Brian Roger Holt pleaded guilty to second degree murder on June 23 and was sentenced in BC Superior Court. on Thursday. His sentence also includes a mandatory firearms ban. Holt was charged with the killing a little less than a month after McIver’s daughter found him dead inside his appliance repair shop, McIver’s Appliance Sales and Service, in South Vancouver on June 26, 2019. The charge was the result of Holt confessing to the killing in his third interview with Vancouver police sergeants. “I did something bad. I need to understand. I need to take responsibility,” Holt told an officer, according to court documents. The same day he pleaded guilty to the murder Judge Kathleen Ker ruled that his confession was voluntary.
Killer left the job on bad terms 4 years earlier
Ker’s decision on the confession was posted online Friday and details the circumstances of the killing, along with the VPD’s tactics for catching 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 a significant amount of overtime pay. “By June 2019, Mr. Holt was experiencing significant financial hardship and 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 was managing. Early on the morning of June 26, Holt appeared at the workshop and met with McIver. At some point during the 30-minute showdown, the pair got into an argument that turned physical. “Mr Holt became angry, reached for a metal hand tool and hit Mr McIver on the head. He then hit Mr. McIver over the head with a motor 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 officers used a good cop/bad cop tactic
Police first arrested him on July 3 and took him to the Vancouver jail, where he was interviewed for four hours and 45 minutes by Sgt. Raj Mander, an officer who would become key in obtaining the confession. Mander interviewed Holt again the next day for another three hours and 10 minutes, but in both interviews the suspect refused to talk about the killing, exercising his right to remain silent. Holt was released without charge on July 4. Police re-arrested Holt on July 23 after new evidence, including DNA samples, linked him to the scene of the murder. That night, Mander interviewed him one more time for three hours and 19 minutes, followed by an interview with a second officer, Sgt. Revard Dufresne, who finally convinced the killer to talk. DNA evidence linked Brian Roger Holt to the scene where John McIver was murdered 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 get a confession out of Holt. Mander, according to the judge, “remained cheerful, respectful, calm and courteous throughout and did not engage in any threatening behavior or raise his voice … Instead, at times, Sgt. caring and supportive tone.” Dufresne, on the other hand, “was much more direct and assertive,” Ker said. He wrote that the second officer made “a more direct moral appeal to Mr. Holt’s conscience.” Both officers lightly disparaged McIver as a difficult boss, the ruling says, in an effort to give Holt an opening to explain why he committed murder. “With 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 who had lost his way in the heat of an argument,” Ker wrote. Realizing that he was not going to be released from prison, Holt finally admitted that he had killed McIver. Holt’s defense team had argued that the officers used subtle incentives to coerce Holt into giving an involuntary confession and asked that his testimony be ruled inadmissible. Ker rejected these arguments and found that Holt had exercised his free will and was fully informed of his right to legal counsel.
