MURDER IN THE FAMILY

It was almost as if someone had convened a gathering of the cream of New Brunswick society.

There, walking through the tall doors of the elegant white church, while camera shutters fluttered at a respectful distance, were the then reigning heads of the province, led by premier David Alward. There was the lieutenant-governor, Graydon Nicholas. And former finance minister Greg Byrne. And the mayor of Saint John, Ivan Court.

They had come to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in Saint John's placidly wealthy suburb of Rothesay, to pay their respects to Richard Oland, a member of the family that built the Moosehead brewing empire.

For all its pomp and refinement, the ceremony, on a bright July afternoon in 2011, was edged with an unusual disquiet. A day before, while visitation continued at Brenan's Funeral Home on Paradise Row, Saint John police announced they were investigating Oland's death as a homicide.

The killing had already become the talk of the town, dominating newscasts and Tim Hortons gossip. The nature of the crime only added to the intrigue: It soon emerged that someone had broken Oland's skull more than a dozen times with what police speculated was a drywall hammer. There were a total of 45 wounds to his head, neck and hands.

Oland had not been well-liked—his service, fittingly, ended to the strains of My Way—and reporters noticed few outward signs of grief among the congregants. Naturally, people had theories about the identity of the killer, and they looked for clues at the funeral. They focused in particular on the expressions and bearing of Richard's only son, Dennis.

They had been known in the Maritimes for more than a century—the Oland name meant something to everyone. But like so many seemingly unassailable business dynasties, the Olands had a long and bitter history of fractiousness.

The cause, more often than not, was succession; since 1918, when the company that would become Moosehead split into Halifax and Saint John branches, the family had been roiled by bad blood over the issue.

Dick Oland and his older brother, Derek, represented the latest iteration of the trend. As young men, both worked at Moosehead under their steely father, Philip, who went by "P.W."

The brothers couldn't have been more different. Derek was mild-mannered and had a bookish mien, with his glasses and aquiline nose—to the boardroom born, as it were. Dick, bluff and plain-spoken, had a stronger rapport with the blue-collar workers at the company's Saint John factory.

"They kind of feared him, admired him and loved him at the same time," says Bill Farren, a city councillor and long-time Moosehead worker.

One especially macho episode still impresses Farren. Production had ground to a halt because of a broken gear in the plant's bottle soaker. As the company hemorrhaged money, Dick worked the phones tirelessly until he found a replacement part in Illinois.

It could only be flown as far as Boston, so Dick had the piece of equipment put in the trunk of a cab and driven 670 kilometres to Saint John. Once the part had been carried inside, Dick, still wearing his suit and dress shoes from his day in the office, crawled under the soaker with Farren and helped haul the thing into place.

"He was a go-getter," says Farren. "Upset some people sometimes, but he was a go-getter."

Dick's rutting-bull style extended to the front office and often infuriated his more cerebral brother.

"Dick would argue with anybody. It didn't matter who it was," Derek told an interviewer for an official history of Moosehead. "I couldn't work for Dick because of the nature of the guy."

By 1980, the bickering had become too much for Derek, who threatened to leave the company and move his family to New Zealand.

The prospect spooked their father, who knew his peppery younger son wasn't temperamentally fit to lead the company. To keep Derek in the fold, P.W. made him executive vice-president and heir apparent.

An embittered Dick left Moosehead to run a trucking company, Brookville Transport. Though the younger Oland had launched Brookville while still at the brewery, he was hardly striking out on his own: About 60% of his business consisted of hauling Moosehead beer to the United States.

Some of his energy would be devoted elsewhere: He went on to lead a series of well-received civic initiatives in Saint John, including a successful bid to host the 1985 Canada Games. But he was far from done with the company that had made his family's fortune.

P.W. died in 1996. His will divided his brewery shares between his children according to the extent of their contributions to the firm: Derek got 53%, Dick 33% and their sister, Jane, 14%.

With a renewed foothold at Moose-head, Dick once again became a thorn in Derek's side, suing him twice: first in 1998 over a drop in business that stalled dividend payments, and again in 2007 for reasons that remain unclear.

In the corporate history— Last Canadian Beer by Harvey Sawler—Derek recalled Moosehead annual meetings in which Dick would hand Jane page after page of needling questions to ask their brother. "It was like Law & Order," Derek said.

In 2007, the eldest Oland finally bought his siblings out and took full control of the company—"pruning the tree," he would later call it. His branch cut loose, Dick eventually settled into quasi-retirement.

Moosehead churned on without him. The silos and red-brick facade of its factory still loom in the west end of Saint John; as other historic Canadian brands like Labatt and Molson disappeared into the maw of foreign multinationals, Moosehead stayed local and proudly family-owned.

In a city that is insular even by Atlantic Canadian standards, the Olands have cultivated and profited from that down-home image. "You Gotta Live Here to Get It," ran an old marketing slogan for Alpine, one of their beers.

Over the years, Moosehead has grown so ubiquitous as to almost disappear. "It's just like when you see a Kleenex box—you don't think about it," says April Cunningham, a former reporter with the Saint John Telegraph-Journal.

Moosehead managed the trick of staying independent in part by opening itself to the world: By 2004, about 40% of the company's business was in bottling foreign beer like Guinness.

Still, Moosehead now stands as the largest independently owned Canadian brewery. Annual revenues at the firm, which is privately held, are estimated to be about $200 million.

Just as important, leadership succession at the company finally seems to be proceeding smoothly. Derek has drifted up to the boardroom as executive chairman, while his son Andrew—a square-jawed Harvard MBA—has taken over as president and CEO. Two more sons, Patrick and Matthew, are CFO and vice-president, respectively.

"I get a lot of pleasure out of seeing this place grow, seeing the young people coming in," Derek told Sawler. "It's the same dream my father had."

Compared to cousins like Andrew, Dennis Oland's destiny was more troubled. His father had no family business to hand over; while Derek's sons rose in the ranks at Moosehead, Dennis settled into a job as an investment adviser at CIBC Wood Gundy—a broker in a city without much to invest.

His relationship with Dick, meanwhile, was the stuff of archetypes. Constance Oland told police after Dick's death that her husband's rapport with all three of their children deteriorated after his stormy departure from Moosehead. But the tension between Dick and Dennis was rooted deeper.

Even in his late 60s, Dick shared the compact build and pent-up energy of a fire hydrant; the energy was spent pursuing Ernest Hemingway's idea of leisure. Dick enjoyed salmon fishing in the Miramichi, riding horseback in Kingshurst, skiing on Poley Mountain and, above all, sailing his beloved Vela Veloce through the choppy waters of the north Atlantic.

Soft-spoken Dennis was something of a wet fish by comparison.

In most everything the men did together, Dick took charge. As a sailing skipper, his style was to "bark and bark and bark," Dennis later told police.

The pattern held true in business: One of Dennis's most important clients at CIBC was his father. And he was merely Dick's "order taker," he said—the office was fitted with a special phone line that allowed the older man to dictate investments.

After the Moosehead split, two new sources of rancour crept into their relationship. During Dennis's bitter 2008 divorce from his first wife, Dick had given him a half-million-dollar loan—small change, given a fortune that included $36 million in investments alone. Most of the loan served as a de facto mortgage that allowed Dennis to keep his home. The monthly interest payment was $1,666.67. Dick was now his son's banker, as well as one of his biggest clients.

If Dennis was grateful at first, the pressure of paying the interest soon began to weigh on him. Despite his job in finance, he was no good with his own money: Indebted and with a solid but declining income from CIBC ($180,000 in 2008; $100,000 two years later), he and his second wife, Lisa, consistently lived beyond their means.

Dennis's bank accounts were often overdrawn and his lines of credit maxed out. Still, he continued to take his family on trips to Europe and to stock his wardrobe with elegant clothes, including a Hugo Boss sports coat that set him back more than $1,000.

The second sticking point was more awkward still: About a year before her father's death, Dennis's' sister, Lisa, began suspecting Dick was having an affair. The fear was borne out when she found a bottle of Viagra in her father's house and confronted him about it.

Dick admitted that for eight years he had been seeing a real estate agent, Diana Sedlacek. Dennis was disturbed to learn this; he told Dick's business partner, Bill McFadden, that the relationship should end, because of the humiliation it would cause his mother if people kept talking about it. But Dennis didn't confront Dick about the affair.

There was one sphere where father and son could get along. Both men were fascinated by their family's genealogy. Dennis's web savvy allowed him to feel useful, even superior, in the course of their research. Several times a year, father and son met in Dick's office on Canterbury Street to pore over their latest findings.

Late on the afternoon of July 6, 2011, Dennis took the short trip from his own office toward such a rendezvous. He had made a new discovery, and he was excited to show his father.

Dennis worked in an office building near Market Square, in the heart of uptown Saint John. Across the square stood a statue of a moose, dedicated by Moosehead to the people of Saint John "with thanks and appreciation."

It was about a two-minute walk to the offices of his father's money-managing company, Far End Corp., but Dennis drove anyway. In his account, he'd mounted the stairs to Far End when it dawned on him that he'd forgotten something at his office.

He had driven part way back when he realized he didn't have his card key for after-hours access either. So he doubled back toward Canterbury Street, finally parking his VW Golf around 5:30 p.m.

Carrying a reusable shopping bag—what he said people jokingly referred to as his "man purse"—he exchanged friendly greetings with Maureen Adamson, Dick's secretary. She left around 5:45 p.m.

The two men were left alone. Dennis had brought information about a will from 1825, uncovered during a recent trip to England.

The document indicated that the Olands had an illegitimate child in the family line—something that apparently delighted Dick, who loved to puncture the pretensions of his clan's Halifax branch. (The Halifax Olands had sold their principal brewing business to Labatt in 1971.)

The meeting went well, Dennis would tell police. The two parted in their customary way, with Dick issuing a gruff, distracted goodbye.

Like his father, Dennis lived in Rothesay. He set off for home at about 6:30 p.m. but, once again, proceeded waywardly. Near home, he stopped at the Renforth Wharf—to see if his children were swimming there, as they often did in the summer.

But a witness, Barbara Murray, said Dennis was acting in a way that made her nervous: walking briskly; picking up an object off the ground; walking to the end of the wharf; sitting down; taking something red out of his bag and wrapping the object in it; putting the object back in the bag; and then returning to his car.

Dennis would later say he was picking up broken glass. That is not how Murray saw it. "I knew it wasn't right," she told police. "There was a purpose to what he was doing."

The purpose, many have since assumed, was the disposal of two crucial pieces of evidence, neither of which were ever found: the murder weapon and Dick's iPhone. The phone was the only thing that went missing from Dick's office. And the last text message the device received pinged off a cellphone tower near the wharf at 6:44 p.m.—just about exactly when Dennis would have been in the area.

The following morning, a Thursday, Adamson arrived to open up before her boss would appear, as she usually did.

She noticed something unusual: The ground-level door was unlocked. As she climbed the stairs to the second floor, she noticed a bad smell.

Opening the double glass doors to the office, she saw blood on the floor and a pair of legs. Adamson ran downstairs in a panic and fetched an employee of the printing shop on the first floor. Preston Chiasson confirmed what she feared—there was a body. It appeared to have been "slaughtered." Chiasson called the police.

At the request of police, Dick's family came into the Saint John police station for an interview less than 24 hours after his death.

Officers were speaking to anyone who knew Dick well. But Dennis's visit took on a different tenor. By the time he left the station, about eight hours after arriving, he was a suspect in his father's murder.

What may have set off alarms in the mind of Constable Stephen Davidson, who was conducting what quickly became an interrogation, was Dennis's inconsistency.

He seemed confused in describing his whereabouts between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. the day before. He went to his father's office but left before reaching the door, then started back toward his own office but never made it there, driving the wrong way down a familiar one-way street. And his memory seemed to have gaps in it, even though the events he was describing were less than a day old.

Dennis admitted he was becoming flustered. "You have me intimidated now," he told Davidson, "so now I'm getting a mental block."

On Thursday, July 14, two days after Dick's funeral, Saint John police raided Dennis's Rothesay home, a pretty place with stables and a meadow for horses to graze.

The officers found two pieces of evidence there that would become central to their case: a brown Hugo Boss sports coat and a dry cleaning receipt from the day after his police interview.

Testing eventually showed the jacket was stained with a few tiny spots of blood, three of which contained Dick Oland's DNA.

Earlier in the week, then Saint John police chief Bill Reid had called a press conference regarding what was now being treated as a homicide.

"You can always be said [to] have tunnel vision in an investigation and you're focusing on one person or a specific thing," he said. "Our folks are being very methodical, and they're analyzing the information. We do not want to make a mistake."

Far from avoiding mistakes, the officers leading the investigation seemed intent on leaving no mistake unmade, adding another layer to the scandal.

From the beginning, they treated the crime scene with cavalier abandon. For the first two days after Dick's body was discovered, police, and perhaps other people, availed themselves of the small bathroom adjacent to his office—exactly where the murderer would have been likely to clean up.

And while the office was still being combed over, an inspector named Glen McCloskey, who had no connection to the case, walked around the room without protective gear on—out of curiosity, he later admitted.

The police force's sins of omission were equally staggering. No one, for example, tested the building's back door for fingerprints before using it, though it was the most obvious escape route for the killer.

But the way investigators handled Dennis's brown jacket was by far their worst blunder. First, while the jacket was still hanging in a closet, Const. Rick Russell grabbed one sleeve with his bare hands. Then another officer left the jacket in a bag for nearly four months before examining it and sending it for forensic testing.

As Dennis's lawyer Alan Gold would later put it: "Not great police work."

It didn't help a case that had scant evidence tying Dennis to the crime scene. No blood was ever found on any of his possessions apart from his jacket—not on his BlackBerry, which he texted with shortly after leaving Dick's office; not on his car's steering wheel; and not on his shoes or any of his other clothes.

The blood spots on his jacket, meanwhile, were tiny: The dry cleaner to whom his wife brought the garment after Dennis's police interview did not see them during a thorough pre-cleaning inspection. That struck some observers as odd, given the ferocity of the killing.

Whoever bludgeoned Dick 45 times—leaving blood spattered around the office and pooled around his head—would presumably have been covered in blood themselves.

Although police sent a team of divers to scour the floor of the Kennebecasis River around Renforth Wharf, where Dennis had made his odd visit the evening of the killing, they came up empty-handed.

A rumour went around in the early days of the investigation that Dick had been murdered with an axe. Later, police suggested that a drywall hammer was more likely—its blunt head and sharp, flat back were consistent with the wounds Dick suffered. But that was only a theory.

In any case, much of Saint John had made up its mind about the most important detail: Dennis seemed in so many ways to be the most obvious suspect. He was the last person known to have seen Dick alive. He owed his father money. Plus, the savagery of the killing suggested someone with a deep, long-standing grudge against the victim—and Dennis certainly had that.

"Especially in the first year, there was this sense of, why haven't they made an arrest yet? Everyone knows who did it," says reporter Cunningham. At the same time, many locals doubted an Oland would be convicted.

On Nov. 13, 2013, after more than two years of investigation, police finally arrested Dennis, charging him with second-degree murder. Dennis spent six days in jail before being bailed out by his uncle Derek, who joined the rest of the Olands in maintaining that police had the wrong man.

By New Brunswick standards, the Olands are only a second-tier dynasty. The province, one of Canada's oldest, is still dominated by an industrial aristocracy comprising a few families, such as the McCains and the Irvings.

"We are an underdeveloped province—you don't have the immigration and the new people coming in," says Greg Marquis, a professor of Canadian history at the University of New Brunswick's Saint John campus. "If you're a business enterprise, you might become a bit more powerful than otherwise—people are hungry for jobs and investment."

With its grand 19th-century bank buildings sporting For Rent signs in their windows, Saint John embodies New Brunswick's oligarchic tendencies and its nagging poverty, often in the space of a single block.

Once home to an important shipyard and dry dock, the city's centre has been hollowed out by deindustrialization and suburban flight. The city's population now hovers around 70,000, down from about 90,000 in the early 1970s. "You're on the street at night, and it's almost like you can see the tumbleweeds rolling," says Marquis.

The gloom was compounded by Richard Oland's murder, which bestowed a circuit of macabre landmarks on the city. Meanwhile, Dennis, out on bail, continued to live more or less as he always had, going shopping and eating out with his wife.

The city's haunted feel was pervasive, Cunningham says. "How can a community move forward with such a gruesome murder happening in the heart of the city to someone of such prominence?"

Gossip was one coping mechanism. Theories about possible murder scenarios abounded—a Russian hit man was imagined—and terms like "drywall hammer," "brown jacket" and "spatter" entered the local lexicon.

The natural prurience of a small city was augmented by class-based schadenfreude. The Olands themselves had not been particularly disliked before Dick's death; they were discreet about their wealth and civic-minded in their use of it.

But poking around in the dirty laundry of one of Saint John's richest families was too strong a temptation to resist. "There's a little resentment," says Farren, speaking about downtown attitudes toward Rothesay, "because all the brainpower lives out there."

With this backdrop, jury selection had to be done with a wide net. Last summer, New Brunswick's justice ministry sent out 5,000 summonses for the trial—many times more than it usually issues.

No courtroom was big enough to accommodate the pool of some 1,130 potential jurors who made it to the final screening, so a hockey arena was used for the purpose.

Dennis's legal team was led by Alan Gold, a brilliant defence lawyer from Toronto. It was a reputation he did not wear lightly. Everything about the aloof, barrel-chested man in the black leather jacket and sunglasses suggested confidence in his own abilities.

But Gold knew that any whiff of arrogance could be a liability during the trial; he was contending with the innate Maritime aversion to "CFAs" (come from aways).

In his way, the flashy Toronto lawyer tried to project humility before the jury. "I have come to admire and appreciate the Maritime way of life," he said at the beginning of his closing arguments. "You are the most polite people in Canada."

The performance didn't last long. Soon Gold had reverted to his native swagger, speaking in an insistent, slightly wheedling tone, studding his argument with rhetorical questions, slapping his rostrum for emphasis and generally trying to impress the jury with the obviousness of his points.

Remarking on the failure of the police to discover useful forensic evidence at the crime scene, he quipped, "If I could steal from Winston Churchill: 'Never have so many searched so long to find so little.' "

If Gold brought an acidic tone to the proceedings, it was more than neutralized by the soothing presence of Judge John Walsh.

With his white moustache and pink jowls, Walsh presided over the courtroom with a folksy authority. When hallway chatter became distracting, he asked, "Can somebody tell them this isn't a ballpark?"

Known to his colleagues as Jack, Walsh rarely rushed during the marathon trial. "I've got a lot of miles to go before I sleep," he was fond of saying during jury instructions.

But Walsh was no bumpkin. As a prosecutor in New Brunswick earlier in his career, he became one of the first Canadian lawyers to successfully use DNA evidence in a trial. And he had earned his stripes on the bench, working his way up from a rural provincial court in the Miramichi.

"He's razor-sharp," says Joel Pink, a Halifax defence lawyer who has known Walsh for 30 years.

Still, the collegiality of the courtroom and the technical complexity of the evidence made the proceedings drone on disarmingly. Marquis, who attended most of the trial, says it occasionally felt like a "long zoning hearing."

Proceedings came to life whenever a prominent witness was being examined—never more so than during Diana Sedlacek's turn on the stand. Dick's former mistress arrived at the courthouse wearing a silk shawl and dark sunglasses.

Bailiffs set up extra chairs to accommodate the crush of spectators. They heard Sedlacek testify to the intensity of her affair with Dick: The couple met about three times a week, she said—often at his office and "often after church on Sunday." Saint John was rapt.

Some also thought the famous Other Woman might be a plausible suspect—the defence had recently argued that her affair with Dick was fraying in the months leading up to the killing.

On July 4, two days before his death, Sedlacek had sent him an angry text: "Richard Richard!!!!! It's 2 long now—Hate this waste of time!!!! You're always wasting OUR time OUR life."

But when she took the stand, the putative femme fatale swore she had an alibi: On the evening of July 6, she had been at home on Darlings Island, a 30-minute drive from Dick's office.

The series of texts she had sent him that night and the following morning revealed growing anger at his silence. "I have a lot of men who would [love] 2 b with me!!!!!" she wrote. "Answer the damn phone!" And then, at 11:12 p.m.: "Pathetic!"

The trial's marquee event, inevitably, was the two-day examination of Dennis Oland. The man who had been trailed by lurid rumour for four years and who had sat in enigmatic silence for two and a half months was finally going to speak.

On his first day of testimony, the courtroom was full. On day two, spectators had to be turned away.

If those in the courtroom were expecting Dennis to falter on the stand, they went away disappointed.

Gary Miller, Gold's able partner in Dennis's defence, declared, "We'll start at the end. Did you kill your father?"

"No," Dennis replied. "No, I did not."

As the defence continued its questioning, Dennis occasionally gave answers that contradicted what he had told police.

Now he claimed to have visited his father's office three times on the day Dick died, not twice. (The third visit, Dennis said, was to pick up a logbook for his uncle.) And his description of his relationship with Dick was not as bleak as in earlier accounts: he "absolutely" loved his father, he told the Crown during cross-examination, fighting back tears.

Overall, Dennis was thought to have held up well. He gave a plausible account of an innocuous summer day: a routine visit to his father's office, an enjoyable chat about family history, a text from his wife saying she felt unwell, a stop at the wharf to check on his kids, a trip to the pharmacy, a movie and to bed.

On the first day of the trial's final week, Debbie Tingley and Claire Appleby drove from Moncton to be there in person, arriving early, before the courthouse opened.

The true-crime aficionados had been following the case from the start. It was as good as anything on Nancy Grace and happening right in their backyard. The Maritimes' very own O.J. trial, some people called it.

"There's money, passion, cheating—there's all the elements of an interesting crime story," said Appleby. "Betrayal, jealousy, greed."

There was also gore.

In driving home the defence's key theme—that the evidence against Dennis was circumstantial and full of holes—Gold focused on blood: the enormous quantity that would have spouted from Dick Oland's body during the attack and the tiny spots found on Dennis's jacket.

"It's not just that there should have been spatter—there should have been lots of spatter, a ton of spatter," said Gold.

To prove his point, he put pictures of Dick's battered corpse up on the courtroom monitor. A halo of blood encircled the dead man's head; his scalp had been reduced to a pulp.

Then Gold showed pictures of Dennis's jacket on the same monitor. The spots of blood were circled in red, yet still hard to see. "There is no way to go from that bloody scene to that jacket," Gold said.

"That evidence cries out innocence. It cries out at the very least reasonable doubt. It cries out that your verdict has to be not guilty."

Crown prosecutor P.J. Veniot left the expansive oratory to Gold. Short, plump and unassuming, Veniot had the look of a country priest. His voice was flat and he mumbled; it often seemed as though he were reading his arguments for the first time.

The prosecution's strategy was to focus on motive. Veniot called the killing "a crime of passion born of a deranged mind," dwelling on the fact that nothing had gone missing from the office but Dick's iPhone. The deranged mind, he said, belonged to Dennis.

Veniot then concocted a conversation between Dick and Dennis in the Far End Corp. office. The prosecutor speculated that after meekly accepting his father's infidelity and harsh financial treatment for years, Dennis finally snapped.

Dennis's bizarre navigation of a familiar neighbourhood showed he was "distraught" after a brutal murder. He was "a man who didn't know where to turn."

"The inescapable conclusion," the prosecutor wended his way to saying, "is that Dennis Oland killed his father, and he should be found guilty."

With arguments completed, most observers felt the defence had argued circles around the Crown.

Two days later, Judge Walsh had characteristically homespun advice for the men and women he was sending to sit in judgment of Dennis Oland: "Keep an open mind, but not an empty head."

The jury deliberated for 30 hours over the course of four days, reaching a verdict on the morning of Saturday, Dec. 19. E-mails went out to the family, the lawyers and the press.

Around 10 a.m., Dennis marched up the hill toward the courthouse with the studied self-confidence of a man trying to bluff his way to courage and took his seat for the last time in the box that had been his second home for three months.

Much of his family sat in the public gallery behind him. As the jury entered the courtroom, the Olands rose.

The bailiff asked the jury foreman whether there was a verdict, and when the answer was yes, asked what that verdict was. There was a moment's silence as the word rippled through the room. If anyone wasn't listening, they had only to look at Dennis.

The accused, now the convicted, collapsed into his chair. With his head buried in his hands, he began to wail and whimper. It was a sound of sheer distress: short, gasping cries, high-pitched, almost shrill. "Oh my God," he said, again and again.

On Jan. 20, Dennis's lawyers filed a notice of appeal with the provincial Court of Appeal. Their stated grounds were extensive, including that forensic evidence from the brown jacket should not have been admitted as evidence during the trial, because the search warrant under which it was obtained did not permit the forensic testing that discovered Dick's DNA.

(The error-prone police investigation became the subject of an investigation itself. And in February, the ruling of the judge who committed Dennis to trial was released; Judge Roland LeBlanc complained that the police, apart from their mistakes with evidence, jumped to the "irrational" conclusion that Dennis was their man, without sufficient proof.)

The lawyers also requested Dennis's release on bail pending the decision. Enclosed in their submission was an affidavit signed by Dennis himself, promising to abide by the terms of his bail if released.

"On Dec. 19, 2015, I was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of my father, Richard Oland," it says. "I am 47 years old…I have lived in Rothesay, New Brunswick, all my life, with the exception of attending university at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, between 1986 and 1990, working in Toronto, Ontario, between 1991 and 1995, and my present period of incarceration."

The bail money was to be posted by Dennis's uncle Derek and mother, Constance. The family maintains that Dennis is innocent and have taken to issuing jeremiads against the justice system at every step of his appeal.

On Feb. 17, members of the Oland clan packed a courtroom in Fredericton for the bail hearing. Dennis's request was denied.

It's extremely rare for convicted murderers to receive bail pending appeal, but his family released a distraught statement anyway: "We know Dennis has been wrongly convicted and are confident our appeal will see justice prevail. His prolonged absence will be incredibly difficult and only serves to further compound the loss and anguish our family has suffered since Dick's murder."

Just a week earlier, some 200 friends and family had come to the Saint John courthouse for Dennis's sentencing. Among them was John Wallace, a sitting Canadian senator.

"It has been nightmarish for [the Olands] and very painful for many, many in the community who they are so close to," he told reporters.

As the jury had recommended, Judge Walsh gave Dennis the lightest sentence available under the law: He would serve life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 10 years.

From the bench, Walsh summed up: "This was a family tragedy of Shakespearean proportions."

Follow Eric Andrew-Gee on Twitter: @ericandrewgee

FROM THE OLAND TRIAL ARCHIVES