Summary: The Case Of Elizabeth Bain

On June 19th of 1990, Robert Baltovich’s girlfriend Elizabeth Bain went missing. Elizabeth told her family that she was going to check the tennis schedules at her school, the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus. She never returned, but her car was eventually recovered. It was found with blood on the backseat, with forensic tests showing that it was Elizabeth’s. With no clear evidence, the “solving” of the case was completely based on eyewitness testimonies, which eventually had Robert arrested for the murder of his girlfriend.
There were two key eye witnesses to Robert’s accusations, Marianne Perz and David Dibben. Marianne stated that she had seen Robert and Elizabeth sitting together on campus at 5:40pm, the day when she disappeared.

The other witness, David, declared that he had seen Robert driving Elizabeth’s car on June 22nd, three days after Elizabeth’s disappearance. If these two testimonies were true, it seemed obvious that Robert was behind the disappearance of Elizabeth Bain.
Even though both witnesses could be considered unreliable, the jury believed their accounts. Marianne claimed that her memory of the man that she had seen with Elizabeth that evening was fuzzy, but through a process of hypnosis to help with memory recollection she became sure that it was Robert. The other testimony was based on David’s description on the man in Elizabeth’s car. He stated that he hadn’t entirely been paying attention and that it wasn’t clear who the driver was, and his initial description of his appearance didn’t match Robert’s. None of the evidence was entirely legitimate, and could definitely be an account of a different man entirely. Even with this fact, the trial found Robert Baltovich guilty of second degree murder of Elizabeth Bain. He was convicted in 1992, and sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole for 17 years.
Seven years later, Robert’s appeal was finally heard. He contacted an AIDWYC (The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted) lawyer, James Lockyer. When AIDWYC started to investigate Robert’s case, they found several problems with his trial. The judge had not been impartial, and their comments were inconsiderate to Robert’s case, focussing on the evidence for the Crown’s. The judge had also not informed the jury about the possible unreliability of the eyewitness testimonies, making the jury’s assumptions based on perceived fact.