The HullaBoard - View Single Post - New Deveopment in Jabaji stabbing.

Taken from the Toronto Star.

Quote:

Secret tapes aimed at trick confession
Conversations recorded by brother of another accused man
Victim, 20, stabbed to death at The Docks nightclub in 2001

PETER SMALL
STAFF REPORTER

David Coulter was languishing in jail charged in the stabbing death of a student at The Docks nightclub, but his twin brother was sure he was innocent.

So Charles Coulter decided to prove his identical twin was not the killer by tricking the man who he believed had committed the crime into confessing during a series of secretly tape-recorded phone calls, he told a murder trial yesterday.

The Superior Court jury heard more than three hours of tape recordings in which Coulter used a number of arguments to pressure Jeffrey Tuck, who had not been charged, into telling police he was the killer so that David Coulter would not spend years in jail.

"Who took the guy's life ... you're not going to admit to that?" Charles Coulter asked Tuck during one of the calls that he taped using a device he bought from a local "spy" supply shop.

"Yeah. If I have to, I will," Tuck replied.

"What do you mean if you have to?" Coulter asked.

"If I know your brother is going away, I will but ..." Tuck said.

Tuck, 24, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in Salim Jabaji's death at the popular Toronto nightclub during a rave on Feb. 4, 2001. Jabaji, 20, an electrical engineering student at Hamilton's Mohawk College, had made the dean's list the previous year but was taking time from off his studies to care for his ill father.

After the late-night stabbing on the packed dance floor, the Coulter brothers and Tuck drove away from the waterfront nightclub, Charles Coulter has testified.

As David Coulter drove his green BMW, Tuck complained about a bleeding baby finger and explained that someone had come after him with a knife, which they fought over, and that he had stabbed his opponent, he told the jury.

But soon it was David who was charged in Jabaji's death, the court heard.

"I saw basically that the Toronto Police Service were trying to pin the murder on my brother," Coulter told Crown prosecutor Robin Flumerfelt yesterday. "And I could foresee that Jeffrey Tuck would pin it on my brother as well."

So that's when he hatched his plan and made a series of tapes, some of poor quality, of telephone calls to Tuck in the two months following Jabaji's death, he said.

In his first call, Tuck complained of depression and an inability to sleep. "At night I'm trying to sleep, I'm thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking," he said. "I'm in, like, a daze."

Tuck admitted to being scared, of worrying about wasting his youth in jail, and of feeling wracked with guilt because he knew David Coulter had been charged despite having no role in the death.

Charles Coulter complained that their parents' health was suffering because of the stress, and warned Tuck that he and his brother would be forced to testify against him if the matter went to court.

Tuck asserted on tape that the police had no evidence, adding he wanted to find out what they knew before deciding his best course.

Both agreed that the crime was manslaughter, not murder.

"Why don't you just, you know, make things easier on everybody and get it all over with?" Coulter urged.

"And go to jail for eight years? Like, I have no future then" Tuck replied.