MANDEL: Crown opposes acquittal for convicted child killer Timothy Rees

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It’s not as clear cut as Timothy Rees’s lawyer would have you believe.

So if it were up to the Crown, the convicted child killer will not be getting the acquittal he’s sought for more than three decades of insisting that, despite his police confession, he’s an innocent man.

Prosecutors admit Toronto Police should have disclosed their recorded interview with an alternate suspect that may have helped Rees’s defence — but insist the buried, unmarked and undated tape found 20 years after the slaying doesn’t prove landlord James Raymer was the real killer who strangled 10-year-old Darla Thurrott in her bed in 1989.

“The narrow issue here is what is the best remedy?” said Crown Karen Papadopoulos. “We all agree the Raymer tape should have been disclosed in 1989 and the conviction should be quashed.”

To substitute an acquittal verdict, though, the appeal court would have to find it was “clearly more probable” that jurors would find Rees not guilty in a retrial. “The case here was and remains a strong one,” she insisted. “There’s just too much evidence against Mr. Rees for this court to enter an acquittal.”

At best, Papadopoulos urged the Court of Appeal to enter a stay of proceeding. “It would no longer be in the interest of justice to proceed,” she said. “A new trial can’t be run in a fair way 35 years later.”

A stay, though, does little for Rees, 61. He’s already served his sentence for second-degree murder and it wouldn’t remove the stigma of being convicted of killing a young girl.

“I did not harm Darla at all. I did not murder Darla,” Rees insisted in a statement read Tuesday by his lawyer, James Lockyer. “I have carried the burden of being her killer for 35 years and it is wrong. I want my self-respect back and that is why I must seek to be acquitted of her murder.“

It was the last day of school before March break 1989 and Darla had gone to bed in the Etobicoke home she shared with her parents, a basement tenant and Raymer, their landlord, who slept in the room directly across from hers. Also there was Rees, her dad’s longtime friend who after a night of booze and drugs decided to sleep over rather than head home.

The next morning, Darlene Thurrott found her daughter dead in her bed.

Raymer, who died in 1999, was originally a suspect but police quickly discounted him because he was cognitively impaired and physically disabled due to cerebral palsy and they didn’t think he had the strength to strangle a 94-pound girl quickly and quietly, Papadopoulos said.

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But would a jury have thought otherwise? In the undisclosed recording, Raymer told Const. George Clanfield he’d kissed her that night — though he later retracted that — and she’d seduced him in the past.

Lockyer accused police of intentionally and maliciously suppressing the tape once they’d badgered a confession out of Rees.

It’s that admission that stands in the way of finding Rees not guilty, the prosecutor maintained.

In his testimony before the appeal court in the summer, Rees ultimately admitted saying and affixing his signature to the words typed out — recorded statements weren’t standard at the time — by the police: “And then I guess it went through my head that I should take her away from all the bulls— she was going through. I choked her,” the confession said. “Then I more or less sat there and told her nobody would hurt her anymore.”

Lockyer has argued that confession wouldn’t be admissible at a retrial: Rees was tired, suicidal and coming off a binge of cocaine and alcohol when he told investigators what they wanted to hear. Papadopoulos said it was voluntary and admissible, but conceded that without the confession their case against him is “gutted.”

The Court of Appeal has reserved its decision.

Who really killed Darla? Perhaps we’ll never know.

But this much is true — it sent her mother in a downward spiral of crack and prostitution that ended with her strangled and dumped in Lake Ontario in 1997.

mmandel@postmedia.com