They Took His Bloody Chainsaw, And Sent Him On His Way

http://http://www.canada.com/compon...

They Took His Bloody Chainsaw, And Sent Him On His Way
Man On Run From Law, Spattered With Blood, Allowed To Enter US
Gary Dimmock and Chuck Brown, The Ottawa Citizen
June 08, 2005

Gregory Allan Despres was supposed to be going to jail the morning folks spotted him hitchhiking to the US border with a bloody chainsaw. His trousers were spattered with blood. Inside his backpack he had a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife and brass knuckles. He was also packing pepper spray and wearing a bullet-proof vest.

The 22-year-old man with the Mohawk haircut and bugged-out eyes still got rides in friendly New Brunswick. And incredibly, in this dawn of intense border security, he still made it through customs. After customs officers fingerprinted him and seized his arsenal, including the chainsaw, they let him go.

According to police, Mr. Despres, a naturalized American citizen, told the border guards he was in the US military.

They didn’t know he was running from the law, let alone linked to the killings of his elderly next-door neighbours in Minto, an old coal mining town in central New Brunswick — killings that ended a years-long, violent feud.

The Mounties didn’t find the bodies of Frederick Fulton, 74, and his wife Veronica Decarie, 70, until the next day. They had been stabbed in their bedroom.

Police found the body of Mr. Fulton, a country singer, on the kitchen floor, just a few feet from his head, which had been stuffed in a pillow case and shoved under the breakfast table.

According to a U.S Attorney’s complaint, filed by the US Attorney’s office as part of the extradition case and obtained by the Citizen, after he was stopped at the border Canadian and American authorities consented to his release into the United States.

At the time he crossed the border he was free on bail. That morning — April 25 — he was to have been sentenced for threatening to kill his neighbour’s son-in-law. Mr. Fulton and Ms. Decarie had just been slain.

Mr. Despres changed his trousers, which were spattered in blood, behind a shop in St. Stephen, N.B, and then walked up to the US Customs booth on foot, with the bloodied chainsaw strapped to his backpack. He made it to the border crossing at 10 a.m., just hours after the double homicide.

Eddie Young, a 38-year-old fish-plant worker, sat next to Mr. Despres in the customs office at Calais, Maine, while the agents processed them. Mr. Young was on his way to catch a flight to Mexico with friends, but was detained when the officers noticed on his file a 20-year-old drug conviction in Ottawa.

"When he come in, they opened his bag up and they took out," Mr. Young said in an interview. "It looked like large bayonets to me, but they could have been a little bit longer for swords, and then two pairs of brass knuckles fastened to his bag, a chainsaw and what looked like a flak jacket."

Mr. Young said the US customs agents appeared to be joking around.

"I watched the customs guys fling the swords around in the back room," he said. "I mean, wouldn’t the evidence be ruined with their fingerprints?"

Mr. Young said Mr. Despres was treated better than he was.

"When I come back in (to the room) they were giving him a coffee," he said. "He got processed faster than I did."

Mr. Despres, who has a 10-inch swastika tattooed on his lower back, set off on foot into the United States. He was picked up by US police two days later, on April 27, the day police issued a North America-wide warrant. Mr. Despres, arrested in Massachusetts, is now facing an extradition hearing, to be held next month.

So how did a Canadian, at large for skipping a sentencing hearing, simply walk through US customs — with a bloody chainsaw, no less?

"Nobody asked us to detain him," said Bill Anthony, a spokesman for US Customs and Border Protection.

"Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up. We’re governed by laws and regulations, and he did not violate any regulations," Mr. Anthony told the Associated Press.

None of Mr. Despres’ weapons are prohibited by law in the United States. The customs spokesman conceded it "sounds stupid" that a man carrying a bloody chainsaw couldn’t be detained. "Our people don’t have a crime lab up there. They can’t look at a chainsaw and decide if it’s blood or rust or red paint," he said.

In a New Brunswick court hearing earlier this year, Mr. Despres’ father was sentenced for beating his live-in girlfriend. High on cocaine, court heard, his father used to rev up his own chainsaw and use it on appliances and the ceiling. Another time, his live-in girlfriend woke up with him standing over her bed with a chainsaw.

The killings of the elderly couple in the small New Brunswick town has left many devastated. Days after the killings, councillors called a town meeting to help the citizens cope.

According to the police complaint, the RCMP believe Mr. Despres, bent on settling accounts with his neighbours, broke down their door some time in the morning of April 25, then started stabbing them in their bedroom. The Mounties believe Mr. Fulton ran into the bathroom and used its door as a shield. He was then stabbed to death and decapitated. They found his car in a gravel pit on a highway leading to the U.S. border, on the other side of the St. Croix River, which runs along the southwest corner of New Brunswick.