Richard Oland manslaughter is 'waiting game,' investigators say

SAINT JOHN, N.B. â€" It could be summer before police get forensic lab results for the manslaughter investigation of prominent New Brunswick entrepreneur Richard Oland, retired police investigators say.

There have been no arrests eight months after the murder of Oland, a 69-year-old businessman who 30 years ago left Moosehead Breweries, now run by his brother, Derek Oland.

Police have remained guarded about information on one of the most highly publicized criminal cases to emerge from Saint John in years.

With significant backlogs at RCMP forensic laboratories â€" there are only a handful of such labs to deal with criminal cases from across the country â€" it wouldn't be uncommon to wait anywhere from nine months to a year, said Eric Fiander, deputy director of the Atlantic Police Academy in Prince Edward Island.

"If they've got a pile of exhibits, then they'll wait quite a while before they get it," said Fiander, the retired inspector in charge of criminal investigations at the Fredericton Police Force. "It's a game for a very patient person."

Chief Bill Reid of the Saint John Police Force says investigators are waiting for lab test results for a "significant number" of pieces of evidence in the Oland manslaughter.

The results of those forensic tests are essential in getting to the bottom of what happened in the businessman's office last July, Reid said earlier.

"We had seized a significant number of exhibits, and they have to be processed, and they have to be analyzed," Reid said after a meeting of the Saint John Board of Police Commissioners. "That takes a long, long time. So we have to be patient with the work that third parties are doing on our behalf."

Reid would not specify what evidence was sent for analysis.

Questioned by reporters last week, Reid said he couldn't say if police were any closer to making an arrest.

"I don't have a crystal ball to give you that information because we're relying on a third party to give us that information," he said, referring to the lab results.

"We're not the only police agency in Canada that's asking crime labs to do work for them, so we submit and we wait."

Without the skills and equipment to analyze DNA and other forensic evidence in-house, police send exhibits to RCMP laboratories, Sgt. Mark Smith of Saint John's forensic identification section confirmed.

Fiander said a more serious crime may get bumped up to the front of the line, but with many murder investigations happening in Canada, the wait could still be long.

Forensic lab results can make or break the case, he said.

"If you've got a smoking gun, then the exhibits are secondary, but if you don't have the smoking gun, then your exhibits are your entire case," he said.

Guy Colton, a retired Toronto forensics police investigator now teaching at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., said labs will typically accept only around 10 samples at a time â€" usually taking one or two months to submit the results of each batch.

Colton said he has worked on investigations that have taken up to 15 months before police had enough evidence to make an arrest.

But he said it would be shallow to assume the forensic evidence is the "be all and end all" of the case.

"In a major case, there's all kinds of fragments. It's a puzzle," he said, adding toxicology results and other investigation techniques can take time.

The forensic evidence could be in, but police might still need to match the DNA profile to a suspect, for instance.

"Some of these investigations can go on for close to a year," he said.

© Copyright (c) New Brunswick Telegraph Journal

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