The RCMP’s “overwhelming abundance of evidence” against Jason Klaus started with a dead dog, police said.
In an August 2014 interview at the Red Deer RCMP detachment, police officers laid out the case they had built against Klaus in a bid to get him to talk.
The murder was planned, his parents, Gordon and Sandra, and sister, Monica, were shot in the head, and the gun used was thrown in the Battle River near Halkirk, RCMP major crimes investigator Robert Kropp told Klaus in an interview the day after his Aug. 15, 2014 arrest. The family GMC Sierra he fled in was abandoned elsewhere on the river.
Kropp said they knew that the fire that burned down the family home near Castor on Dec. 8, 2013, was intentionally set using gasoline. Cartridge casings from a semi-automatic pistol and blood and were found at the scene along with the family dog, which had been shot to death with the same kind of gun used to kill the Klauses.
The dog and the bullet found inside it proved key evidence. If that dog had not been found, the deaths of his family members may never have been investigated as a homicide, Kropp said.
But it was, and the RCMP investigation was extensive involving dozens of officers over eight months.
“I can tell you no stone was left unturned,” Kropp told Klaus in the video played in Red Deer Court of Queen’s Bench on Friday.
Klaus, 41, and a friend, Joshua Frank, 32, are on trial on three counts of first-degree murder and arson. Frank is also charged with killing the family brown Labrador retriever.
Kropp told Klaus he was not charged with murder on a single piece of evidence. “We collected a ton of evidence.”
The ashes and debris from the burned out home was systematically examined three times and special forensic investigators spent more than seven days combing through the ruins compared with two or three days at a typical crime scene, he said.
In what Kropp said was a unique move the Calgary Medical Examiner’s office sent one of its experts to the crime scene.
Klaus’s phones were also tapped. “I can tell you, honestly, that is not standard in every investigation.”
Klaus peered intently at photographs of the crime scene shown to him on a computer monitor but otherwise said little in the recorded interview.
RCMP interview expert Staff Sgt. Michael McCauley, who spent more than three hours chatting with Klaus the previous evening, told him his fianceé knows he is guilty and wants him to “deal with this.”
His dead parents and sister and other relatives would also want him to say something, he said.
“They deserve for you to take some ownership,” he said. “Your existing family deserves that.”
When, in one short exchange, Klaus seemed to suggest that family members did not believe he did the murders, McCauley asked if he was denying it.
“No statement,” said Klaus.
McCauley said he had hoped Klaus would admit what he had done.
“I can tell you’re not a cold-blooded killer. I can tell you’re a guy who’s got a story to tell and made a terrible mistake.”
McCauley said the “black and white picture is you’re a terrible human being who murdered his family.
“I believe the colour you could provide would show that you’re not that terrible, awful person.”
At one point, McCauley compares the case to Justin Bourque, who gunned down five Mounties, killing three, in Moncton, N.B. in June 2014.
Bourque and Klaus are not the same. Klaus is not the “worst of the worst” and his family should know that.
“That’s what you have, the power to make them and everyone understand.”
The trial wrapped up in the early afternoon on Friday because Frank required dental treatment, the court was told.
The police interviews form evidence in a voir dire — often described as a trial within a trial — to determine the admissibility and “voluntariness” of statements the accused gave police. It will be up to Justice Eric Macklin to decide if the recordings can be admitted as evidence.
More of the RCMP recordings will be heard on Monday when the trial resumes.
pcowley@reddeeradvocate.com
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