It took 20 years to get 25 in jail

Doran Aisenstat and Susanna Miu (Yang) react to verdict in the Jean Ann James murder trial. on Friday, November 4, 2011 in Vancouver.
Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, PNG

Family members of murder victim Gladys Wakabayashi, who say they have waited 20 years for justice, were gratified to see a jury render a guilty verdict Friday.

After less than a day of deliberations, the B.C. Supreme Court jury found Jean Ann James, a friend of Wakabayashi, guilty of first-degree murder in the June 1992 slaying.

B.C. Supreme Court Madam Justice Catherine Bruce imposed on James, 72, the mandatory sentence of life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years.

The Richmond senior had little reaction to the jury's verdict.

But several members of the victim's family were obviously relieved.

"We would like to extend our gratitude to everybody who contributed so much and helped us so much," Susanna Yang, Gladys' sister-in-law, said outside court.

She thanked the Vancouver police, the RCMP, the judge and the jury for a "wonderful job."

"We just think that the justice system works even after this amount of time, that something like this can come to fruition and that the long arm of the law is a true statement," said Doran Aisenstat, Gladys' son-in-law.

"It doesn't stop. If a crime is committed, justice is going to be served."

Yang said the past 19 years had been been "very difficult" but the family never gave up.

Aisenstat said he wasn't surprised at James' reaction, calling her a "cold individual, without a conscience," as the accused had portrayed herself to undercover cops.

"For her to have had the life she has had for the last 19 years, knowing what wad in her history, it's obviously a huge vindication for us."

The verdict in the sensational trial followed about three weeks of evidence, the most compelling of which was James’s taped confession to undercover cops.

It was 19 years ago that the body of 41-year-old Wakabayashi was found in her home in the posh neighbourhood of Shaughnessy.

No charges were initially laid by Vancouver police and the case lay cold for nearly 15 years, until police reviewed the file and launched a year-long undercover operation aimed at getting a confession from James.

The so-called Mr. Big operation took James through dozens of scenarios in which she was asked to perform tasks for what she was told was a criminal organization.

During one scenario, in which undercover cops stage a kidnapping, James is asked what they should do with the victim.

She responds that they should cut his “knackers” off.

James also told undercover cops that she had no conscience and was willing to do anything for them.

At the end of the operation, James is told that there is a “big score” in which she can share in a $700,000 windfall for helping commit an unspecified crime.

She travels to Montreal, where she is confronted by the “crime boss,” an undercover cop who demands that she come clean about the murder of Wakabayashi, the daughter of a Taiwanese billionaire.

In a confession captured on videotape and played for the jury, James explains calmly that she discovered Wakabayashi “screwing around” with her husband, Derek James.

“I slit her throat,” the accused told the fake crime boss, who cannot be identified due to a publication ban.

James says she used box cutters to slash her friend across the throat and cut her on the legs in a bid to find out details of the infidelity.

“I just went around to her and confronted her about it and she lied to me ... She just started laughing in my face and I just got furious and I did it.”

The accused said she disposed of the murder weapon in a dumpster on the other side of town and took her clothes and threw them in a school incinerator.

She said she used gloves during the crime, left nothing behind and never told her husband about the crime.

Though police had her as a suspect, she said she’d been to the Wakabayashi home several days before the murder to visit her friend and that “my fingerprints were all over the house.”

“I didn’t like the police coming around, but I wasn’t shook up about it,” she said.

In final submissions to the jury, Crown counsel Kerr Clark argued that James was in a jealous rage when she murdered her friend.

Her husband had had other affairs, but the accused’s anger was heightened by the fact that Wakabayashi was a trusted friend, said Clark.

James’s lawyer, Aseem Dosanjh, argued Mr. Big confessions are by their very nature unreliable, some would say “notoriously” unreliable.

He noted there was no DNA or fingerprint evidence and submitted that it was a “false-confession case.”

(Article above from the Province online & photo from Vancouver Sun online.)