Lessons to be learned about reporting on court cases — and keeping track of them later

A 2017 Star story about a Toronto husband and wife charged for taking a homeless couple’s baby and claiming the boy as their own — and the way that criminal case ultimately resolved — provide good lessons for journalists who cover courts.

Much of the detail in the nearly 2,900-word, accurately reported article was based on stunning evidence from a trial unfolding at the time in a downtown Toronto courtroom.

Aside from taking the baby, Gary Willett Sr. and wife Maria were also charged with stealing all of the homeless man’s government disability cheques, the trial heard.

Aside from major play in the Star, the story was picked up by other outlets and made international headlines.

Willett was convicted in early 2018 of abduction of a child under 14, theft over $5,000 and assault, and was sentenced to about five years in prison months later, though he was released on bail pending his appeal.

But last week in a stunning turnaround, Willett had those guilty verdicts overturned by the Court of Appeal for Ontario and a new trial ordered on all charges.

The charges are expected to be withdrawn.

The reason the verdicts were tossed? The main witness in the police and prosecution’s case, Tim Goldrick, a man described in court as having “limited intelligence,” later “effectively recanted” his original testimony, according to the crown prosecutor.

He’d given over the baby willingly and his disability cheques weren’t being stolen, Goldrick testified.

It was contradictory evidence that undermined Goldrick’s credibility and triggered the unravelling of the serious charges against both Willetts.

Yet that new testimony was heard in 2019 during the prosecution’s separate trial against Maria Willett, held the year following her husband’s conviction.

Goldrick’s new story, considered “fresh evidence,” led to the withdrawal by the Crown of charges against Maria of abducting a child and stealing Goldrick’s disability money.

It’s a complicated case, the details of which I don’t have the space to fully delve into for this column. But it was only last week — about three years after Maria’s trial — that the Star and other media learned Goldrick, the main accuser, had significantly changed his story in court.

Daniel Kayfetz, Maria’s lawyer, told me in an interview this week that he was surprised in 2019 and afterwards that there were no reporters present in the courtroom for his client’s trial, nor doing subsequent followup on her case.

“How can you leave out the last chapter of a great novel?” he asked me.

Kayfetz says he wondered at the time — mistakenly, he now fully admits after speaking with me at length — whether the Star didn’t want to report on Goldrick changing his story because that undermined the Star’s original 2017 front page splash on the case. (Kayfetz tried sending an email to the Star about the case last year, but he didn’t send it to the correct email address, we both recently discovered.)

The Star didn’t deliberately ignore the recanting, of course.

We weren’t there in court in 2019 for Maria’s trial and didn’t do the subsequent followup because we simply lost track of the case, explained the Star’s senior Toronto editor Doug Cudmore. The reporter who had been following the case was no longer at the Star, and there was a change in responsibilities at the management level.

It was during this transition that “the file got dropped,” Cudmore told me this week.

“If I was aware that this was the way the case was going, I would absolutely have ensured it was covered,” he said. Cudmore noted the Star used to employ a staffer whose responsibilities included tracking court cases — bail appearances, preliminary hearings, the beginning of trials, verdicts, sentencing dates, etc.

That’s no longer the case. Reporters and their editors are responsible for tracking cases, which isn’t always easy in terms of workload, Cudmore pointed out.

When we report on charges and trials, it’s important that we also report on how these cases resolve, said Anne Marie Owens, the Star’s editor-in-chief.

She added that in the current climate for media companies, “shrinking resources and competing priorities prevent us from sending a reporter to every trial.

“We strive to do our best, but there are increasingly worrisome resource issues. And that is dangerous for the justice system and the public, because the justice system depends on transparency and reporting by the media for its legitimacy,” Owens said.

Nicholas Xynnis, the defence lawyer who represented Gary Willett at the successful appeal, said it has become incumbent on reporters to do “regular, journalistic followup” on court cases.

There’s another obvious lesson here: a reminder that not everything said in court is accurate or truthful, even when coming from a Crown witness vetted by prosecutors and police officers.

Kayfetz said the abduction and theft charges stemmed from an “outrageous story … it was too much.” (Goldrick also alleged he was held as a captive, but a judge cleared Gary Willett of forcible confinement charges in 2018).

Alyshah Hasham, a veteran reporter who covered courts for this newspaper for years (she now reports for us on city hall) said when you’re covering a trial, it’s different from an in-depth investigation — you’re explaining what’s happening in a courtroom, you’re not doing an independent analysis.

“So, you approach it with a healthy sense of skepticism and an open mind, which I think is really important,” she said, adding it’s key both sides of a case are told by the media.

“You have people testifying and you’re trying to figure out what happened, and sometimes you can’t really be sure. As much as we want to believe that everyone is acting in good faith, sometimes people are not, or they have very good reasons for not sharing the full picture.

“The underlying reasons for why people do what they do are very complicated and it’s not always possible to understand or know that,” Hasham said.

That sounds like very wise counsel to me.

Donovan Vincent is the Star’s Public Editor and based in Toronto. Reach him by email at publiced@thestar.ca or follow him on Twitter: @donovanvincent