April 7, 2021 • 37 mins
A Nova Scotia man was targeted for the murder of his ex-girlfriend despite a rock solid alibi and evidence pointing toward a man later discovered to be a serial killer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
On November twelfth, Brenda Way's body was discovered behind a
dumpster in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Her throat had been split,
with a solid alibi. The initial investigation cleared her ex
boyfriend Glenna Soon of the murder, but nearly a year later,
a new investigator was assigned to this cold case, who
used the ramblings of a crack addic seeking leniency in
(00:25):
order to bring Glenn back into suspicion. The investigation continued
down an increasingly ridiculous path, involving psychics and even more
crack addicts. While there was evidence pointing toward a bearded
serial killer the entire time, police both disregarded and hid
that evidence, though, choosing to stay with the course they
(00:48):
knew was a farce, and Glenn spent over sixteen long,
miserable years behind bars until Innocent's Canada was able to
unearth that detail and spring and from prison. However, nothing
will ever replace all of the years stolen from Glenn
and his family. This is wrongful conviction with Jason plom
(01:25):
Welcome back to wrongful conviction with Jason Flom. That's me,
of course, I'm your host, and today you're going to
hear a story from north of the border. We have
two incredible lawyers, Sean McDonald and Phil Campbell from Innocence Canada. Sean,
first of all, welcome to Wrongful Conviction. Thanks for being here.
Thanks very much for having me and Phil. I'm so
(01:45):
glad that you're here as well to highlight the work
that Innocence Canada does because I don't believe that this
organization gets enough attention and we want to change that.
So thanks for being here as well. Thanks so much,
And of course save the best for last. We have
a guy who I can only call a hero to
so many of us, Glenna Soon, who went to hell
(02:07):
and back and is here to share his story with us.
So Glenn, thank you for being here. Thank you. I'm
glad to be here. Yeah, it's sort of a miracle
that you made it through and that you are here,
and it speaks to your strength and your spirit. So
I'm really excited that you're here and I'm sorry you
had to go through this. Let's go back to the beginning, Glenn,
where did you grow up? I grew up in Sydney,
(02:29):
Cape Brenton, Nova Scotia is a small town. And how
was your life before this? What were some of your hobbies.
My hobbies was playing a guitar, try to learn how
to play a guitar properly and stuff, listen to country
music and trying to play a country music And you
were raising a pretty large family as well at the time, right, yes,
I had three kids to raise back in the seventies,
(02:51):
and then everything went to hell in a handbasket. We're
talking about Sunday morning, November twelve five, your ex girlfriend,
Brenda Way, was discovered behind an apartment building in Dartmouth, Nova, Scotia,
and her throat had been split. Even I think for
avid listeners of the show, who have heard so many
(03:13):
of these stories, this one, it's fucking sick. Now. This
is where I want to turn to the legal team
because the preventable nature of all of this, it's so
stunning to me. Tell me what the hell happened here.
So at the beginning, police rightfully interviewed all the people
that had contact with Brenda Way. They interviewed Glenn. They
(03:33):
determined that he had an ALBI. He was with his
roommate and friend and Morse all night with two other
roommates that night, so he had a supportable, credible truthful,
most importantly alibi, And in the end it appeared to us,
at least on the record that we reviewed, that they
cleared him as a suspect, or at least d prioritize
him as a person of interest and moved on to
(03:55):
look at other things. Yea. So he had this excellent
alibi armed within hours of the discovery of the body,
and sometime in the year or two afterwards, the brenda
Way homicide shifted to two different officers, and those two
guys decided that Glenna soon must have done it. And
really it's a kind of classic example of the tunnel
(04:18):
vision that so often characterizes wrongful convictions, where you stop
investigating a crime and you start investigating a person. And
once they fixed on Glenn, the first thing they had
to do was discredit the alibi. So they pulled in
Anne Morse, who had told the truth. They arrested her
for obstruction of justice for having told the truth. They
(04:41):
told her she was going to jail for three to
five years. They intimidated her, and then they finally persuaded
her that maybe she couldn't know, and maybe she wasn't sure,
even though she had always said before then it has
always said afterwards that that statement I gave the morning
Brenda was found was the truth. So they thought they
had a little c in the alibi. And then they
(05:01):
started finding recruiting other witnesses, and there was just a
daisy chain of witnesses, each less credible than the either,
but collectively they made up the case that the Crown
eventually put in front of the jury. It's like they
send in the clowns, right, One farcical witness after another
(05:21):
is dragged into this. Can you walk us through this
cast of characters real quick? Glenn was hitting the streets
after Brenda was killed, trying to find out who killed her.
One of the people Glenn was regularly speaking with was
a woman by the name of Margarette Hartwik. Margaret was
a well known street prostitute. Now it's interesting because at
(05:42):
different times Margaret Hartrick would call Glenn and say I
have information on Brenda's murder. And there were a number
of occasions where Glenn brought Margarette to the attention of
the police because she was telling him I know what happened.
I'm hearing on the streets what's happening, And Glenn was saying, well,
you know, tell the police. Mark Good eventually was picked
up by the police in relation to a customer of
(06:03):
hers who had died, and while she was speaking to
the police about this, she said to them, well, I
also have information on Brenda Way's homicide. And so the
police officers said, okay, well you know what do you
have to say, and they sat her down and she
started to go on, just rambling die tribe about psychic
(06:24):
visions and psychic dreams that she had where she saw
areas of Dartmouth where Brenda was taken by different people,
and how she was killed, to the point where the
cops just said, look, thanks for the information, and they
started to shuffle her out the door, or at least
this is the way they recall the conversation and when
they testified at Glenn's trial, and then Margaret suddenly said, well,
(06:44):
I guess you don't care that Glenn was at the
sight of the murder at four fifteen am and the
morning Brenda was killed. So suddenly they're saying that she's
changing her evidence after forty five minutes of psychic ramblings,
after months and months of ramblings with and to the police,
and puts Glenn at the scene of the murder inconsistent
(07:05):
with the alibi that they already checked out and found
to be credible. And that was the moment where the
new officers investigating this case had their witness The investigation
increased in pace from that point forward. The next development
was the emergence of Brenda's sister, Jane. Jane told the
police that she had found a knife, and she said
(07:26):
that she had been looking for the knife near the
scene of the crime, which had been thoroughly searched by police,
because a psychic had told her that her sister was
killed by a broken tipped knife, and lo and behold,
she had gone out, looked around the area adjacent to
the murder and found a broken tipped knife. The police
(07:48):
would ultimately seize this knife. The knife would have no
forensic evidence that tied it either to the homicide or
to Glenn as soon, but it ultimately became an exhibit
trial and it became the focal point of the next
key witnesses story, and that is a woman named Mary Cameron.
(08:08):
Marry Cameron was, unsurprisingly to us, a friend of Jane,
a sister, and she popped up to the police with
a story that she had been with a friend of hers,
and Glenn had walked in and said, I killed her.
I got her ear to ear, I cut her so
hard I broke off the tip of the knife. This
(08:30):
is a confession. He supposedly volunteers in front of a
complete stranger, and Mary becomes the next crown witness, even
though the woman who she was with her friend, who
also knew Glen, flatly denied that any such conversation had
taken place, so that Margaret and now Mary so. Brenda's
(08:50):
cousin is a woman by the name of Karen Way. Karen,
within two weeks of the murder, was at a bar
with her boyfriend and heard two guys walking down the
bar in this dark ced bar in Dartmouth, one guy
telling the other guy you should have seen the look
on Brenda Way's face when I slid her throat. And
the guy who said it was a burly guy with
(09:11):
dark hair and a beard, and it was so disturbing
to Karen. Karen calls the police. The police show up
and they do nothing. They take a report. That report
gets filed. The officers did not go back to Karen
Wade to try and talk to her about what she saw.
They didn't go to the bar. They didn't look at
cameras around the bar, they didn't do anything. And that
(09:31):
description very closely tracks the description of Michael Wayne McGray,
who is a serial killer currently doing life in prison.
I think for seven murders or maybe eight that he's
confessed to so far. The detective that investigated Glenn didn't
give a crap about that evidence. Nothing was done with it.
It's so sickening because aside from the grotesque in justice
(09:54):
that was done to Glenn and his family, all they
had to do was follow up on that and then
the rest of this mayhem could have been avoided and
these other victims would never have known the terrible faith
that befell them. So it's just sickening. It it doesn't
make any sense. It's never going to make any sense.
But gleanned back to you. So back in March, you
(10:18):
surrendered to the police, right, and you still maintained that
this was just going to get worked out because you
with somebody who I presumedly believed in the justice system. Yeah,
I thought it was going to be worked out in
two weeks time at the tops, because I knew I
was innocent, I knew they were making a mistake. But
I found that there was a can of wide warrant
one for me, so I turned myself into the RCMP.
(10:41):
They arrested me, They took me on a plane, took
me back to Nova Scotia, and I was never so
embarrassing on my life since shackles and change, going to
an airport that was clogged full of people. It's just
all happened so fast. So they gave you a polygraph.
You passed the polygraph, but of course they ignored as well,
and you were smart enough to see what they were
(11:03):
up to, which is why you requested a lawyer. But
now it takes a crazy turn in the courtroom, and Sean,
if you could take us through that, Glen didn't see
eyed eye with the lawyer that he had. Glen's approach
was pretty simple. I'm innocent. Bring everybody in that you
can find to say whatever they have to say, because
the truth will show the jury that I didn't commit
this murder. And that created tension between him and his lawyer.
(11:26):
That hit a crescendo and Glenn fired his lawyer at
the very beginning of a long jury trial four second
degree murder, and at that point Glenn was granted a
short adjournment to try and find another lawyer. However, inmates
inside of correctional facilities can't just go to a phone
anytime they want to pick it up and dial a lawyer.
(11:48):
They've got to have somebody except to cleck call. On
the other hand, they have to have a lawyer who's
willing to talk to them, and they have to have
a lawyer who's capable and has the time to prepare
for a murder trial. And in Glenn's case, those things
didn't align and the court lost patience with him, and
the judge said, I'm not giving you any more time.
You're going to represent yourself with the grades six education
(12:09):
and don't worry about it. Everybody has to have their
first case, and that is when Glenn's trial started. This
is basically like asking someone to go perform surgery on themselves.
I mean, I think that's not an unfair comparison because
the odds of success are about the same. And at
one point, Glenn, um, you told the jury you're innocent,
(12:32):
that evidence was being hidden from them, all of which
was true. And then the judge ordered the sheriffs to
physically cover your mouth and drag you out of the
courtroom in front of the jury as you screamed out
your innocence. It's a fucking horror show. What was that
like from your perspective? I said to myself, I I
need a lawyer. I can't do this. So I decided
(12:54):
when the judge came in, I'm gonna tell her that
I need a lawyer. So long story short, I had
no idea that you can speak in front of the the jury.
And I stood up and said, your honor, I'm an
innocent man. I need a lawyer. She said, take him out.
Take him out. So two sheriffs dragged me across the
courtroom floor and right in front of the jury. The
judge said, if I hear any more outburst and mutmaster,
(13:17):
assume you'll be watching your trial through a total circuit camera.
All I could do is stay up all night and
reach statements and radio questions to ask these people if
it gets them in their lives. Every time I would
get to a point where I was putting them in
a corner where they had no choice to tell the
truth to Crown an object and cleared the courtroom. I
don't know how many times the jury was cleared in
(13:38):
the courtroom several and I was exhausted, but I kept
on going through it, and of course the results were predictable.
September seventeenth, the jury went out and they found you
guilty of second degree murder. And can you describe that
horrible moment for us? It was a fielding I felt
(14:00):
before and I should have said I'm wrongly convicted. Now
it's official, and she objection to it. She said, Mr Son,
you had your chance to testify in the trials over
now you can't be talking. I knew I was being railroaders,
railroads to hell. This episode is underwritten by the A
(14:27):
i G pro Bono Program. A I G is a
leading global insurance company, and for over a decade, the
A I G pro Bono Program has provided thousands of
hours of free legal services and other support to nonprofit
organizations and individuals most in need. More recently, the program
added criminal and social justice reform as a key pillar
(14:48):
of its mission. This episode is brought to you by
Stand Together. Stand Together is a philanthropic community dedicated to
helping people improve their lives. For more than twenty Stand
Together and its partners have been on the front lines
of criminal justice reform by empowering people to take action,
supporting nonprofits and working with businesses. Stand Together tackles the
(15:11):
root causes of problems in our communities and empowers those
closest to the problems to drive solutions. Solutions like reducing
unjust prison sentences through the First Step Act, empowering community
based programs that help people re enter society, and now
working to bridge divides in our communities. To learn how
you may get involved, visit stand Together dot org slash conviction.
(15:40):
There you are sentenced to eighteen and a half years
to life on December thirteenth of nineteen. I think many
people in United States have a vision of Canadas a
peaceful place with a more just system that is violent perhaps,
But in fact the prisons there are just as bad
as here. And you were sent to one of the
(16:01):
worst ones. Is that correct? That's correct? And I went
to Dorchester Penitentiary and that's the last I have seen
any scenery because it's a forty five ft wall around
the place, and that's all I've seen is that wall.
And uh, it was dangerous there for me. I almost
got killed here a dozen times. I was telling anybody
and everybody who would listen to me, because I'm an
(16:23):
innocent man. They made a mistake. So I knew a
guy in there who was done leather work. I had
a hat with just a blank hat, and I got
him to make up a patch on my hat. Wrongly convicted,
and I wore that had around the prison until I
wore it out, and then the guards took it from me.
The guards came to me one day and they said,
(16:43):
we're putting you in the hall. I said, why why
you put me in the hall? I didn't do anything,
So the handcuffed me, took me down the hall. They
got me in there and they shoved me against the
wall and they got me on the floor and I
was still handcuffed behind my back. Mind you, and this
guard he would wait about two seventy five pounds. He
was beating me with it looks like a staying a
(17:04):
steel pipe. So he was beating me over the head
with that, and he broke my ankles with it. And
they cut the clothes off me right there with a
pair of scissors while I was still laying in my
face taking a beating. And uh, they beat me half
the debt and then they took me into a camera
cell and just left me there for about five hours.
The only thing I had on me was my underwear.
(17:26):
They caught the boots off of me and everything. The
only thing was in there was a toilet and a sink,
and the sink didn't work, so the toilet did. I
was beat so bad I flushed the toilet a few
times and I drank water the toilet. I was so
dehydrated from the beating that it took me. I mean,
it's hard to even hear this story, and I just,
you know, I wanted to apologize to you on behalf
(17:49):
of you know, the entire human race, because nobody should
ever be subjected to a fraction of what you went through.
And you had to go through all of it. And
here you are a guy that I think a lot
of people can probably late to you more than you know.
I mean, here you are a guy in your forties,
five ft five forty pounds, no history of violence, no
ability to navigate this orn situation that you're thrust into.
(18:13):
It's literally something out of a movie that would give
anybody nightmares. And you went through it. But somehow or other,
you got through it, and then, you know, things eventually
turned around. How did Innocence Canada become aware of the
case and how did you manage to unravel this insanity?
Added around two thousand and six, I was in the
(18:34):
Innocence Canada office for a meeting with our executive director,
and I had some time to kill and I was
sitting in the boardroom. And in the boardroom at Innocence Canada,
like most innocence organizations across the country or the world,
there's boxes of documents and memos everywhere. So I happened
to pick one up and it was a memo written
by a lawyer at Innocence Canada by the name of
Jerome Kennedy. And Jerome had represented Glenn a year beforehand
(18:58):
on his appeal. And as I turned the pages, as
everybody does with this case, I got madder, and I
got madder, and I got madder, And by the time
I finished that overview memo, I was in And from
that point forward, I knew that I wasn't gonna start
I wasn't gonna stop working on Glenn's case until we
were able to get them justice. So I looked at
the five witnesses that were called a trial from the
(19:20):
perspective of an appellate lawyer, and Mary Cameron was the
strongest crown or prosecution witness, but Sean did some digging
on her and eventually she signed an affidavit that took
back most of her evidence, and Cathy Vlad, who had
witnessed the supposed confession, made it very clear that nothing
like that had ever happened. We managed to develop links
(19:43):
between the sister of Brenda, Jane, who was led by
the psychic to the knife, with the three core witnesses
in the case. Each of them had connections to Jane
or to her family, and so the thing started to crumble.
But critical to it was a girl who also worked
the streets of Halifax and who experienced something dreadful in
(20:07):
the winter of seven. We call her Megan. That's a pseudonym,
but Megan had been picked up by a burly man
with dark hair and a dark beard, and he had
taken her out to an industrial site in the middle
of winter at night in the dark, assaulted her and
(20:28):
raped her, and then, rather than killing her, drover back
into the city and in the course of that admitted
that he was the killer of brend Away. Glenn had
been brought back from British Columbia in the spring of
nine nine, in a blaze of local publicity, arrested for
the murder of Brendaway. Megan had seen that on TV
(20:49):
and said, well, that must be the guy who assaulted
me and confessed to killing Brenda Way, and so she
went to the police with that story, believing that it
was true. Although the man she described had striking similarities
to the description of Demand that Karen Way had heard
Bragg about committing the murdered days after it had happened
(21:12):
in nineteen five, Glen, as it turned out, had spent
that whole winter when that attack took place in Halifax,
on the other coast of Canada, thirty five hundred miles away,
and that could be documented. However, the Crown at trial
ran a theory that Glen had somehow gotten a plane
ticket flowing to Halifax in the middle of winter, raped Megan,
(21:34):
confessed to the murder of Brenda, and then flown back
without any other trace, no evidence of his presence in Halifax,
no evidence of his flight from British Columbia to Halifax.
By the time of Glenn's appeal in the early two thousands,
Michael McGray, a burly bearded man had been arrested and
(21:56):
publicly identified as a serial killer. Indeed, he had shown
a propensity to break about his killings, and he bragged
about killings enough that he was quickly identified as a
serial killer. With McGray and custody and publicly known as
a serial killer. Jerome Kennedy, acting for Glenn an appeal,
asked for disclosure of what the police had on Michael McGray,
(22:20):
and the police came back with a document that said
that he was not viewed as a suspect by the
police and the killing of Brenda Way. Jerome tried to
advance that to the Court of Appeal, but it had
no substance and it was rejected as a ground of
appeal and Glenn's conviction was upheld. So that's the case
that we were handed and we thought that Michael McGray
(22:43):
looked like a good suspect if we just had more
evidence about him. And at that point Sean, who was
a lawyer but also an on the ground investigator in
this case, got in touch with a couple of guys
by just working the prison system. During the course of
those inquiries, we found two people who had done time
(23:04):
with Michael McGray, and both of those witnesses independent of
one another, none of whom knew Glen, told us stories
about McGray, providing detail of murders that he committed to
them while they were in prison together. The story they
told was chilling, and it was chilling not only because
it demonstrated what we felt we already knew, which was
(23:26):
that Glen was innocent. They were disturbing because of the
detail they provided. And these people had no idea what
details attached to Brenda Way's murder. But suddenly we're getting
these people giving us affidavits providing that detail. We later
found out that McGray had lived but a hundred yards
away from where the body was found, and we had
another witness that came to us and told us they
(23:46):
moved out of that apartment McGray and his girlfriend within
forty eight hours of the murder. And not only did
they move out, they left their furniture on the front stoop.
So we've got McGray as a very plausible of suspect
in this case. Remember, Megan. Megan added one other really
striking feature, the only very distinctive feature about her description.
(24:09):
She said that the man who had confessed to Brenda's
murder while raping an assaulting horror though it was the
middle of winter and a very cold night with snow
on the ground, was wearing socks and sandals on his feet.
When we began to look at photos of McGray and
then talked to these inmates who knew him, it became
(24:30):
clear that that was a very well known characteristic of
Michael McGray. So we've got a guy who fits the description,
including in that unique way, who fits the m oh perfectly,
and so we were developing that for the Minister of
Justice when something really stunning happened. We got information from
the retired our CMP officer that he had been speaking
(24:53):
with another our CMP officer who knew much more than
we ever dreamed about Glenna Sooon's case and about Michael McGray.
This fellow was an officer with the Behavioral Profiling unit
of the RCMP in Halifax, and he accumulated every data
point possible about McGray. He spent the better part of
(25:15):
a year conducting an investigation into McGray, but specifically into
the murder of brend Away, which by this point was
a solved, closed case, and he eventually reached the conclusion
that McGray or another guy he identified were very probable
killers of Brenda Way and that glennissoon was innocent. He
(25:37):
had tried his best for months and months to get somebody,
you know, either the RCMP which he worked for, or
the Halifax Police Service which had investigated this case, to
do something about it. And remember, Glenn is still before
the Court of Appeal while this is happening. And not
only that, but Jerome Kennedy, his lawyer, has made a
(26:00):
specific request of the prosecution to obtain information about McGray
to see whether there was anything relevant that he could
use on Glenn's appeal. And rather than disclosing this information,
the report he got back from the Crown, who got
it from the police was that there was no relevant
information and McGray was not viewed as a suspect. It
(26:23):
is hard to believe, but it is as blatant and
as well documented as I have just summarized it. Eventually
we were able to establish exactly what I've just said,
that is that the police themselves had identified Michael McGray
as a suspect for the murder Glenn was doing time
for and had suppressed it throughout the appellate process. I'm
(26:46):
going to just go through that again, because it's so
incredibly it's just breathtaking in terms of the misconduct. While
the Department of Justice was investigating, but unbeknownst to Glenn
or his legal team, this police officer, this good cop,
conducted a multi year investigation into Glenn's conviction and concluded
(27:08):
that he was innocent. He had concluded that a serial
killer McGray had lived a hundred yards from the murder
scene and was the real killer. Oh my god. And
then it gets worse. So this guy, to his credit,
told all of his superiors that he believed there was
an innocent man in prison with Glen, of course, but
instead of looking into the claims and freeing Glenn, as
(27:31):
they clearly should have done, they transferred this officer from
his unit and destroyed the fucking evidence that he had
compiled over the course of his investigation. I mean, there's
really there's a special place in hell for people who
conducted themselves in this manner. I don't know how else
to say it, so slightly less colorful language. That was
(27:52):
our submission to the Minister of Justice. Well, well that's
a good thing I didn't write it. So between the
(28:14):
information that suggested McGray was the killer and the massive
constitutional violation represented by the non disclosure of evidence of innocence.
We eventually had a very powerful case for first getting
Glenn out of jail, which we managed to do in
two thousand fourteen, and then getting him exonerated, which the
(28:34):
Minister of Justice and then the Supreme Court of Nova
Scotia did in two thousand nineteen. Glenn, what was it
like to walk out of this like living tomb that
you were in, this this torture chamber, into free air
for the first time in this uh, in this century.
It was the happiest day in my life. I couldn't
(28:55):
It couldn't be any happier. And it was just astronomical
feeling of happiness to be a free man. And I
don't know, I can't explain the feeling for you that
I felt when when I first got to my brother's place.
The first day I woke up a free man in
a beautiful home. I went outside just to smell the air,
(29:17):
and I went out in the backyard, and uh, I
wouldn't go nowhars for about a week. I was too
scared to go anywhere because I thought the cops are
gonna frame me again. So it took still almost another
five years for the full exoneration. And I want to
talk to the guys about how good did you feel?
How good do you feel today knowing that Glenn is
(29:40):
never going back, He's never gonna have to wear an
ankle monitor again, He's never gonna be subjected to this
inhumane system again. You know, I think the person who
summed it up best was the judge that acquitted Glenn
on March the first of two thousand and nineteen of
his justice, Chipman, and he said, you kept the faith
with remarkable dignity. That you are to be commended for
(30:01):
your courage and your resilience. You are a freeman. I
sincerely wish you every success. And that sort of summed
up our feelings too has been steadfast. I mean, he
is now a member of our family. He's not just
a client. That that's the truth, you know. I get
asked very often two things, whether the people who framed
the innocent man or woman faced any disciplinary actions, much
(30:24):
less prison for their own misconduct, and whether or not
the person who suffered so greatly the exonerated person themselves
received any compensation. And I'm assuming the answer to both
of those questions in this case is unfortunately no, so no. Actually,
this case is really taken on an increased significance in
Canada anyway, because it is the first case in Canadian
(30:45):
history where the premier or in other words, of the
governor of the province in which the rawful conviction took
place ordered his Attorney general to start in a criminal
investigation into the officers who were involved and contributed to
the miscarriage of justice and the destruction of the evidence.
So the answers yes to that, And the second part
(31:08):
of your question with respect to compensation is also yes
to the credit of Prime Minister Trudeau, an Attorney General
Lametti and of course the government of Nova Scotia. They
came to the table and took this very serious. They
understood that it was an egregious, wrongful conviction of sort
of historic proportions, and we were able to negotiate financial
(31:30):
compensation package for Glenn that as far as money can contribute,
it's going to give him an opportunity to try and
as best he can with the years he has left,
move on with his life and you know, have a
pickup truck and a dog and a maybe you know,
a little place in the woods where he can sort
of relax and try and find peace to the extent
(31:50):
that he can. Well, that's amazing news and I'm so
glad they finally came around on this. But nothing is
ever going to make up for all the time lost.
Now this does go a long way towards making Glen
more comfortable. As you said, I like the visual with
a pickup truck and the dog, but he deserves every
blessing that life has to offer. Um, if anyone wants
(32:13):
to get involved or help out with the great work
that Innocence Canada is doing, your help would go a
long way. So we're gonna have a link in the
episode bio and you can also follow Innocence Canada on Instagram.
Scroll down, click get involved. And now this is as
good a time as any to turn to the part
of the show called closing arguments. First of all, I
(32:34):
want to thank Sean McDonald, Phil Campbell, and most of
all Glenn as Soon for joining me and us here
and sharing your story and your spirit with our audience.
And now I'm going to turn my microphone off, kick
back in my chair and just listen as you say
whatever you want to say whatever that's left to say,
(32:56):
and let's start with Phil, then Sean, and it's with Glenn.
Of course. One of the things I find about innocence
cases like Glens is that when you look back on them,
when you start to unravel them, you see so many
places where things could have taken a different turn, where
things could have gone right but went wrong. There's never
(33:18):
just one thing. There's always a cascade of injustice and error.
And when I think back to the original police who
had a sound alibi and acted on it and treated
it with the seriousness that deserved, that was one place
where things could have gone right but went wrong. When
(33:39):
I think back to the trial that Glenn went through,
and this was not a contest of equal adversaries, and
then I think of the appellate process when the truth
not just a glimpse into the truth, but a full
dossier on the truth about what I believe is the
real killer in this case was a veil able to
(34:00):
the authorities and it didn't emerge. When you go through
that kind of history, you realize what I think is
the great lesson of the criminal law, which is that
we should always approach this business of arresting people and
charging them with crimes and putting them on trial and
throwing them in jail. We should always approach it humbly,
because we are fallible, and our processes, as well refined
(34:24):
and carefully reviewed as they are, are fallible. The police
we trust, the prosecutors we trust, the juries we trust.
All of those things will fail sometimes, and we are
best to go at this whole business of crime punishment
with a lighter, humbler touch. And this case, just to me, illustrates,
as so many do, how many ways there are to
(34:45):
go wrong, and how vigilant we should be to ensure
that things go right. I look at this case as
the evolution of not just a wrongful conviction case, but
for me, looking back now, weren't the evolution of of
of a friendship and in the friendship that I developed
with Glenn from the first call that he made to
(35:08):
my phone when it was only the two of us
in this world. It was him on a penitentiary pay phone,
me on my phone talking to a guy that I
clearly knew was in some deep, deep pain. And uh,
you know the evolution of that as it expanded and
we started to work harder and get more evidence slowly
(35:28):
as it's sort of the gratitude that Glenn and I felt,
has more and more people got involved, including Phil, you know,
including using the resources of Innocence Canada. We use many investigators.
One in particular who isn't here today, who died. His
name is Steve Jones, was an amazing investigator. I'm grateful
to Steve. I'm grateful to Fred Fitzsimmons, who was another
(35:48):
investigator who was an x RCMP pomicide investigator who probably
put a hundred people in jail for murder rightfully, but
believed in Glenn's innocence. You know, I'm grateful to everybody
else that got involved, including celebrities like Michael B. Jordan's
supported glass case and did a video and we were
in the process now of writing him to think him.
But the point is that has the case evolved, our
(36:10):
friendship evolved, and has more people got involved. Both Glenn
and I are thankful to everybody that helped bring it
to this point. Glenn, over to you. Well, I'd just
like to say to my two lawyers, Sean McDonald and
Phil Campbell, I'm so grateful for your help and for
saving my life because because you did you literally saved
(36:32):
my life. If you had to come along, I wouldn't
have made it. I would have been dead by now.
Just let you know I had four heart attaction prison
and they only took me out for one, and I
got stints in my heart now and I only got
thirty five percent of my heart left because of what
happened to me. Well, we love you, Glenn, as simple
(36:54):
as that. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with
Jason Flam. Please support your local innocence projects and go
to the link in our bio to see how you
can help. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall,
Jeff Clyburne and Kevin Warns. The music on the show,
(37:16):
as always, is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction
and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with
Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number one
On November twelfth, Brenda Way's body was discovered behind a
dumpster in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Her throat had been split,
with a solid alibi. The initial investigation cleared her ex
boyfriend Glenna Soon of the murder, but nearly a year later,
a new investigator was assigned to this cold case, who
used the ramblings of a crack addic seeking leniency in
(00:25):
order to bring Glenn back into suspicion. The investigation continued
down an increasingly ridiculous path, involving psychics and even more
crack addicts. While there was evidence pointing toward a bearded
serial killer the entire time, police both disregarded and hid
that evidence, though, choosing to stay with the course they
(00:48):
knew was a farce, and Glenn spent over sixteen long,
miserable years behind bars until Innocent's Canada was able to
unearth that detail and spring and from prison. However, nothing
will ever replace all of the years stolen from Glenn
and his family. This is wrongful conviction with Jason plom
(01:25):
Welcome back to wrongful conviction with Jason Flom. That's me,
of course, I'm your host, and today you're going to
hear a story from north of the border. We have
two incredible lawyers, Sean McDonald and Phil Campbell from Innocence Canada. Sean,
first of all, welcome to Wrongful Conviction. Thanks for being here.
Thanks very much for having me and Phil. I'm so
(01:45):
glad that you're here as well to highlight the work
that Innocence Canada does because I don't believe that this
organization gets enough attention and we want to change that.
So thanks for being here as well. Thanks so much,
And of course save the best for last. We have
a guy who I can only call a hero to
so many of us, Glenna Soon, who went to hell
(02:07):
and back and is here to share his story with us.
So Glenn, thank you for being here. Thank you. I'm
glad to be here. Yeah, it's sort of a miracle
that you made it through and that you are here,
and it speaks to your strength and your spirit. So
I'm really excited that you're here and I'm sorry you
had to go through this. Let's go back to the beginning, Glenn,
where did you grow up? I grew up in Sydney,
(02:29):
Cape Brenton, Nova Scotia is a small town. And how
was your life before this? What were some of your hobbies.
My hobbies was playing a guitar, try to learn how
to play a guitar properly and stuff, listen to country
music and trying to play a country music And you
were raising a pretty large family as well at the time, right, yes,
I had three kids to raise back in the seventies,
(02:51):
and then everything went to hell in a handbasket. We're
talking about Sunday morning, November twelve five, your ex girlfriend,
Brenda Way, was discovered behind an apartment building in Dartmouth, Nova, Scotia,
and her throat had been split. Even I think for
avid listeners of the show, who have heard so many
(03:13):
of these stories, this one, it's fucking sick. Now. This
is where I want to turn to the legal team
because the preventable nature of all of this, it's so
stunning to me. Tell me what the hell happened here.
So at the beginning, police rightfully interviewed all the people
that had contact with Brenda Way. They interviewed Glenn. They
(03:33):
determined that he had an ALBI. He was with his
roommate and friend and Morse all night with two other
roommates that night, so he had a supportable, credible truthful,
most importantly alibi, And in the end it appeared to us,
at least on the record that we reviewed, that they
cleared him as a suspect, or at least d prioritize
him as a person of interest and moved on to
(03:55):
look at other things. Yea. So he had this excellent
alibi armed within hours of the discovery of the body,
and sometime in the year or two afterwards, the brenda
Way homicide shifted to two different officers, and those two
guys decided that Glenna soon must have done it. And
really it's a kind of classic example of the tunnel
(04:18):
vision that so often characterizes wrongful convictions, where you stop
investigating a crime and you start investigating a person. And
once they fixed on Glenn, the first thing they had
to do was discredit the alibi. So they pulled in
Anne Morse, who had told the truth. They arrested her
for obstruction of justice for having told the truth. They
(04:41):
told her she was going to jail for three to
five years. They intimidated her, and then they finally persuaded
her that maybe she couldn't know, and maybe she wasn't sure,
even though she had always said before then it has
always said afterwards that that statement I gave the morning
Brenda was found was the truth. So they thought they
had a little c in the alibi. And then they
(05:01):
started finding recruiting other witnesses, and there was just a
daisy chain of witnesses, each less credible than the either,
but collectively they made up the case that the Crown
eventually put in front of the jury. It's like they
send in the clowns, right, One farcical witness after another
(05:21):
is dragged into this. Can you walk us through this
cast of characters real quick? Glenn was hitting the streets
after Brenda was killed, trying to find out who killed her.
One of the people Glenn was regularly speaking with was
a woman by the name of Margarette Hartwik. Margaret was
a well known street prostitute. Now it's interesting because at
(05:42):
different times Margaret Hartrick would call Glenn and say I
have information on Brenda's murder. And there were a number
of occasions where Glenn brought Margarette to the attention of
the police because she was telling him I know what happened.
I'm hearing on the streets what's happening, And Glenn was saying, well,
you know, tell the police. Mark Good eventually was picked
up by the police in relation to a customer of
(06:03):
hers who had died, and while she was speaking to
the police about this, she said to them, well, I
also have information on Brenda Way's homicide. And so the
police officers said, okay, well you know what do you
have to say, and they sat her down and she
started to go on, just rambling die tribe about psychic
(06:24):
visions and psychic dreams that she had where she saw
areas of Dartmouth where Brenda was taken by different people,
and how she was killed, to the point where the
cops just said, look, thanks for the information, and they
started to shuffle her out the door, or at least
this is the way they recall the conversation and when
they testified at Glenn's trial, and then Margaret suddenly said, well,
(06:44):
I guess you don't care that Glenn was at the
sight of the murder at four fifteen am and the
morning Brenda was killed. So suddenly they're saying that she's
changing her evidence after forty five minutes of psychic ramblings,
after months and months of ramblings with and to the police,
and puts Glenn at the scene of the murder inconsistent
(07:05):
with the alibi that they already checked out and found
to be credible. And that was the moment where the
new officers investigating this case had their witness The investigation
increased in pace from that point forward. The next development
was the emergence of Brenda's sister, Jane. Jane told the
police that she had found a knife, and she said
(07:26):
that she had been looking for the knife near the
scene of the crime, which had been thoroughly searched by police,
because a psychic had told her that her sister was
killed by a broken tipped knife, and lo and behold,
she had gone out, looked around the area adjacent to
the murder and found a broken tipped knife. The police
(07:48):
would ultimately seize this knife. The knife would have no
forensic evidence that tied it either to the homicide or
to Glenn as soon, but it ultimately became an exhibit
trial and it became the focal point of the next
key witnesses story, and that is a woman named Mary Cameron.
(08:08):
Marry Cameron was, unsurprisingly to us, a friend of Jane,
a sister, and she popped up to the police with
a story that she had been with a friend of hers,
and Glenn had walked in and said, I killed her.
I got her ear to ear, I cut her so
hard I broke off the tip of the knife. This
(08:30):
is a confession. He supposedly volunteers in front of a
complete stranger, and Mary becomes the next crown witness, even
though the woman who she was with her friend, who
also knew Glen, flatly denied that any such conversation had
taken place, so that Margaret and now Mary so. Brenda's
(08:50):
cousin is a woman by the name of Karen Way. Karen,
within two weeks of the murder, was at a bar
with her boyfriend and heard two guys walking down the
bar in this dark ced bar in Dartmouth, one guy
telling the other guy you should have seen the look
on Brenda Way's face when I slid her throat. And
the guy who said it was a burly guy with
(09:11):
dark hair and a beard, and it was so disturbing
to Karen. Karen calls the police. The police show up
and they do nothing. They take a report. That report
gets filed. The officers did not go back to Karen
Wade to try and talk to her about what she saw.
They didn't go to the bar. They didn't look at
cameras around the bar, they didn't do anything. And that
(09:31):
description very closely tracks the description of Michael Wayne McGray,
who is a serial killer currently doing life in prison.
I think for seven murders or maybe eight that he's
confessed to so far. The detective that investigated Glenn didn't
give a crap about that evidence. Nothing was done with it.
It's so sickening because aside from the grotesque in justice
(09:54):
that was done to Glenn and his family, all they
had to do was follow up on that and then
the rest of this mayhem could have been avoided and
these other victims would never have known the terrible faith
that befell them. So it's just sickening. It it doesn't
make any sense. It's never going to make any sense.
But gleanned back to you. So back in March, you
(10:18):
surrendered to the police, right, and you still maintained that
this was just going to get worked out because you
with somebody who I presumedly believed in the justice system. Yeah,
I thought it was going to be worked out in
two weeks time at the tops, because I knew I
was innocent, I knew they were making a mistake. But
I found that there was a can of wide warrant
one for me, so I turned myself into the RCMP.
(10:41):
They arrested me, They took me on a plane, took
me back to Nova Scotia, and I was never so
embarrassing on my life since shackles and change, going to
an airport that was clogged full of people. It's just
all happened so fast. So they gave you a polygraph.
You passed the polygraph, but of course they ignored as well,
and you were smart enough to see what they were
(11:03):
up to, which is why you requested a lawyer. But
now it takes a crazy turn in the courtroom, and Sean,
if you could take us through that, Glen didn't see
eyed eye with the lawyer that he had. Glen's approach
was pretty simple. I'm innocent. Bring everybody in that you
can find to say whatever they have to say, because
the truth will show the jury that I didn't commit
this murder. And that created tension between him and his lawyer.
(11:26):
That hit a crescendo and Glenn fired his lawyer at
the very beginning of a long jury trial four second
degree murder, and at that point Glenn was granted a
short adjournment to try and find another lawyer. However, inmates
inside of correctional facilities can't just go to a phone
anytime they want to pick it up and dial a lawyer.
(11:48):
They've got to have somebody except to cleck call. On
the other hand, they have to have a lawyer who's
willing to talk to them, and they have to have
a lawyer who's capable and has the time to prepare
for a murder trial. And in Glenn's case, those things
didn't align and the court lost patience with him, and
the judge said, I'm not giving you any more time.
You're going to represent yourself with the grades six education
(12:09):
and don't worry about it. Everybody has to have their
first case, and that is when Glenn's trial started. This
is basically like asking someone to go perform surgery on themselves.
I mean, I think that's not an unfair comparison because
the odds of success are about the same. And at
one point, Glenn, um, you told the jury you're innocent,
(12:32):
that evidence was being hidden from them, all of which
was true. And then the judge ordered the sheriffs to
physically cover your mouth and drag you out of the
courtroom in front of the jury as you screamed out
your innocence. It's a fucking horror show. What was that
like from your perspective? I said to myself, I I
need a lawyer. I can't do this. So I decided
(12:54):
when the judge came in, I'm gonna tell her that
I need a lawyer. So long story short, I had
no idea that you can speak in front of the the jury.
And I stood up and said, your honor, I'm an
innocent man. I need a lawyer. She said, take him out.
Take him out. So two sheriffs dragged me across the
courtroom floor and right in front of the jury. The
judge said, if I hear any more outburst and mutmaster,
(13:17):
assume you'll be watching your trial through a total circuit camera.
All I could do is stay up all night and
reach statements and radio questions to ask these people if
it gets them in their lives. Every time I would
get to a point where I was putting them in
a corner where they had no choice to tell the
truth to Crown an object and cleared the courtroom. I
don't know how many times the jury was cleared in
(13:38):
the courtroom several and I was exhausted, but I kept
on going through it, and of course the results were predictable.
September seventeenth, the jury went out and they found you
guilty of second degree murder. And can you describe that
horrible moment for us? It was a fielding I felt
(14:00):
before and I should have said I'm wrongly convicted. Now
it's official, and she objection to it. She said, Mr Son,
you had your chance to testify in the trials over
now you can't be talking. I knew I was being railroaders,
railroads to hell. This episode is underwritten by the A
(14:27):
i G pro Bono Program. A I G is a
leading global insurance company, and for over a decade, the
A I G pro Bono Program has provided thousands of
hours of free legal services and other support to nonprofit
organizations and individuals most in need. More recently, the program
added criminal and social justice reform as a key pillar
(14:48):
of its mission. This episode is brought to you by
Stand Together. Stand Together is a philanthropic community dedicated to
helping people improve their lives. For more than twenty Stand
Together and its partners have been on the front lines
of criminal justice reform by empowering people to take action,
supporting nonprofits and working with businesses. Stand Together tackles the
(15:11):
root causes of problems in our communities and empowers those
closest to the problems to drive solutions. Solutions like reducing
unjust prison sentences through the First Step Act, empowering community
based programs that help people re enter society, and now
working to bridge divides in our communities. To learn how
you may get involved, visit stand Together dot org slash conviction.
(15:40):
There you are sentenced to eighteen and a half years
to life on December thirteenth of nineteen. I think many
people in United States have a vision of Canadas a
peaceful place with a more just system that is violent perhaps,
But in fact the prisons there are just as bad
as here. And you were sent to one of the
(16:01):
worst ones. Is that correct? That's correct? And I went
to Dorchester Penitentiary and that's the last I have seen
any scenery because it's a forty five ft wall around
the place, and that's all I've seen is that wall.
And uh, it was dangerous there for me. I almost
got killed here a dozen times. I was telling anybody
and everybody who would listen to me, because I'm an
(16:23):
innocent man. They made a mistake. So I knew a
guy in there who was done leather work. I had
a hat with just a blank hat, and I got
him to make up a patch on my hat. Wrongly convicted,
and I wore that had around the prison until I
wore it out, and then the guards took it from me.
The guards came to me one day and they said,
(16:43):
we're putting you in the hall. I said, why why
you put me in the hall? I didn't do anything,
So the handcuffed me, took me down the hall. They
got me in there and they shoved me against the
wall and they got me on the floor and I
was still handcuffed behind my back. Mind you, and this
guard he would wait about two seventy five pounds. He
was beating me with it looks like a staying a
(17:04):
steel pipe. So he was beating me over the head
with that, and he broke my ankles with it. And
they cut the clothes off me right there with a
pair of scissors while I was still laying in my
face taking a beating. And uh, they beat me half
the debt and then they took me into a camera
cell and just left me there for about five hours.
The only thing I had on me was my underwear.
(17:26):
They caught the boots off of me and everything. The
only thing was in there was a toilet and a sink,
and the sink didn't work, so the toilet did. I
was beat so bad I flushed the toilet a few
times and I drank water the toilet. I was so
dehydrated from the beating that it took me. I mean,
it's hard to even hear this story, and I just,
you know, I wanted to apologize to you on behalf
(17:49):
of you know, the entire human race, because nobody should
ever be subjected to a fraction of what you went through.
And you had to go through all of it. And
here you are a guy that I think a lot
of people can probably late to you more than you know.
I mean, here you are a guy in your forties,
five ft five forty pounds, no history of violence, no
ability to navigate this orn situation that you're thrust into.
(18:13):
It's literally something out of a movie that would give
anybody nightmares. And you went through it. But somehow or other,
you got through it, and then, you know, things eventually
turned around. How did Innocence Canada become aware of the
case and how did you manage to unravel this insanity?
Added around two thousand and six, I was in the
(18:34):
Innocence Canada office for a meeting with our executive director,
and I had some time to kill and I was
sitting in the boardroom. And in the boardroom at Innocence Canada,
like most innocence organizations across the country or the world,
there's boxes of documents and memos everywhere. So I happened
to pick one up and it was a memo written
by a lawyer at Innocence Canada by the name of
Jerome Kennedy. And Jerome had represented Glenn a year beforehand
(18:58):
on his appeal. And as I turned the pages, as
everybody does with this case, I got madder, and I
got madder, and I got madder, And by the time
I finished that overview memo, I was in And from
that point forward, I knew that I wasn't gonna start
I wasn't gonna stop working on Glenn's case until we
were able to get them justice. So I looked at
the five witnesses that were called a trial from the
(19:20):
perspective of an appellate lawyer, and Mary Cameron was the
strongest crown or prosecution witness, but Sean did some digging
on her and eventually she signed an affidavit that took
back most of her evidence, and Cathy Vlad, who had
witnessed the supposed confession, made it very clear that nothing
like that had ever happened. We managed to develop links
(19:43):
between the sister of Brenda, Jane, who was led by
the psychic to the knife, with the three core witnesses
in the case. Each of them had connections to Jane
or to her family, and so the thing started to crumble.
But critical to it was a girl who also worked
the streets of Halifax and who experienced something dreadful in
(20:07):
the winter of seven. We call her Megan. That's a pseudonym,
but Megan had been picked up by a burly man
with dark hair and a dark beard, and he had
taken her out to an industrial site in the middle
of winter at night in the dark, assaulted her and
(20:28):
raped her, and then, rather than killing her, drover back
into the city and in the course of that admitted
that he was the killer of brend Away. Glenn had
been brought back from British Columbia in the spring of
nine nine, in a blaze of local publicity, arrested for
the murder of Brendaway. Megan had seen that on TV
(20:49):
and said, well, that must be the guy who assaulted
me and confessed to killing Brenda Way, and so she
went to the police with that story, believing that it
was true. Although the man she described had striking similarities
to the description of Demand that Karen Way had heard
Bragg about committing the murdered days after it had happened
(21:12):
in nineteen five, Glen, as it turned out, had spent
that whole winter when that attack took place in Halifax,
on the other coast of Canada, thirty five hundred miles away,
and that could be documented. However, the Crown at trial
ran a theory that Glen had somehow gotten a plane
ticket flowing to Halifax in the middle of winter, raped Megan,
(21:34):
confessed to the murder of Brenda, and then flown back
without any other trace, no evidence of his presence in Halifax,
no evidence of his flight from British Columbia to Halifax.
By the time of Glenn's appeal in the early two thousands,
Michael McGray, a burly bearded man had been arrested and
(21:56):
publicly identified as a serial killer. Indeed, he had shown
a propensity to break about his killings, and he bragged
about killings enough that he was quickly identified as a
serial killer. With McGray and custody and publicly known as
a serial killer. Jerome Kennedy, acting for Glenn an appeal,
asked for disclosure of what the police had on Michael McGray,
(22:20):
and the police came back with a document that said
that he was not viewed as a suspect by the
police and the killing of Brenda Way. Jerome tried to
advance that to the Court of Appeal, but it had
no substance and it was rejected as a ground of
appeal and Glenn's conviction was upheld. So that's the case
that we were handed and we thought that Michael McGray
(22:43):
looked like a good suspect if we just had more
evidence about him. And at that point Sean, who was
a lawyer but also an on the ground investigator in
this case, got in touch with a couple of guys
by just working the prison system. During the course of
those inquiries, we found two people who had done time
(23:04):
with Michael McGray, and both of those witnesses independent of
one another, none of whom knew Glen, told us stories
about McGray, providing detail of murders that he committed to
them while they were in prison together. The story they
told was chilling, and it was chilling not only because
it demonstrated what we felt we already knew, which was
(23:26):
that Glen was innocent. They were disturbing because of the
detail they provided. And these people had no idea what
details attached to Brenda Way's murder. But suddenly we're getting
these people giving us affidavits providing that detail. We later
found out that McGray had lived but a hundred yards
away from where the body was found, and we had
another witness that came to us and told us they
(23:46):
moved out of that apartment McGray and his girlfriend within
forty eight hours of the murder. And not only did
they move out, they left their furniture on the front stoop.
So we've got McGray as a very plausible of suspect
in this case. Remember, Megan. Megan added one other really
striking feature, the only very distinctive feature about her description.
(24:09):
She said that the man who had confessed to Brenda's
murder while raping an assaulting horror though it was the
middle of winter and a very cold night with snow
on the ground, was wearing socks and sandals on his feet.
When we began to look at photos of McGray and
then talked to these inmates who knew him, it became
(24:30):
clear that that was a very well known characteristic of
Michael McGray. So we've got a guy who fits the description,
including in that unique way, who fits the m oh perfectly,
and so we were developing that for the Minister of
Justice when something really stunning happened. We got information from
the retired our CMP officer that he had been speaking
(24:53):
with another our CMP officer who knew much more than
we ever dreamed about Glenna Sooon's case and about Michael McGray.
This fellow was an officer with the Behavioral Profiling unit
of the RCMP in Halifax, and he accumulated every data
point possible about McGray. He spent the better part of
(25:15):
a year conducting an investigation into McGray, but specifically into
the murder of brend Away, which by this point was
a solved, closed case, and he eventually reached the conclusion
that McGray or another guy he identified were very probable
killers of Brenda Way and that glennissoon was innocent. He
(25:37):
had tried his best for months and months to get somebody,
you know, either the RCMP which he worked for, or
the Halifax Police Service which had investigated this case, to
do something about it. And remember, Glenn is still before
the Court of Appeal while this is happening. And not
only that, but Jerome Kennedy, his lawyer, has made a
(26:00):
specific request of the prosecution to obtain information about McGray
to see whether there was anything relevant that he could
use on Glenn's appeal. And rather than disclosing this information,
the report he got back from the Crown, who got
it from the police was that there was no relevant
information and McGray was not viewed as a suspect. It
(26:23):
is hard to believe, but it is as blatant and
as well documented as I have just summarized it. Eventually
we were able to establish exactly what I've just said,
that is that the police themselves had identified Michael McGray
as a suspect for the murder Glenn was doing time
for and had suppressed it throughout the appellate process. I'm
(26:46):
going to just go through that again, because it's so
incredibly it's just breathtaking in terms of the misconduct. While
the Department of Justice was investigating, but unbeknownst to Glenn
or his legal team, this police officer, this good cop,
conducted a multi year investigation into Glenn's conviction and concluded
(27:08):
that he was innocent. He had concluded that a serial
killer McGray had lived a hundred yards from the murder
scene and was the real killer. Oh my god. And
then it gets worse. So this guy, to his credit,
told all of his superiors that he believed there was
an innocent man in prison with Glen, of course, but
instead of looking into the claims and freeing Glenn, as
(27:31):
they clearly should have done, they transferred this officer from
his unit and destroyed the fucking evidence that he had
compiled over the course of his investigation. I mean, there's
really there's a special place in hell for people who
conducted themselves in this manner. I don't know how else
to say it, so slightly less colorful language. That was
(27:52):
our submission to the Minister of Justice. Well, well that's
a good thing I didn't write it. So between the
(28:14):
information that suggested McGray was the killer and the massive
constitutional violation represented by the non disclosure of evidence of innocence.
We eventually had a very powerful case for first getting
Glenn out of jail, which we managed to do in
two thousand fourteen, and then getting him exonerated, which the
(28:34):
Minister of Justice and then the Supreme Court of Nova
Scotia did in two thousand nineteen. Glenn, what was it
like to walk out of this like living tomb that
you were in, this this torture chamber, into free air
for the first time in this uh, in this century.
It was the happiest day in my life. I couldn't
(28:55):
It couldn't be any happier. And it was just astronomical
feeling of happiness to be a free man. And I
don't know, I can't explain the feeling for you that
I felt when when I first got to my brother's place.
The first day I woke up a free man in
a beautiful home. I went outside just to smell the air,
(29:17):
and I went out in the backyard, and uh, I
wouldn't go nowhars for about a week. I was too
scared to go anywhere because I thought the cops are
gonna frame me again. So it took still almost another
five years for the full exoneration. And I want to
talk to the guys about how good did you feel?
How good do you feel today knowing that Glenn is
(29:40):
never going back, He's never gonna have to wear an
ankle monitor again, He's never gonna be subjected to this
inhumane system again. You know, I think the person who
summed it up best was the judge that acquitted Glenn
on March the first of two thousand and nineteen of
his justice, Chipman, and he said, you kept the faith
with remarkable dignity. That you are to be commended for
(30:01):
your courage and your resilience. You are a freeman. I
sincerely wish you every success. And that sort of summed
up our feelings too has been steadfast. I mean, he
is now a member of our family. He's not just
a client. That that's the truth, you know. I get
asked very often two things, whether the people who framed
the innocent man or woman faced any disciplinary actions, much
(30:24):
less prison for their own misconduct, and whether or not
the person who suffered so greatly the exonerated person themselves
received any compensation. And I'm assuming the answer to both
of those questions in this case is unfortunately no, so no. Actually,
this case is really taken on an increased significance in
Canada anyway, because it is the first case in Canadian
(30:45):
history where the premier or in other words, of the
governor of the province in which the rawful conviction took
place ordered his Attorney general to start in a criminal
investigation into the officers who were involved and contributed to
the miscarriage of justice and the destruction of the evidence.
So the answers yes to that, And the second part
(31:08):
of your question with respect to compensation is also yes
to the credit of Prime Minister Trudeau, an Attorney General
Lametti and of course the government of Nova Scotia. They
came to the table and took this very serious. They
understood that it was an egregious, wrongful conviction of sort
of historic proportions, and we were able to negotiate financial
(31:30):
compensation package for Glenn that as far as money can contribute,
it's going to give him an opportunity to try and
as best he can with the years he has left,
move on with his life and you know, have a
pickup truck and a dog and a maybe you know,
a little place in the woods where he can sort
of relax and try and find peace to the extent
(31:50):
that he can. Well, that's amazing news and I'm so
glad they finally came around on this. But nothing is
ever going to make up for all the time lost.
Now this does go a long way towards making Glen
more comfortable. As you said, I like the visual with
a pickup truck and the dog, but he deserves every
blessing that life has to offer. Um, if anyone wants
(32:13):
to get involved or help out with the great work
that Innocence Canada is doing, your help would go a
long way. So we're gonna have a link in the
episode bio and you can also follow Innocence Canada on Instagram.
Scroll down, click get involved. And now this is as
good a time as any to turn to the part
of the show called closing arguments. First of all, I
(32:34):
want to thank Sean McDonald, Phil Campbell, and most of
all Glenn as Soon for joining me and us here
and sharing your story and your spirit with our audience.
And now I'm going to turn my microphone off, kick
back in my chair and just listen as you say
whatever you want to say whatever that's left to say,
(32:56):
and let's start with Phil, then Sean, and it's with Glenn.
Of course. One of the things I find about innocence
cases like Glens is that when you look back on them,
when you start to unravel them, you see so many
places where things could have taken a different turn, where
things could have gone right but went wrong. There's never
(33:18):
just one thing. There's always a cascade of injustice and error.
And when I think back to the original police who
had a sound alibi and acted on it and treated
it with the seriousness that deserved, that was one place
where things could have gone right but went wrong. When
(33:39):
I think back to the trial that Glenn went through,
and this was not a contest of equal adversaries, and
then I think of the appellate process when the truth
not just a glimpse into the truth, but a full
dossier on the truth about what I believe is the
real killer in this case was a veil able to
(34:00):
the authorities and it didn't emerge. When you go through
that kind of history, you realize what I think is
the great lesson of the criminal law, which is that
we should always approach this business of arresting people and
charging them with crimes and putting them on trial and
throwing them in jail. We should always approach it humbly,
because we are fallible, and our processes, as well refined
(34:24):
and carefully reviewed as they are, are fallible. The police
we trust, the prosecutors we trust, the juries we trust.
All of those things will fail sometimes, and we are
best to go at this whole business of crime punishment
with a lighter, humbler touch. And this case, just to me, illustrates,
as so many do, how many ways there are to
(34:45):
go wrong, and how vigilant we should be to ensure
that things go right. I look at this case as
the evolution of not just a wrongful conviction case, but
for me, looking back now, weren't the evolution of of
of a friendship and in the friendship that I developed
with Glenn from the first call that he made to
(35:08):
my phone when it was only the two of us
in this world. It was him on a penitentiary pay phone,
me on my phone talking to a guy that I
clearly knew was in some deep, deep pain. And uh,
you know the evolution of that as it expanded and
we started to work harder and get more evidence slowly
(35:28):
as it's sort of the gratitude that Glenn and I felt,
has more and more people got involved, including Phil, you know,
including using the resources of Innocence Canada. We use many investigators.
One in particular who isn't here today, who died. His
name is Steve Jones, was an amazing investigator. I'm grateful
to Steve. I'm grateful to Fred Fitzsimmons, who was another
(35:48):
investigator who was an x RCMP pomicide investigator who probably
put a hundred people in jail for murder rightfully, but
believed in Glenn's innocence. You know, I'm grateful to everybody
else that got involved, including celebrities like Michael B. Jordan's
supported glass case and did a video and we were
in the process now of writing him to think him.
But the point is that has the case evolved, our
(36:10):
friendship evolved, and has more people got involved. Both Glenn
and I are thankful to everybody that helped bring it
to this point. Glenn, over to you. Well, I'd just
like to say to my two lawyers, Sean McDonald and
Phil Campbell, I'm so grateful for your help and for
saving my life because because you did you literally saved
(36:32):
my life. If you had to come along, I wouldn't
have made it. I would have been dead by now.
Just let you know I had four heart attaction prison
and they only took me out for one, and I
got stints in my heart now and I only got
thirty five percent of my heart left because of what
happened to me. Well, we love you, Glenn, as simple
(36:54):
as that. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with
Jason Flam. Please support your local innocence projects and go
to the link in our bio to see how you
can help. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall,
Jeff Clyburne and Kevin Warns. The music on the show,
(37:16):
as always, is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.
Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction
and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with
Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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