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In Dean Penney’s eyes, Vic was a close friend who opened up a world of possibilities in the wake of his wife’s disappearance.
In reality, Vic was the primary operator in a covert RCMP operation to get Penney to confess to any involvement he may have had in Jennifer Hillier-Penney’s death.
Those two versions of a man were on display in court on Tuesday, as the undercover officer testified in Penney’s first-degree murder trial.
His identity was shielded from the gallery by a long, black curtain, but his face was in plain view of the judge, jury and the accused in Supreme Court in Corner Brook on Tuesday.
Penney opted to keep his head down and his eyes fixed forward, glancing over only when the man known as Vic was asked to identify Penney in the courtroom.
The glance was brief, but their friendship was anything but fleeting.
It started when Vic went to St. Anthony on Sept. 13, 2019, to make a cold introduction. He met Penney in the ice room of the local fish plant, and quickly raised the possibility of renting Penney’s cabin for a hunting trip.
That kicked off a four-year friendship in which Vic recruited Penney to join a fictitious criminal organization where he did odd jobs ranging from courier for stolen police computers, to scouting for a fuel heist at the U.S. border in Alberta.
In between fake criminal jobs, Penney and Vic spent countless hours of downtime together.
“We spent a lot of time driving around the community and bonding,” Vic told the court. “We enjoyed cooking. We enjoyed watching movies.”
Vic met Penney’s youngest daughter, Deana, on one occasion. He would later make a trip to St. Anthony to meet Penney’s new girlfriend and spent time observing their relationship. Penney took Vic on hunting and fishing trips, and they spent time snowmobiling together.
The undercover police officer spoke fondly of his time with Penney while testifying on Tuesday.
“We openly talked about a multitude of different things,” he told the court. “He was very accommodating to me. I was not a proficient hunter or outdoorsman. I certainly learned a lot of things from Mr. Penney over the years in terms of what it takes to be a woodsman.”
Jury hears more about elaborate scenarios
Vic was asked to run through many of the same scenarios the jury heard on Monday from another undercover officer who went by the pseudonym Joe.
Joe acted as the second-in-command for the organization, but in reality he was the architect designing all the scenarios behind the scenes.
Vic went into deeper detail on several of those scenarios, including one in which Penney was involved in an extortion racket.
It was Oct. 5, 2022. Vic testified that Penney was sitting at the bar in the Delta hotel in St. John’s. He was keeping a close eye on a sex worker named Crystal cozying up to a womanizing port official named Peter.
Crystal swiped Peter’s cell phone and slipped it to Penney as she ducked away for a cigarette, Vic said. Penney rushed the phone up to a room, where Vic was waiting to download its contents.
Later that evening, Crystal was said to have taken Peter back to her room and snapped compromising photos of him. From that point forward, Peter became a reluctant part of the organization, giving them an influential figure on the waterfront.
Unbeknownst to Penney, everyone involved was an undercover police officer.
The ruse was concocted to show him how the organization could get leverage on officials in positions of power.
Dean Penney’s murder trial continued on Tuesday with more details about the RCMP’s Mr. Big operation — a fictitious world of organized crime that was designed to get a confession out of Penney. The CBC’s Troy Turner reports.
A month later, Penney was in Alberta with Vic when they were tasked with picking up another member of the organization — an undercover officer with the pseudonym Dinger, who was just getting out of prison in Drumheller.
Penney was told Dinger had been convicted of aggravated assault for attacking his girlfriend and stabbing her lover in a fit of rage.
After picking him up, the organization threw a party for Dinger that evening in Edmonton. The next morning, however, they were told Dinger was missing. All members, including Penney, were tasked with finding him.
Mr. Penney didn’t seem fazed by it.– Vic
When he eventually turned up, he told the group he’d gone home with a woman the previous night and woke up to her rummaging through his belongings. He told them he attacked the woman, and didn’t know if she was dead or alive.
Vic said Penney took part as the group launched into action devising an alibi for Dinger. At one point, he said Penney suggested Dinger ditch his clothes as there could be evidence on them.
The group went to a casino on a nearby reservation, where a member’s cousin was said to be able to alter the time stamps on security footage to make it appear they were there the previous night.
When they got back to Edmonton, other group members said they found the woman — an undercover officer named Judith — and that she was alive. Penney and his colleagues were told Judith had a pimp who owed the group money.
The court heard profanity-laced audio from a confrontation where members of the group confronted Judith and the pretend pimp at a motel, demanding the debt be wiped clean in exchange for Judith’s silence.
Penney could be heard on the audio yelling at the undercover police officer he believed to be a sex worker who stole from his associate.
“Mr. Penney didn’t seem fazed by it,” Vic told the court. “I think he felt the same as what we were portraying to feel…. He didn’t seem intimidated. He gave them some words.”
The scenario was concocted after Penney had made several comments to Vic about how he opposed violence against women, and how he was raised better than that. The purpose, Vic said, was to show Penney that violence against women was tolerated by the group in some circumstances.
“If he had been involved in a crime against a woman, this scenario helped lay the foundation for that,” Vic said.
Officer confessed to cold case
Vic went into detail on a third scenario in 2022, in which he confessed to Penney that he’d killed someone in a debt collection gone wrong.
They were at a restaurant in Regina, when a man confronted their table and had words with some of the members. Penney saw the exchange, but was left in the dark as to why it happened.
Vic said he became sullen and withdrawn, but opened up to Penney on a long drive the next day.
He told him the man was the intended target of a violent debt collection years earlier in Saskatchewan. Vic told Penney another man showed up instead, and pulled a knife. After a brief struggle, Vic said he stabbed the man to death.
He gave Penney the name of a real person, whose 2013 murder remains unsolved.
“It was a very emotional disclosure,” Vic told the court on Tuesday.
He said Penney was supportive and consoling in the aftermath, insisting Vic only acted in self-defence.
All these elaborate scenarios laid the groundwork for Penney’s interviews with the organization’s top boss in November of 2023. The Crown has said Penney disclosed details of his alleged involvement in his wife’s death and disappearance.
The jury has yet to hear those interviews, but the defence has already said there are major inconsistencies in Penney’s stories from those two interactions.
Vic’s testimony continues Wednesday morning. He’s yet to be cross-examined by the defence.
Penney has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. Jennifer Hillier-Penney, who was last seen on Nov. 30, 2016, has never been found.
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