Robert Baltovich is innocentScott Peterson Trial: Timeline
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Paul Bernardo murdered Elizabeth Bainnsnews On November 19, 1990, Robert Baltovich was arrested and charged with the murder of 22 year old University of Toronto student, Elizabeth Bain. Baltovich was arrested because Elizabeth Bain was his former girlfriend. On April 22nd, 2008, the Crown abandoned the prosecution after 18 years of insisting that Baltovich was the killer. Baltovich served about 8 years in prison before a bail release in 2000 pending appeal.
The problem with blaming an innocent man is that legitimate questions about murder are not properly addressed because the police suppress all evidence that points elsewhere.
During Robert Baltovich's first trial in 1992, the possibility that an unidentified Scarborough rapist was responsible for the disappearance of Elizabeth Bain was ridiculed because the police focused on Robert Baltovich to the exclusion of all other potential perpetrators, and that happens all the time. We now know that the unidentified rapist is Paul Bernardo and that he is in fact responsible for the murder of Elizabeth Bain.
Between March 1986 and May 26, 1990, Paul Bernardo committed 21 sexual assaults in the Scarborough area with a pattern of escalating violence. He attended the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus from which Bain disappeared and took his girlfriends to adjoining Colonel Danforth Park. Receipts found in Bernardo's house indicate that he frequented various stores in, or near the Scarborough area around the time of Bain's disappearance. An ex-Bernardo girlfriend introduced Elizabeth Bain to Paul Bernardo in the mid 1980's. Bain was seen at a restaurant with a blond man several weeks before her disappearance. Bernardo was known to frequent the very same restaurant. At 5:30 p.m., on the day Bain went missing, a female University of Toronto student saw a blond man on the Scarborough campus staring, frightening her as she made a phone booth call. She wrote a description of the man and indicated that he resembled a composite drawing of the Scarborough rapist. A package of du Maurier Light cigarettes, Bernardo's brand, was found in the glove compartment of Bain's car. Bain's car was found backed into its parking spot, consistent with how Bernardo parked. The radio was tuned to CFNY 102.1, Bernardo's favourite station. A New Order recording, another Bernardo favourite, was in the cassette deck. Paul Bernardo is a serial killer who is an expert at killing people and making their bodies disappear.
On June 19, 1990, the police asked Paul Bernardo whether he had killed Elizabeth Bain and he said, "Well that's a loaded question. I mean, are we going to go back and go through the time sequence of what happened in my life?" Paul Bernardo evaded answering because he thought that Karla Homolka had obtained a sweatheart deal by lying to the police and he was therefore going to do the same. In his words, "Anyways, I know I'm giving you guys a hard time but I mean really. I'm a human being...the 800-pound gorilla in a room -that's life-25 sentence, you know." Paul Bernardo expects to be parolled and he is therefore going to maintain the delusion that he is a human being who deserves to be parolled.
The dirty little secret that nobody wants to talk about is that Robert Baltovich was cleared of murdering his former girlfriend because Paul Bernardo killed Elizabeth Bain in 1990. It happens all the time. A serial killer baffles the authorities because they almost always believe there is an obvious connection between the victim and the killer and they are frequently wrong.
For example, in Canada, everybody blamed the disappearance of Alicia Ross on Sean Hine, and when we claimed otherwise, we were harrassed, threatened and called the scum of the earth because we insisted that as long as there was not a single iota of evidence to suggest his involvement, Sean Hine had absolutely nothing to do with the suspected murder of Alicia Ross. On the contrary, Sean Hine was the only one who was genuinely concerned about the disappearance of his girlfriend because he was the only one (besides us) who did not point the finger where it did not belong.
We posted messages so frequently on the 680 news message board, proclaiming the innocence of Sean Hine, that they shut it down. Nobody wanted to hear the fact that Sean Hine had absolutely nothing to do with the disappearance of his girlfriend, Alicia Ross.
To be sure, everybody who really knew Sean Hine claimed he was innocent, but when the authorities get a bug up their asses, everybody else is supposed to be wrong.
The authorities were aided and abetted by the media. Indeed, every newsroom assumed that Sean Hine was guilty, and there is absolutely no excuse for this level of journalistic incompetence.
The media bandwagon made it easy to lynch Sean Hine and Investigative journalist, Carsten Stroud, exposed the real bogeyman -the terrifying hurdle that most authorities are too incompetent to clear, when he said:
"As investigators, we're faced with the worst kind of murder investigation-the random killing. No obvious connection between the victim and the killer. We're left with doing a massive canvass of everyone who could have had anything to do with the victims-neighbhbors, passers-by, anyone in the vicinity where the bodies were found. And at the same time, we do a complete background check on all the family members, in Homicide terms, the Nearest and Dearest, because experience has shown us that most victims have at least a marginal connection with their killers.
And we also know that, even in the worst serial killer investigations, the task force almost always generates the name of the killer within the first thirty days. It happened in the Bundy case: he was one of a massive list of people who were reported by citizens as owning the right kind of Volkswagon Beetle. Unfortunately, his name was buried under thousands of other possibles, and he went on to kill as many as fifty other people before he was run to earth in Florida."
And what if a serial killer dies before he gets caught? What are some of the clues that some of the friends and neighbors who are falsely convicted, were probably railroaded?
First and foremost, by definition, serial killers are "experts" at getting away with murder through tactics like dumping bodies in or near water. To quote Carsten Stroud again, "nothing destroys forensic evidence better than water. It washes away fibres, skin samples, fluids-anything from which some DNA or any locator evidence might be obtained." Serial killers know what to do to get away with murder and they are clearly not the nearest and the dearest to the people they kill.
Lockyer has repeatedly said he suspects convicted sex killer Paul Bernardo was involved in Bain's disappearance. Bernardo confessed in 2005 to a series of rapes in Scarborough that occurred at about the same time as Bain disappeared, although he denied killing Bain.
The judge overseeing Baltovich's trial was going to allow Lockyer to bring up the Bernardo theory in court but, with the abrupt end to the trial, Lockyer never got a chance.
"I think he [Bernardo] probably did it, and I think the evidence shows he probably did it," Lockyer said.
Indeed, when Bernardo was interviewd by the police in June of 2007 in Kingston Penitentiary, he essentially confessed when he cryptically said, "I've given you directions to go find the truth and no one has done that."
That is a confession. Confessions are negotiated. The hint that Paul Bernardo is in a position to do what nobody has been able to do -locate the body of Elizabeth Bain -is the best confession one can obtain -short of a negotiation of the sort that his wife, Karla Homolka, was able to secure. When Paul Bernardo says that nobody has found the truth, he means that as long as there is nothing in it for him, he is not going to provide the confession that is necessary to turn his guilt from the realm of the "circumstantial" to the "conclusive".
Most people do not know what a confession is. In fact, anybody who expects Paul Bernardo to say, "Yes, I am the one who murdered Elizabeth Bain", is deluded.
Murderers have to be exposed, they rarely confess out of the goodness of their hearts.
If Daniel Sylvester, who turned himself in for Alicia's murder, was a crafty serial killer like Paul Bernardo, Sean Hine would have been convicted for the murder of Alicia Ross, and that is exactly what happened to Robert Baltovich. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out, you just have to make sure that the authority of all the incompetent people who are responsible for convicting innocent people, is completely taken away.
When the police asked Paul Bernardo if he had ever met Elizabeth Bain, he said, "I'm going to answer that one with I don't remember. Because if I did, I don't remember."
The "random" acts of serial killers like Paul Bernardo are impossible to unravel through inventing silly speculation like the fickle claim that Robert Baltovich murdered Elizabeth Bain in a fit of jealous rage. On June 14, 1991, while stealing license plates for his cigarette smuggling operation, Paul Bernardo met Leslie Mahaffy, who was locked out of her home. He invited her to his car for a cigarette, then he drove her to his home. Karla and Paul kept her as a sex slave and videotaped assaults. After days of torture they killed her In their basement, Paul cut up her body with a circular saw and Karla washed the body parts before setting them in concrete. If the video did not exist, Paul Bernardo would not remember Leslie Mahafy, the way he currently does not remember Elizabeth Bain.
Under the circumstances, it is safe to say that Paul Bernardo does not want to remember Elizabeth Bain because he expects to be parolled. The last thing he would do is confess to a murder that would thwart his expection, and that is why "No" means "Yes" when Paul Bernardo conveniently, carefully and evasively denies killing Elizabeth Bain.
Robert Baltovich is not the only innocent man who was falsely accused for the trail of crime that serial killers like Paul Bernardo leave behind. This other incident of another man who was falsely accused suggests that scapegoats like Robert Baltovich are a dime a dozen.
» 04-25-2008
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