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Real-life whodunnit no less compelling than scripted TV dramas
Paula Simons, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Saturday, December 09, 2006
On our television screens each night, we watch cops, FBI agents and prosecutors matching wits with clever defendants, unravelling complex plots. Real life is more prosaic. But every now and then, Edmonton is gripped by a real whodunnit to fit the fiction formula.
On July 12, 2005, a pretty young mother named Liana White, pregnant with her second child, was reported missing. Her abandoned SUV was found not far from her home, her belongings littered beside it. Her husband appeared on television, making tearful appeals for her return in best CNN style. It was as if he were following the Scott Peterson playbook. In more ways than one.
Five days later, White led a search party to Liana's body, in a field just outside the city. Police promptly arrested him and charged him with second-degree murder. This Thursday, after 10 hours of deliberation, an Edmonton jury found him guilty. White now faces a mandatory life sentence. The jury went a step further, and recommended he be ineligible for parole for at least 15 years.
White's legal team mounted a diligent defence of their client. Lawyer Laura Stevens, who delivered closing arguments, did her best to create reasonable doubt, pointing out all the unanswered questions in the Crown's case, especially the lack of motive. But the weight of evidence against White, circumstantial though it was, was overwhelming.
Two things were particularly damning. First, there was the video surveillance tape from the neighbourhood pub, located between the White family home and the lot where the family's Ford Explorer was found abandoned.
White told police Liana had left the house in the SUV at her usual time, 6:15 a.m. But witnesses saw the vehicle abandoned as early at 5:45 am.
In fact, the videotape showed the Explorer zooming past the pub at 4:59 a.m.
The blurry image shows a man in a white T-shirt with White's stocky build driving the SUV. Eleven minutes later, the video shows what looks to be the same man running back towards White's house. Under police interrogation, White admitted the Explorer in the video was his, but insisted he was not the burly bald guy in the video.
He never explained how Liana could have driven away at 6:15 a.m. in the same vehicle. Or how or why a guy who looked uncannily like him would have been out driving around his neighbourhood in his Explorer at 5 a.m.
Then there were the two bags of clothing, paper towels, sponges and gloves -- all stained with Liana's blood -- that White retrieved from a field on the northwest edge of the city, two days after Liana's "disappearance." At the time, White was under police surveillance, though he didn't know it. Police saw him drive to the field, pick up those two bags, and put them out front of his house in Dunluce for garbage pick-up.
White testified at trial that he just happened to find the bags while he was out searching for Liana's body and brought them home, without looking in them, because he didn't like to see garbage lying around. The blood on the towels and gloves, he explained, came from a nosebleed Liana had three weeks earlier.
Real-life whodunnit no less compelling than scripted TV dramas
Paula Simons, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Saturday, December 09, 2006
White testified Liana must have bundled up the clothes, towels and a broken lamp from the couple's bedroom without his knowledge.
A guilty man, Stevens argued, would never have gone back to the secluded spot where he has dumped two garbage bags of bloody evidence and brought them back to his own house. No one would have been so stupid.
And a guilty man, Stevens said, would have thought up a better explanation than a bad nosebleed to account for the presence of Liana's blood in the garbage bags and on the floor and walls of the couple's bedroom. The story, she suggested, was too stupid to be a lie.
There was just one problem with Stevens's argument. To the jury, Michael White seemed just that stupid.
A sensible man in White's position might well have confessed to killing his wife, insisting it all happened in an unpremeditated moment of blind rage, and tried to get a manslaughter plea.
Yet right to the end, White denied any responsibility for what happened to Liana, and stuck to his cockamamie story. Like Dunluce's O.J. Simpson, White still insists he's innocent. And so do his ardent supporters, the folks at the Freedom Church of God.
"We remain confident that the truth will prevail in spite of this temporary injustice," said pastors Robert Scott and Gerald Budzinski, in a statement released Thursday afternoon.
Talk about blind faith.
Yet there is something perplexing about White's attitude, something that might have hoodwinked his backers. It's as if Whites believes his own story, as if he's in such denial about his crime, that he can't face reality.
At some level, perhaps, he feels he's telling the truth when he says he didn't kill Liana, or concocted his elaborate, half-baked coverup. That it was his shadow self, his inner evil twin, if you will, who did all these things.
But life isn't a TV show. Liana's murder was all too real. The only injustice here is that a woman died, that a little girl lost her mother in the most dreadful circumstances. Liana's friends and family have only this bitter consolation. The legal system got this one absolutely right.
- Liana White was a devoted wife and mother, dedicated to her job and respected by her co-workers. Her husband, Michael White, is a liar, a thief and now convicted of her murder. / See David Staples and Jamie Hall in the Journal's Sunday Reader