For his part, Wilson said the maroon paring knife found near Gail Miller’s body was similar to one that Milgaard had with him on their road trip from Regina to Saskatoon. He said he’d seen blood on Milgaard’s trousers when he was changing at Cadrain’s house. He also recounted the incident when John found a woman’s compact while she was looking in his car’s glove compartment for a map, which Milgaard tossed out the window. Incidentally, Miller’s compact was found with other items from her purse. Wilson also claimed that when they were in Calgary, Milgaard said he had tried to take a girl’s purse in Saskatoon and that he’d jabbed her with a knife when she resisted. Roberts did not test the incriminating evidence by polygraph. It’s not entirely clear why the teenagers suddenly changed their stories, but it proved to have devastating consequences for Milgaard. Now the police had the stories they needed to arrest him.
Milgaard was in Prince George, British Columbia, selling magazines when he found out the RCMP were looking for him. He went to the detachment. Police arrested him on May 30, 1969, after a four-month investigation. The pressure to find Miller’s killer was finally over. Milgaard was brought to Saskatoon and committed to stand trial after a preliminary hearing on September 11.
The police did not disclose to the Crown that they had initially believed that the same person was responsible for both Miller’s murder and the string of sexual assaults that preceded it. As was police practice at the time, they only sent the prosecutor the reports and witness statements that they felt were relevant to the case. In fact, neither the Crown nor Milgaard’s lawyer, Calvin Tallis, were even aware of the sexual assaults.
The day before Milgaard’s trial got underway, Wilson told police that Milgaard had re-enacted Miller’s murder at a party in a Regina motel room in early May, shortly before he was arrested. Wilson had heard the story from Craig Melnyk and George Lapchuk. Detective Karst interviewed Melnyk and Lapchuk. They told him that they were at a party at the Park Lane Motel when a newscast about Miller’s murder appeared on television. When Lapchuk suggested to Milgaard, who was under the influence of drugs, that he had killed Miller, Milgaard apparently grabbed a pillow and made stabbing motions. According to the two witnesses, he admitted that he killed the young nursing assistant. Milgaard told his lawyer that he had no memory of the incident. If he had done as his friends suggested, it was only intended as a joke. He had not killed Gail Miller.
Milgaard’s trial by judge and jury began in Saskatoon Court of Queen’s Bench on January 19, 1970, before Chief Justice Alfred Bence. Crown witness Sergeant Bruce Paynter testified that the frozen semen found at the crime scene was from someone who had type A blood and secreted antigens into bodily fluids such as semen and saliva. Milgaard had type A blood but no antigens were found in his saliva. This suggested he was not a secretor and the semen the police tested was not his. Tallis argued that Milgaard, therefore, could not be the person whose semen was found at the crime scene and this forensic evidence exonerated him.
However, testimony from Milgaard’s friends suggested otherwise. Wilson, who initially told police that Milgaard was never away from the car for more than a minute or two, testified that he left the vehicle for fifteen minutes. The Crown’s theory was that this was when Milgaard fatally stabbed Gail Miller. Although Wilson told police that he didn’t see any blood on Milgaard’s clothes, he testified during the trial that he saw blood on Milgaard’s pants and shirt. Cadrain testified that he saw a bloodstain that was one or two inches in diameter and a few splatters on Milgaard’s pants and shirttail. Melnyk and Lapchuk recounted the story about the motel room re-enactment. Melnyk admitted that he didn’t speak to the police until he was charged with armed robbery.
John testified that she couldn’t remember saying that Milgaard had stabbed Gail Miller. This was inconsistent with the police statement she had given in May. Caldwell had the option of asking the judge for permission to cross-examine John on the previous inconsistent statement she had made in writing. This was a new provision in the Canada Evidence Act. Without the presence of the jury, Justice Bence received submissions from Tallis and Caldwell about the procedure to follow. Contrary to their submissions, the judge decided that evidence about the circumstances in which John made the out-of-court statement should be given in the jury’s presence. Crown prosecutor T.D.R. Caldwell was granted permission to treat her as a hostile witness, before the defence had a chance to question her about the circumstances surrounding her police statement without the jury present. In the presence of the jury, Caldwell was allowed to read portions of John’s police statement in which she claimed to have seen Milgaard stab a woman. When asked if her statement was true, John replied that she didn’t know. Although the judge warned the jury to only use the parts of John’s police statement that she had adopted on the stand, the damage was done. They had heard her police statement incriminating Milgaard. He didn’t testify in his own defence after the Crown presented forty-four witnesses. His lawyer believed that Milgaard’s drug use and previous brushes with the law would not make him a good witness.
Milgaard was convicted on January 31, 1970, and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for ten years. He was seventeen years old. As his mother Joyce recounted in an excerpt from her book A Mother’s Story,[1] David’s conviction had an impact on the entire family. They lived in Langenburg, Saskatchewan, a tiny community of about 1,000 people, where Milgaard’s father, Lorne, was a foreman at a potash mine. David’s quiet fifteen-year-old brother came home showing signs of having been in fights, fourteen-year-old Susan suddenly no longer had friends, and children surrounded ten-year-old Maureen and taunted her with, “Your brother is a killer!” By May 1970, it became clear that the family would have to move. Lorne found a job running a quarry and the Milgaards headed to Winnipeg. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal rejected Milgaard’s appeal in January 1971, and the Supreme Court of Canada followed suit on November 15. He had reached a legal dead end.
But Larry Fisher’s involvement with the criminal justice system had just begun. At the time of Gail Miller’s murder, he lived in the basement apartment of the Cadrain house with his wife Linda and their infant daughter Tammy. Three weeks after Milgaard was convicted, a fourth victim was followed home and raped in Saskatoon on the evening of February 21, 1970. Another woman was assaulted in Fort Garry, Manitoba on August 2. Fisher was arrested in Fort Garry on September 19 while he was raping his sixth victim. He had no criminal record. The Saskatoon Police was alerted since Fisher had previously lived in that city. Perhaps they had unsolved rapes in that jurisdiction?
During an interview with Saskatoon Police Detective Eddie Karst in Winnipeg on October 22, 1970, Fisher confessed to two of the assaults in Saskatoon. Two months later, on December 30 (a month after Milgaard appealed his murder conviction to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal), Fisher was charged with raping three victims in Saskatoon and one indecent assault. On May 28, 1971, he pleaded guilty to raping his final two victims in Manitoba, for which he was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. On December 21, he pleaded guilty to the four Saskatoon attacks and was ordered to serve his sentence concurrently with his thirteen-year sentence in the Manitoba attacks. In 1971, Crown prosecutor Serge Kujawa handled Milgaard’s leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada and Fisher’s guilty plea in Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench. But neither the police nor the Crown made a connection between the series of rapes and Gail Miller’s murder in the same neighbourhood around the same time period.
Fisher was released from prison on January 26, 1980, after serving ten years of his sentence. He was soon back behind bars after raping and slashing the throat of a woman in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, on March 31, 1980. He was sentenced in June 1981 to ten years in prison for rape and attempted murder. Fisher’s first convictions ten years earlier had aroused the suspicions of his ex-wife Linda Fisher. In 1971, she confronted him while he was in the Prince Albert Penitentiary, but he denied that he had killed Miller. His denial, nor the fact that Milgaard had been convicted, didn’t ease her suspicions. She even went to the public library to look for a picture of the murder weapon that was used in Miller’s killing. She wanted to compare it with her missing paring knife.
On August 28, 1980, Linda Fisher went to the Saskatoon Police and told them she suspected that Larry Fisher was Gail Miller’s killer. She thought David Milgaard was innocent.