Gratitude for justice after 19 very difficult years

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PROVINCE - NOVEMBER 6th, 2011 - KEITH FRASER
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19-year ordeal ends for dead woman's kin
 
Jean Ann James, 72, killed friend in 1992, not eligible for parole for 25 years


Family members of murder victim Gladys Wakabayashi, who say they have waited 19 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 Wakabayashi's friend, Jean Ann James, guilty of first-degree murder for the June 1992 slaying.

Justice Catherine Bruce imposed the mandatory sentence of life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years.

The 72-year-old Richmond woman had little reaction to the 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, Wakabayashi's sister-in-law, said outside court, thanking 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, Wakabayashi's son-in-law.

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

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

The body of 41-year-old Wakabayashi, the daughter of a Taiwanese billionaire, was found in her Shaughnessy home.

No charges were initially laid, and the case lay cold for nearly 15 years, until Vancouver 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. She told undercover cops that she had no conscience and was willing to do anything for them.

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

James travelled to Montreal, where she was confronted by the "crime boss," an undercover cop, who demanded that she come clean about the murder of Wakabayashi.

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

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

James said 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.

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

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

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.

James' lawyer, Aseem Dosanjh, argued Mr. Big confessions are by their very nature unreliable, some would say "notoriously" unreliable.

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