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Word Document Including APA Reference Page

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Reasons for the Wrongful Conviction of Robert Baltovich

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Reasons for the Wrongful Conviction of Robert Baltovich

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Mistaken Eyewitness Testimony
Marianne Perz said she saw Robert and Elizabeth sitting together on campus the evening of her disappearance. However, before making her statement, she had seen Robert’s photo in a newspaper and talked to Elizabeth’s family members about the possibility of Robert’s involvement – both factors which could influence her testimony. This testimony was still used as evidence, despite the fact that Robert had an alibi for his whereabouts at the time, which was confirmed by several of his family members. Furthermore, Elizabeth was later shown a photo array of potential suspects, an already dangerous technique, and then was told by the officer that Robert’s photo was in the group. Line-ups should be presented by an officer who does not know if the suspect is a choice or not.
A second eyewitness testimony was made by David Dibben, who said he saw Robert driving Elizabeth’s car three days after her disappearance. However, he did not actually get a good look at the driver.
Both witness’ descriptions of the man they believed to be Robert were not close matches for Robert’s appearance, and both changed drastically over time. Both eyewitness testimonies were obtained while the witnesses were under hypnosis, which could have possibly altered or planted false memories.
There was also an issue with the way the judge instructed the jury members. He placed too much emphasis on the Crown’s case against Robert, and did not pay an equal amount of attention to Baltovich’s defence. He then left out important cautionary statements regarding the lack of reliability of the eyewitness testimonies. The judge also improperly used a number of rhetorical questions, and had an overall tone that displayed his personal bias and belief that Robert was guilty. At Robert’s retrial, both eyewitness testimonies were determined to not be admissible in court – in fact, the Prosecution chose not to call any evidence, agreeing that there was really no case against him at all.

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Convicted serial rapist and murderer, Paul Bernardo, is interviewed regarding his alleged connection/responsibility for the murder of Elizabeth Bain. Paul Bernardo is extremely defensive and rather agitated, but states that he did not kill Bain.

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Paul Bernardo & Karla Homolka Trial / Archive Footage

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Paul Bernardo Russell Williams Holmoka Thom Philbin

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Paul Bernardo & Karla Homolka The Ken & Barbie Killers Documentary

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Convicted Killer Paul Bernardo Interview on Elizabeth Bain

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Joseph Neuberger comments on Baltovich's upcoming re-trial - Global News - December 2, 2004

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Joseph Neuberger comments on Baltovich's upcoming re-trial - Global News - December 2, 2004

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A discussion about the possibility of Baltovich being called to testify, and his defence lawyer's plan to relate all pieces of circumstantial evidence on Paul Bernardo as the prime suspect.

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Robert Baltovich Speech - April 28, 2008 - Toronto Star Video

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Robert Baltovich Speech - April 28, 2008 - Toronto Star Video

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Robert Baltovich delivers a speech at a press release following his 2008 acquittal. Baltovich discusses his feeling of relief and his condolences for the Bain family.

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Robert Baltovich was acquitted today of second-degree murder after Crown prosecutors declined to offer evidence at his second trial. So the mystery of who killed Elizabeth Bain 18 years ago still remains. Her body was never discovered. Visit thestar.com for the latest News headlines, Sports, Entertainment and more from the voice of the GTA.

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Robert Baltovich and then girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain

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Robert Baltovich and then girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain

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City News - Local - Robert Baltovich And The Murder Of Elizabeth Bain: The Timeline - Oct 15, 2007

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City News - Local - Robert Baltovich And The Murder Of Elizabeth Bain: The Timeline - Oct 15, 2007

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A chronological sequence of events, from the date of Bain's disappearance, to the date of Baltovich's acquittal.
http://www.citynews.ca/2007/10/15/robert-baltovich-and-the-elizabeth-bain-murder-trial-the-timeline/

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One of the longest mysteries in recent Ontario history finally reaches an ending in a provincial courtroom. Here's a timeline of the Robert Baltovich case.

June 19-20, 1990

Twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Bain leaves home to check a schedule at the U. of T.'s Scarborough campus. When she doesn't return, her worried mother calls police.

June 22-24, 1990

Fears grow after the missing woman's car is discovered at an auto body shop not far from her home. A large bloodstain is ominously found in the backseat, but there's no sign of Bain. Cops immediately turn to her boyfriend, 24-year-old Robert Baltovich. He's questioned by detectives for hours, but some of his responses arouse their suspicions. There are massive searches for the absent woman during most of that summer, but her body is never found. Police conclude she's been murdered.

July 11, 1990

A heartbreaking public appeal is issued by the Bain family, asking for any clues to Elizabeth's whereabouts. Included in the plaintive plea: a message to her suspected killer to at least let them know where her body can be found. The request goes unanswered.

July 25, 1990

Police zero in on Baltovich as the main suspect in the crime. They search his home and his car, and are seen leaving the area with numerous pieces of potential evidence.

November 19, 1990

Robert Baltovich is arrested and charged with first-degree murder in Bain's disappearance, despite the fact police don't have the body. It's been exactly five months since she walked out the door of her house, never to return.

February, 4, 1992

The accused boyfriend's first trial starts, with more than 100 witnesses taking the stand. The Crown drops the charge to second-degree murder, painting Baltovich as a spurned lover who became murderously angry when Bain tried to end their relationship. Baltovich continues to insist he's innocent, offering a not guilty plea. His lawyers claim there's significant evidence someone else may have committed the crime, introducing witness testimony about a blond man seen near her before she vanished. It comes at the same time the so-called "Scarborough Rapist" is on the prowl, and will later lead to speculation that Paul Bernardo could be a viable suspect.

March 31, 1992

Baltovich is found guilty of second-degree murder and receives a life sentence.

May 1992

Baltovich hires a new attorney and files an appeal. Legal documents cite a number of suspect issues with the trial, including the judge's address to the jury and the fact that some witnesses were hypnotized to aid their memory recall.

February 17, 1993

Paul Bernardo is arrested and accused of being the Scarborough Rapist, among other crimes. When Baltovich's lawyer hears about the arrest, he hires a private investigator to probe the suspect's background. The P.I. claims to have found evidence that may tie Bernardo to Bain.

May 16, 1996

Baltovich's appeal is filed with the Ontario Court of Appeal. Although it doesn't name Bernardo, it does contain references to the Scarborough Rapist as one of the main reasons the verdict may be in doubt. The court is supposed to hear the case in February of the following year, but it gets put off with no timetable for resumption. Baltovich remains in jail, still swearing his innocence.

March 2000

The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted takes up the case, filing its own documents with the Court of Appeal. For the first time, Paul Bernardo is directly named in a legal brief as a possible main suspect. The group demands Baltovich be released while the appeal is considered. He's been behind bars for eight years.

March 31, 2000

The court agrees to review the case and frees Baltovich pending the appeal. A judge appears to agree with at least one major contention from the appeal - calling the conviction wholly 'circumstantial' and admitting it needs a second look.

September 20, 2004

After endless delays and more than a decade after his guilty verdict, The Ontario Court of Appeal finally reviews the Baltovich case.

December 2, 2004

The Ontario Court of Appeal sets aside the Baltovich conviction and orders a new trial. The court agrees there were significant errors made in the first case, but refuses to acquit the accused outright, opting to let another jury decide.

July 15, 2005

The Attorney General's office confirms it intends to retry Baltovich on the murder of Bain. Once again, they're pinning second-degree murder charges on him.

June 7, 2007

Toronto Police secretly travel to Kingston to interview Bernardo on the Bain murder. He denies any involvement.

October 15, 2007

In a case already fraught with so many delays came yet another one. On the day jury selection was set to start in a new trial, the judge who was going to hear it was appointed to a new court - and the proceedings have been stopped.

March 31, 2008

The long awaited resumption is set to begin with jury selection underway. The actual trial may not start until mid-April.

April 22, 2008

Jury finds Robert Baltovich not guilty of second-degree murder in Bain's death minutes into the retrial.

May 16, 2008

Attorney General Chris Bentley confirms he won't call an inquiry into the case because it won't help the administration of justice.

Bain's mother: I don't think Bernardo did it

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Robert Baltovich And The Elizabeth Bain Murder Trial: The Timeline - CityNews Toronto

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One of the longest mysteries in recent Ontario history finally reaches an ending in a provincial courtroom. Here's a timeline of the Robert Baltovich case. June 19-20, 1990 Twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Bain leaves home to check a schedule at the U. of T.'s Scarborough campus. When she doesn't return, her worried mother calls police.

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Toronto Sun - News - Toronto and GTA - Baltovich demands apology years after acquittal - Oct 2, 2016

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Toronto Sun - News - Toronto and GTA - Baltovich demands apology years after acquittal - Oct 2, 2016

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A recent interview with Robert Baltovich, part two. http://www.torontosun.com/2016/10/02/baltovich-demands-apology-years-after-acquittal

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Their reaction was swift and definitive: "The case is solved."

Even as Robert Baltovich was emerging from the downtown courthouse following a second trial that found him not guilty of the murder of Elizabeth Bain, Toronto Police were stubbornly insisting that despite the verdict, they had the right man all along. There were no other suspects. There was no more investigation to be done.

Baltovich believes it's high time they admitted that's not true.

"It's eating away at me knowing the person who committed this crime is literally out there for the taking. At the very least, if they reopen the investigation with a new perspective and a new set of eyes, they may realize the killer is staring them in the face," he says in an exclusive interview.

"Whoever committed the crime, it's clear now that I didn't."

The proof, Baltovich insists, was hidden in the Crown's files for decades and only uncovered a few years ago as his civil lawyers were sifting through 13,000 Crown documents in preparation for his $13-million lawsuit for malicious prosecution.

According to the police timeline, Baltovich killed Bain on June 19, 1990 before she attended her night class at U of T's Scarborough campus. He hid her body nearby in Colonel Danforth Park and moved her Toyota to Morrish Rd. In the early hours of June 22, he used her car to move her body to the Lake Scugog area and then returned her Toyota to the same Morrish Rd. spot where it had been seen by witnesses, according to allegations.

Yet just days after arresting Baltovich in November 1990, former homicide detective-sergeant Brian Raybould had a meeting at the Centre of Forensic Sciences where he was told the police theory was scientifically "untenable."

If Bain had been killed almost three days earlier, the scientists said, the blood found in the rear foot well of her Toyota Tercel would have been darker and there would have been a pungent odour consistent with a body that had decomposed for several days. Instead, the forensics suggested Bain was transported in her car within three hours of her murder - not almost three days later. And Baltovich could account for his movements on the night of June 19 and the early morning of the following day.

The lawsuit claims Raybould buried the meeting and even doctored his notes to hide it - an allegation he's denied and has not been proven court.

Baltovich believes police tunnel vision doomed him from the start.

"I want an official apology," he says. "I didn't feel like anything remotely like that was forthcoming in 2008. Instead, they suggested I was still responsible."

That impression was only compounded in 2010 when the Ontario government refused to compensate him for his wrongful conviction. Shortly after, he launched his civil lawsuit.

Never married, Baltovich lives a fairly anonymous life. His masters degree in library science isn't helpful in today's job market so he's working at a social services agency and teaching English as a second language. He looks very much like he did when he was at the centre of a sensational murder case though his dark hair is a bit thinner and flecked with a little grey. Few seem to recognize him from those years in the headlines.

After all this time, you wonder why he would abandon that anonymity to go public with his demand that the case be reopened.

"I feel there's this ghost hovering over me that can't go away," explains Baltovich, 51, as he sits outside an Annex coffee shop. "I don't want to live the rest of my life not knowing what happened. I realize my efforts might not be enough and at some point someone is going to have to investigate this case in an official capacity in order to bring the proper person to justice."

A lot of his spare time is spent poring over transcripts and disclosed documents, searching for clues to the identity of Bain's killer. His appeal lawyers suggested it was Paul Bernardo - though the sex killer denied he was involved when interviewed by Toronto Police in 2007. Baltovich has his suspicions about another possible suspect closer to the Bain family, but he wants an outside police service to look into it.

"I understand that by reopening the investigation, that's a tacit acknowledgement that they arrested the wrong man but the forensic evidence has shown they did. That ship has sailed."

Toronto Police still feel differently. "Pending any new evidence that is brought forward," says spokesman Meaghan Gray, "the Toronto Police Service considers this case closed,"

***

Outside the Bains' Scarborough home, little has changed from that day their beautiful daughter left for the tennis courts and never returned. There is still a wagon wheel by the porch and a white gate at the end of the driveway.

Little has changed save for the memorial garden of flowers dedicated to their slain child. Without a grave, it is the only marker they have.

Ricardo Bain comes to the door, surprised that a journalist would still be covering the story about his daughter's death after all these years. The 77-year-old grandfather scoffs when told about Baltovich's crusade to reopen her murder case and find the real killer.

"Good luck to him," he says. "There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that he did it."

He admits he never liked Baltovich and grew suspicious when he seemed so cold and unperturbed in those desperate days following the disappearance. It didn't matter that there was no evidence linking him to her murder. "His demeanour was all wrong. Everything was all wrong," he explains. "The way he behaved, the things he said to us, all of those things are more important to me than finding a knife under his bed. Sometimes the strongest cases are built on circumstantial evidence. A 150 little arrows point in one direction."

He will entertain a "1%" chance that Baltovich isn't guilty. As for the possibility that Bernardo was the killer, that's a "red herring" that he and his wife Julita have never believed.

Bain has his own complaints about the justice system. He's bitter that Baltovich's appeal and retrial were postponed so long that 18 years after the murder, the Crown could no longer mount a viable case against him. "I feel very strongly he is the right guy. But it doesn't keep me awake at night."

The rest of his family has found it harder to deal with: His three surviving children have moved to the west coast and his wife battled cancer, which he blames on the tragedy.

Baltovich's acquittal in 2008 was another blow. The man they are sure killed their child told a crush of reporters that he hoped the Bains could eventually accept that he wasn't responsible. "I loved her. I miss her. Maybe one of these days we can get together and grieve together," he said.

Those were fine words, Bain says, but Baltovich has never made any overture toward them. "He could have sent one flower to my wife and a note saying, 'I'm sorry. I loved your daughter.' He could have sent a note to test the waters. But he didn't." He shrugs then. "Maybe it's just as well."

For years, the grieving father searched for her body, trudging through forests and fields, before finally giving up when no trace of her had been found. In his dreams, he sees her under water. "You live with it every day until you die."

But he is not consumed by any need for vengeance. "I don't hold any grudge against him. I just think he's guilty, that's all, and it's part of his personality that he will go to his death denying what is obvious."

And then Bain offers this surprising statement before heading back into his home.

"I forgave him a long time ago. I decided my health was more important. That's all you have left at the end. I think we've all forgiven him."

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Baltovich demands apology years after acquittal

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Their reaction was swift and definitive: “The case is solved.”Even as Robert Baltovich was emerging from the downtown courthouse following a second trial that found him not guilty of the murder of Elizabeth Bain, Toronto Police were stubbornly insisting that despite the verdict, they had...

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Toronto Sun - News - Toronto and GTA - Robert Baltovich wants police to reopen the Elizabeth Bain case - Oct 1, 2016

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Toronto Sun - News - Toronto and GTA - Robert Baltovich wants police to reopen the Elizabeth Bain case - Oct 1, 2016

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A recent interview with Robert Baltovich, part one. http://www.torontosun.com/2016/10/01/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. 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?

*****
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.

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Innocence Canada - AIDWYC -  Cases - Exonerations - Robert Baltovich

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Innocence Canada - AIDWYC -  Cases - Exonerations - Robert Baltovich

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A case file published by Innocence Canada (formerly known as The Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted). Includes details pertaining to the trial, questions of Paul Bernardo as the guilty murderer, https://www.aidwyc.org/cases/historical/robert-baltovich/