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The answer to the 7 questions

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This is a photograph of Robert Baltovich and his then girlfriend (victim) Elizabeth Bain,  during Christmas 1989.

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In this YouTube video, the narrator goes into details about the Robert Baltovich case, and carries you through a chronological order of all events surrounding the case.

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In this YouTube video you get new details into the Robert Baltovich case, including that an ex-girlfriend of Paul Bernardo introduced Bain and Bernardo in 1987.

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This is a photograph of Robert Baltovich from the year 1996 in the prison library. He worked in the prisons library from the year 1993 to the 1998

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In this YouTube video, the narrator goes more into detail about how the original court proceedings were handled incorrectly by the judge. As well as the use of hypnosis on the key eye witness.

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This article by the "The Star" goes into the ins and outs of Baltovich's $13 million request for compensation. Which he was denied as there is no "factual evidence".

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A $13 million malicious prosecution and negligence lawsuit filed by Robert Baltovich takes aim at a sacred cow - a respected former prosecutor who is now a judge - as well as Toronto police and two former defence lawyers.

Baltovich, 44, who was acquitted two years ago this week of murdering his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain, alleges two Crown attorneys - John McMahon and Paul Amenta - intentionally failed to disclose key evidence and misused their office, and that Ontario's Ministry of the Attorney General is now "vicariously liable" for their conduct.

McMahon is now an Ontario Superior Court judge.

Brendan Crawley, a ministry spokesman, said the civil court process "is open to anyone who chooses to use it - as Mr. Baltovich has chosen to do with respect to this matter."

But Crawley signalled on Friday that a settlement isn't likely and the ministry intends to fight the lawsuit. Earlier this year, Attorney General Chris Bentley rejected a request for compensation for Baltovich, who spent seven years in prison for the murder, before the Ontario Court of Appeal quashed his conviction and ordered a new trial in 2004.

Louis Sokolov, a Toronto civil lawyer with expertise in representing the wrongly convicted in claims against government, said Baltovich has a tough battle ahead of him because malicious prosecution claims - always notoriously hard to win - have become more difficult thanks to a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision.

Potential plaintiffs must now have "actual evidence" of malice, Sokolov said.

Baltovich is also suing his two trial lawyers, William Gatward and Michael Engel, for breach of contract, alleging they failed to ask for notes made by investigating officers and failed to follow up on invitations from police to go through investigative files.

At Baltovich's 1992 trial, they also refused to concede Bain had been murdered. Her body has never been found.

A statement of claim filed on Wednesday by Baltovich's civil lawyer, Harvey Strosberg, also alleges Toronto police became fixated on Baltovich and failed to follow up on the most natural suspect in the case, Scarborough rapist Paul Bernardo.

None of the allegations has been proven in court.

At Queen's Park, NDP MPP Peter Kormos (Welland) castigated Premier Dalton McGuinty for not compensating Baltovich and warned Ontario taxpayers will end up forking over more money than if the Liberals had just settled the case.

"Mr. Baltovich was the victim of serious injustice," Kormos told the Star 's Robert Benzie.

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Robert Baltovich seeks $13M for 'wrongful' conviction | The Star

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A $13 million malicious prosecution and negligence lawsuit filed by Robert Baltovich takes aim at a sacred cow - a respected former prosecutor who is now a judge - as well as Toronto police and two former defence lawyers.

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This is a photograph of Robert Baltovich leaving the Don jail in Toronto on Dec, 2nd 2004. This is after Ontario's appeal court ordered him a n trial.

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In this article it is discussed that evidence had been altered from the first time he appeared in court, to his re-trial.

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Robert Baltovich, who was convicted, imprisoned, released and acquitted for the murder of his girlfriend Elizabeth Bain more than 20 years ago, claims to have proof that police and prosecutors withheld key evidence that would have helped exonerate him sooner.

In documents filed at Ontario Superior Court in November last year, Baltovich's lawyers outline how a key record of a police interview with forensics experts "was never disclosed to Baltovich or his trial counsel or his appellate counsel."

Baltovich's lawyers also contend that a copy of the police investigator's notebook provided to them was altered to erase evidence of the meeting.

The new evidence was submitted as part of Baltovich's $13 million lawsuit against the Attorney General, the two homicide detectives assigned to his case, the Toronto Police Services Board and his original defence lawyers.

Baltovich, who spent almost nine years behind bars and nearly nine more on probation preparing his appeal, was found not guilty at his second trial in 2008 because the Crown decided to present no evidence.

After his acquittal, the province refused to compensate Baltovich for the wrongful conviction.

Twenty-two-year-old Bain disappeared on her way to an evening class at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus in June 1990. Her body was never found and the investigation and prosecution of her boyfriend, Baltovich, occupied the front pages for years.

Police contended that Baltovich killed Bain and hid her body for several days in Colonel Danforth Park before putting it into her car and driving up to the Lake Scugog area, where he disposed of it.

When Bain's car was discovered three days after she went missing, it contained a significant amount of blood. Homicide investigators were called in and quickly turned their attention to Baltovich.

Last spring, one of Baltovich's lawyers discovered a one-page handwritten note in the 13,000 pages of evidence gathered by police.

The note was written by Det.-Sgt. Brian Raybould and recorded a discussion he had with two forensics experts two days after Baltovich was arrested.

The forensics experts told Raybould that there was too much blood in the car for a body that had been left outside for days, the note allegedly states. If a body had been put into the car two to three days after death, it would have left a strong odour and blood stains would have been darker in colour, not bright red as the police found them.

"As a result of the advice he received (from the forensics experts), Raybould knew or ought to have known that the Police Theory was flawed and untenable," the claim states.

Defence lawyers weren't given access to the document and the Crown continued to deny its existence, even after repeated requests, the claim states.

In a responding motion, the Attorney General claims the defence could have found that note at any time. During the original 1992 trial, the Crown had an "open box" policy of allowing the defence to access all evidence, the government response says.

Crown council John Corelli wrote a letter in 2004 that says Baltovich "(for the past 12 years) has had an open invitation to look at the police investigative file. It was not until last week that the defence chose to look at the investigative file."

"A diligent review in 2004 of the police investigative file ... would have found the same 'Raybould note,'" the government claim states.

Baltovich's claim also says handwritten notes from Raybould's notebooks were missing several pages. In September last year, lawyers for the police produced the missing pages that detailed the meeting with the forensics experts.

In the original copy of the notebook provided to Baltovich's lawyers in 1999, Raybould wrote a date on the first page after the omitted pages "to make it appear that it was in sequence," the claim states. The new copy has no date on that page.

The claim states that Raybould concealed the meeting with the forensics experts before during and after Baltovich's original trial.

Baltovich's claim also points to several other pieces of evidence that weren't disclosed to his defence team including an entry in Bain's dairy that refutes Crown claims that she had broken up with Baltovich in the days before she was murdered.

Attorney General spokesperson Brendan Crawley and Baltovich's lawyer David Robins declined to comment because of the ongoing litigation.

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Elizabeth Bain murder: Robert Baltovich says police hid key evidence | The Star

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Robert Baltovich, who was convicted, imprisoned, released and acquitted for the murder of his girlfriend Elizabeth Bain more than 20 years ago, claims to have proof that police and prosecutors withheld key evidence that would have helped exonerate him sooner.

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In this article, The topic of discussion is on Baltovich wanting to re-open the Bain case, as now the police force knows he is not criminally responsible.

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Robert Baltovich sits in a busy Annex cafe, unrecognized, anonymous, at last. He doesn't need to do this. He probably shouldn't do this.

But next month marks 26 years since he was arrested for a murder he didn't commit. As her boyfriend, Baltovich was the immediate suspect when Elizabeth Bain vanished after heading to the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto on the hot afternoon of June 19, 1990. Her blood-stained Toyota was discovered three days later across from a nearby autobody shop - but despite an exhaustive search, her body has never been found.

While there's an entire generation that doesn't know this story, the disappearance of the 22-year-old, raven-haired beauty remains one of this city's most puzzling murder mysteries. After an appeal and an acquittal, hidden evidence, discredited hypnosis and tunnel vision by Toronto Police, the man once convicted of the crime is demanding the case be reopened and authorities finally admit he is not the one responsible.

"An outside police force should take control of this investigation," insists the 51-year-old Baltovich in an exclusive interview. "They should give Liz the investigation she deserves."

***

They were a fairytale couple.

Their beginning, though, was rocky. They met in a class at U of T's Scarborough College in the fall of 1987. He was smitten; he complains the beauty "strung him along" all term until she eventually told him she was seeing someone else. He remembers being so angry and humiliated. "Yeah, for a very brief half a second, I was mad enough to kill her," Baltovich recalls.

In retrospect, that was an honest admission the naive suspect shouldn't have offered when Toronto homicide detectives came calling years later.

The couple began dating in 1989. By the time of her disappearance, Baltovich had just graduated with a degree in history and psychology and was working that summer at the university. She had two part-time jobs caring for the disabled and was taking summer courses toward her sociology and psych degree, He thought they would marry one day.

She was known as sweet and shy but her diaries revealed a young woman plagued with torment, self-doubt and conflicted feelings about her boyfriend. "I could never stop loving Rob," she wrote a month before her disappearance. "I don't know why sometimes I think I should leave Rob but I really, truly love him."

Her last entry, written three days before she went missing, was far different: "Every morning I rise I try to find a reason not to put a bullet in my head. My temper is swarming, I'm going to murder somebody.

"I have to break free and be alone. I want death to come and end this ... pathetic life that is getting worse by the day ... Last night I wanted to put a bullet in Rob's head, he's such a pest."

***

Who was she going to meet that afternoon?

Bain told her mom she was driving over to the Scarborough College tennis courts in the valley to check the schedule. But there was no posted schedule there; if the courts were busy, you just put your name on the list.

Julita Bain would never see her daughter again.

Tennis instructor Marianne Perz would be the prosecution's star witness. She saw Bain at a picnic table near the courts between 5:40 and 5:45 p.m., sitting between a man and a group of women. Following hypnosis, and after seeing the July 1 Sunday Sun story featuring a photo of Baltovich as a suspect, Perz picked him out of a police photo line-up. He "looked like" the man she'd seen with Bain, but she wasn't sure.

Baltovich insisted he was home with his family at the time and denied seeing his girlfriend at all that day.

But he did go looking for her. Bain had recently been moody and secretive and Baltovich suspected she was seeing someone else. Driving to the campus gym at about 7 p.m., he saw her car near the tennis courts but couldn't find her. He continued on to the weight room where he worked out until shortly before 9 p.m.

A witness confirmed he was there during that time. Another, Kaedmon Nancoo, claimed he was actually there between 5:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., contradicting Baltovich's alibi that he was home with his family.

***

Ruth Collins was heading home from her health food store to catch "In the Heat of the Night," her favourite TV show airing at 9 p.m. She was walking north on Morrish Rd. just after 8 p.m. when she noticed a small grey Toyota parked in the driveway of the Three R Auto with a "very beautiful girl" in the passenger seat trying several times to get out. She looked just like Elizabeth Bain, at least an hour after the police would theorize that she had already been murdered by Baltovich.

***

After the gym, Baltovich waited for Bain outside her lecture hall. When he spotted another man hanging around, "my suspicion was that she had indeed gone to the (Scarborough) Valley to meet someone," he told police. Now he was labelled "the jealous lover."

Baltovich admits going to the balcony to spy on whether his girlfriend was meeting another man. Bain never exited the class; the man was there for someone else.

Later, police would accuse Baltovich of lying and insist he had no alibi for that time. Only years later did he discover that they knew that wasn't true: the waiting stranger had told investigators he'd spotted Baltovich on the balcony that night.

Leaving campus, he drove by the valley and saw Bain's car was now gone. He headed to her home on Scarboro Ave. She wasn't there either. He then returned to the rec centre.

At 6:30 a.m. the following morning, her worried mom called Baltovich and asked if her daughter was with him. Bain had never come home.

***

At 2:30 p.m. on Friday June 22, following more than two days of desperate appeals and searches, her Toyota was found by her brother Paul across from Three R Auto on Morrish Rd. There was fresh blood in the footwell of the back seat. Bain's blood.

Only 30 minutes later - and more than 48 hours before he'd even meet him - Homicide Det. Sgt. Steve Reesor asked for surveillance on her boyfriend, saying: "It is believed Elizabeth Bain was murdered by the suspect: Robert James Baltovich."

"Reesor had already tried and convicted me," Baltovich says.

To this day, he wonders why Reesor and partner Det. Sgt. Brian Raybold hated him from the start. "It was as if they decided, 'We're going to show this hotshot university kid he's not as smart as he thinks he is.'"

Their theory was that Baltovich murdered Bain in a fit of jealous rage between the hours of 5:40 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., hid her body in busy Colonel Danforth Park on a bright June evening and moved her car to Morrish Rd.

Three days later, their theory continued, Baltovich used Bain's car to move her remains from the woods to the Lake Scugog area. He then returned her car to the exact same Morrish Rd. spot where it had been seen by witnesses since the morning she was reported missing

The police "love boyfriends as suspects," Baltovich says. and they will twist and bend the facts to make them fit their theory. The testimony of David Dibben, another key Crown witness, would be a searing example.

John Elliott said he was "80% sure" he saw Bain's car Wednesday morning June 20 in the parking lot of his Lake Scugog-area restaurant. If correct that clears Baltovich, as the appeal court would later note, "it is a virtual certainty that (Baltovich) was home in bed at the time."

But there was another sighting that better suited their case against the boyfriend.

Dibben reported seeing a blond man with a moustache and receding hair line driving a car matching Bain's near Port Perry at about 6 a.m. Friday, June 22. "Based on accepted information already received that her car was opposite 3 R Auto on 90/06/20, this sighting would be impossible," police concluded.

But now with Baltovich's whereabouts accounted for on the Wednesday morning, a Friday morning drive to Lake Scugog would work. In November, they went to interview Dibben, who conveniently had changed his description of the driver to a dark-haired man who resembled their No. 1 suspect.

A few days later, Baltovich was under arrest for murder.

***

Without a body or any forensic evidence linking him to the car, the case against him was entirely circumstantial. It didn't help that his defence team had never argued a murder case before or that they alienated the jury by not even conceding Bain was dead. To their credit, though, they did offer a viable alternative suspect that the police had simply ignored - witnesses had seen Bain with an unidentified blond man before she disappeared and that man could have been the Scarborough Rapist terrorizing the area at the time.

Shockingly, Toronto Police had never even considered the possibility. Paul Bernardo was known to police at the time and on the very day after Baltovich's arrest, he was asked to give a DNA sample in their hunt for the Scarborough Rapist.

Crown attorney John McMahon, now a Superior Court judge, dismissed the defence's choice of alternative suspect. After all, the Scarborough Rapist had never killed his victims. We would only later learn the error in that belief when Bernardo was arrested in February, 1993.

The jury was told Baltovich killed Bain when she tried to break up with him and then coldly proceeded to lie and concoct false alibis. As just one example, they were told he stole pages of her diary and destroyed a "Dear John" letter that showed he had a motive.

In fact, he had volunteered to police that Bain had recently given him a page from her diary written before they'd started dating where she professed her love for him. He also gave the entry to her father. "By the trial," Baltovich says, "Mr. Bain denies ever receiving it and my friend who never even saw it or spoke to me about it testified that it was a 'Dear John' letter indicating Liz wanted to break up with me."

Years later, it was located in the prosecutors' own files. "When it was found in 2004 it turns out it was exactly what I described it to be and showed that I had told the truth about giving it to Mr. Bain."

The woman who saw Bain struggling with a man in her car on Morrish Rd. after 8 p.m. was painted as unreliable by prosecutors because her recollection was inconvenient - Baltovich had an alibi for that time.

Also working against him was his decision not to take the stand. "I was so naively optimistic," he says, shaking his head. "I thought I would be acquitted and get on with my life."

Instead, after a charge to the jury by Justice John O'Driscoll that was later found by the appeal court to have "unduly promoted the case for the Crown and effectively ignored and denigrated the case for the defence," Baltovich was sent to a new trial where he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He would spend another eight years behind bars before he was released on bail in 2000 pending his long-delayed appeal.

While in prison, his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer and died unexpectedly after surgery in 1997. "It was the worst day of my life by far," Baltovich would later recall. "You're in prison and that's when you realize so much has been taken away from you."

***

Just tell us where her body is and you'll only have to serve another day in prison.

That was the offer made to Baltovich on the eve of his scheduled 2008 retrial that had been ordered by the Court of Appeal four years earlier. But he couldn't tell them what he didn't know. He didn't kill the woman he loved.

Following years of dogged effort by his new lawyers James Lockyer and Joanne McLean of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (now Innocence Canada) as well as Brian Greenspan, the prosecution's case against him had collapsed; evidence from key witnesses that had been enhanced by hypnosis was no longer admissible following a 2007 Supreme Court decision. Other witnesses had been completely discredited: Kaedmon Nancoo, the man who claimed to have seen Bain's boyfriend at the gym between 5:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. - and not between 7 and 9 p.m. as Baltovich said - suddenly told the Crown 18 years later that he now remembered Baltovich had threatened to kill Bain if she left him.

"It is likely that Mr. Nancoo's new 'recollection' is false," ruled Justice David McCombs in excluding him as a witness from Baltovich's second trial.

With their case now in tatters, assistant Crown attorney Philip Kotanen shocked the courtroom by announcing at the start of the retrial there was "no longer any reasonable prospect" of conviction and they would be calling no evidence. He advised the jury to return a verdict of not guilty.

For the first time in almost two decades, Baltovich was a free man.

He could have walked away and put it all behind him. And he almost did. But the more he has learned about the myopic investigation and suppressed evidence, the more he needs to know: Who really killed Elizabeth Bain?

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In Monday's Sun Part 2 - A call to reopen the case and a father convinced they had the right man.

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Robert Baltovich wants police to reopen the Elizabeth Bain case

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Robert Baltovich sits in a busy Annex cafe, unrecognized, anonymous, at last. He doesn't need to do this. He probably shouldn't do this. But next month marks 26 years since he was arrested for a murder he didn't commit.