It was a house of horrors.
It was hours after the bodies of Colin and Veronica Henry had been discovered by Toronto Police at about 2 a.m. on Sept. 21, 2022 in the blood-soaked bathtub of their Etobicoke apartment following two 911 calls — one made by a motorist on behalf of their shell-shocked youngest son, Daniel, and the other made by the oldest, Alpha, still in their apartment.
“My brother came back from flying, and he came to murder me and my parents,” Alpha Henry told the 911 operator of his brother, an Air Canada flight attendant who had just returned from Japan. “He just started to stab us. And now there’s blood everywhere. And he pulled my parents to the washroom. And I’m bleeding.”
But the Crown alleges that it was all a fabrication by the real killer, trying to pin the double murders on his brother. Ultimately, it would be Alpha Henry charged with the second-degree murders of his father, Colin, 68, and mother, Veronica, 67 — both devout members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church — as well as the attempted murder of his younger brother.
Henry, 30, has pleaded not guilty before Superior Court Justice Joan Barrett.
Det.-Const. Paul Dunning testified that he arrived at the Bergamot Ave. apartment after 4 p.m. on Sept. 22, 2022 to execute a search warrant.
“The whole apartment smelled of gasoline,” Dunning testified at Henry’s judge-alone trial. “The blue bucket was used to prop open the door, and that was to get air circulation going through because the apartment smelled like gasoline for the first, like, three days we were in there.”
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And there was blood everywhere.
In the living room, he found two gas canisters — one with blood near the spout. Blood had soaked through the couch’s chair cushion and arm rest, and under it was one sandal covered in blood. In the dining area, Dunning found a blood-stained blue shirt, an empty bleach bottle and on the kitchen table, two Master Chef knives on a tray beside a knife sharpening tool.
In the kitchen garbage can were two receipts from Canadian Tire and plastic packaging for a three-pack set of knives and the knife sharpener. Were they part of the murderer’s plan to dispose of the bodies?
On a kitchen chair, Dunning found a Playstation with blood on it. Had the killer actually played after the slayings?
Prosecutors contend Henry fatally stabbed his parents on the afternoon of Sept. 19 — long before his younger brother returned home at about 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 21. Daniel has testified that he arrived to find Alpha, who was homeless and had a contentious relationship with their parents, suddenly come at him with a knife.
In the ensuing struggle, Daniel said he managed to wrestle the weapon away and fled to a nearby gas station where he had someone call 911, unaware his parents were dead. He was arrested for their murders, but later released.
As Crown attorney Michael Wilson went through the gruesome apartment photos, he warned spectators in the courtroom — many of them students ‘- that there would be a lot of blood. The accused killer cast his eyes down and didn’t look at the macabre evidence of his parents’ murder.
In one bedroom, Dunning found blood had soaked through the sheets and the mattress.
In the bathroom where the bodies were discovered, he said there was blood on the door and floor, in the sink, on the toilet, on a cleaning glove and on the bottom and sides of the bathtub. Inside the tub was a blue-hooded sweater, a blue nightgown, a grey-hooded sweater, a checkered blanket, a T-shirt and a lace-edged table runner.
“All of these items had blood staining on them,” he said. “These items are actually still wet and have a strong odour of gasoline.”
The blood and gas-soaked clothes taken from the dead couple at their autopsies had to be placed in a police drying locker for two weeks before he could photograph and examine them.
On the front of Colin Henry’s shirt, he located two holes, side by side. On his wife’s shirt, he said, there was a “distinctive hole” in the left shoulder and another in the back right armpit area.
The trial continues.