Raymond Collison, a mechanic from Chesterville, was 58 years old when he disappeared without a trace in August 2009. His skeletal remains were found five years later in a sewer.
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The Crown has lost its appeal in the case of Jimmy Wise, who was acquitted by a jury in 2020 of murder and manslaughter in the death of Raymond Collison.
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Crown prosecutors appealed the not guilty verdict and asked the Ontario Court of Appeal to order a second trial for Wise, arguing that the judge had “compromised” the secrecy of the jury’s deliberations and that evidence had been excluded from the trial. trial that “materially affected” the acquittal. .
Wise, a retired mechanic, was residing in a Winchester long-term care home when he was arrested in 2018 and charged in connection with Collison’s death.
He was found not guilty on December 7, 2020.
Collison, a mechanic from Chesterville, was 58 when he disappeared without a trace in August 2009. His skeletal remains were found five years later in a culvert in Morewood, near Wise’s property. Collison had been shot five times: one in the back of the head and four in the back.
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Wise “quickly emerged” as the prime suspect in the man’s death, according to a summary of the case, after investigators discovered Wise had “negative feelings” toward Collison.
But the Crown case was “entirely circumstantial,” according to the Court of Appeal summary, and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty after six days of intense deliberations.
Those deliberations became a central point of the Crown’s appeal, with prosecutors arguing that the trial judge inadvertently breached the secrecy of the deliberations and should have declared a mistrial.
Superior Court Judge Kevin Phillips presided over Wise’s murder trial.
With the jury deadlocked at the end of the trial, allegations surfaced that one juror was “bullying” and “threatening” other jurors in the deliberation room.
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Phillips conducted an investigation into the claims, and the juror in question admitted to telling others to “fuck off” and threatening to punch another juror in the face.
It was during that investigation that a juror revealed the offending juror’s intentions: he was adamant that the deadlocked jury return with a guilty verdict.
The Crown at the time asked Phillips to declare a mistrial, arguing that the “cumulative effect of the investigative process violated the jury secrecy rule and undermined the fairness of the trial.”
Phillips refused to declare a mistrial, and instead the jury was dismissed.
After another day of deliberations, the remaining 11-member jury returned with a not guilty verdict.
The Crown had also argued that dismissing the jury “would cause the remaining members to disapprove, not only of their conduct, but also of their opinion (which was to convict).”
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The Court of Appeal said that while it was “regrettable” that the jury’s voting intent was revealed, the judge conducted a “careful and limited investigation” which did not infringe fair trial rights.
“No reasonable person could believe that (the jury) was dismissed because of his opinion. He was fired because of his misconduct,” the appellate court wrote.
The Crown also appealed an earlier ruling by another judge that excluded evidence from Wise’s trial after finding that police violated Wise’s rights during two searches of his home.
Ontario Provincial Police conducted an undercover search of Wise’s home in October 2014 and took photos of several items of interest, including a weekly planner and a composition book that had several pages removed.
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Police seized the book after obtaining a second search warrant in 2016.
A forensic examination determined that “a two-page map with Xs in circles had been torn out” and “the police theory was that this map revealed the location of Collison’s remains, as well as the locations of other known suspicious deaths and homicides.”
The jury was not allowed to hear anything about Wise’s long and bizarre history with the law. He was suspected of serial murder in the 1980s and, after his name became public, he won an apology from the provincial attorney general and compensation for damages.
The draft book was declared inadmissible at Wise’s trial and the Court of Appeal rejected the Crown’s arguments to overturn that ruling.
“It was apparent that there were gaps in the information available to law enforcement,” the panel wrote, and investigators “attempted to fill” those gaps with the expert opinion of a forensic psychiatrist.
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The doctor had told the court that it was “within the realm of possibility that (Wise) still possessed personal items belonging to Collison or other alleged victims…”
However, the judge found “no evidence to support that claim” and said the expert’s opinion was based on the general theory that serial killers kept “memories” of their victims.
The Court of Appeal rejected the Crown’s argument and upheld the judge’s ruling, saying the second search warrant in 2016 “did not give rise to reasonable and probable grounds to believe that (Wise) was guilty of any further murder, or that serial killers probably keep ‘memories’ of their murders”.
The court also rejected a third Crown appeal and upheld an earlier ruling that excluded “hearsay” evidence from Wise’s trial.
Collison had told a friend that Wise once “threatened to make him disappear,” saying, “He doesn’t want me around anymore.”
With files from Andrew Duffy
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