The killer of 11-year-old Alison Parrott played by a strategic "game plan" when he selectively answered police questions at his interrogation, the Ontario Court of Appeal said yesterday.
The court voted 3-0 to reject Francis Carl Roy's claim that conniving police officers unfairly induced him to breach his constitutional right to remain silent.
In ending a drama that convulsed Toronto in the summer of 1986, the court pointed out that Mr. Roy spoke to his lawyer immediately before the interrogation.
He had clearly "decided from the outset of the interview to tell the police certain things and remain silent about other things," the judges said.
Alison was tricked into leaving her affluent midtown home to meet a man near Varsity Stadium on the afternoon of July 25, 1986. The man had asked to take pictures of her for a sports magazine.
Since Alison had recently qualified for a track meet in New Jersey, she took the bogus request to be genuine. Two days later, two teenaged boys discovered her naked body in a park on the west bank of the Humber River. She had been raped and strangled.
Mr. Roy was an early police suspect. However, he provided a detailed account of his whereabouts that weekend, and police had little else to link him to the crime. Three witnesses thought they had seen a girl who might have been Alison in the same area, but ruled out Mr. Roy as the man they saw with her.
It took 10 years for DNA technology to advance to the point where scientists were able to link Mr. Roy to sperm found in the dead girl's body. On April 13, 1999, he was arrested. This time, aware that the police had a DNA match, Mr. Roy admitted to having encountered Alison's body.
"He testified that he came across Alison's body while running through the park," Mr. Justice David Doherty wrote on behalf of Madam Justice Kathryn Feldman and Mr. Justice James MacPherson.
"He had stopped to urinate and found her body as he was about to resume his run. For some reason, which he made no attempt to explain, the appellant said that he put his finger into Alison's vagina. He said that he had masturbated earlier that morning and had not washed afterwards."
Notwithstanding the powerful DNA evidence, the jury at Mr. Roy's trial deliberated for five days before convicting him of first-degree murder. The 45-year-old man was sentenced to a mandatory life term with no parole for at least 25 years.
Lawyer Anil Kapoor put all his eggs in one basket at Mr. Roy's appeal, arguing only that his client had been denied his right to silence during his interrogation. Mr. Kapoor said that Mr. Roy signalled his intention to remain silent, yet police persuaded him to do otherwise.
Judge Doherty described Mr. Kapoor's legal argument as "an attractive presentation," but he said the trial judge, Superior Court Judge David Watt, had scrutinized the evidence very carefully and had no doubt about the voluntariness of Mr. Roy's statements.
"The right to choose whether to speak to the police lies at the heart of the right to silence," Judge Doherty said. "The trial judge's reasons are replete with findings of fact that deny the basic premise of the appellant's right-to-silence argument."
Judge Doherty said some defendants attempt to assert their right to silence and yet end up talking. These statements could be inadmissible, he said, but Mr. Roy's case was not one of them.
"On the trial judge's findings, the appellant stuck to his 'game plan' throughout the interview, answering some questions, declining to answer other questions, and posing questions to the investigating officer as he saw fit," he said.
One of Judge Watt's rulings at the trial prevented the jury from being told that Mr. Roy had raped a 19-year-old Toronto woman in 1979 and abducted a 14-year-old girl the next year. In fact, he was on parole when he murdered Alison.