Walter (Wally) Gillespie stands in front of a Saint John, N.B. home, on Aug. 18, 2020, where he lived and was arrested for murder by the Saint John Police.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
The day after Walter Gillespie was exonerated by New Brunswick’s Chief Justice in early January, he packed his life’s belongings into four boxes and closed the door of the halfway house. Across town, he stepped into his “cell,” as he called it, a cramped, dark apartment where he would spend his final months, living on his old age pension.
“Don’t drop the TV,” he told his friend, journalist Gary Dimmock, who recalled helping him move his meagre life’s possessions.
After serving 21 years behind bars, and nearly 40 years fighting for his innocence, Mr. Gillespie’s freedom was short lived. He died on April 19, his body found the next day inside that dingy apartment where his colourful paintings hung on the wall – just 106 days after he had been declared an innocent man. He was 80.
Mr. Gillespie leaves behind a daughter, Patricia, whom he spent four decades struggling to get to know. “Life was not fair to him, but he never let that turn him from a kind soul into a bitter or angry person,” she wrote in a statement to CTV. “This is saying a lot because ‘unfair’ doesn’t even begin to cover what his life was.”
Walter Francis Gillespie, known simply as Wally, was a quiet, mild-mannered man with hangdog eyes and a tousle of hair. He sometimes wore flashy pieces of clothing – a neon undershirt or a cotton candy button up – and at times had a sense of humour to match. He devoured books, particularly westerns by American author Zane Grey.
Mr. Gillespie’s life was troubled from the start. Born Aug. 31, 1943, in the hardscrabble port city of Saint John, he was the youngest of seven children, raised by a violent, hard-drinking shipyard worker. His father died when he was 17.
He became a day labourer on the docks and a heavy drinker by night. By the time he was an adult, he turned to crime to pay for his booze habit and was forging bad cheques all over the city. He was 20 and in prison when he heard that a fire had torn through the cramped, rundown tenement where his family lived. Inside, the bodies of his mother, brother and four sisters were discovered huddled in a bedroom.
Over the next decade or so he was charged with more than 50 crimes, many of which were breaking and entering. He sometimes drank with a man named Robert Mailman, a feared bootlegger who had been tried for murder three times for the death of another man, and beat an attempted murder charge against a Saint John police officer.
In 1983, the charred and badly beaten body of a local plumber was discovered by a jogger in a vast wooded park on the edge of the city. A month and a half later, Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Mailman were charged with the murder by the Saint John Police Service.
Saint John Police twice offered Mr. Gillespie a plea deal to testify against his friend but he never took it – a fact that Innocence Canada lawyer Jerome Kennedy said “speaks volumes about his character, both in terms of loyalty, friendship and his willingness to accept the consequences of his decisions.”
Despite both men having strong alibis with multiple witnesses placing them kilometres from the crime scene on the day of the murder, they were convicted on May 11, 1984, after two trials. When the judge asked Mr. Gillespie if he wanted to say anything, he stood and said “Just that I’m not guilty,” according to Mr. Dimmock’s 1988 story in The New Brunswick Reader.
Both were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole eligibility for at least 18 years. They never wavered in insisting on their innocence.
Mr. Gillespie was considered a model prisoner – the only infraction he recorded during his time was for stealing an onion from the prison kitchen. His focus was on clearing his name. He and Mr. Mailman, housed at a maximum security prison in Renous, N.B., met in the exercise yard daily to discuss their case. The men penned letters and called every lawyer who would listen, pleading their innocence and asking for help.
The case caught the attention of Mr. Dimmock, a young, ambitious crime reporter at the Saint John Telegraph-Journal. In 1988 he published an exhaustive investigation about it, which helped bring the cracks in the case to the attention of Innocence Canada. Appeals to the Court of Appeal for New Brunswick and the Supreme Court of Canada were dismissed in 1988 and 1994.
In 2018, Mr. Kennedy, the chairman of the case review committee for Innocence Canada, turned his attention to the case, poring over thousands of documents and court transcripts with a team of lawyers. It quickly became clear to him that the evidence the men were convicted on wasn’t credible: witnesses had been paid (which hadn’t been divulged), both of those witnesses later recanted, and a receipt that backed up Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Mailman’s alibi in the police file hadn’t been disclosed. The following year, they submitted an application for federal criminal conviction review, a last option when all rights of appeal have been exhausted, to ask the justice minister to consider one last look at the case.
On Dec. 22, 2023 federal Justice Minister Arif Virani ordered a new trial for both men, saying evidence had surfaced that called into question “the overall fairness of the process.”
At the hearing in early January, the Crown didn’t present any evidence, triggering Chief Justice of the New Brunswick Court of King’s Bench Tracey DeWare to acquit them.
After nearly four decades of fighting for his innocence, Mr. Gillespie never got his hopes up, Mr. Kennedy said. It took him a tremendous amount of courage and inner fortitude to keep going even when all appeared hopeless, he added. And it was under that pall that Mr. Gillespie emerged from a Saint John courthouse on an overcast Jan. 4, shocked and speechless. The label of murderer had finally been lifted. He shuffled toward a scrum of reporters, his friend Mr. Mailman, skeletal with terminal cancer at his side. “I’d just like to thank everybody,” he said, breaking off, his face and voice quavering with emotion and looking down at his black patent shoes.
Speaking to him in the weeks after his exoneration, Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Gillespie felt joy and a sense of relief while adapting to a new lifestyle without shackles of parole officers and other restrictions.
“Even though it was a long and terrible fight to prove his innocence, the main thing is that he died an innocent man,” Mr. Kennedy told The Globe.
In the days following Mr. Gillespie’s death, Innocence Canada co-president Ron Dalton wrote a tribute to his friend, with whom he served prison time for several years before his own wrongful conviction was overturned.
“Wally leaves a mark on the fabric of the Canadian justice system in our country by raising awareness of the scourge of wrongful convictions, but his true legacy is the example of his strength of character and friendship,” Mr. Dalton wrote on Law 360. “His passing is a sad end to a difficult but honourable life.”
With a report from Canadian Press
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