Richard Oland's body was found in his office here on the morning of July 7, 2011. He had been beaten to death with what police believe was a drywall hammer, and left with 45 wounds to his head, neck and hands. Blood was spattered widely on the hardwood floor.
What happened to Mr. Oland's blood during the attack became a crucial question in the grisly second-degree murder trial of Dennis Oland – Richard's son – as lawyers delivered their closing arguments on Monday.
The case of alleged patricide has become an obsession in this small Maritime city. The Olands are the family behind the Moosehead beer empire, both revered and resented for their wide-ranging influence. Claire Appleby, a true-crime connoisseur, drove to Saint John from Moncton to witness Monday's proceedings.
"There's all the elements of an interesting crime story," she said. "Betrayal, jealousy, greed!"
As dozens watched in a packed courtroom, lead prosecutor P.J. Veniot charged that Dennis Oland, 47, was motivated by long-simmering antipathy toward his father, and killed the older man on the evening of July 6 in "a crime of passion."
The defence, headed by prominent Toronto lawyer Alan Gold, countered by pointing to the lack of forensic evidence linking Mr. Oland to the crime scene – remarkable, he said, given the brutality of the attack.
Leaving the court in stunned silence, Mr. Gold displayed several horrific images of the carnage left by the killer that evening.
Monitors showed the elder Mr. Oland lying face down, his scalp a landscape of gashes. Blood was dispersed so widely in the office that cleanup and repairs cost a reported $30,000.
Next, the monitors showed the most talked-about piece of evidence in this endlessly talked-about case: the brown sports jacket worn by Dennis Oland on July 6, 2011. The jacket was marked with four specks of blood, found by investigators to contain his father's DNA.
If Mr. Oland had viciously bludgeoned his father to death with a hammer, the jacket would have been stained with much more blood, Mr. Gold argued.
"There is no way to go from that bloody scene to that jacket," he said.
Referring contemptuously to "those four tiny spots that the Crown is so fond of," Mr. Gold returned over and over to the concept of "blood spatter," a phrase that became a kind of refrain.
"There was no spatter," he said. "There should have been lots of spatter, a ton of spatter."
The blood stains on the jacket are in fact tiny, hard to see on courtroom monitors. Mr. Gold has argued that the blood could have landed on the jacket through everyday physical contact between father and son – Richard Oland was known to have a scalp condition that left scabs, and occasionally chewed his cuticles.
Despite extensive testing, there was no blood or DNA found on any of Dennis Oland's possessions except for the jacket, Mr. Gold noted: none on his BlackBerry, none on the steering wheel of his Volkswagen, and none on his shirt or shoes.
"If I could steal from Winston Churchill," he said, "never have so many searched for so long to find so little."
A smooth-talking outsider in an insular, plain-speaking city, Mr. Gold obliquely acknowledged what many court watchers see as a potential factor in the case when facing jurors Monday.
"I've been told by others than I'm what you call a 'come-from-awayer,' " he said. "While it is true that I'm not from here, I have come to admire and appreciate the Maritime way of life. You are the most polite people in Canada, and the friendliest."
Mr. Veniot – who has the advantage of a pronounced New Brunswick accent despite his modest oratorical gifts – focused in closing arguments on Dennis Oland's motive.
When Dennis visited his father on the afternoon of July 6 to discuss family genealogy, he was struggling with money. His bank accounts were frequently overdrawn, court heard, and he had been forced to ask his manager at CIBC Wood Gundy for an advance.
Meanwhile, Dennis continued to pay his father interest on a $538,000 loan that Richard had extended during his son's divorce. The elder Oland had a net worth of $36-million when he died. Mr. Veniot suggested that the disparity in their financial situations caused Dennis to snap.
"The accused would no longer live paycheque to paycheque while the father sat on a fortune," the prosecutor said.
On the second element of Mr. Oland's supposed motive, it was relatively easy for the Crown to establish that Dennis and Richard did not get along.
"He and I didn't have that close father-son relationship," Dennis told police in a videotaped interview the day after the killing. "He would say and do things that could be hurtful."
Mr. Veniot also pointed to a portion of that interview in which Dennis complained about his father's eight-year affair with a local real-estate agent.
"She really seems to be a wack job," Mr. Oland told the investigator. "They call her the Dragon Lady."
Shoddy police work become a factor in both arguments Monday.
Mr. Gold complained that too many officers had been allowed to enter the crime scene, and that some of those officers used the bathroom adjacent to Richard Oland's office, possibly destroying evidence of a cleanup effort. An investigator on the case also handled Dennis Oland's brown jacket without gloves, while the force left the jacket folded in a paper bag for months before sending it for tests.
Mr. Veniot tried to minimize the significance of the cops' bumbling, saying that "no investigation is perfect," but he conceded that the number of officers allowed into the crime scene should have been limited.
It's possible – indeed many here believe – that mistakes by police have reduced any hope of finding out the truth in the Oland murder. People in Saint John speculate about a hung jury. Frustrating though it may be, the trial could end inconclusively.
"Throughout the whole trial, everyone was waiting for the big moment – and it didn't come," said April Cunningham, a former reporter for the Telegraph-Journal in Saint John.
The jury will receive its instructions on Tuesday.
Eric Andrew-Gee