A key Crown witness at a Halifax trial for two people charged with murder admitted during cross-examination Thursday that he has lied to the jury at times.
Wayne (Batman) Bruce made the admission after earlier agreeing that three statements he gave police in 2017 following the killing of Nadia Gonzales at a Dartmouth apartment building contained multiple lies, and that it didn’t bother him.
Gonzales, 35, of Hammonds Plains, was stabbed to death at 33 Hastings Dr. on the night of June 16, 2017. Her body was found in a hockey bag on a landing in a stairwell.
Calvin Maynard Sparks, 26, of Dartmouth and Samanda Rose Ritch, 22, of Halifax were arrested the next day. They are on trial in Nova Scotia Supreme Court on charges of first-degree murder and attempting to murder John Patterson.
Patterson has told the jury he went to the building with Gonzales that night to deliver crack cocaine to Bruce, who lived in apartment 16 on the fourth floor.
Sparks and Ritch allegedly came out of Bruce’s apartment with knives and attacked Gonzales and Patterson in the hallway. Patterson made his way out of the building and collapsed on the front lawn of an elementary school across the street.
Bruce, 63, began testifying Wednesday, telling the jury he has smoked crack almost daily for 41 years and often bought crack or powdered cocaine from Gonzales and Sparks, who he said were in business together.
Bruce recalled that Ritch and Sparks showed up at his apartment earlier in the day on June 16. He said Sparks was carrying a black hockey bag that he had seen in his possession before.
He said Sparks put the bag in his bedroom and gave him some cocaine that he cooked into crack and smoked. He said Sparks kept asking if Gonzales was coming over.
Bruce said he later received a text from Gonzales’ phone saying she would be there in eight minutes. He said Sparks went to his living room window and stood there looking at the front of the building below.
Sparks then said “they’re here,” Bruce testified, and went into the bedroom with Ritch. When the pair emerged from the bedroom, Bruce said they had gloves on, were armed with knives and had pulled their hoods up.
Bruce said the two accused went to the door and stood there before Sparks looked through the peephole and told him to go into the bedroom. He said he heard Sparks tell Ritch, “I’ll get John, you get her.”
After he heard the door to his apartment open and close, Bruce said he went to the door and opened it just wide enough to throw the hockey bag into the hallway. He said he didn’t see or hear anything in the hallway.
Bruce said he locked the door and sat down and “had a puff” of crack.
He said he then got a call from the building superintendent asking him to come out into the hallway. When he went out, “I saw blood everywhere,” he said.
Bruce went back into his apartment and said he got a phone call from a friend named Frankie Tynes telling him to go outside and check on Patterson because he’d been stabbed. He said that when he opened his door, he was greeted by a police officer and placed under arrest.
Bruce was questioned by police that night but released without being charged. He was arrested again that August and charged with first-degree murder. He spent about eight months behind bars before the charge was stayed by the Crown and later dropped.
Bruce sailed through his direct examination by Crown attorney Steve Degen, but defence lawyers Peter Planetta and Malcolm Jeffcock pointed out various lies in two statements to police in June 2017 and a longer statement that August.
Bruce conceded he had not been honest and truthful with police, had told “white lies” and big lies, had made some things up and had deliberately not told investigators some things.
“It doesn’t bother you lying, does it?” Planetta said. “It doesn’t bother you at all.”
“No,” Bruce responded.
Later, Bruce admitted to Jeffcock that in addition to using crack, he provided it to other people, and that he had lied under oath Wednesday when he said he wasn’t a drug dealer.
Jeffcock also got him to agree that he had perjured himself at other points in his testimony.
Bruce said he takes medication for bipolar disorder and has been diagnosed with ADHD. He said smoking crack makes him more awake, aware and energetic but sometimes causes him to zone out.
He said using crack hasn’t affected his memory, and that he had only recently remembered new details about the night of the killing.
A former chef, Bruce said he cooked dinner for Princess Diana during a royal visit while working at a hotel, and was burned for $1.3 million by an ex 20 years ago. He said he had accumulated the money over a period of two years by selling marijuana for $20 a gram.
In 2017, he told police that one of his sources for drugs when he was a dealer was John Gotti’s cousin.
“Sometimes do you have feelings of grandiosity?” Jeffcock asked.
“I’ve been told that, but I don’t think that way,” Bruce said.
Bruce will be back on the stand Friday for further cross-examination.
The trial got underway Nov. 4 and is scheduled to sit until Nov. 29. A jury of nine men and four women is hearing the case, with Justice Christa Brothers presiding.
