In 2002, a man named Jason Dix was awarded nearly $765,000 for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.
The 37-year-old Dix had successfully sued a group of his accusers, including RCMP officers and a provincial Crown prosecutor, who had helped build a criminal case against him in a double murder investigation.
His victory stemmed from the fact that he had been held in custody for nearly two years, in a case that was ultimately withdrawn due to a lack of evidence. But not for a lack of trying.
Mr. Big
The RCMP spent more than a year and, at the time, an unprecedented amount of money on Operation Kabaya, an undercover sting investigation.
Kabaya employed the controversial Mr. Big template, where undercover officers pretend to be part of a criminal organization in order to get close to a subject.
There can be inducements of easy money with little risk or membership in the high-level gang, as examples of incentives.
The end is supposed to come with a big meeting, when the subject sits face-to-face with the leader of the outfit, the so-called Mr. Big, who asks for loyalty and honesty and a full confession of their own criminal past.
The high-level covert might tell the suspect that his gang can help get rid of any remaining loose ends or overlooked evidence from the suspect’s past.
It’s a scenario that has worked many times for the RCMP in difficult cases.
It can fail as well. With Dix, it did so in spectacular fashion.
And it was an investigation that started just as poorly for Strathcona County RCMP.
Two murders in Sherwood Park
On Oct. 1, 1994, two employees at a paper recycling plant called Crown Packaging Limited, located on the edge of Sherwood Park, went into work on a Saturday to try to repair a bailer.
They discovered they wouldn’t be able to finish the job and would pack up early to head home.
When Tim Orydzuk’s wife became concerned by his failure to arrive home, she had a neighbour drive her to CPL.
That’s when the bodies of 33-year-old Orydzuk and 24-year-old co-worker James Deiter were discovered.
Shortly after that, the theory that the men had been electrocuted started to circulate around the civilians, then first responders, and ultimately, RCMP officers on scene.
By that evening, the senior officer had arrived and looked around for approximately two minutes before calling Occupational Health & Safety about two workers who had died by electrocution.
Thirty-six hours after the Mounties gave up the crime scene to OHS investigators, an autopsy determined that each victim had been shot in the head three times by small-calibre slugs.
Far from being electrocuted, it appeared the two men were killed execution style.
Jason Dix became the double murder suspect for the RCMP. He knew both victims because he worked for a commercial scale company and was installing a weight scale at the plant in the months prior to the killings.
He had become friendly, through repeated interactions, with plant worker Deiter, and to a lesser extent, Orydzuk, Dieter’s supervisor.
Dix and Deiter were out drinking the night before the shootings with a woman named Lu Payette. Dix, who was married, was having an affair with Payette.
One motive for the murders, according to investigators, was that Dix was jealous of the younger Deiter’s attention to Payette.
Another might be that the suspect, Dix, was worried his wife would find out about the affair from Deiter. Investigators surmised that the death of the second victim, Orydzuk, could be explained as simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Despite the lengthy undercover operation against Dix, he never once admitted any part in the double murder.
Some of the tactics included having Dix witness a staged drug deal gone bad in the British Columbia town of Yaak that ended with a pretend gangster fatally shooting someone in a trailer with Dix watching from outside.
It was all staged.
They even flew Dix to Toronto to witness $1 million in cash being counted out in front of him.
It was real money, but the big boss was a cop, and again, it yielded nothing.
Police openly lied to Dix and even lied to his four-year-old son.
They interrogated him for 11 hours straight and still Dix made no admissions.
As his trial finally got underway in 1998, a Crown prosecutor misrepresented a letter at one of Dix’s bail hearings, claiming a jailhouse friend of Dix authored it, when in reality it was penned by RCMP investigators.
As a result, the trial was initially paused. Then the Crown prosecutor was replaced and eventually sanctioned.
A newly assigned prosecutor finally dropped the double murder charges against Dix due to a lack of evidence, and he was set free.
The families of Orydzuk felt let down by both the RCMP and the provincial Crown.
One of them, Tom Olsen, stated on the day the charges were dropped in 1998, “This was like a national black eye for the RCMP. They were dogged in their pursuit of Jason Dix. So, you know, we feel betrayed by everyone involved, the justice system and the RCMP.”
It was speculated at trial that Dix may have been tipped off about police investigative techniques or the undercover operation against him.
After winning his judgement in 2002, Dix moved on to Saskatchewan.
No one else has ever been brought to trial in the murders of Orydzuk and Deiter.
The Mounties have continued to employ the Mr. Big scenario in their investigations.
