In 1984, Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie were convicted for second-degree murder in Saint John. Forty years later, a New Brunswick judge confirmed their innocence. What happened?
For half a lifetime, Robert Mailman dreamed about a single moment.When they said ‘not guilty,’ I never got the feeling that I really wanted, because I know it’s overshadowed by cancer, that I’m dying,” said Mailman. “I’m down to nothing. I’m a skeleton.”
On the courthouse steps after the decision, in his first moments of true freedom in four decades, Gillespie was overcome with emotion and couldn’t speak to the media. Jerome Kennedy, one of the lead lawyers with Innocence Canada, is more direct. He said the whole case hinged on a police obsession with Mailman.
In this undated photo, Robert Mailman is seen participating in a prison recreation program while at the maximum-security Atlantic Institute in Renous, N.B. Mailman spent 18 years in federal penitentiaries. Kennedy from Innocence Canada says that when a jogger found the burned body of a 55-year-old plumber named George Leeman in a Saint John park on Nov. 30, 1983, the local police saw a chance to put Mailman behind bars.
In a statement to CBC News, Saint John Police chief Robert Bruce said he was “concerned about the outcome, in particular, the role of the Saint John Police in the original investigation and prosecution.” Loeman said he saw a woman named Janet Shatford — a local pimp — hit George Leeman with an axe, and that Bobby Mailman then struck him in the head with the barrel or butt of a shotgun three to four times.
Gillespie says while he was in custody, a Saint John Police officer tried to get him to pin the murder on Mailman.He get me in the office all by himself … I’m not sure how long I was in there, but I would say between 10 and 12 hours. And he wanted me to make a statement against Robert Mailman,” said Gillespie.
Mailman and Gillespie’s first trial went for three days in late March 1984. It ended with a hung jury. But at a new trial that May, they were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.Mailman says that for the first decade in prison, the only thing that kept him going was “revenge.”
“I would draft up some letters for them to send to media, to their own lawyers — when they had lawyers,” Dalton said. “Wally used to run the poker games inside, and if he made a few dollars, he would use that money to hire a private investigator out in the real world,” said Dalton, smiling at the memory. “They did everything they could with the limited resources they had.”
In its application to have the Mailman and Gillespie convictions overturned, Innocence Canada pointed out that both “eyewitnesses” to Leeman’s death in 1983 — John Loeman Jr. and Janet Shatford — had since recanted their trial testimony on multiple occasions and admitted that they had lied under oath at trial.
What Sodhi had found was indeed proof that in 1984, at the time of the trial, the Saint John Police Force had paid a 16-year-old witness.