A disgruntled former employee who killed Vancouver businessman John McIver by hitting him in the head with a metal tool and motorbike before strangling him with an electrical cord has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 10 years.
Brian Roger Holt pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on June 23 and was sentenced in British Columbia Supreme Court on Thursday. His sentence also includes a mandatory ban on carrying firearms.
Holt was charged with the killing less than a month after McIver’s daughter found him lying dead at his appliance repair shop, McIver’s Appliance Sales and Service, in South Vancouver on June 26, 2019.
The charge resulted from Holt confessing to the killing in his third interview with Vancouver police sergeants.
“I did something wrong. I have to come to grips with it and own up to it. I have to take responsibility,” Holt told an officer, according to court documents.
He pleaded guilty to the murder the same day Judge Kathleen Kerr ruled that his confessions were made voluntarily.
The killer left his job on bad terms 4 years ago
Kerr’s ruling on the confessions was posted online Friday and details the circumstances of the slaying, along with the VPD’s tactics to catch a killer.
According to the ruling, Holt had stopped working for McIver nearly four years before the murder, in April 2015. He left the job on bad terms, believing he was owed significant amounts of overtime.
“By June 2019, Mr. Holt was experiencing significant financial difficulties and was facing eviction from his apartment,” Kerr wrote.
A few weeks before the murder, Holt contacted McIver out of the blue and said he was interested in discussing an appliance deal at an apartment building he managed.
Early on the morning of June 26, Holt showed up at the repair shop and met with McIver. At some point during the 30-minute meeting, the two got into an argument that turned physical.
“Mr Holt became angry, reached for a metal hand tool and struck Mr McIver in the head. He then hit Mr. McIver in the head with a motorcycle that was on a nearby workbench and strangled Mr. McIver with an electrical cord,” Kerr wrote.
According to her decision, Holt became a suspect in the murder almost immediately. Surveillance video showed him going to and from McIver’s store that morning.
The cops used a good cop/bad cop tactic
Police first arrested him on July 3 and took him to Vancouver jail, where he was questioned for four hours and 45 minutes by Sgt. Raj Mander, an officer who would become key to gaining recognition.
Mander interviewed Holt again the next day for another three hours and 10 minutes, but during both discussions the suspect refused to talk about the murder, exercising his right to remain silent. Holt was released without charge on July 4.
Police arrested Holt again on July 23 after new evidence, including DNA samples, linked him to the crime scene. That night, Mander interviewed him one more time for three hours and 19 minutes, which was followed by an interview with a second officer, Sgt. Revard Dufresne, who finally convinced the killer to talk.
DNA evidence links Brian Roger Holt to the scene where John McIver was killed in June 2019 (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)
The decision suggests that Mander and Dufresne used something akin to the classic good cop/bad cop strategy to gain recognition from Holt.
Mander, according to the judge, “remained cheerful, respectful, calm and polite throughout and did not engage in any threatening behavior or raise his voice… Instead, at times, Sergeant Mander became very soft spoken and quiet, perceiving protecting, nourishing and maintaining tone.”
Dufresne, on the other hand, “was much more direct and pushy,” Kerr said.
She wrote that the second officer made “a more direct moral appeal to Mr. Holt’s conscience.”
Both officers slighted McIver as a difficult boss, the ruling said, in an effort to give Holt an opportunity to explain why he committed murder.
“In not so many words, Sergeant Dufresne essentially asked Mr. Holt if he was a cold-blooded killer or a man with a heart and soul lost in the heat of an argument,” Kerr wrote.
Realizing that he would not be released from prison, Holt finally confessed to killing McIver.
Holt’s defense team argued that officers used subtle inducements to coerce Holt into involuntary confessions and asked that his statement be ruled inadmissible.
Kerr rejected those arguments and found that Holt exercised his free will and was fully informed of his right to counsel.
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