Case Summary
On the afternoon of August 9th, 1967, Ottawa firefighter Leopold Roy encountered an intruder in the apartment building where he lived and worked as the superintendent. When confronted, the intruder stabbed him and fled. Roy collapsed and died before first responders were able to arrive. Police investigated the crime scene but were not able to retrieve the murder weapon, nor any other evidence. The motive for Roy’s stabbing was unknown. Roy’s wife was the only person to have glimpsed the perpetrator. She described him to police, who accordingly produced a composite sketch that appeared in local papers in the days following this high-profile homicide.1
The sketch came to the attention of Gail Brazeau, who told police in April 1968 that it resembled her boyfriend, Romeo Phillion. Police placed Phillion in a suspect line-up arranged for Roy’s wife, who at first identified him as the murderer, but later stated that he “looked like the man who killed her husband, but she was not sure.2 Since she had not made a positive identification, Phillion was released.3
Unbeknownst to him at the time, police were also aware that Phillion had an alibi: on August 8th, his car had broken down in Trenton.4 That night, Romeo had slept in his car, and on August 9th had called a mechanic to tow the car and repair it. The repairs were completed between noon and 1:00 p.m, a mere two hours before Roy was killed.5 On April 12, 1968, Detective John McCombie wrote a report stating that Phillion had a verified alibi: a Trenton service station employee had informed him that on the afternoon of August 9th, Phillion had left his car radio at the station as payment for gas.6 Therefore it would have been “impossible for him to return to Ottawa by 2:45 p.m. . . . [when] the murder was committed.”7 Police concluded that “Phillion is not the man we are looking for.”8
Years later, in January 1972, Phillion was arrested for an armed robbery and interviewed by two detectives. On the way to holding cells, one of the officers, Det. Huneault, asked Phillion “if he had anything else to tell them.”9 After a brief exchange, Phillion stated that he had “[s]omething big” to confess, “like murder; the fireman, I did it. Get me a coffee and we’ll talk about it.”10 Upon his return with the coffee, Phillion proceeded to confess to Det. Huneault that he had killed Leopold Roy. He said that he would make a full statement after being permitted to speak with his boyfriend, Neil Miller. Police went to Miller's residence and requested that he come to the station. Miller did so and made a statement that a few days earlier, Phillion had confessed to him that he was responsible for Roy’s murder. Phillion was then permitted to meet with Miller, after which he signed a sworn statement that he had entered Roy’s apartment building, broken into one of the units and stolen a knife from the kitchen, and then stabbed Roy on the back stairs before fleeing the premises.11
Later that same night, Phillion told another officer, P.C. Couture, that “he had nothing to do with the murder”: his confession was part of a scheme with Miller to split the reward money for reporting information pertaining to Roy’s killer.12 Phillion added that he “wanted to get even” with police by “send[ing] them on a wild goose chase.”13 Over the years, Phillion would offer a number of other explanations for his false confession: “an ill-advised practical joke” that spiraled out of control; a foolish bid to impress Miller; an attempt to protect Miller from his own problems with law enforcement by fixing their attention on himself; and that “he [had] wanted to gain some publicity.”14
Forensic psychology experts would later give evidence that Phillion—who had been sent away at age eight “to a training school for orphans and truants run by a Christian order”, where “[h]e was sexually abused and bullied”—had antisocial and borderline personality disorders that played a role in this behaviour.15 Miller would go on to describe him as someone “who lived in . . . a world of fantasy”, who “made up a lot of things” and said “he did a lot of things that he didn’t do.”16
While the full truth of Phillion’s motives may never be known, what is clear is that he confessed to a murder for which his knowledge was incomplete. No one had broken into an apartment in Roy’s building on the day of his murder, nor had anyone stolen a knife.17 Later, Phillion displayed an “inability to recall the most basic details of the crime when he was taken back to the scene . . . for a re-enactment.”18 At one point, he took police “to a bridge where he had purportedly thrown his bloodied clothes into a river. However, upon learning that the location was inaccessible by car, he had changed his mind and taken them to a different bridge.”19 Nonetheless, police charged Phillion with Leopold Roy’s murder, and he was committed to stand trial.20
At Phillion’s trial, the jury never heard that Ottawa police had investigated and verified his alibi. In fact, the 1968 report was never disclosed to his lawyer, despite the fact that “it was abundantly clear that the Crown prosecutor had a copy” of it.21 While the jury heard the evidence of Phillion’s confession, his many subsequent attempts to retract it were not permitted to be presented.22 After a 23-day trial, the jury found Phillion guilty of Roy’s murder on November 7, 1972. He was sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for ten years. However, he would remain there much longer, as he felt that applying for parole would be tantamount to admitting his guilt.23
Phillion appealed his conviction to the Ontario Court of Appeal, but the court dismissed his appeal on September 3, 1974. He appealed again to the Supreme Court of Canada. On March 22, 1977, the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal as well.24
In 1998, by which point Phillion had spent a quarter century in prison, his parole officer gave him an envelope containing police reports from his corrections file. One of these reports contained Det. McCombie’s April 12, 1968 statement that Phillion had a verified alibi proving he was not in Ottawa at the time of Roy’s murder.25
Phillion sent this envelope to the Osgoode Hall Law School Innocence Project. In 2003, counsel for the Innocence Project and the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (now known as Innocence Canada) submitted an application to the federal Minister of Justice to review Phillion’s conviction, in accordance with s. 696 of the Criminal Code.26 On July 21, 2003, the Ontario Superior Court released Phillion on bail while the Minister of Justice investigated whether he had been wrongfully convicted.27
Five years later, the Minister of Justice referred the case back to the Ontario Court of Appeal for rehearing.28 A two-to-one majority of the court ordered a new trial for Phillion, finding that “the April 12, 1968 report would have been gold in . . . [Phillion’s counsel’s] hands.”29 (The third judge, in dissent, would have upheld Phillion’s conviction.30) The majority discussed several “disturbing features in the documentary record” of Phillion’s police investigation.31 In particular, Det. McCombie had claimed to have discredited Phillion’s alibi at some point after the April 12, 1968 report, but “not one shred of documentary or physical evidence existed to confirm [his] . . . alleged discounting of the once verified alibi.32 Moreover, police had lost an assortment of potentially crucial evidence including line-up photos shown to Roy’s wife, “fingernail scrapings, blood and hair samples removed from the deceased, as well as a hair sample voluntarily provided by” Phillion.33
On April 29, 2010, which was Phillion’s 71st birthday, the Crown withdrew the murder charge against him.34 In all, Phillion had spent 31 years in prison, longer than any other Canadian in history known to have been wrongfully convicted.35
In 2012, Phillion commenced a $14 million lawsuit for damages he suffered as a result of his wrongful murder conviction against the Crown, the Ottawa Police Services Board, and two officers (including Det. McCombie).36 Phillion asserted that his conviction resulted from the defendants’ failure “ to make full, frank and complete disclosure of all relevant evidence and information” to him, including the “evidence that established that [he] . . . was at or near Trenton at the time Roy was murdered in Ottawa.”37
However, Phillion’s lawsuit was dismissed as the motions judge found that it was an abuse of process and should be stayed due to the lengthy passage of time since his 1972 murder conviction. In 2014, Phillion appealed this decision to the Ontario Court of Appeal. The court reversed the judgment and allowed his lawsuit to proceed, observing that the elapsed time was of course not Phillion’s fault, but rather that of the defendants. The Crown then applied to the Supreme Court of Canada for leave to appeal that decision, which the court rejected in February 2015.38 Before he could see the outcome of his lawsuit, Phillion died after a long illness in September of that year.39