"It was called the trial of the century in New Brunswick - - a confluence of celebrity, money and murder. Richard Oland of the Moosehead brewing family -- one of the richest, most powerful men in the region – was dead, bludgeoned in his office. Charged and convicted with the brutal killing, the victim’s son, Dennis Oland. Last week, Dennis Oland was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years in the 2011 killing. It’s a case where many felt family influence and clout would prevail. Police were accused of fumbling the high-profile case and now there is an appeal. Bob McKeown investigates a tangled family tale that ended in murder – with many questions still unanswered." 9.00 PM/9.30 NT; Friday 19 February
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/m/episodes/2015-2016/the-dick-oland-case-murder-in-the-family
"See Globe and Mail story on the trial's closing arguments: "Dennis Oland trial hears of motive, forensics and police missteps." (Reporter Eric Andrew-Gee)..."As dozens watched in a packed courtroom,
lead prosecutor P.J. Veniot charged that Dennis Oland, 47, was motivated
by long-simmering antipathy toward his father, and killed the older man
on the evening of July 6 in “a crime of passion.” The
defence, headed by prominent Toronto lawyer Alan Gold, countered by
pointing to the lack of forensic evidence linking Mr. Oland to the crime
scene – remarkable, he said, given the brutality of the attack. Leaving the court in stunned silence, Mr. Gold displayed several horrific images of the carnage left by the killer that evening. Monitors
showed the elder Mr. Oland lying face down, his scalp a landscape of
gashes. Blood was dispersed so widely in the office that cleanup and
repairs cost a reported $30,000. Next,
the monitors showed the most talked-about piece of evidence in this
endlessly talked-about case: the brown sports jacket worn by Dennis
Oland on July 6, 2011. The jacket was marked with four specks of blood,
found by investigators to contain his father’s DNA. If
Mr. Oland had viciously bludgeoned his father to death with a hammer,
the jacket would have been stained with much more blood, Mr. Gold
argued. “There is no way to go from that bloody scene to that jacket,” he said. Referring
contemptuously to “those four tiny spots that the Crown is so fond of,”
Mr. Gold returned over and over to the concept of “blood spatter,” a
phrase that became a kind of refrain. “There was no spatter,” he said. “There should have been lots of spatter, a ton of spatter.” The
blood stains on the jacket are in fact tiny, hard to see on courtroom
monitors. Mr. Gold has argued that the blood could have landed on the
jacket through everyday physical contact between father and son –
Richard Oland was known to have a scalp condition that left scabs, and
occasionally chewed his cuticles. Despite
extensive testing, there was no blood or DNA found on any of Dennis
Oland’s possessions except for the jacket, Mr. Gold noted: none on his
BlackBerry, none on the steering wheel of his Volkswagen, and none on
his shirt or shoes. “If I could steal from Winston Churchill,” he said, “never have so many searched for so long to find so little.”"
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/dennis-olands-defence-opens-closing-argument-at-murder-trial/article27743228/?service=mob
