Cold-case murder trial set for 2020
A retired Winchester mechanic, charged in connection with a 10-year-old cold case, will stand trial for first-degree murder in a Cornwall court next year.
The trial for James Henry “Jimmy” Wise, 75, has been scheduled for five weeks beginning in March 2020.
Wise, who waived his right to a preliminary hearing, is to plead not guilty in the case.
Wise’s defence lawyer, Ian Carter, said a change of venue application has been abandoned, but several pretrial motions will proceed, including one that challenges the validity of police searches executed in the case.
“What I can say at this stage is that it’s a circumstantial case that involves various pieces of evidence,” said Carter, a member of the Ottawa criminal defence firm, Bayne Sellar Ertel Carter.
“The charges are dated so that makes it trickier. There are no eyewitnesses; there is no DNA that places him at the scene. So it is a complicated case with a lot of different witnesses.”
During earlier court appearances, Wise has entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. He suffered a stroke several years ago and was living in a Winchester nursing home when OPP arrested him in May 2018.
Wise was charged in the death of Raymond Collison, of Winchester Springs, a 59-year-old father and handyman. His relatives described Collison as a friendly, happy-golucky man who lived with mental illness.
Collison was reported missing in September 2009, three weeks after he was last seen getting on his bicycle outside the McCloskey Hotel in Chesterville, south of Ottawa. His body wasn’t discovered until April 2014 when two people out for an evening stroll came across a human skull in a drainage ditch.
DNA testing was required to identify the decomposed body.
OPP investigators announced that Collison’s death was the result of foul play, but they’ve never revealed the cause.
Wise has remained in custody since his arrest. A bail application has been unable to proceed because of the difficulty in securing a place for him in a local nursing home. Wise is being held in the infirmary at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre.
Collison’s decomposed corpse was found in a ditch at the corner of Thompson and Steen roads in Morewood, south of Ottawa.
The same small town has been the scene of two unsolved murders. Randy Rankin, 46, a children’s clown and former racetrack announcer, was shot in the back of the head as he sat in the basement of his Thompson Road home on a dark morning in February 2007.
Twenty years earlier, in July 1987, a nighttime fire engulfed the Morewood home of John King, 59, a reclusive bachelor. Forensic tests showed he had been shot in the head.