Two Canadians who served time for murder are found not guilty

The court recognized its error in a 40-year-old case.

Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie of St. John, after years in prison, heard acquittals today. Both were convicted in May 1984 in a murder case.

Tracy Dewer, chief judge of the Court of King’s Bench, said Thursday, Jan. 4, that Mailman and Gillespie are "innocent in the eyes of the law" in the Nov. 30, 1983, murder of George Gilman Leeman in St. John. Forty years have passed since the conviction.

Prosecution

Mailman and Gillespie were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for 18 years. An appeal from the conviction was dismissed in 1988.

Leeman's badly beaten and partially burned body was found by a jogger in a wooded area. Human rights activists from Innocence Canada said that Gillespie and Mailman "both had strong alibis with multiple witnesses placing them far from the crime scene on the day of the murder."

The prosecution rested on the testimony of two witnesses, one of whom, 18-year-old Josh Arnold Lowman, recanted twice. First he testified against Mailman and Gillespie, then said he had been coerced by police threats, and then reverted to his original version.

Human rights activists are also convinced that police and prosecutors did not initially consider all available evidence. For example, a receipt for an auto part that the men bought outside St. John on the night the murder occurred in the city. Police have yet to comment on the acquittal.

Justification

In 2019, the elderly Mailman and Gillespie filed a motion to reconsider their sentences. At that point, they were on parole, having served 18 (Mailman) and 21 (Gillespie) years, respectively.

Last month, Justice Minister Arif Virani announced that new evidence had emerged and that a new trial had been ordered. He referred to new information that had not been presented to the court initially and during the course of the trial and appeals, and which called into question "the overall fairness of the process".