Jason Klaus admitted he planned the murders of his sister and parents to an RCMP undercover officer during an elaborate sting operation.
But he did not pull the trigger, he insisted. It was his friend Joshua Frank who shot to death Klaus’ parents Gordon and Sandra and sister Monica in the family farmhouse near Castor on Dec. 8, 2013.
Frank would back up Klaus’ story and confess to the murders to an undercover officer posing as a criminal in a July 2014 parking lot meeting in the CrossIron Mills Mall north of Calgary.
The confessions were made during a four-month Mr. Big RCMP undercover operation that lured Klaus into joining what he thought was a criminal organization.
The RCMP officer in charge of the operation known as the “cover” walked the court through the 26 scenarios they ran between April and July to get Klaus and Frank’s confessions.
The names of all of the officers involved in the sting are protected under a court publication ban.
Evidence from the Mr. Big operation is part of a voir dire – a trial within a trial – to determine its admissibility in the Red Deer Court of Queen’s Bench trial for Klaus and Frank, who are each facing three charges of first-degree murder.
Undercover officers first introduced themselves to Klaus on April 1, 2014, while making a deal to store vehicles on the Klaus farm.
He was offered a chance to do some work for his new acquaintances and within a few days joined them on a trip to Grande Prairie to repossess a car. The car was not located, but he was paid $500 for his trouble.
Other jobs followed. By April 26, he was in Edmonton intimidating a man who supposedly owed the criminal organization money. Other jobs saw Klaus helping catch a member of the criminal organization in a lie and blackmailing a supposedly corrupt border guard.
Through it all, Klaus was wined and dined at restaurants and strip clubs, taken to the Calgary Stampede and given regular payments amounting to $12,340 by the end of the operation.
As Klaus took a larger role in the organization, he was told that honesty was paramount for Mr. Big. If Klaus hoped to move up in the organization he had to come clean on his past.
The message was: if he was honest, Mr. Big had the resources to make problems go away.
To prove it, an elaborate “scenario” saw a member of the organization calling for help because he thought he had beaten a prostitute to death. A female undercover officer, convincingly portrayed the woman left in the trunk of a car.
When she unexpectedly came to, the criminals warned her to say nothing and she would not be harmed.
Klaus wondered why they did not kill the woman, the undercover officer testified.
“He questioned why we would leave a loose end like that.”
That night in a Medicine Hat hotel room, Klaus admitted for the first time arranging the murder of his family and paying Frank to fire the shots.
The confession came in the 14th “scenario” run by police.
”It’s almost unheard of for something to happen that fast,” the officer testified.
A few days later, peeved about a dispute over money, he recanted his confession, saying he had been lying. After the hard feelings were smoothed over he was back to his original story.
He did not waver on his version of events even when finally getting a chance to meet Mr. Big at a Calgary condominium July 19. Unconvinced, Mr. Big asked to meet Frank.
Klaus arranged a meeting at the CrossIron Mills parking lot. Frank met privately with a member of the criminal organization and admitted to pulling the trigger and killing the Klauses.
He described where he threw the keys of a vehicle driven from the scene the night of the murders and the location of the gun, which had been thrown in a river. Frank told the undercover officer he still had the lighter he used to start the fire and a bullet from the gun.
The next day Klaus and two of his criminal organization friends bought a metal detector and drove to where Frank said the keys were and quickly found them. An unsuccessful effort was made to find the gun, which would later be recovered in another search by divers.
At the beginning of his testimony the officer said that the Klaus Mr. Big operation was one of the shortest he had ever been involved in.
Why asked Crown prosecutor Douglas Taylor.
“It was Mr. Klaus. He progressed the operation very quickly.”
Klaus and Frank were arrested Aug. 15, 2014.
pcowley@reddeeradvocate.com
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