Medical examiner testifies at Garland triple murder trial

CTV Calgary: 'Death Dealers Manual' found on hard The Douglas Garland murder trial continues in a Calgary courtroom with more testimony from digital forensic experts. Ina Sidhu has the lates

Alberta’s chief medical examiner took the stand at the murder trial for Douglas Garland and talked about some of the evidence that was collected from the  Liknes’ Parkhill home and the Garland farm.

Garland is charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of the Alvin and Kathy Liknes and their five-year-old grandson Nathan O’Brien.

The Crown alleges that Garland took the trio forcibly from their home in June 2014 and then killed them at his family’s farm near Airdrie.

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On Tuesday, the court heard from Cst. Doug Kraan, a digital forensic investigator, who testified about Google searches done on the Liknes’ Parkhill home and the community they’d planned on moving to after selling their house.

Kraan also talked about some of the more disturbing, Internet searches that were conducted including; ‘most painful torture’, surgical autopsy kits and other tools, ‘best butcher knives’ and the ‘force needed for concussion’.

Research on lock picking and how to bypass the same sort of lock that was on the side door of the Liknes home, were also found on the hard drive.

On Wednesday, the Chief Medical Examiner of Alberta, Dr. Elizabeth Brooks-Lim, took the stand and talked about blood found in the Liknes’ Parkhill home.

She said she first attended the scene on July 2, 2014 and was accompanied by a blood stain analysis expert.

Dr. Brooks-Lim said that she concluded that it was possible that the three missing individuals may have sustained fatal or non-fatal injuries and that the blood could have come from lacerations or abrasions or from significant internal trauma.

She told the court that she was concerned about the possibility of head injury because of the amount of blood that was found on the headboards of beds in the master and spare bedrooms.

Brooks-Lim also went to the Garland farm with an expert on skeleton and bones and they examined the contents of a burn barrel that was found on the property.

She testified that the bones were severely brittle and charred and that they could not be identified as human remains.

She also said that it would take about two hours at a crematorium to burn a human body.

Under cross-examination, she said that the burned bone fragments could have been human and that she felt they could have been those of a child under the age of five.

Testimony at the trial has wrapped for the day.