Sunday, January 31, 2021

Getting Away With Murder

"Wise asked who he was being arrested for murdering, and continued to eat his sandwich."
"James Henry Wise has a 30-year history of being linked to people that are victims of homicide that share a similar modus operandi."
"One incident by itself may be happenstance, but the evidence, passage of time, and geography make it highly improbable that any other person is responsible for these crimes."
"Now that we see the map and the evidence, it is clear that he [Wise] used cunning and trickery to gain trust of people in the community, and he turned it against them for his own cruel intentions."
OPP Detective Constable Michael Hyndman
Jim Wise stands outside his garage in Morewood yesterday, confident his name will be cleared in a valley serial murder case.
Jim Wise in Morewood  Jonathan Hayward, Ottawa Sun
"I haven't done nothing. there's no place I can drive without them [police] being there. I have been watched from the air by helicopters. Wherever I turn around, I always see someone following me and I know someone is out there."
"A lot of people assume I have millions. My job is to say nothing."
"They [Ontario Provincial Police] had 35 years to try and come up with something. They came up with nothing."
Jimmy Wise, 77, retired mechanic, suspected serial killer
"When one considers the small rural community in w hich the accused resides, it is not difficult to imagine the stigma which has attached to the accused."
"I am sure the stigma will be with him for the rest of his life as long as he remains in that community."
Justice James Chadwick

James Henry(Jimmy) Wise was born and grew up in North Dundas Township, Ontario, one of eleven children in the family. From an early age he came to the attention of police and as a young man had amassed a criminal record inclusive of convictions for break-and-enter, armed robbery and car theft. He worked as a freelance mechanic in adulthood. "All I have to do is hear an engine and I know what's wrong with it" he boasted, having earned a reputation of being capable of fixing just about anything, charging a fraction of what a regular garage would.

Forty years a go when his girlfriend left him he became a suspect of arson at her father's home in Winchester in the Ottawa Valley where the family home was set ablaze with the use of an accelerant while the father and the girlfriend's three-year-old child were inside the home where the doors and windows had been wired shut. Fortunately the fire's heat melted the wire and escape was possible. A search warrant found two cans of gasoline in Wise's car but he denied any wrongdoing. Some time later, driving a stolen car Wise mounted a sidewalk and ran his erstwhile girlfriend over, but she sustained no serious injury.

He was convicted on a charge of attempted murder and received a one-year jail term. A year later, a local 60-year-old man was killed as he sat at his kitchen table in his remote farmhouse in a nearby town, shot three times with a .38-calibre handgun fired through the kitchen window. Shot in the back, neck and head. In another four years, a single shot fired through the dining room window of an Avonmore farmhouse killed another 48-year-old dairy farmer.

Original suspect in the Ottawa Valley killings Jim Wise was never charged.

Two months later a fire at night engulfed the Morewood home of a retired courier and reclusive bachelor. Forensic evaluation indicated he had been shot in the head before his house was burned to the ground. The three homicides, the OPP confirmed, were connected. Another three deaths, two which were attributed to mysterious fires, were thought as well to be the work of  the same serial killer, according to investigators. The OPP followed Wise whom they had good reason to believe was the serial killer, for a year.

Wise was arrested and charged multiple times for a whole series of these crimes. Never was any incriminating evidence found that could be used against him in court, only circumstantial evidence. The one time that real evidence was found to link him to the murders and the torchings and break-and-enters was when investigators undertook an unauthorized search of his home and discovered a map of the nearby area with Xs marked at specific places. Those Xs marked where murders and other crimes had taken place.

At his most recent trial, which had recently concluded, long after the fact of the crimes, but due to the fact that one of his victims' well-decomposed corpse had been discovered along with incriminating evidence that his lawyers handily contested at court, the judge ruled that the map could not be used in court as critical evidence because it had been obtained in a manner that violated Wise's right to privacy. And though the jury deliberated for a lengthy period, they found for a 'not guilty' verdict for the-now 77 year-old, by then in poor health after a stroke that left him wheelchair-bound.

Years earlier he had been incarcerated after a successful trial on a lesser criminal charge and was convicted, and sent to Burwash Correctional Centre, a provincial prison. There he earned a reputation for hating police, small animals and old men. He was reported to be enthralled by guns and by fire. An avid reader of books about serial killers. He became an accomplished break-out artist, breaking out of three different jails in the 1960s. 

He was the primary subject of suspicion in a series of violent deaths in the general area, but incriminating evidence was never found such that would serve to convict him in a court of law. He launched a lawsuit for $2-million in a defamation and civil rights case against the OPP and in 2002 the suit was settled out of court under terms of secrecy. Three decades after the first time he became the subject of a serial murder investigation, police suspected him of another series of murders in the rural community.

He was a suspect in four other homicides, one suspicious death, an attempted murder and a long string of unsolved arsons in and around North Dundas Township. He was suspected of the shooting death of a man in Morewood, shot through his basement window on a dark, snowy February morning. In a statement to police, Wise denied any involvement in the homicide. But it emerged that the man who was shot had contracted with Wise to burn down his trailer to enable him to collect an insurance settlement. The man used the $100,000 settlement to build a new home, but neglected to pay Wise the $10,000 he had contracted him for.

Another area man had suffered an unexplained series of fires on  his property, destroying an old house, a barn, a machine shop and a number of vehicles in a dozen fires. The last of the fires saw the 58-year-old part-time farmer with mental health problems himself burned to death, his body discovered in his burnt-out Ford pickup truck. The resulting forensic tests indicated the man had been overcome by smoke and flames, his body found splayed out the back window of his cab halfway into the truck bed.
 
OPP Detective Hyndman spoke with Wise on a number of occasions hoping to persuade him to confess to the murders to enable the families to have closure. He informed Wise that he knew he was responsible for the murders and asked him to "tell him about the other people he killed and fill in some of those spaces", so Wise could "go out on his own terms with respect". To which Wise responded he would give it some thought. 
 
Once again Hydman asked Wise to confess to the murders, wanting to understand why he had committed them."You will never understand", responded Wise, according to a police account of the meeting. "I don't understand". 

Jimmy Wise, shown here in the late 1980s, has been charged with first-degree murder of a Chesterville, Ont., man whose body was discovered in 2014. (CBC)


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posted by Pieface @ Sunday, January 31, 2021

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