Scott Van Alstine always took the tough cases. “He was the go-to-guy for the Crown on the big, ugly cases,” says Nanaimo defence lawyer Stephen Taylor. “They’ll have to hire three prosecutors to replace him.”
For the past 45 years, Van Alstine has immersed himself in the most tragic stories in our province. Between the years of 1982 and 2016, Van Alstine was the prosecutor in more than 70 murder trials.
Some are still talked about.
Ruby Ann Ruffolo injected her husband with a fatal overdose of heroin, then drove his rigid body, feet sticking out the window of her car, to a Langford ditch.
Drug-addled Stephen Reid used a loaded shotgun to rob a bank in Victoria, then shot at the police officer who chased him.
Victoria real-estate agent Patrick Lees strangled his wife Laurie with his belt.
Bonnie Walford shot her lawyer to death in his Nanaimo office.
Many of the other cases he prosecuted have faded from public memory — but not from Van Alstine’s.
He has witnessed the consequences of anger, jealousy and evil. He has shepherded families dealing with the violent death of their loved one through court proceedings. And he has felt compassion for the families of an offender, who pay a horrible price for something they didn’t do.
“What’s remarkable is that Scott remains a believer in the essential goodness of people,” says Laura Ford, who was his co-counsel on the murders of two Duncan women by serial killer William Elliott.
“Scott has left an indelible mark, not only on the history of criminal justice in this province, but on those he has worked with over the years. He is, quite simply, irreplaceable.”
His last big case was the shooting at the Western Forest Products mill in Nanaimo. Laid-off mill worker Kevin Addison was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
At the Victoria courthouse, Van Alstine is considered a classic, old-time barrister, habitually jingling his pocket change and rattling defence counsel by talking about politics, the speeches of Winston Churchill or the latest biography of John F. Kennedy, his greatest hero.
Taylor says Van Alstine taught him how to handle the big trials.
“He would come to court in a six-week trial with a single piece of paper with 14 different highlighter colours on it. But it was a single piece of paper. And what I realized was you don’t have to be prepared for a six-week trial, you have to be prepared for tomorrow.
“Basically, it was as simple as that old saying about eating an elephant one bite at a time. When you broke down a trial to its components, the number of witnesses you had to be prepared for each day and what you needed from those witnesses, it became very doable. It took away a lot of my fear of the big, big trials.”
Gentlemanly, is how many describe Van Alstine. Low-key. Humble. Determined.
On this sunny, early summer day, Van Alstine is at home in Sidney with Peri, his wife of 43 years. He has traded in his waistcoat, tabs and gown for a rugby shirt, shorts and sneakers.
Their two children, Daniel, a school teacher, and Catherine, a probation officer, have given them five grandchildren. Van Alstine walks by a trampoline, a basketball hoop and tub of baseball bats on his way to the backyard pool.
“JFK loved to swim,” he says. “He had a bad back. Most people thought it was a war injury, but it was congenital.”
Then he changes tack, again, and looks at the pool where the grandchildren will spend a fair bit of their summer.
“The hardest cases are always ones that involve children,” he says. “There’s a life lost, so there’s always a tragedy. But when it’s kids, it’s the worst for me.”
Van Alstine pauses to consider how he got through all those tough, ugly cases.
“I don’t want to exaggerate, but put it this way: You want justice. Particularly when it’s a child and their whole life is before them and they don’t even know how precious and valuable it is. And the terrible impact on the families. It’s just, well, you think about it.”
Van Alstine was born to Jean, a nurse, and Ralph, a real-estate agent, in Ottawa on Remembrance Day 1942. Soon after, the family moved to the Toronto suburb of Leaside — “the same street Stephen Harper lived on” — then to Prince Edward Island, before settling in Burnaby in 1957. In 1961, he had already discovered the power of words when he delivered the valedictory address to the Grade 12 graduating class at Burnaby Central High School.
He had grown up in the United Church and attended youth groups, and says he was young and idealistic. After graduation, he became a student minister for two years, taking a six-month biblical course at the Christian Leadership Training School in Naramata.
“It was one of the finest experiences I ever had in my life. One of my professors had taught Nelson Rockefeller at Princeton,” says Van Alstine. “I was blessed. It was inspiring. A number of First Nations people lived there. When I look back on it, sometimes I think why didn’t I go and march with Martin Luther King. That would have been something to meet the great man.”
He drifted away from the church — “I didn’t think it was for me” — and ultimately found law.
In 1971, Van Alstine received his bachelor of law from the University of British Columbia. He was called to the bar in 1972 and articled with R.M.J. Hutchinson in Nanaimo.
“I was really lucky to article with Rafe. He was a wonderful friend and tutor and became a Supreme Court judge. He was also a mountain climber. When I first met him, we were walking one day. I said: ‘You sort of walk funny, Rafe.’ And he said: ‘I have no toes.’ Frostbite.”
Ten of his 12 years as a defence lawyer predate the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Van Alstine had a small private practice, defending people accused of rape, murder, criminal negligence causing death and other crimes. He also did some ad hoc Crown counsel work.
“It was fun defending in the old days. I had a few murders. I did everything, but I always liked criminal law,” he recalls.
“You’d say to the judge, to keep out a statement: ‘My Lord, my client asked to phone a lawyer and he was refused.’ And the judge would say: ‘That’s a very good point. I’ll consider that carefully.’ But I can tell you, in my experience, the statements always went in.
“I always think it was a big advantage to have worked the other side because you saw what a defence lawyer experiences. Many times you liked your clients. They got into a bad mess and you tried to help them out.”
Dennis Murray, the assistant deputy minister of the criminal justice branch, had seen Van Alstine in action and hired him to be the administrative Crown in Duncan.
“I had prosecuted cases he had defended. He was a hard worker, a brilliant cross-examiner, one of the top five I ever saw in my career, and I saw a lot of good people. He had an innate sense of fairness. These are all qualities that are at the top of the list for anyone who understand the role of a prosecutor. He was firm, but fair,” says Murray.
“Scott was good. Not because he grandstanded and made a big show out of everything. With quiet determination, he would penetrate and poke holes in the stories of people who were making up stories. And he was incredibly good at it. As far as I was concerned, when it came to really serious trials, he was the backbone of the Vancouver Island Crown.”
Together, Murray and Van Alstine prosecuted Kelly Toop for the murder of Suzanna Seto at the Village Green Motel in Duncan in 1980. Seto was sexually assaulted and tortured for up to two hours before her body was dumped beside the Cowichan River. Toop was convicted of first-degree murder in 1983 and is serving a life sentence.
About that time, Van Alstine handled the bizarre case of Bonnie Walford, who took a rifle, walked into the office of her lawyer Doug Trail and shot him at close range. Trail had unsuccessfully launched a civil suit on her behalf.
“She was a crack shot,” says Van Alstine. “And I knew Doug. He worked at MacIsaac and Company right across the street from the courthouse.”
In 1985, Van Alstine moved to Kelowna to take on the duties of deputy regional Crown counsel. He prosecuted murderers in Kelowna, Penticton, Cranbrook and Nelson. One of those cases was Dean Christopher Roberts, who killed his wife and one-year-old twins. Van Alstine believes it was the first Mr. Big sting using undercover operatives in the province.
In 1997, Van Alstine returned to the Duncan office and prosecuted criminals in every court on Vancouver Island.
One of his most challenging cases was Ruby Ann Ruffolo. It took seven years of legal wrangling to convict Ruffolo of the first-degree murder of her husband.
“It was a difficult case in so many ways,” says Murray. “Scott handled a really, really difficult situation with Miss Ruffolo and all the various lawyers she went through and all the difficulties she caused in the courtroom. No matter what happened, it was always dealt with respectfully by him toward her. He was quietly competent and dignified.”
Victoria lawyer Peter Firestone says Van Alstine is the best of the best.
“I heard he wanted to be a provincial court judge but they wouldn’t appoint him because they didn’t want to lose him, the effective advocate that he was. So Scott would have been one of the best provincial court judges we never got, because he was too valuable to the prosecution.”
Firestone regrets he didn’t get the chance to do a murder trial with Van Alstine as his junior counsel.
Van Alstine never rubbed your nose in it when you lost a case, he saID.
“My clients might not like me saying it, but there was always a pleasure to lose to Mr. Van Alstine because he was a gentleman litigator. He was an excellent counsel with good stories and people liked listening to what he had to say.”
What he said in court was often difficult to hear. In July 2013, William Elliott stood in a crowded Victoria courtroom and pleaded guilty to murdering two Duncan women — Karrie Ann Stone, 42, and 18-year-old Tyeshia Jones.
Bev Stone put her hand to her mouth in shock as Van Alstine described how her daughter was beaten with a baseball bat, then set alight while she was still alive. Tyeshia’s mother, Mary Jim, learned Elliott had run his truck over her daughter.
“Many people do an evil act, but they’re not evil,” says Van Alstine. “I’ve met a few that did an evil act and are pure evil, but not many.”
Elliott had one of the saddest backgrounds Van Alstine had ever seen.
“Just a terrible upbringing. He had good parts to him. He obviously had bad parts to him he couldn’t control.”
Van Alstine says he coped by moving from one case to the next.
“But there are parts of the cases you always remember. I haven’t forgotten many of them.”
And words linger.
A mother, whose five-year-old was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and killed, went to work in a different community. She told him it was a miracle she didn’t kill anybody when she made the 30-minute drive to work every day.
“I said: ‘What do you mean?’ She said: ‘Because I’m crying so hard.’ You never forget that.”
A mother saying goodnight to her daughter for the last time has also stayed with him. When the mother woke up, her three-year-old was gone.
The criminal courts are much different than they used to be, says Van Alstine. In the past, few people came to court. Now families attend court and present victim-impact statements.
“It’s a hard, hard experience for people who come to court and witness how their loved one passed.”
But it’s also a rite of passage and it helps if matters can be completely quickly. Still, families never get over the loss of a loved one, he says.
“I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes for one minute. The passage of time must help, but nonetheless, I think the big hurt is always inside.”
Van Alstine says it has been a privilege intersecting with people at a critical time in their lives when they’re dealing with the loss of a loved one. He also has compassion for the families of the accused, calling them the forgotten people.
For the most part, he believes, judges and juries get it right.
“A trial is a living experience,” says Van Alstine. “You can read everything and be prepared and when all the evidence is played out and the defence has evidence you didn’t know was coming, sometimes you get a lesser verdict than you hoped for.”
Peter Juk, assistant deputy attorney general, who worked with Van Alstine for many years, calls the 70 homicide cases “a Mount Everest of work for any prosecutor to scale.”
Juk, who has discussed politics, law, history, philosophy and religious faith with Van Alstine, has given some thought to how the seasoned prosecutor survived the psychological toll of dealing with all those terrible cases, sharing and dwelling upon all that personal tragedy and pain.
“It’s explained by the type of man Scott is,” Juk reflects. “Scott is deeply compassionate. He has a longing for justice, always tempered by fairness. And he is constantly striving after knowledge, after wisdom, after truth.”
The former student minister never really abandoned his pursuit of the divine or the solace that it brings, and this has sustained him through his long and sometimes arduous career, Juk says.
“Scott has never ceased travelling the long journey inward, always thinking about how he should live his life, how he should perceive and relate to a higher power, how he should relate to his fellow human beings and how he should live a meaningful life. He has done this by helping people, by doing good work and by pursuing justice.”
