Buried evidence?

Man jailed 19 years for murder learns incriminating police recording of someone else was never turned over to defence

- BETSY POWELL

Did Toronto police investigators “bury” a shocking tape recording of a man admitting sexual encounters with a 10-year-old murder victim in order to convict a man who went on to serve nearly two decades in prison for a crime he insists he did not commit?

That’s the allegation at the heart of an unusual court proceeding initiated by Timothy Rees, 61, who claims he was wrongfully convicted of second-degree murder in the strangulation death of Darla Thurrott, found lifeless in her bed on March 17, 1989.

A tape-recorded police interview with James Raymer — a 53-year-old man who slept in a room across from Darla’s bedroom — was so incriminating, Rees should never have been charged with her murder, let alone convicted, Rees’s lawyer James Lockyer argued this week while grilling several former Toronto police officers over their investigation.

Rees long ago exhausted all avenues of appeal, and so he turned to Innocence Canada while serving his life sentence. It was only when a lawyer with the non-profit advocacy group requested full disclosure of the case, that they received an audio cassette tape of an interview conducted between a Toronto police constable and Raymer, the owner of the Etobicoke house where Darla lived with her parents.

The recording was never disclosed to Rees’s defence lawyer in 1990.

After reviewing this “fresh evidence,” federal justice officials last year sent the case back to the Ontario Court of Appeal for a rare criminal conviction review hearing, saying there was “reasonable basis to believe that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred.”

If the panel of three judges agrees, Rees’s case will join the list of Canada’s highest-profile wrongful convictions, alongside those of names like Steven Truscott, Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall and David Milgaard.