The wife of a former member of the Devil’s Army motorcycle club told a jury her husband looked terrified when he burst into their bedroom on the afternoon of March 11, 2016, and warned her not to go downstairs.
“Just by the look on his face I knew I had to stay. He said: ‘Lock the door and don’t let anybody in ’til I get you.’ So I did that. I grabbed my knife and went back to bed,” the woman testified Thursday at Richard Alexander’s trial for the first-degree murder of Dillon Brown.
The woman, a protected witness who can only be identified as Y, is married to X, a former full-patch member of the outlaw motorcycle club. Both have testified for the Crown this week under heavy security.
The Crown has alleged that Alexander, former president of the Devil’s Army, shot Brown, a 30-year-old mixed martial arts fighter, in the head in the basement of the Devil’s Army clubhouse.
Alexander denies killing Brown but has admitted that he drove Brown’s car with Brown’s body in the trunk to Sayward and abandoned the car by the side of the road. X has testified that he cleaned up the crime scene.
Y told the court she went to bed at the clubhouse in the early morning of March 11, 2016, and woke up several times during the day. The second time she awoke, she heard loud heavy-metal music and her husband running down the hallway to their room at the clubhouse.
“How did he look?” asked prosecutor Kimberly Henders Miller.
“Terrified,” Y replied, adding that nothing like that had ever happened before.
Y started praying and eventually fell back to sleep. When she woke up, the energy seemed calmer. She got out of bed and started going downstairs, but couldn’t go all the way because one of the bikers was standing in front of the staircase.
X was standing near the bar, cleaning, she recalled.
“How was he cleaning?” Henders Miller asked.
“Frantically,” Y replied.
“What was he cleaning with?”
“Vinegar, which I found very suspicious,” said Y, explaining that the clubhouse was usually cleaned with Pinesol.
X looked pale and clammy and seemed distracted, she recalled. “He wasn’t himself at all that night. He was very distant. He didn’t want to be there. He wanted to go home.”
In May 2016, X was made a full-patch member and received a gold pin from Hells Angel Chad Wilson, who has since died.
“I was happy but X didn’t seem as happy as I thought he would be,” said Y.
His commitment to the Devil’s Army had changed. He no longer wanted to go to the clubhouse. In fact, X really didn’t want to leave their house at all, she said.
Y heard about Brown’s murder during an interview with a police officer. The officer had a search warrant for her cellphone. She learned the phone was pinging off cell towers at the time and in the area where Brown was murdered.
“How were you feeling after the meeting?” Henders Miller asked.
“Shocked, confused, angry, every emotion you can think of,” she said.
During cross-examination, Y admitted to defence lawyer Brent Anderson that she lied when she told police her husband never had her cellphone. The court has heard that X had used her phone more than 1,00 times.
Y explained that she was lying to protect her husband. She was also in shock and didn’t know what was going on.
After talking to police, she and X left Campbell River in June 2017. They didn’t talk about Brown’s murder for a long time because she was “furious and pissed off.”
Y began to cry during her testimony when she was asked to read from one of the documents.
“So much raw emotion,” she said, wiping her eyes with a tissue.
The trial is continuing with evidence from the RCMP officer who discovered Brown’s abandoned car.
