware of the RCMP lab having violated any of its own protocols, and that he'd been unaware the lab was properly accredited and had been audited several times since 2001.

Millar framed the whole case for the jury as a recipe for wrongful conviction. He told them they had an accused with a history of sexual assaults. He told them they weren't going to like Bob Bonisteel and that he wasn't going to ask them to. He told them they owed him absolutely nothing except a verdict based on the evidence.

CHAPTER TEN: THE ACCUSED TAKES THE STAND

Robert Bonisteel testified in his own defence, and his explanation was specific and, in places, oddly detailed.

He said the confession was false. He said he invented some of the details and got others from police, who had interrogated him repeatedly over the years and shown him pictures.

On the stand, his lawyer walked him through the confession line by line.

Why did he tell Buck one girl had one stab wound and the other had two? Because, he said, Corporal Brown had told him one girl was stabbed in the throat and handed him a picture of her lying down with an ugly wound in her side, and Brown's associate said the other had been stabbed in the diaphragm area. That, he said, was how he understood them to have died.

Why hitchhiking? Because the airport was the only thing he knew in Richmond, he didn't know these people, and hitchhiking was the only reasonable answer.

Why distinguish a heavy set girl from a thin one? Because if you have any two people together, one is always heavier than the other. He called it an unwritten law.

Why say he left the knife in for 5 minutes? He said he didn't know why he said that. He knew she was supposed to have bled to death, so he assumed she hadn't died immediately.

Why provide that level of detail at all? Because Buck kept asking for more, it was happening fast, and he was having trouble keeping track of what he'd already said.

Where did the cut artery come from? He said he'd been told she bled profusely when the knife was removed, so he assumed a vessel. He said police told him there had to be forensics all over his car and he might as well own up to it and be a man.Why the arcade at the airport? Because when he was a kid, malls weren't common, they had pinball machines, and that was the reason kids used to sneak out.

Millar asked him whether Buck ever questioned how the second girl sat in the front seat for 5 minutes while he had a knife in the first one. Bonisteel said he never thought about it, that Buck was asking for detail and he was trying to come up with some, and that he wasn't being real logical at the time.

And the reason for all of it, he said, was fear. He said Buck was a dangerous guy. He said he'd already told Buck he had no involvement and Buck wasn't listening, that the only thing Buck wanted to hear was what Buck wanted to hear, and that's exactly what he gave him. He said he believed he'd be beaten or killed if he didn't.

The Crown's cross-examination went after the one claim the whole defence rested on: that police had shown him crime scene photographs.

Reiner put to him that he'd been interviewed by police 6 times, not the dozen or so he claimed. That on the only occasion an officer tried to show him death scene photographs, Bonisteel covered his eyes and ran out of the room.

Bonisteel said he had no memory of that.

Then Reiner produced the book of photographs and asked him to find the specific picture he'd described so vividly.

He couldn't find it.

Reiner also raised the evidence of a former B.C. Tel co-worker, Alf Lund-Pedersen, who'd testified that he and Bonisteel delivered telephone poles around the Lower Mainland together in late 1974 and early 1975, and that they drove that exact stretch of Westminster Highway roughly twice a week for 6 months. Lund-Pedersen also testified that one day Bonisteel simply didn't show up for work.

Bonisteel told the jury he wasn't familiar with the area and didn't know they'd ever driven by there.

And then his composure came apart. When Reiner suggested his own statements showed he was admitting he was capable of murder, Bonisteel told the prosecutor he thought he was insane. Justice Stewart called an afternoon break. Afterward, Bonisteel spent hours refusing to answer questions about passages from his own confession, saying he didn't see what other response was possible when he was being railroaded. After lunch he apologized and started answering again.

Reiner's final submission was that the testimony was almost entirely devoid of credibility. He made a point worth remembering. It's completely understandable that a person can't recall things from 30 years back. The problem arises when the same person recalls trivial details with perfect clarity and cannot recall the significant ones at all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE WARNING

Now I want to do something this show doesn't usually get to do, which is tell you what the judge actually said to the jury. Because most people assume that when a confession gets played in a Canadian courtroom, the judge more or less lets it stand.

That is not what happened here. Not remotely.

Justice Stewart told the jury that it is a fact known to those immersed in the criminal law that sometimes even people who know they're talking to a police officer confess to crimes they haven't committed. He told them it happens, and not to think it doesn't. He told them not to start from the premise that people only confess to crimes they've actually committed, and he said that premise is simply wrong.

He told them that manipulating the target, inducing him to speak and drawing out as much detail as possible, is the essence of an operation like this one.

He told them that as a class of evidence, confessions produced by an undercover operation such as this are viewed as inherently unreliable, and are taken in an atmosphere that makes them highly suspect without independent confirmation.

He told them a confession obtained under oppressive or fearful circumstances may not be reliable.

He told them to proceed with caution, consider everything, and be slow to conclude that the accused had confessed to a crime he'd actually committed.

And then he gave them the two-sided test that decided this case. He asked them to consider whether the accused told Buck one or more things that only the killer would know. And he told them to look at the other side of that coin: whether he got something wrong that you'd expect the real killer to get right.

He named the things he got wrong. The presence or absence of a chain at the site. The presence or absence of houses on the road. And the number of stab wounds.

On that last one, the judge went further than a neutral instruction. As the Court of Appeal later recorded it, Justice Stewart expressed his own opinion to the jury that the accused got the number of stab wounds wrong.

The trial judge told a jury, out loud, that the Crown's central piece of evidence contained an error.

And they convicted anyway.

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE CASE AGAINST HIM, THE EVIDENCE EXPLAINED

So let's do the thing I do in every episode where a verdict rests on a chain rather than a single link. Let's lay out what that jury had, and be honest about the weak parts.

The Court of Appeal identified 3 pillars: blood from the car, DNA from the shoe, and the confession. I'll take those and everything around them.

First: the shoes. Seized February 21st, 1975, with the wife's permission. Human blood confirmed that year. Re-examined in 1984 and 1988 without result. In 2001, a profile from the left shoe matched Mariea Dick at a frequency the Crown put at 1 in 14 billion. This is the strongest single item in the case, and the one the defence hit hardest. The jury had to decide whether 26 years of imperfect handling created a false positive. The Crown's answer was Kearsey's evidence that the packaging was sealed and the exhibits intact when they reached her, and Riley's concession that he couldn't point to a single RCMP protocol actually broken.

Second: the blood in the car. A forensic examination in 1975 found small amounts of human blood inside the vehicle. The record doesn't show it was ever attributed to either girl, and I'm not going to suggest otherwise. What it does is put human blood inside the car of a man who left town the morning after two stabbed bodies turned up.

Third: the timing of his departure. Police issued a press release about the discovery at 6:00 pm on February 6th. Bonisteel left the next morning. That's not a vague coincidence of timing. That's the following morning, after the news went out. His wife said there were no marital problems. He drove across the Prairies, and told his mother-in-law only that he was far away.

Fourth: the knife. His wife testified he told her, before leaving, that he kept a sheathed knife about 8 inches long in the driver's door pocket. The girls were stabbed to death. That doesn't identify a murder weapon and the Crown never claimed it did. What it establishes is that this man kept a large knife within arm's reach in his car in January 1975.

Fifth: geography. He worked for B.C. Tel delivering telephone poles. A co-worker testified they drove that stretch of Westminster Highway about twice a week for 6 months. The bodies were dumped in an unofficial roadside junkyard just off that highway, in a spot no casual visitor would know existed. On the stand he denied being familiar with the area.

Sixth: the map and the drag marks. He drew Buck a map. And the trial evidence was that he described pulling the bodies feet first, causing the clothing to bunch up over their heads. That matched the scene. Corporal Brown testified he'd never told Bonisteel that theory and it had never been released publicly.

Seventh: the Wolch line. He told Buck that Buck was the only person outside his old lawyer who knew, and that the lawyer didn't know details. The Crown argued that sentence was an admission on its own.

Eighth: his own explanation for himself. He gave Buck a motive that no police officer could have fed him. Feeling mean and nasty about the world. A marriage falling apart. Killing two girls to see whether it changed how he felt. Then committing rapes on purpose to get himself locked up.

And now the other side of the ledger, because it was real.

He said he stabbed one girl once and the other twice. It was 9 and 25. Buck gave him a second chance at that number and he confirmed it. He was wrong about a chain at the site. He was wrong about houses on the road. He said it was 4 or 5 weeks before the bodies were found, when it was 18 days. He had been shown a fake police report and a staged beating 5 weeks earlier. And he was sitting one day away from $80,000.

So how does a jury square that?

I want to be careful here, because Canadian juries don't give reasons and nobody outside that room knows what persuaded them. What follows is my read, and you're free to disagree with it.

I think the answer is in the nature of the two categories of error.

The things he got wrong are the things a man reconstructing a crime from the outside would get wrong: counts, distances, landmarks, how long a body lay in a field. They're also the things a real killer might genuinely lose over 27 years, though I accept the wound count is an odd thing to be that far off on, and I accept the judge himself thought so.

The things he got right are different in kind. A map. A dump site. The manner in which two bodies were moved, which had been deliberately withheld from the public. A motive nobody had ever put to him. And a 26-year-old bloodstain on his own shoe that matched one of the girls.

His answer to the right answers was that police fed them to him in the 1970s. And that answer had a real problem, which is that the 1975 notebooks and tape recordings had been destroyed or lost. Corporal Brown testified he interviewed Bonisteel and has no specific recollection of what was asked or answered. So the jury had two competing accounts of an interview room 30 years earlier and no records to settle it.

The Crown answered it the only practical way available. It handed him the photo book and asked him to find the picture he swore he remembered.

He couldn't.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: Notice how little of this case came from 2002 onward. The undercover team did excellent work and the lab did excellent work, but almost every decisive fact in that courtroom was generated in about 3 weeks of February 1975 by ordinary officers doing ordinary things. Seizing shoes that meant nothing yet. Sealing them properly. Getting a forensic examination on a car in another province. Writing down what an ex-wife said about a knife in a door pocket. Holding the drag marks back from the press. Thirty years later, all of it was load-bearing.

And here's the lesson that matters most, given how this confession came out. The Mr. Big statement did not convict this man on its own, and it was never going to. The judge told the jury flat out that it was inherently unreliable and that parts of it were wrong. It only worked because there was independent corroboration sitting in an exhibit locker. If you're building one of these files and you're counting on the confession to carry it, you've built it backwards.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE VERDICT

The jury deliberated for 3 days.

On Saturday, July 9th, 2005, they came back.

Guilty. First-degree murder. Both counts.

Bonisteel sat in the prisoner's box with his head in his hands. As sheriffs escorted him out, he turned to his lawyer and threw his arms up.

First-degree murder in Canada carries an automatic sentence: life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for 25 years. He was 57. He'd be 82 before he could even apply.

Outside the courthouse, Faith Peters was overcome. She said all the hurt had been brought back up after 30 years, and that it had come out positive for them. She said she'd spent months looking through a tunnel and was now looking at the world through new eyes. She thanked everyone who'd worked on it, right down to the person who did the smallest thing.

John Zeschner said he felt total relief, and that the family couldn't thank the officers enough.

Hank Reiner gave the credit where I think it belonged. He said police had done a phenomenal job all around, and singled out the long-retired Don Brown, whose decision in February 1975 to look at Bonisteel and seize a pair of suede shoes was, in Reiner's words, the basic solid police work without which the case would never have been cracked.

Credit also went to the cold case investigators who reopened it, Corporal Stew MacDonald, Constable Sean Stephens and Corporal Darren Schneider, to Superintendent Ward Clapham, who approved a budget that nearly doubled the original projection, and to Inspector Dave DeBolt, who'd built Richmond's unsolved homicide team in the first place because he believed some of those files were solvable.

Reiner made one more point worth sitting with. He said the public rarely hears about the Mr. Big operations that clear people. When a target is exonerated by one of these scenarios, the operators simply drift out of his life as quickly as they appeared, and he never learns he was a suspect at all. Reiner called that a success too.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE APPEAL

Bonisteel appealed. The case was argued in Vancouver on June 10th and 11th, 2008, before Madam Justice Levine and Justices Lowry and Bauman. Jim Millar appeared for Bonisteel. Hank Reiner and Elizabeth Campbell appeared for the Crown.

Every ground of appeal concerned the confession. Six of them.

One: the bad character evidence. The tapes were full of things no accused wants a jury to hear. The rapes. The 20 years. Drug dealing. Hating his mother. Preferring knives to guns. Being diagnosed a sociopath. Crystal meth. Refusing to cooperate with Corrections. Millar had asked at trial to have the statements excluded entirely or heavily edited.

Justice Stewart had refused. His reasoning was that the whole association between the officers and the accused was relevant, because the jury needed the full context to decide whether the October 26th statement was a truthful confession. He acknowledged the risk of prejudice was real, and said the answer was a strong warning rather than exclusion. He then gave the jury one, telling them that reasoning from bad acts to bad character to guilt was a forbidden chain, that they must obey that instruction, and that it was their duty to pull up any fellow juror who started down it.

Two: the references to his old lawyer. Millar argued the Wolch material should have been cut. The Court of Appeal noted something that undercuts the argument: Bonisteel raised his lawyer first, not the police.

Three: cross-examining the architects of the operation. The defence had wanted a hearing to question the people who designed it, including a police psychologist who had obtained corrections records containing medical and psychiatric information about Bonisteel. On appeal Millar argued he'd been blocked from probing how those psychological characteristics were used to build the operation, and how often these operations produce false confessions. The Court found the argument was based on speculation about evidence that might have been obtained, and raised no legal error.

Four: the false confession expert. The defence had proposed calling a psychologist to educate the jury about false confessions. The expert had never interviewed Bonisteel and the opinion didn't address this operation. Justice Stewart ruled it wasn't necessary, and that a clear warning to the jury was the right tool. The Court of Appeal agreed, following the Ontario Court of Appeal's decision in Osmar.

Five: threshold reliability. Millar argued the confession should have had to pass a reliability screen before the jury heard it at all. The Court said no: a statement by an accused goes in as an admission, without a necessity and reliability analysis.

Six: community shock. This is the most interesting one. Millar argued the police tactics were so far over the line that the statements should have been thrown out to protect the integrity of the justice system. He pointed at the undermined lawyer relationship, the prison records obtained without a court order, the deliberate weaving of prior bad acts into the tapes, and the Toni scenario.

And Justice Levine gave that argument something close to a fair hearing. She acknowledged there are aspects of this case arguably worse than earlier Mr. Big cases the courts had approved. She specifically named the staged beating and the prospect of $80,000.

Then she said no. The test from the Supreme Court is conduct so appalling as to shock the community, with examples like an officer posing as a chaplain or a legal aid lawyer. This didn't reach that.

On September 9th, 2008, the appeal was dismissed.

But I want to give you the last paragraphs, because they're not triumphant. Justice Levine wrote that the prospect of a wrongful conviction haunts everyone involved in the criminal justice system. She quoted the Supreme Court listing the names that signal caution in a murder case: Marshall, Milgaard, Morin, Sophonow, Parsons.

And then she wrote the phrase that tells you exactly where the law stood in 2008.

Based on the law as it now stands, the appellant overstates his case.

As it now stands.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: WHAT CHANGED AFTERWARD

Six years later, the law stood somewhere else.

Mr. Big is largely a Canadian invention. It's mostly unusable in England and in most of the United States, because their confession rules work differently. In Canada the key point is that the protections attaching to a police interrogation, the right to counsel, the right to silence, the voluntariness requirement, are triggered when a suspect speaks to a person in authority. A man who doesn't know he's talking to police thinks he's talking to a criminal. So historically these confessions came in as ordinary admissions, and the defence was left to argue about weight.

That's exactly what the Court of Appeal told Bonisteel in 2008. No reliability screen. It goes to the jury.

In 2014, in R. v. Hart, the Supreme Court of Canada built the screen that Bonisteel had been denied. Mr. Big confessions are now presumptively inadmissible. The Crown has to show that the probative value outweighs the prejudicial effect. Courts are told to look at the length of the operation, the inducements offered, the pressure applied, the suspect's vulnerabilities, and whether the confession contains details that only the offender could know. A judge can also throw the whole thing out as an abuse of process if police conduct crossed the line.

Would this confession survive that today?

I said earlier in my prep that I thought it clearly would. Having read the trial judge's charge and the appeal reasons, I'm less sure, and I'd rather be honest with you than tidy.

On the one hand you have the map, the drag marks, the dump site and a self-generated motive. That's the confirmatory detail Hart tells judges to look for.

On the other hand you have an 8-month operation, $324,000 spent, $80,000 dangled the day before, a staged beating 5 weeks before, a fabricated police document produced in the room, and a confession that got the wound counts, a chain, the houses on the road, and the time before discovery all wrong. Hart tells judges to weigh exactly those things too.

My honest answer is that it would get a serious hearing that never happened in 2005, and that the Crown would probably win it, because of the shoe. The DNA is the independent corroboration. Without it, I don't think this confession stands up under Hart at all.

Which is, in a roundabout way, the same lesson as the last chapter. The confession was never the case. It was the thing the case was hung on.

A FINAL THOUGHT

There are two things in this case I can't let go of.

The first is what those families were told.

For decades, the Dick family and the Zeschner family believed the man who killed their daughters was already in prison. It wasn't until 2002, 27 years later, that they learned the truth. Whatever the reason, and I don't have it in the record in front of me, I want you to understand what it meant. Two families made their peace with a lie. When the phone finally rang in 2002, Harry Dick froze in his chair.

The second thing is Ralph Sanders.

He stopped his truck on a February afternoon to throw out a bag of garbage. He saw a ring sparkling in the snow. He did what a decent person does, which is walk closer instead of walking away, and then drive straight to a telephone and call the police.

And for that, he carried 27 years of quiet suspicion, including from inside his own family.

When the arrest came in October 2002, that cloud lifted. And what did he do with it? He and his brother started raising money for memorial benches at the spot where he found them, and pledged a donation in their names to a shelter for battered women and children. Two hundred dollars each out of their own pockets to start it off.

He never met those girls. He carried them anyway.

So the last word tonight belongs to them.

To Mariea Dick, 14 years old, who her father remembered as a happy little girl, and whose little sister was 6 when she vanished and spent a lifetime waiting for an answer.

And to Liz Zeschner, 14 years old, 5 feet tall, 95 pounds, black hair and brown eyes, who fought hard enough to leave defensive wounds on her own hands.

They were best friends. They called each other sister. They walked out to a convenience store on a January night and never came home.

There is a bench out there now, in a part of Richmond that is heavily developed today and looks nothing like the field it used to be. If you're ever near Westminster Highway, think about them.

Before I let you go, a word about the people in this story who wore a uniform.

There's a cost to this work that never makes it into the headlines. The officers who stood in that snowy field in 1975. The ones who kept pulling the file out in 1984, and 1988, and got nothing back. The undercover operators who spent 8 months of their lives inside another man's, who still cannot be named, who have families they can't talk to about any of it. The lab staff who kept testing a stain the size of a pinhead. And every first responder listening right now who carries images home they can't unsee, who misses their kids' bedtimes and their own holidays so strangers can have theirs in peace.

A lot of them live with PTSD they never mention, because the job teaches you to hold the line and keep moving. So if you know a first responder, or you're related to one, or you pass one on the street, understand that what they do costs something real. Appreciate it. Check on them. They've earned that and a lot more.

Take care of each other out there.

This episode was written, researched, and produced by me, Ryan Dell.  Please take a moment to leave a 5-star review.

I love hearing from you. If there's a case you think I should cover, send me an email. My address is: canadiancrimecast@gmail.com

I'm Ryan Dell, and this is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Sources: R. v. Bonisteel, 2008 BCCA 344 (CanLII), Court of Appeal for British Columbia, reasons of Levine J.A., Lowry and Bauman JJ.A. concurring, September 9, 2008. Contemporaneous trial reporting: The Vancouver Sun (May 3, June 8, June 22 and June 25, 2005), reporting by Maurice Bridge and Gerry Bellett; The Province (May and June 2005, and July 1 and 5, 2005), reporting by Keith Fraser; the Richmond Review (April 30 to July 14, 2005), reporting by Martin van den Hemel; the Times Colonist (May 3 and July 10, 2005), CanWest News Service and The Canadian Press reporting by Camille Bains. Subsequent legal framework on Mr. Big confessions: R. v. Hart, 2014 SCC 52. A court-ordered publication ban prohibits publication of any information tending to identify the undercover officers involved in this investigation, including their likenesses, attire and physical descriptions.