Two men accused of murdering a Castor-area family have almost identical stories about what happened that December 2013 night — but with one major difference.
Jason Klaus and Joshua Frank each pointed their finger at the other as the killer who gunned down Gordon, Sandra and Monica Klaus and burned down the family farmhouse.
Frank told RCMP investigators that weeks before the Dec. 8, 2013 murders Klaus asked him to kill his family.
“I said I can’t kill anybody,” said Frank, in a videotaped interview with police at the Red Deer RCMP detachment the day after the two men were arrested on Aug. 15, 2014.
“I told him I can’t do it.”
Klaus told him he now knew too much and there would be a “bullet coming your way” or his family’s if he did not help him.
Frank said he reluctantly agreed to help Klaus.
“That’s when I made the worst decision of my life ever to help him,” he said.
On the night of the murders, Frank drove Klaus to his family’s home outside Castor. But Frank said he he parked nearby and had nothing to do with shooting the Klauses or starting the fire.
Klaus and Frank are on trial in Red Deer Court of Queen’s Bench on three counts of first-degree murder.
Klaus, who was being grilled by police at the same time in a different interview room at the detachment, told an almost identical story, except that it was Klaus who waited in a vehicle while Frank did the killings.
During hours of interviews, RCMP investigators pressed Frank to tell the truth. They showed him video recordings taken during an undercover Mr. Big operation earlier in the year of Klaus talking about the murders, blaming Frank.
At one point, a sniffling and emotional Frank was left alone in the interview room.
“I don’t want to go to jail,” he sobbed to himself, adding moments later, “What have I done?”
As police persistently urged Frank to come clean, he was asked if it was his idea to go to the Klaus’s to kill them.
“No, it was his idea. He proposed it to me,” he said.
“I would have nothing to gain by taking them out.”
The videotaped interviews are being played as part of a voir dire to determine if they will be admissable as evidence in the trial. Similar interviews with Klaus were accepted as evidence in an earlier decision by Justice Eric Macklin.
More to come