Ottawa triple murder trial: Accused killer Bush admits his hair root at crime scene

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Ian Bush, the Ottawa consultant on trial for the 2007 killings of three seniors, has now admitted that a hair root found at the scene of the crime is in fact his.

His defence team, led by Geraldine Castle-Trudel, made the key admission Thursday, moments before prosecutors called a hair-and-fibre expert to the stand.

The prosecution’s case against Bush, 61, is anchored in DNA evidence and security video from a nearby bus stop capturing images of Bush before and after the killings of retired tax court judge Alban Garon and his wife Raymonde, both 77, and Marie-Claire Beniskos.

The victims met an awful end: Hog-tied, beaten and suffocated. All three had plastic bags over their heads. The judge had a hangman’s noose around his neck, and had been beaten about the head. They were all found in a pool of blood in the living room of their condo, on the 10th floor of their building on Riverside Drive.

The prosecution’s theory is that Bush, enraged over a bitter tax feud, targeted the retired chief justice of Canada’s tax court in a murderous revenge plot.

Beniskos, a friend of the Garons who lives in the same building, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s alleged. She had dropped by to make plans to catch a movie with the Garons later that day.

Ottawa police seized handwritten journals from the accused killer’s home, and prosecutors have told the jury they contain the ramblings of a madman who had deep hatred for the taxman. In the journals, tax collectors were described as the “lowest form of humanity” and likened them to extortionists.

Police also found a toolkit for murder that included duct-tape, rubber gloves, a sawed-off rifle, ammunition and plastic bags (the ones with suffocation warnings).

Bush, who took notes in the prisoner’s box, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder in the first degree.

While the jury has heard that Bush’s hair root was found by police at the scene of the crime, it hasn’t heard any explanation because it’s not yet the defence’s turn to call evidence, if they decide to do so.



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