Davis killer cleared in quadruple murder plot

A Superior Court judge has acquitted Marshall Ross of counselling to commit a quadruple murder, finding the purported scheme described by the Crown’s main witness was too “fanciful and implausible” to pass the “reality check.”

The prosecution alleged Ross, serving a life sentence for arranging the 2007 murder of Toronto philanthropist and businessman Glen Davis, tried to enlist a fellow inmate’s help to kill four people, including Davis’s widow, Mary Alice Davis.

Ross was the godson of Glen and Mary Alice Davis, and the revelation that he was responsible for murdering Glen Davis shook the family to their core.

That inmate, who testified at trial last month under the pseudonym “Joe,” claimed that Ross wanted the four executed to wipe out a $3-million debt he owed to Davis’s investment and holding company, Davis Corp.

Joe’s testimony should not be “lightly discounted” given the risk to which he exposed himself by breaking the inmate code of silence, Justice Graeme Mew said, reading his reasons in court Wednesday. Nor was there any evidence he received anything in return. But there has to be some “threshold of plausibility, some air of reality, for the elements of the offence of counselling to be complete,” Mew said.

Moreover, people do not commit a criminal offence “merely by talking about the possibility of committing some wrongful or unlawful act,” Mew said.

“The plan to have four individuals murdered is so fanciful and implausible, and subject to the contingency of Mr. Ross’s transfer to a lowsecurity facility and a successful escape, that it should not in the circumstances form the basis for a conviction on the offence of counselling.”

The judge, however, found a handwritten document drawn up by Ross — including the names of the alleged targets and a map showing two of their addresses — “is a very troubling piece of paper” with no rational explanation for why, as the defence argued, it could have been linked to civil litigation. Crown attorney Monica Heine had described the map as a hit list.

After Mew finished reading his decision, security officers put Ross, 51, back in handcuffs and led him out of the courtroom to return to a federal penitentiary.

“You’re still a murderer, you scumbag, I hope you rot in hell,” yelled Keith Jones, general manager of Davis Corp. and one of the purported targets. Ross didn’t look back at Jones.

Outside the courtroom, Ross’s defence lawyer Peter Zaduk praised the judge for a thorough and wellreasoned decision, and for finding there were “so many loose ends, and open questions” in Joe’s evidence. He said the judge correctly found that convicting Ross of counselling another inmate to counsel someone else to do the murders is “not an approach that’s accepted by the law.”

His client, relieved this long process is over, can now resume his rehabilitation behind bars, where he has been since 2009 after acknowledging responsibility for committing an “horrendous and evil crime,” Zaduk said.

Others gathered to watch the proceedings were disappointed by the outcome. But it does not “change the fact that Marshall Ross is still a convicted killer and will be returning to a security facility for the foreseeable future,” said Toronto police Staff Supt. Peter Moreira. He and Staff Supt. Mike Barsky, also in court Wednesday, were the two homicide detectives responsible for arresting Ross for Davis’s murder. Both said they deeply regret that Davis’s widow, Mary Alice, has had to relive the nightmare of her husband’s death due to this case.

Peter Quinn, a Davis Corp. lawyer and friend of Glen Davis — and another alleged target of Ross — said that despite the judge’s ruling, he has no doubt Ross intended to kill them.

The plot sounded “a little bizarre” but so did the original murder, when Ross put a contract hit on Davis because “he thought the debt was going away,” Quinn said.

Jones, the one-time Davis family chauffeur, who worked his way up in the company to general manager, said Ross has put his own family through “17 years of hell.”

His wife and daughters, also in court Wednesday, were working at Davis Corp. headquarters back in 2005 and came to Davis’s rescue “as he lay bloodied and beaten in a driveway,” after the first failed attempt on his life orchestrated by Ross.

Jones said he takes some comfort in the fact that “we’re going to live our lives well. He’s in a box, and we’re up at our cottage in Muskoka.”