Jim Smyth, the star Ontario Provincial Police interrogator who famously pried a confession from sex killer Russell Williams, has a reputation that demands a screenplay.
As a top Canadian practitioner of the modern art of police interrogation, it is his job to bring forensic psychology to life, using conviviality and guile to convince murderers to skip trial and go straight to jail.
Major successes include his work on the interrogation of Michael Briere, who confessed to killing 10-year-old Holly Jones in Toronto in 2003, and his profiling in the case of Tori Stafford, 9, which led him to discover the girl’s remains by following a hunch to a rural field.
But now Detective-Sergeant Smyth’s sly charm and relentless pursuit of confessions have derailed a major prosecution, leading a judge to rule a suspected murderer’s admission of guilt was involuntary and possibly false, and therefore inadmissible. With no other evidence against him, Cory Armishaw, 26, was cleared of second-degree murder over the 2006 shaking death of three-month-old Jaydin Lindeman in Guelph, Ont.
Battling gangs Provincial Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services Jim Bradley was at the Guelph Police station Friday, to announce $113,000 in funding to help Guelph Police battle gang activity.