Reference no: EM133284808

The Exoneration of David Milgaard -

A little after 6:30 a.m. on the morning of January 31, 1969, 16-year-old David Milgaard drove into the city of Saskatoon with his two teenage companions, Nichol John and Ron Wilson. There were ice crystals in the air; the temperature hovered just below -40 degrees Celsius. Milgaard and his friends were looking for the home of their friend Albert Cadrain, but became lost, first stopping at a motel to obtain directions, and then becoming stuck in ice in a back alley, a few miles from the Cadrain home. They knocked on the door of a home in the neighbourhood where they had become stuck, and a local couple invited them in, allowing them to make arrangements to get their car out of the back alley. The three friends spent about a half hour in the home, chatting amicably with the couple, and then finally made their way to Cadrain's, arriving about 9 a.m. On the same morning, Gail Miller, a 20-year-old nursing assistant, left her rooming house a little before 7 a.m. to walk a few blocks to her bus stop. She never arrived. She was dragged into a back alley, stabbed repeatedly in the back and chest with a small paring knife, and sexually assaulted. Her body was found about an hour later, face down in a snow bank. Her underwear was down around her ankles, and there were 11 stab wounds in her back, above her breast, and on the left side of her neck. The police initially believed that the killing was the work of a predatory rapist who had committed three sexual assaults on women in the same neighbourhood during the previous six months; these crimes all involved the use of a knife, and dragging the victims into a back alley, before perpetrating the attacks. Police interviews in the local neighbourhood after the killing were turning up little of value, although there was some forensic evidence of note. A trail of Gail Miller's belongings was found, going from the crime scene a few blocks away, to the Cadrain home. Albert Cadrain told police in early March that he had seen blood on David Milgaard on the morning of the murder. Cadrain had already been interviewed by Regina police in February, strip-searched, and subjected to a rectal examination for drugs. At that time he had laughed at police suggestions that he, Milgaard, or Wilson could be responsible for such a crime. The police charged him with vagrancy; he was convicted and sentenced to a week in jail. Saskatoon police, after receiving this information from Cadrain, interviewed Milgaard, John, and Wilson repeatedly. They began to think that one of these three young hippie kids from Regina, likely David Milgaard, was responsible for the rape and murder of Gail Miller. Within a few months, the police had statements from both Wilson and John, implicating Milgaard. The two teens finally said that Milgaard had left the car that morning after being stuck in a back alley, and before arriving at the motel; they claimed he had gone out of sight, and stabbed and raped a young woman before returning to the car. In January 1970, David Milgaard was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to hang. His appeals against the conviction were unsuccessful, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Fast-forward to 1990. David Milgaard had been in federal penitentiaries for more than 20 years, but his mother, Joyce, had always believed in his innocence. Two important developments took place during that year. First, the Milgaards learned that someone had been convicted in 1970 for the rapes in Saskatoon that occurred in the months prior to the Gail Miller murder. That person was Larry Fisher, who had a history of violent rape with knives, and was serving a 12-year sentence for raping and stabbing a woman in Saskatchewan and leaving her for dead. Fisher had also been living in the basement of the Cadrain home in 1970 with his wife, Linda; the trail of belongings leading from Gail Miller's body to Cadrain's now had a different interpretation attached to it. Second, a private investigator tracked down Ron Wilson. Over a few beers, Wilson confessed that he and John had decided to "sink" Milgaard to get police investigators off their backs-and that Milgaard had never left the car at all.

A Personal Perspective on the Milgaard Case Neil Boyd

In that same year, 1990, I was supervising a directed studies on homicide with Kim Rossmo, who was in the process of developing his now globally renowned technique of geographic profiling, a tool that permits police officers to focus on the likely residence of offenders in cases of serial crimes. Kim and I received a grant for an academic study of the Milgaard conviction, and we set to work. It was an example of what might best be called "criminology in action": we read law in the form of hundreds of pages of trial transcripts and appeal transcripts; we visited the crime scene and timed the movements that were behind the theory of the Crown; and we interviewed all of the witnesses at trial who would talk to us, most notably David Milgaard, Ron Wilson, and Linda Fisher (the former wife of Larry Fisher). Criminology had come a long way since 1969. We knew in 1990 that the statistical likelihood of having two predatory sex offenders active in the same neighbourhood in Saskatoon in 1969 was extremely small. We also knew, in large measure from Kim's geographic profiling, that Larry Fisher was a much better bet for this crime; he had a lengthy history of predatory sexual assault; David Milgaard had no criminal history at all. By 1990 we knew that wrongful convictions occur for a variety of reasons: tunnel vision by the police, lying by individuals in custody (or in debt to police in some way), a lack of relevant DNA evidence, false confessions, and erroneous forensic evidence at trial. The Milgaard convictions had all of these variables in play. The police never backed away from their initial tunnel vision: their view that Milgaard was guilty persisted, quite surprisingly, even after 1990, when Fisher surfaced as an alternative suspect and Wilson recanted his testimony. Both John and Wilson had spent time in police custody before offering up false statements regarding Milgaard's guilt. Cadrain had been a police informer prior to the murder of Gail Miller; four years after his testimony against Milgaard, he was committed to a psychiatric institution for mental health difficulties. Our own careful reconstruction of the timeline of the homicide, available from the trial transcript, revealed to us that the theory of the Crown was not tenable. There simply was not enough time for David Milgaard to rape and kill Gail Miller. And it was almost beyond belief to think that this teenage boy would be chatting amicably with a motel operator and a couple in Saskatoon just minutes after raping and stabbing a young woman to death. We learned something important from this case: individuals can be reluctant to admit having made tragic mistakes and, instead, may run away from those life-changing errors, as Ron Wilson and Nichol John did. In April 1992, after the Milgaard case had been referred to the Supreme Court of Canada, the court came down with its unanimous decision. The court could not conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Milgaard was not guilty, and for reasons that are still hard to fathom today, it could not even conclude that Milgaard's innocence was more probable than his guilt. They simply concluded that the new evidence regarding Larry Fisher might lead to a different outcome, and so they ordered a new trial. The province of Saskatchewan decided not to prosecute, given the time lag between the events of 1969 and the present, and so David Milgaard was set free, but not without a cloud still over his head. Was he guilty or innocent? There was no answer. But in 1997 we finally received a verdict, not from the fallible realm of human justice, but from the science of DNA testing. New developments in DNA testing in Britain had made it possible to determine the DNA link between the spermatozoa found on Gail Miller's clothing and the DNA of the two suspects, David Milgaard and Larry Fisher. The results exonerated David Milgaard and clearly matched Larry Fisher. Today, David Milgaard is a free man, and was awarded $12 million in compensation for spending 23 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. And Larry Fisher, now in his 60s, is serving a 25-year term for the first-degree murder of Gail Miller. This case is a reminder of the progress of criminology over time. Ultimately, it was science, in this case, that led to justice, providing an important reminder of both human fallibility and the need to continually expand our understanding of crime.

Questions -

1. What can you say about this case?

2. How many different kinds of criminological study are mentioned in this case study?

3. Why is this a worthwhile case study for criminologists to examine?

4. What larger questions or issues does it raise for anyone studying crime?

5. What reasons might account for "tunnel vision" on the part of police?

6. In what ways has our understanding of crime expanded since Gail Miller's murder?