What’s the difference between domestic violence and murder?

No, that was a serious question. Because after eleven episodes, 26 cases, and 32 bodies, it seems to me that we in North America at least have a major problem telling the difference between the two. It seems like serial killers get more deserving sentences because they didn’t know their victims, while those found guilty of murdering, raping, or otherwise abusing those close to them are routinely given a slap on the wrist. We saw it just last week with Jerry Smaale, who was sentenced to just 50 months in jail (a little over four years) plus two years probation after bashing is girlfriend’s head into a tile floor and burying her in a shallow grave in the woods. It’s as though they can’t be held accountable because their partners somehow signed up for the abuse by being with them; that by entering into these relationships, the courts consider that to be consent for the terrible things they suffer, the fear they can’t escape, and the all too often horrific ways their lives end. It doesn’t matter which side of the border you’re on, our justice system needs an overhaul in that respect. If anything, I feel like domestic abusers—in particular those who commit crimes like the ones I’m about to tell you about—should receive harsher sentences for betraying the trust and love of their partners, and for the danger the pose to all future love interests—if we even believe that people like this can feel love, rather than just ownership.

For that reason, I’m going to issue a rare trigger warning for this episode for domestic violence with a side of sexual assault. I won’t be very graphic, but I know as a domestic abuse survivor it was really hard for me to read one of the accounts I’m going to quote heavily here, and I know it’s going to be really hard for some of you to listen to. If this episode isn’t for you, that’s fine and I’ll see you in the next one, or you can fast forward to our second case of the evening. I’ll leave a timestamp in the episode description.

This isn’t a typical Highway of Tears case. There’s no missing person. We have a body, and we know who the killer is. Hell, we even have an eyewitness! But like all the cases on this podcast, there is a massive miscarriage of justice.

In the wee hours of January 19, 1992, the Sullivans were just having a good time with a friend. Wayne and Maureen were out drinking at the Alpine Pub in Prince George with Maureen’s close friend Sandi. (I haven’t been able to find Sandi’s last name, at in articles from the time of the crime, her name was withheld for privacy reasons.)

The three of them were at the bar until closing time. Sandi later stated she had four beers, but there’s no record of how much the others drank. It is pretty clear however that Wayne, at least, was heavily intoxicated.

Sandi drove the three of them to the Sullivan’s home, where they invited her in for a drink. On the way up the walk, Maureen slipped on the pavement. While she was uninjured, she was cold and wet so once they got inside she went straight to the bathroom to change, leaving her husband and friend in the entryway. As Sandi was struggling to pull off her boots, Wayne grabbed her behind. Startled, she tried to get away from him. She told him to stop, that it made her uncomfortable and she didn’t think his wife would like it. In response, he grabbed her and kissed her.

To quote an article from the Prince George Citizen:

“He said, ‘I’ve been thinking about this. I think that you and Maureen and I should have this threesome.’

“She said she told him it wasn’t a good idea. She said her husband and Sullivan’s wife would not approve.

“’He said they (Sullivans) had previously discussed it,’ she said. The complainant said she expressed doubt.”

Later, Maureen and Sandi were chatting casually at the kitchen table. Wayne came up behind them, putting his arms around them both, once again insisting on a three way and that Sandi should live with them.

Maureen, at least, did not take him seriously. She took his arm and escorted him to the bedroom, returning a few moments later. Neither woman brought up his behavior.

Again from the Prince George Citizen:
“All of a sudden Wayne came back in the kitchen. I said, ‘Gee big guy, I thought you had passed out.’”

Wayne didn’t acknowledge the joke, instead collecting his drink and going to the living room. The women talked for a few more minutes before Sandi got up to go.

“I remember seeing Wayne and Maureen standing together at the door—all of a sudden there was a loud noise and a big flash and I saw Maureen falling to the ground.”

In shock, Sandi thought it was some kind of joke, some sick joke to make her agree to stay. But then Wayne pointed the gun at her and ordered her into the bedroom.

Once in the bedroom, she was told to undress. She begged Wayne to check on his wife. He left, returning a moment later to report that she was still breathing.

When Sandi continued to hesitate, Wayne became angry. She took off her jacket and blouse, all the while urging him to take care of his wife. He left a second time to check on her, and Sandi dove for the bedside phone, dialing 911, but only getting a recording. She tried again, but this time Wayne was on the extension, ordering her to hang up.

After sexually assaulting Sandi, Wayne picked up the phone and dialed 911 himself. The recording was played in court at his trial, in which he requests police and an ambulance for his wife. When the operator asked who shot his wife, he confirmed he did.

At the trial under cross examination, Sandi confirmed that she’d known the Sullivans for three years, and that Wayne acted out of character that night. Well, I would certainly hope that coming on to his wife’s friends, pulling a gun, plus rape and murder would be out of character. However, this was used to the defense’s advantage. Despite the coroner testifying that Maureen had been shot point blank in the head, the 911 call, and the victim testimony, the defense was able to successfully argue that Wayne Sullivan was Not Criminally Responsible Because of a Mental Disorder, also known as a temporary insanity plea. And what mental disorder did he have? Was it untreated schizophrenia? Bipolar disorder? Perhaps some sort of anger management issue he’d failed to treat?

No. No, his mental disorder was “extreme intoxication.” The last time I checked, that’s not listed in the DSM, but apparently the jury agreed with this diagnosis and he was acquitted on all charges, though ordered by the court not to drink. The order included random testing, and in summer 1998 he was jailed for failing to produce a blood sample. After one year he was given an absolute release with no restrictions because the court failed to file paperwork describing why he should remain on parole.

The absolute rant I could go off on right now. I don’t even have words for this level of injustice. Alcoholism should never be an excuse for murder. Never. Now a woman is dead because of it, and another has had her life changed forever. Even worse, I can’t find any record of him being charged for sexual assault, kidnapping—nothing pertaining to Sandi’s ordeal. Maureen was only 30 when she was killed. Her friends and family are understandably livid about this and brought forward a petition in 1993 to parliment to try to have intoxication removed as one of the mental disorders listed in that temporary insanity defense, but it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. According to section 33.1 of the Criminal Code of Canada, extreme intoxication may still be used as a defense—it might not be a winning defense, but it can still be entered and has a chance of working.

Just the fact that the jury found this to be a reasonable excuse of murder makes me absolutely sick. I don’t know who the jurors were or what ratio of men to women it was, but it just feels like the Good Old Boys club, that group of middle aged drunks who show up at the bar every Friday night to enable each other as they complain about their wives and how unfair life has been to them for making them white men got together for this acquittal.

Back in Episode 8, I mentioned a name and promised we’d be hearing it again: Brian Peter Arp. To recap, Arp kidnapped and murdered Marnie Blanchard, who was looking for a ride at 2am outside the Rock Pit Cabaret in Prince George. The circumstances surrounding her death remain a mystery, but in 1998 Arp was tried and convicted of her murder, along with that of another woman: 38 year old Therese Umphry.

When police questioned him in Therese’s death, he refused to give a DNA sample, but police were able to test the butts of the cigarettes he smoked during the interview. The DNA matched semen found on the body of Therese Umphry, and was later matched to Marnie Blanchard.

In searching for information about Therese, I stumbled on some court documents which mentioned Marnie and how the police came to suspect Arp in her murder, so please allow me to back up just a little bit to tell some more of Marnie’s story; I feel it’s the least I can do for her.

The same night Marnie was at the Rock Pit Cabaret, Arp went drinking with a friend, who later testified in court. Around midnight, Arp drove him home and dropped him off, but instead of heading home, the friend noticed that Arp turned back toward town. The next day when they met, the friend noticed that the sleeve around the gear shift in his truck was damaged. Arp claimed he’d gone back to town to give a girl a ride to Vanderhoof. She’d promised to pay him for gas, but discovered she didn’t have any money when they arrived, so she left her jewelry with him, instead. Arp claimed his wife was furious when she found a strange woman’s jewelry in his pocket.

All of this happened back in 1990. As I mentioned in Episode 8, the friend went to the police when Marnie’s body was found, but Arp was uncooperative. They finally convinced him to give hair samples, but they didn’t match the physical comparison to the samples taken from Marnie’s body. Because this was still very, very early for DNA, no further testing was performed on the hair samples. I don’t have any record of where they are now or what happened to them after 1990. Presumably, they’re in a box somewhere and could have been used to solve this case much sooner, had someone thought to test them for DNA.

Therese, or Theresa, as she’s called in court documents, went bar hopping with friends on February 13, 1993, and they must have had quite a night. Between 2:20 and 3:40 in the morning, she was seen walking near a convenience store where she hitched a ride. She was so drunk she couldn’t even tell them where she lived. After driving around for a while, they returned her to the area where they found her and sped off. It was the last time anyone saw her alive—except for Arp.

Lest than 12 hours later, at 2:30pm, her nude body was found in a snowbank 50km south of Prince George. She was partially frozen, and presumably had been there for some time. Her clothing had been thrown down an embankment, some of it landing more than a kilometer from her body. Her bra had been cut off and tied in the back, and one of her shoelaces was also cut, as if with a knife. She had been strangled both manually and with a ligature. It wasn’t entirely clear what the ligature was, but the pathologist suggested the cut shoelace could fit the bill.

The documents I have fail to mention why Arp was a suspect in Therese’s murder, only that he had been interviewed several times by police in the intervening years, and presumably there were enough similarities between the way Marnie vanished and was then found and how Therese’s body was found to make police suspect the killer could be the same person or people. Though the police told Arp his original hair samples were being tested for DNA, this was also the point when they confiscated his cigarette butts, presumably for a “fresh” DNA sample, and to ensure there was no risk of contamination. Either way, the DNA confirmed that there was only a 1 in 31 BILLION chance that someone other than Arp murdered Marnie and Therese. Those are pretty hard odds to argue with, since that’s roughly six times the entire population of the planet in 1993.

Arp was denied both full parole and day parole in 2019, and continues to serve out his sentence. He refuses to confess to his crimes, and since his arrest has been involved in nearly a dozen incidents in jail. According to an interview with Prince George Citizen in 2019, he reportedly turned over a new leaf in 2015 after realizing his uncooperative and threatening behavior wouldn’t get him out of jail. So we can see where his priorities are. Thankfully, the judge at his appeal said that it would be “too difficult” to even calculate the harm he could do if freed, so he remains in prison.

The night of February 13, Therese was on a double date with her younger sister, Marie Healy. They were chatting and visiting at the home of Stephan Hetu, Therese’s boyfriend.

When Marie and her fiance got up to leave, she tried to convince her sister to come with her. Marie didn’t trust many of Therese’s friends, and knew her sister was…let’s say, motivated by alcohol. Unfortunately, Therese didn’t listen. According to a later statement from Marie, Therese had “a history of wandering off on her own,” sometimes for a drink.

I don’t have fond feelings for alcoholics, as you might have gathered from the last segment. I don’t think drunkenness is an excuse for bad behavior. But I also believe that regardless of what mental state you are in, you deserve to walk down the street unmolested. Unfortunately, Arp doesn’t share that opinion. This is mostly conjecture on my part, pieced together from the interviews, articles, and court documents I’ve read, but Arp was probably cruising the streets of Prince George in his favored time block, sometime between 2:30 and 3:30am when he saw a clearly intoxicated woman stumbling down the street. He probably offered her a ride, and instead left her naked by the side of the road. He tried to strangle her with his bare hands, but perhaps because of the cold, he couldn’t get enough pressure, so he reached instead for the closest thing at hand—the shoelace—wrapping it around her neck and pulling hard. When he was done, he threw her clothes out the car window as he drove away.

If I can try to put a silver lining on all of this, I will, and it’s Corrina Merasty-Gallant. Corrina is Therese’s niece. In 2018 she spoke to CBC news, describing how hard her family had to fight to get the RCMP to investigate her aunt’s death. Corrina would have been about 13 when she died, but 15 when Arp was charged, and 18 when he was convicted. “We, as family and friends, shouldn’t have to bug the RCMP to find the people that did this to our family,” she said.

Corrina, along with so many other survivors and family members of the victims of the Highway of Tears, is now an advocate for missing and murdered indigenous women, girls, and two-spirits through Sisters in Spirit. She works to raise awareness of the dangers along Highway 16, and encouraging a thorough investigation not only into those currently missing, but into the people who are supposed to be looking for them and hunting down their killers.

“It’s also the beginning of raising awareness to the atrocities and injustices of these many, many thousand women who have not been given justice,” Catherine Anne Martin said. “As citizens of this country, they have not been served, the family has not been served and something has to change.” Catherine is another member of Sisters in Spirit, a filmmaker who has been using her work to raise awareness for the victims.

There are too many missing, and too many dead. And all too often, these cases were entirely preventable. And not because the victims shouldn’t have been drinking, or shouldn’t have been hitchhiking. But because the killers should have been minding their own business instead of looking for people to take advantage of.

And I think that is where I need to leave you here tonight, folks, before I go off on an entirely inappropriate rant. Keep them in your minds and hearts—all of them. All 26. Because there’s still more to come on the Highway of Tears.

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Sources:

https://medium.com/@natasha.leigh/highway-of-tears-1969-1999-d47386654778
http://pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca/fedora/repository/pgc:1993-12-01/-/Prince%20George%20Citizen%20-%20December%2001,%201993
https://lakinafolabilaw.com/intoxication-defence/#:~:text=Mild%20intoxication%20is%20never%20a,for%20offences%20with%20specific%20intenthttp://pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca/fedora/repository/pgc:1993-12-01/-/Prince%20George%20Citizen%20-%20December%2001,%201993
https://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/local-news/murderer-of-two-women-denied-parole-3736801
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/sisters-in-spirit-events-mmiwg-1.4851505
https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1664/index.do
https://www.ranker.com/list/highway-of-tears-facts/nathan-gibson
http://pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca/fedora/repository/pgc:1995-03-01/-/Prince%20George%20Citizen%20-%20March%2001,%201995