Sherman Murders: On Subterfuge

DALL·E/OpenAI

Let’s talk a little bit more about the odds that this crime could actually have been perpetrated by someone we have never heard of, and of whom limited to no public speculation exists. Subterfuge? Maybe. Maybe not.

The case study that I have written on before is that of Douglas Garland. It’s a fair starting point to survey what exactly happened in that case a bit more. But buyer beware, this one sits at the edge of extreme in all of true crime horror.

Garland

Douglas Garland was, in brief, a medical school drop out with a criminal record (or at least he had a history of past charges). At the time of the murders he perpetrated, he was living a relatively isolated life on his parent’s farm in a remote area of Alberta, just outside Calgary. At trial, he would be described as a loner.

Closer to the city’s core lived Alvin and Kathy Liknes, an elderly couple in the midst of an estate sale at the time they were murdered by Garland.

The issue? Based on everything we know, the motivation likely involved a grudge over a patent dispute and report of money left unpaid to Garland. Nearly a decade earlier, Garland and Alvin Liknes worked on a oilfield pump patent, court details show. It would provide limited to no economic return, so far as we know, but Garland felt betrayed and wronged after the falling out. The crown would argue that this perceived slight, and the animus that grew from it, fueled the killings.

Garland finding out about the Liknes estate sale was the straw that broke that camel’s back, according to the crown. The prosecutor would substantiate the importance of the estate sale in kicking off Garland’s crime in earnest. He apparently viewed a link showing the estate sale advertisement and noted the couple’s address. It seems this new information is what ultimately turned Garland’s heated animus into cold action. On this point, the prosecutor is the best we have outside Garland himself, who pled not guilty.

There was a familial connection between the two men, but it is not suggested they were close in any way leading up to the murders - in fact the opposite appears true.

At trial, the scope of Garland’s quiet planning was exposed (reader take care, these details are not for the faint of heart). He would search the schematics of the specific door lock used at the Liknes home, and studied its mechanism, all acts that simplified the actual break in and suggested that he may have been to the residence more than once (in order to obtain the specific model of the lock he would search online).

On the final evening of the Liknes estate sale (they were moving and re-orienting their lives) an impromptu sleepover was decided upon. The couple’s daughter and her two small children were to stay over that night. The daughter had difficulty settling her one-year-old child during the night, and decided to head home, leaving her five-year-old with the grandparents.

A few short hours later, Garland engaged in a mind-boggling series of crimes, including break and enter, assault, and kidnapping. At trial, more of the horrors that happened would bubble to the surface and torment anyone following along with the case. I won’t detail the specifics here, but they are grisly to be sure. And those details land differently than do to specifics of many other horrible cases. Again, buyer beware.

In the Garland case, we come to see the previously invisible due in large part to his own sloppiness and the astute work of Calgary Police and their timely leveraging of a grand investigative resource: the public.

Shortly after the house was found bloodied and empty by the Liknes’ daughter, police canvassed wide and far. Garland used a distinctive pick-up truck to facilitate his gross crimes and CCTV video of the truck in suspicious locations at suspicious times led his family to alert police, uncovering the link to Alvin Liknes and ultimately painting the picture as to what happened.

A back and forth legal saga would end in Garland’s capture some two weeks after the victims went missing. Amidst the darkness, a prowling helicopter and ground force of officers would call him to his knees in a field near his farm.

Animus is likely what drove Garland to take the steps he did. The opportunity of the estate sale as detailed above was most probably another motivating factor to answer the specific question: why now?

It is an eerie case, but an example of how estranged cognitive states and motives and behaviors can become. People like Garland have adjusted to circumstance in a way that the casual true crime follower will have trouble understanding in any real way. Indeed, Garland’s crimes specifically, and the insistence on involving the five year-old grandson (who, from Garland’s most likely point of view, was not supposed to be there) make his actions relatively incomprehensible - akin to an act fueled by a nothing to lose sentiment.

Sherman Murders

It’s the relatively incomprehensible point that interests me and relates all of this to the Sherman case. Once the decision was made to do what he was going to do based on whatever twisted logic he was using, the extension of the crime to other family members was probably a relatively easy decision for Garland - at least that is how he seems to have acted, anyway. If the intention was to torture and humiliate the grandfather and his wife, that process was amplified by the happenstance of the grandchild being present. The precariousness of the situation for the couple’s daughter and her other child substantiate the risks involved in crimes such as these.

In the Sherman case, that potential element of torture, the kind that goes far beyond mere anger or frustration or the financial ultimatum those emotions may have come with, is very much viable. I’ve talked about Brad Garret a lot, and I think it is a take that followers of the case should consider carefully. The Sherman murders seem like an instance of a very personal attack and crime. The extra effort, in the context of the killings and the risk of capture is simply astonishing. To me, it makes a mere money motive relatively less likely and I say this as someone having held multiple theories and likelihoods in mind over time. Put another way, the specifics here increase the likelihood of that sort of revenge angle to such a staggering degree as to make the entire endeavor a parody of itself if the point of strangulation and staging was merely to confuse. There are, shall we say, so many easier and more straightforward and less risky ways to confuse sloppy cops.

Garret asks us to consider what logically makes sense in a case.

Add to that, what makes logical sense when interpreting an investigation?

Let’s focus on the facts. First, the Toronto Police Service was wrong and wrong-headed for the first month and a half of the investigation - precious real estate in any murder probe. Even beyond the six week delay in declaring a targeted double homicide, their refusal to attend the second autopsy was estranged and indefensible. Their reluctant reliance on the very same autopsy to come to the actual conclusion was embarrassing.

Add to all of this the fact that the officer now working on the day-to-day of the Sherman investigation is relatively inexperienced. The lead of the investigation is the same person who initially rallied the press and the public around a murder-suicide theory, even if that was not his true intention. The performance of the first pathologist, and the police conclusions at that point are all extremely hard to reconcile as well - the clock really was ticking at that time and the dubious nature of a suicide theory was easy to locate.

Further, the single most impressive part of this probe is how competently the walking man was kept secret. Paradoxically, this is also one of the greatest critiques of the probe - that the police actually waited that long to release the images and video to the public. Had Calgary Police done that with Garland’s unique pick-up truck, one wonders where we’d be today (there was limited evidence left at the scene linking him to the crime, a point his defense lawyer would unsuccessfully rely on). I’m less convinced of outright incompetence here on the part of TPS, but it is on the menu. As I tend to repeat - we aren’t wearing TPS investigator shoes.

That gets to a question we fail to ask in a concrete way. Why did police wait so long to release the footage? It took time for them to try with their own efforts and capabilities, according to the cops themselves. To the best of my knowledge, this seems to be the ultimate reasoning - specifically, that the investigation would have benefited from police identifying the walking man without the public’s help. But whatever rabbit hole they went down - likely the tower dump fiasco - turned up nothing. The strategy was therefore a mistake as anyone with a pulse would agree that immediate release, in retrospect, may have served the investigation well. Of course, we’ll never actually know.

Still, four whole years of that secret, even in this context? There has got to be more to the story, right? Of course, maybe the investigators really were that incompetent at the time. It’s all smoke and mirrors until the bad guy is caught, or the courts agree it’s a cold case - at which time swaths of police thinking, and theory, and documents will probably be unsealed en masse, given all the other legal, journalistic, and investigative variables at play.

This Sherman probe is a great mess, indeed.

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A High Degree of Confidence

While professional and able investigative reporters like Donovan have paved the way for case coherence, and for the release of warrant files, this doesn’t fully speak to what is and is not happening behind the scenes at TPS now. There is a lot we don’t know, but again, there are some things we do know. Here we always find a place to wander back to.

First, police have no ungodly idea who the walking man is according to their own report. Second, they have provided no official public update in almost two years. Third, of the persons of interest, it seems that many if not all have been ruled out as the walking man. It also seems that many if not all have been found to have no connection to the walking man. Fourth, and most obviously, it’s been five and a half years and still we have no suspects named or arrests made. How can a case be simultaneously active and seemingly so cold? If you ask TPS, they will tell you investigations take time. Well, so does getting lucky, and maybe that is what they are actually earnestly engaged in most at present.

Many speculate that the international flare piece of the investigation is an important area to focus on. But here too, we have no real window into the mind of the officers tasked with solving this case, and what other leads or tips or trails have led them to this investment of time and resources. It is this lack of scrutiny here that keeps many up at night. It also doesn’t foster great confidence in the prospects of capture. This is particularly true given the faulty guesses and assumptions that TPS has delivered to the public over time.

But without that information, without giving the public more confidence in the probe’s direction itself, it seems that a one-off, a relative nobody, could be the culprit. Remember that Garland took extreme risks that night, risks that were active and moving, including the number of people in the home at the time he entered. Did the walking man have a similar history and grudge? It seems based on the crime it is a rational possibility. Of course, this would mean basically all of the other theories are toast. My, my.

What happened in Toronto in December 2017 was beyond personal. It does seem logical and compelling to suggest the nature of the more heinous parts of the crime was driven by revenge, and not so much by mere subterfuge. Garret comments on how easy it is to kill these days. Taking on those extra risks, in a case driven solely by money? It becomes hard to wrap your head around it the more you ponder logical likelihoods.

But as Garland shows, true animus is found in the eye of the beholder. It need not be logical, or right, or fair, or even well-known or public - it need just exist in a mind that has changed in order to welcome it.

We can’t know the inner machinations of the killer in the Sherman case with any certainty, of course. But it’s that realization in part that leaves too many possibilities open, and the yearning for a resolution so very much alive and well.