Did interrogation technique result in ‘suspect’ confession?

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Teresa Hsin was a prominent Mississauga owner of several spas in the GTA — but someone wanted her dead.

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In November 2014, an unknown assailant stabbed her in the underground of her Mississauga townhouse complex, but she was fortunate to survive. Five months later, on the day Hsin was moving her belongings from Mississauga to her new condo in North York, the killer was successful.

On April 10, 2015, at 1:26 p.m., two days after her son reported her missing, the 59-year-old was found slumped over in the driver’s seat of her bloody BMW parked in a handicapped space at a Scotiabank. She had been stabbed and slashed at least 20 times with most of her wounds in the head and neck area.

Her son Eric Lu became the prime suspect when police learned he would inherit her Relaxology Wellness Centre business. Justine Ordonio and Mark Dookrham were accused of being the hired killers with the Crown’s theory being that Lu had hidden Ordonio under his mom’s clothes in the backseat of her BMW and he was the stabber.

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After a long judicial odyssey of preferred indictments and mistrials, all three would eventually be convicted of first-degree murder.

For Ordonio, there was no forensic evidence that linked him to the slaying. His undoing would be a 13-hour interrogation by Peel police that ended with his confession.

Five years after his 2019 conviction, Ordonio was on a Zoom camera from Beaver Creek Institution as his lawyer James Lockyer urged the Court of Appeal to order a new trial, contending his statement was a false confession that resulted from a “remorseless” police interrogation know as the Reid technique.

A psychological method of interrogation designed to get unwilling suspects to confess, it involves nine steps broken into two stages. The first centres on convincing the accused that they’re powerless because there’s overwhelming evidence of their guilt and there’s no way out but to talk.

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The softer, second stage involves being sympathetic and befriending the suspect, pointing out their redeeming qualities and minimizing their responsibility by suggesting they were caught up in a bad situation — all while moving physically closer.

Frank Addario of the Criminal Lawyers Association urged the appeal court to express concern about the “widely discredited” Reid technique and find it produces confessions that are “invariably suspect.”

Ordonio’s lawyer contended this was one of them. Lockyer said Det. Mark Heyes’s 2015 interrogation was “classic” Reid technique: He began by showing Ordonio photos of himself and Dookhram returning the rented getaway car and playing clips of Dookhram implicating him in the murder. He later progressed to holding his hand and hugging him as he urged the crying suspect to, “Come on, spit it out, let it go.”

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And when Ordonio broke down and begged Heyes to protect his family from the “triads,” Lockyer said the cop led him to believe he could ensure their safety only if he told him everything.

Eight hours into the interview, Ordonio told Heyes that Lu had hired him for the murder, paying him between $10,000 and $20,000, and he’d recruited Dookrham. They’d “scouted” Hsin’s Mississauga home in advance and while he was “present” at the stabbing, he didn’t know the masked person who actually killed her. “I wasn’t in the BMW when it happened,” he insisted.

Ordonio has been backtracking on everything in that statement ever since.

At his preliminary hearing in 2017, he was set free after the judge agreed his police statement was involuntary and inadmissible. The attorney general then sent him directly to trial where the Superior Court judge came to a different conclusion — admitting it into evidence after finding he hadn’t been manipulated into speaking.

“I find Ordonio, far from the browbeaten and beleaguered captive that defence counsel describes, to be a cunning and calculating individual who held his own throughout,” concluded Justice Deena Baltman in 2019. “Ordonio finally talked not because he was bullied or tricked, but because he realized the evidence boxed him in.”

The Crown is urging the appeal court to come to the same conclusion. The hearing continues Friday.

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