Wife threatened | Judge wades through contradictory claims

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By HEATHER MCLAUGHLIN
mclaughlin.heather@dailygleaner.com

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A Canadian Forces Base Gagetown soldier will be back in court Dec. 16 for sentencing after provincial court Judge Patricia Cumming found him guilty of uttering a threat.

Ronald Anderson changed his plea on a second charge of unsafe storage of a firearm to guilty in Burton court Thursday.

Cumming had to sift through contradictory evidence to reach her decision.

She dismissed a defence theory that Anderson's wife and boyfriend concocted the story to pressure him into signing a custody agreement for the couple's four children.

Anderson testified his estranged wife told him she would lie in court unless he agreed to give her full custody of their children.

But Cumming said Tara Lynn Anderson's evidence has been consistent since June.

In testimony Thursday, Tara Anderson said she and her husband argued June 23 at their French Lake bungalow because she wanted to discuss the divorce and custody issues since she had a Legal Aid appointment that week.

She told the court their relationship had deteriorated after each of her husband's five overseas assignments.

She said after her husband returned from his fifth overseas assignment and second stint in Afghanistan in 2007, he was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

She said he got agitated easily and couldn't handle everyday life.

In May, he started drinking a pint of vodka a day. She found shot-sized mini-bottles of the hard liquor under the seat of the car.

Tara Anderson said her husband started to call her derogatory names and threatened to blow up her mother in her new car and blow her father's head off.

She said on June 23 her husband left her alone, went downstairs and passed out when she told him she had a client coming for a 6 p.m. appointment to do a tattoo at her home-based shop. The client was Wayne Coughlan, a CFB Gagetown vehicle technician who's now stationed at CFB Petawawa. He and Tara Anderson share a home there.

"I was crying when I answered the door," Tara Anderson said of greeting Coughlan for his appointment.

After Coughlan left, Tara Anderson said she slipped on melted ice on the kitchen floor and dislocated her knee. She managed to load her children into the truck, left them at a friend's house and went to the hospital to get medical assistance for her injured knee.

She filed a complaint regarding her husband's threat with the RCMP the next day.

"I was scared he was going to follow through on what he said he was going to do," Tara Anderson told the court.

"You must have been quite frightened?" Anderson's defence lawyer George Kalinowski asked her.

"Yes," she replied.

But Kalinowski said she wasn't so frightened that she had to cancel the tattoo appointment, which calls for a steady hand.

Kalinowski also pointed out that her relationship with Coughlan appeared to go from just friends to an intimate one in short order since Tara Anderson agreed to accompany Coughlan to Ottawa on June 26 and moved with him to Petawawa by July 23.

Kalinowski said in her original statement to police on June 24, Tara Anderson said there weren't any witnesses to the couple's fight. But three weeks ago, Coughlan stepped forward to testify that he overheard part of the argument when he arrived for his tattoo.

Coughlan said it was about 6 p.m. when he arrived at the couple's home.

"I got out of the truck and I could hear screaming and shouting ... Just a lot of screaming," Coughlan said.

When Kalinowski asked him why he didn't step forward with his statement to RCMP until three weeks ago, Coughlan said he considered the matter to be between Tara Anderson and her husband.

"I didn't want nothing to do with it. I was going for a tattoo," he said.

He decided to step forward and tell police and Crown prosecutor Paul Hawkins what he overheard June 23 after he and Tara Anderson had moved to Petawana.

While Kalinowski said that's unbelievable, Cumming said people don't always step forward and do the right thing at the right time.

Anderson, meantime, denied heavy drinking because he said he was taking eight pills a day, including anti-psychotic, anti-depressive medications, a pill to sleep and a pill to stay calm.

Had he been drinking, he said, he wouldn't have been able to work and would have been lethargic. While he agreed that by June he knew his marriage was over, he said all he wanted was joint custody of their children.

He said it was about 8:30 p.m. on June 23 when his wife raised the issue with him.

"She said, 'No, I want full custody,' " Anderson said.

After that, he said his wife went to sleep on the couch downstairs and he went to the downstairs master bedroom, closed the door and fell asleep.

Anderson denied uttering any threat and said Coughlan didn't come to the house for a 6 p.m. appointment June 23.

"No one showed up at the house that night," he said.

When the couple talked on the telephone about separation and custody issues over the past few weeks, Anderson said his estranged spouse said, "She would lie in court to screw my life even more than it ultimately is."

"The Crown's position is that the evidence of Mrs. Anderson has been consistent," Hawkins told Cumming in his summation.

Since the couple has already signed an agreement of custody, there would be little advantage to Tara Anderson coming all the way to New Brunswick to give false testimony with the custody order already signed, Hawkins said.

Anderson was dealing with stress from his military service and the added stress of a marriage breakdown. The bickering and stress may have coloured his recollection of events, Cumming said, especially if he was consuming alcohol.