Lindsay found not responsible for attacks
Mark Lindsay will not be held criminally responsible for a pair of attacks in B.C. in 2011 — one against an undercover police officer, the other on his cellmate at Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre — but a judge had harsh words for the 26-year-old son of Edmonton's former police chief.
After handing down his NCRMD (not criminally responsible by way of a mental disorder) verdict on Friday, March 15, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Dev Dley offered a description of Lindsay's threat to society.
"I consider Mr. Lindsay to be a very exceptionally dangerous person," the judge said.
Dley deemed as "persuasive" the evidence of forensic psychiatrist Marcel Hediger, who testified in a Kamloops courtroom last week about his two-month assessment of Lindsay last year.
Hediger described Lindsay as a paranoid schizophrenic who was propelled into committing his offences by a specific set of delusions — that a group of people was trying to murder him.
Lindsay was arrested on Sept. 21, 2011, by Kamloops Mounties after he stabbed an undercover officer during a confrontation in a vehicle outside a Barriere gas station.
The officer, whose identity is protected by a court-ordered publication ban, had previously engaged Lindsay is a Mr. Big sting operation, in which police pose as gangsters in an attempt to befriend murder suspects and eventually get them to confess to their crimes.
Less than a month after his arrest, Lindsay stabbed his cellmate at Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre twice in the same eye — once with a pen and once with a pencil — during a game of Scrabble.
In court in Kamloops last August, Lindsay admitted to both crimes — as well as the murder of his ex-girlfriend, which precipitated the Mr. Big sting — but said he was acting in self-defence.
In his lengthy testimony, Lindsay claimed to have been the target of a group he called the Serial Killers, or Healers, which was out to get him. He said each of his victims was associated somehow with the group.
Dley ordered Lindsay to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, the results of which were made public for the first time in court last week through Hediger's testimony.
Lindsay's file in B.C. will now be handed over to the B.C. review board.
He is still facing a second-degree murder charge, among others, in relation to the death of his girlfriend, 31-year-old Dana Turner, in Alberta in 2011.
He is slated to appear in a Red Deer courtroom on those charges on April 8. His preliminary inquiry was held in Red Deer earlier this year, and was committed to trial.
If he is found criminally responsible for Turner's death in Alberta, his criminal sentence would trump B.C.'s NCRMD finding until its expiration.
KTW has applied to B.C. Supreme Court to receive a copy of Lindsay's psychiatric report, but Dley has yet to make a decision.
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