Man convicted in murder of Ottawa police officer 'was wrong' in recreating crime

Within days of confessing to the 1967 murder of Ottawa firefighter Leopold Roy, Romeo Phillion flubbed an attempt to recreate events that purportedly took place at the scene of the crime, the Ontario Court of Appeal was told yesterday.

Retired Ottawa police inspector Steven Nadori testified that Mr. Phillion - who maintains he falsely confessed to the crime and spent 31 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit - was wrong about where the stabbing took place, and could not identify the exit the killer used to flee Mr. Roy's apartment building.
In addition, Mr. Nadori said that an account Mr. Phillion supplied about stealing a knife and a wristwatch from a nearby apartment turned out to be wrong.

"He was wrong about a bunch of things," Mr. Nadori said. "I do remember that."

Defence counsel James Lockyer pounced on the discrepancies yesterday as being proof of his contention that Mr. Phillion falsely confessed in hopes of reaping reward money and leading police on a wild goose chase. Mr. Lockyer alleged that the only details of the killing Mr. Phillion got right were those that had already been publicized.

"Did you get the sense that he was sort of just making things up as he went along?" Mr. Lockyer said. "Were you beginning to wonder a bit?"

Mr. Lockyer accused Mr. Nadori and other officers of bringing Mr. Phillion back to a police station after the failed re-creation, "feeding" him correct details, and then taking Mr. Phillion back to the Roy apartment so that he could get his story straight.

Mr. Nadori said he did not feed information to Mr. Phillion, nor did he consider the possibility that Mr. Phillion had fabricated his confession.

"I didn't think of it at that point," he told Mr. Justice Michael Moldaver, Mr. Justice John Laskin and Mr. Justice James MacPherson. "I knew that he was a liar, though."

However, Mr. Nadori agreed that Mr. Phillion did get most of the details right the second time he attempted to re-create the crime.

One of the reasons he never seriously questioned Mr. Phillion's guilt was that he was struck by how naturally Mr. Phillion re-created the stabbing motion he allegedly used to kill Mr. Roy, Mr. Nadori testified.

"The demonstration of how he killed Mr. Roy had a profound effect on me," he said, in an affidavit entered as evidence by the Crown yesterday. "In my mind, I did not believe that one could fake the demonstration unless it had, in fact, occurred."

Mr. Lockyer has portrayed his client as a none-too-bright troublemaker whose attempts to later recant his confession were ignored by police.

Mr. Phillion, 68, is not only the oldest convicted murderer to seek exoneration, but the one who has served the longest prison sentence. As a result of his 1972 conviction for the Roy murder, he spent 31 years behind bars before being released on bail four years ago.

The central evidence in the case is a police report that Mr. Lockyer believes was kept from the defence at Mr. Phillion's trial.

It said investigators had been able to corroborate Mr. Phillion's account of being almost 300 kilometres away from Ottawa only an hour or two before Mr. Roy was slain. A parole officer found the report in 1998 and sent it to Mr. Phillion.

In an affidavit he swore last year, Mr. Nadori said that when he was shown the report for the first time in 2003, he was shocked to see that Mr. Phillion had had a potential alibi.