Man confessed to killing B.C. girl because he feared losing crime job: lawyer

VANCOUVER — Fear of losing a job that offered multiple perks and a promising future with a well-connected crime group led a man to falsely confess to murdering a 12-year-old girl in British Columbia in 1978, a defence lawyer said Monday in closing arguments.

Patrick Angly told B.C. Supreme Court that Garry Handlen also didn’t want to bring any “heat” on members of the close-knit organization that supported him through his common-law wife’s cancer treatment and accepted him as family.

Handlen’s alleged confession came after an undercover officer posing as the head of the fictitious group told him police had a DNA sample linking him to the crime but it could disappear if he provided enough details to pin the blame on a former employee who was dying.

Angly said the boss had already told Handlen he was certain of his involvement in Monica Jack’s death near Merritt. He said there were witnesses and the case would be going to court.

“They’re coming for you,” the undercover officer told Handlen in November 2014, about nine months into a so-called Mr. Big sting in Minden, Ont.

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“He has to agree with the boss,” Angly said. “He has to say he did it.”

Handlen says in the hidden-camera confession already presented in court and outlined by Angly on Monday that he was in a drunken stupor and remembers picking up a girl, having sex and strangling her.

“I know she was native,” he says.

However, Angly said Handlen didn’t provide any new information, only what he’d already been told by the RCMP during a 40-minute interview about a month after Jack disappeared in May 1978.

“It would be wrong of you to draw inferences from the fact that Mr. Handlen was questioned in 1978,” he told jurors. “That would be wrong and unfair.”

Handlen has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the death of Jack. Her remains were found 17 years after she disappeared on a mountain where Handlen says later in the confession he murdered her and burned her clothes.

Angly said Handlen had already seen the crime boss firing someone else in a scenario the RCMP had concocted earlier and did not want to lose a lifestyle that offered him friends, food, hotels and the chance of a middle-management job with the organization that had paid him nearly $12,000 for jobs like smuggling cigarettes, loan sharking and repossessing vehicles.

Angly said his client had told multiple lies, suggesting his confession was just one more, and not because he was boasting, as the Crown has suggested, but because “he is a liar.”

He said Handlen’s lies stretched from saying he had been a member of the British army’s Special Air Service to claims he smuggled goods across international lines as a scuba diver and studied for a pilot’s licence.

“Is there anybody better suited to putting together a bullshit story than Mr. Handlen? Probably not.”

While none of the stories he told the other group members were true, it was in his client’s best interest to confess to murder so his dreams with the organization would not be snatched away, Angly said.

He said his client answered a lot of leading questions by the undercover officer and offered up answers that were publicly available, including in a television documentary, such as having seen Jack at a turnoff on the side of a highway and driving up a dirt road.

“It’s the police, in the form of a Mr. Big, that created the narrative, that created the story,” he said of Handlen’s alleged confession.

— Follow @CamilleBains1 on Twitter.

Camille Bains, The Canadian Press