ST. THOMAS – After a decade behind bars, Boris Panovski, freshly acquitted of murder, looked up to the sky on Friday afternoon.
“My first day out and it’s raining,” he said happily before departing the Elgin County courthouse with defence lawyer Margaret Barnes to an uncertain future.
The former bird dog trainer and hairstylist from Scarborough, who was tried twice for the bizarre homicide of a Toronto-area construction company owner at a Huron County conservation area, was acquitted on Friday by Superior Court Justice Marc Garson of first-degree murder and aggravated assault.
Panovski, 80, said the police could have “been looking for the killer” of Donato Frigo, 70, instead of accusing him of the ambush and execution-style slaying on Sept. 13, 2014.
“They left it to the killer to enjoy his life and get an innocent man in a jail,” Panovski said.
Panovski was convicted by a Goderich jury in 2018. But after a successful appeal in which Ontario’s highest court found the trial judge was unfair in his jury instructions, he was granted a new trial that was moved to St. Thomas last year. Panovski has been in custody since his arrest nine years and 11 months ago.
He was also acquitted of aggravated assault of Frigo’s wife, Eva Willer Frigo, the only eyewitness to the shooting. She had a fleeting glimpse of the shooter and gave the best descriptions she could of both the suspect and his car.
But those descriptions – police sketches of the shooter and the car – plus concerning evidence about tire tracks that didn’t match Panovski’s blue Toyota Corolla were at the foundation of Garson’s decision to acquit.
Garson noted several times during his decision that there was no question Frigo was murdered, but the key issue in the case was the identity of the killer. The Crown’s circumstantial case, while strong on its face, failed to reach the standard of proof to convict Panovski.
“Am I suspicious? Absolutely. Do I think he might have been involved in the shooting? I do,” Garson said. “Was he in the area? He was. Am I sure he was the shooter? I am not. . . . Has the Crown proven his identity as the shooter beyond a reasonable doubt? They have not.”
Frigo was shot to death at the Hullett Provincial Wildlife Area, north of Clinton, on Sept. 13, 2014 while he and his wife were riding horses along the trails and training one of their bird dogs. They were at the nature preserve for the annual field dog trials that had finished that morning.
Frigo’s wife Eva, then 56, was injured by shotgun pellets. At Panovski’s first trial, he was found not guilty of attempted murder, but guilty of aggravated assault. The Crown had proceeded with the attempted murder charge at the second trial but at the end of the prosecution’s case, the charge was reduced to aggravated assault.
The Frigos were ambushed by a shooter hiding in the bushes. Frigo was knocked off his horse with a head injury, while his wife was able to gallop away and get a brief look at the shooter and his car.
She watched in horror when the car drove up to her husband’s crumpled body laying in a ditch, and the killer fired one more shotgun blast out the passenger-side window into the back of Frigo’s head before taking off.
Willer Frigo suffered painful facial injuries. She testified she tried to get a licence plate number but couldn’t and did her best to give a description of the man in camouflage who killed her husband.
The Crown’s theory was Panovski, once a high-flier in the bird dog world who boasted of winning two national championships, had acted on a longstanding grudge against Frigo – who they said Panovski blamed for a precipitous fall from the field dog community.
After Panovski was arrested at a prestigious field dog event in Waynesboro, Georgia, the Crown argued he was shunned from the community and Frigo had renamed a dog Panovski bred from Panovski Silver to Belfield Silver. That dog would go one, as one witness testified, to be one of the greatest dogs in recent field dog competition history.
In the days before the shooting, Panovski tinted the windows of his car, switched out his vanity plates, and fixed his shotgun.
On the day of the shooting, he told his girlfriend he was going goose hunting. Garson said he accepted the evidence of other Clinton-area locals who testified they saw Panovski’s Toyota in the area.
Two days after the shooting, Panovski cancelled his insurance and gym membership and bought luggage and a one-way ticket to his native Macedonia, leaving that night. He returned voluntarily and was arrested at Pearson International Airport about a week later.
But Garson said he just could not be sure Panovski was the killer and there were weaknesses in the Crown’s theory. The car Willer Frigo described was more akin to a Nissan than a Toyota and the police sketch resembled a younger and fitter Panovski, not the 70-year-old at the time of the homicide. And the tire tracks left in the dirt simply didn’t match.
He rejected wholly the defence’s assertion that the police investigation was flawed and that there was tunnel vision to prosecute Panovski.
Garson’s decision was 80 pages long and painstakingly went through the evidence from almost 60 witnesses and 250 exhibits. There was a scary interruption mid-way through Friday’s decision, when one observer suffered a medical incident that required paramedics to be summoned.
When the not-guilty verdict was read out, Willer Frigo crumpled and was comforted by friends. Panovski sobbed and told his lawyer he wanted to stay with the police because he was afraid he was going to be murdered when he was released.
Garson said he understood how difficult his decision would be on Willer Frigo and the rest of the family. He commended Willer Frigo for forthright testimony in which “she did not embellish, neither did she exaggerate or fabricate.”
He added: “To this day she still looks over her shoulder and her life remains upside down. My heart goes out to her and the children of the deceased. This is a senseless and tragic killing.”
Outside the court, Panovski was chatty in slightly broken English and ready to get on with his life. He thanked the appeal lawyers who won him a new trial in 2022. And he thanked his defence lawyer, Barnes, who took over the case just six weeks before the nine-week re-trial started in May.
Panovski was especially grateful to Garson. “Most of all I thank the fair judge. He went through every step . . . he followed every small thing to find real evidence if Boris Panovski is a killer or not.”
Added Panovski, while crying: “The police destroyed my 10 years, my best life. . . . They make me homeless, they take all my money.”
Frigo, he said, was a friend with whom he would hunt and “enjoy life together.” He said Frigo “was the greatest man for me ever.” He said he had known Willer Frigo since she was a teenager through the field dog trials.
His initial plans were to go somewhere safe, but he wasn’t sure where.
“I hope every innocent person can get out of the jail,” Panovski said. “The justice system is a big corruption putting innocent people in the jail and stay for rest of their life sometime (sic).”