Kill All the Lawyers

1 The Last Summer of Arthur Besterman Arthur P. Besterman was a reformed alcoholic and a criminal lawyer. He had been droning away for so long at 222 Main Street that he was regarded by the court staff as a fixture, like one of the cement waste bins or water fountains. If the Provincial Court Building were ever to be sold, Besterman would go with it, still passing out his cards. He was a dogged lawyer but not very gifted, losing most of his cases. Two failed marriages and a nebulous sense of his own incompetence had led him to seek solace in alcohol, but a few years ago he took the cure and joined the Vancouver Trial Lawyers' chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. Most of his clients were persons for whom crime had not paid, shifters and grifters assigned to him through legal aid. He earned enough to keep a small office in the Gastown area and a half-day secretary. An accused person who applies for legal aid often does not know who his lawyer will be. The Legal Services Society might assign a very good lawyer, or at least one of middling skills. Or an accused might get Arthur Besterman. It is a lottery. Thus, did Arthur acquire the file of O.D. Milsom, a dull-witted middle-aged loner who had confessed to the random stabbing deaths of three young women in the previous fall. By the time the trial began the following July, the media had already convicted Milsom, and the court was packed daily with outraged citizenry. For Besterman, a very unusual thing happened. He won. A hearing was held to determine the admissibility of Milsom's confessionand though Besterman hadn't argued it well, he did raise a point which interested the judge. O.D. Milsom had been apprehended by a group of citizen vigilantes known as the White Angels, the leader of which threatened to emasculate him unless he confessed. Did that make the following outpouring of guilt inadmissible? Counsel for the Crown, the wily Leroy Lukey, Q.C., argued through two days that Milsom's confession was not induced by threats or fear of violence. The judge sat silent through all of this, then ruled the confession inadmissible. Since there was little other evidence against Milsom, the judge then ordered the jury to acquit him. An appeal was filed on the same day. Milsom packed up his few belongings and disappeared into the void. Arthur P. Besterman, enjoying the best day of his life, drove straight from the courthouse to a bar in the Gastown area of Vancouver, near his office, where he ordered his first whiskey in three years. He stayed there until midnight, when he was observed stumbling out the back door to the parking lot. At five a.m. on the next day, the twelfth of July, his body was found in the parking lot behind his office, his skull caved in. A fan of blood was spread across the pavement and on nearby cars, leaving a shadow where the assailant had stood. The coroner guessed a baseball bat, or something similar. A mugging was ruled out, since Besterman's wallet, still in his jacket pocket, contained four hundred and fifty-five dollars. Vancouver homicide visited the families of the murdered women, but no anguished father, no vengeance-lusting brother or cousin was found to be without alibi. The leader of the White Angels was questioned, too, but his witnesses confirmed he was snug in his bed at the group's downtown barracks all night. For a while the Bar Association maintained pressure on the authorities to solve this crime. Lawyers don't get killed. Lawyers were members of a professional elite, safe, sacrosanct, removed from the battle. Police and criminals get killed, not lawyers. After several weeks of failed leads, investigators became apathetic. Soon Besterman was earning, at best, only the occasional paragraph in the back pages. The memorDeverell, William H. is the author of 'Kill All the Lawyers' with ISBN 9780770428693 and ISBN 077042869X.