Lindsay claims he had to kill Turner
KTW has obtained exclusively a copy of Mark Lindsay’s psychiatric assessment, completed following a two-month in-custody stay at a Lower Mainland forensic hospital last fall. The report contains details about Lindsay’s crimes that have never before been made public. This story is written based on the 12-page document.
If you take Mark Lindsay at his word, Dana Turner never stood a chance.
According to Lindsay, when the 31-year-old mother of three crossed paths with him inside a psychiatric hospital in Alberta in the spring of 2011, she was immediately marked for death.
Lindsay, the 26-year-old son of Edmonton’s former police chief, was attracted to Turner — a pretty brunette with wavy hair and soft brown eyes.
But, he claimed, he knew he had to kill her.
For years prior, Lindsay said, he had been the target of a group of killers.
He claims to have overheard them at various times talking about murdering him.
On one occasion, he said he heard them “trashing” him in a store. Another time, he said, he turned on the TV to hear a news anchor issue instructions about how to kill him.
Lindsay called them the Serial Killers — and Turner, he apparently thought, was on their side.
“Mr. Lindsay reports that he immediately became concerned that this lady [Turner] was part of the group of serial killers,” forensic psychiatrist Marcel Hediger wrote in the report.
“Mr. Lindsay became concerned that the group of serial killers had found him and had sent in the lady to kill him.
“Over time he became more convinced that this lady was one of the group of serial killers and that she in fact wanted to kill him.”
Those feelings are tough to reconcile with text messages Lindsay sent Turner a few months later, detailed in a copy of Turner’s diary obtained by KTW.
“I love you without judgement or pretentious animosity,” he texted her on June 22, 2011.
“You are the epitome of the beauty I need to be content.”
Later that day, Lindsay stabbed Turner in the head while kissing her — an embrace she described in her diary as “sensual.”
She survived and Lindsay went to jail charged with attempted murder.
Fifty days later, he was released after pleading guilty to a reduced charge.
“Mr. Lindsay reports that shortly after his release from prison, he indeed attacked and killed the lady by stabbing her with a pencil,” Hediger wrote.
“He then took her body and hid it next to a rural road outside Calgary.”
After that, Lindsay went to Vancouver for a few days.
On the Greyhound ride back to Edmonton, he was befriended by a man offering him work.
That friend turned out to be an undercover police officer.
Lindsay’s newfound employment was actually the early stages of an RCMP Mr. Big sting aimed at figuring out what happened to Turner.
According to Hediger’s report, Lindsay “realized” almost immediately — while still on the Greyhound — that the man was part of the Serial Killers group.
Despite that, he spent time with him socially over a period of days leading up to the duo’s first out-of-town work trip — a job that would have them haul a trailer containing two quads from an Edmonton suburb to Kamloops.
Lindsay told Hediger he received “psychic communications” telling him his new friend would be paid a bounty for his murder.
“Mr. Lindsay reports that he received another psychic communication that a person would be killed in Kamloops and he began to become concerned that he would be that victim,” the report reads.
Lindsay decided to attack and kill his friend, whose identity is protected by a court-ordered publication ban.
So, when the duo stopped in Barriere for snacks, Lindsay went inside the store and came out with two chocolate bars.
One of them was a Mr. Big, which he gave to the undercover officer.
Lindsay then attacked him.
The officer escaped with relatively minor injuries — a cut on his eyebrow from an undetermined weapon Lindsay was brandishing.
(What the weapon was is not clear. Lindsay maintained in court last summer it was a pen, but Crown asserted he used a hooked carpet knife that was found inside the vehicle after his arrest. The knife did not contain DNA from Lindsay or the undercover Mountie and Lindsay said he wasn’t aware of its existence.)
A call for help was sent out to police in the area and Kamloops RCMP arrested Lindsay — behind the wheel of the unmarked RCMP truck in which the pair had been travelling — near McLure just before 1 a.m. on Sept. 21, 2011.
Charged with aggravated assault, robbery and possession of a weapon, Lindsay opted not to apply for bail and was housed at Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre.
On Oct. 20, 2011, he was playing Scrabble with his cellmate, 20-year-old Michel Fougere.
Lindsay stabbed Fougere twice in the same eye — once with a pen and once with a pencil, piercing his brain.
In the moments after the attack, Lindsay told his cellmate to lie to correctional officers about what had happened and say he had fallen out of bed and hit his head.
Fougere was rushed to a Vancouver hospital for brain surgery.
He survived, but lost one eye.
Lindsay was then moved into KRCC’s segregation unit — and he has been held in isolation ever since.
Hediger came to the conclusion that Lindsay is a paranoid schizophrenic and the psychiatrist’s testimony earlier this month persuaded a Kamloops judge to absolve Lindsay of criminal responsibility in relation to both B.C. attacks.
In his report, Hediger outlines Lindsay’s psychiatric history — which includes a handful of admissions to Alberta institutions for various mental issues, worsened by Lindsay’s periodic excessive use of drugs and alcohol.
The report also mentions a murder a decade ago in Edmonton in which Lindsay was apparently a person of interest.
A 74-year-old school-bus driver was killed on an Edmonton freeway in 2002 after a group of teens dropped a 30-pound boulder from a pedestrian overpass.
Lindsay was questioned by police and detectives searched his family’s home, but he was never charged.
In an interview with KTW in 2011, Lindsay admitted to being in the area at the time of the overpass incident, but said he wasn’t involved.
In her diary, however, Turner made mention of Lindsay bragging about having taken part in the murder.
Lindsay is now in custody at Forensic Psychiatric Hospital in Port Coquitlam, where he will stay until he has to return to Alberta to stand trial on a second-degree murder charge in relation to Turner’s death.
It’s expected he will use the same NCRMD (not criminally responsible by way of a mental disorder) defence in Alberta.
He’s due back in court in Red Deer on April 8.
A date for trial has not yet been set.
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