Debbie Timlock’s Killer Leaves Juicy Forensic Evidence
(‘Quite a Spectacle,’ Forensic Files)
In school, star athletes always seemed to have a passport to a stable life — early socialization and problem-solving skills plus friendships that make for great networking opportunities later.
But Forensic Files teaches us that even the most promising among them can fall.
Handsome Brian Vaughn, for one, was on track for a basketball scholarship until the Texas teen shot his own father over a dispute about a car. Then there was chiseled football player Bart Corbin, who became a successful Atlanta dentist but killed his girlfriend and later his wife because he couldn’t stand for a woman to break up with him.
The subject of this post, James Douglas Brown, was a popular football player and wrestler with Olympic ambitions. Somewhere between the ages of 18 and 23, however, things went awry for the Canadian. He ended up not as a medalist or a sports commentator but rather as a murderer notable only for leaving his shoe print on a tomato.
For this post, I searched for a hint about why James took such a violent turn and also looked for more details about his innocent victim’s life. So let’s get going on the recap of “Quite a Spectacle” along with extra information from internet research:
Debbie Timlock was Canadian through and through, having been born on July 31, 1956 in Simcoe County, Ontario. Her mother, Laverne J. McKean McArthur, came from the same province, and her father, Mervyn A. McArthur, worked in the Collingwood Shipyards.
By 1989, Debbie had been divorced for several years and lived with her 6-year-old daughter, Lacey, in Collingwood. The town of 12,000 was near Georgian Bay, a beautiful arm of Lake Huron. Collingwood had a troubled economy, though. Recent shipyard closings had contributed to unemployment, giving locals more time to congregate at bars, pool halls, and a strip club in town.
But the 32-year-old single mother was improving her life. She had recently obtained a job as a secretary and was in school. Her mild-mannered brother, Michael McArthur, who Forensic Files watchers will remember from his interview on the show, described Debbie as vivacious and loving to sail.
On June 19, 1989, during a thunderstorm in Collingwood, Debbie met some friends for drinks at Kelseys Original Roadhouse.
Debbie left the bar alone. Later that night, she called 911 from her apartment.
She said she’d been raped and stabbed and punched and didn’t know her attacker. Paramedics found her deceased and naked on the floor. A bloody corded telephone receiver lay next to her. Police saw blood on her waterbed and elsewhere.
It looked as though someone had entered through a kitchen window. On the ground lay a flattened tomato with tread marks. Debbie had set it on the sill to ripen.
Nothing was missing from the house. Fortunately, Debbie’s little daughter was spared the chaos and horror as she was spending the night with relatives.
Someone had raped Debbie, struck her on the head, and stabbed her to death, probably making her paralyzed from the waist down when she crawled to the phone and called for help. Her last words were the “thank you,” she spoke to the 911 operator.
Neighbors gathered near the residence, which was cordoned off with police tape. “It’s terrible,” Jean Elyea, the manager of the apartment block, told the Toronto Star. “Debbie was a great tenant.”
Neighbor Pam Rentner told The Sun Times that Debbie was a friendly and “super-nice girl.”
Thirty local law enforcement officers searched the area for a murder weapon. Collingwood hadn’t seen a homicide since 1977.
Authorities sent Debbie’s body to Toronto for an autopsy, which determined she died of a single stab wound to the heart.
Police turned their attention to Ronald Osborne, whom Forensic Files called a former live-in boyfriend. The Toronto Star, however, said Debbie had only dated him for two months in 1985.
Whatever the case, he sounded like bad news, and he had reason to carry a grudge against Debbie. Ronald had been involved in a $5 million hash-oil smuggling operation. He used a cabin cruiser to transport the drugs from Jamaica to Florida. The DEA and Canadian police later found the boat, named the Dan Bar II, in a Florida marina and discovered suspicious hidden compartments under the floor of the vessel.
Debbie testified against Ronald at his 1988 trial, which didn’t go well for him: Ronald, 34, reversed his not guilty plea to guilty.
But Ronald was in prison at the time of Debbie’s murder. Debbie’s former husband, Randy Timlock, also had a solid alibi.
Her former neighbor James Douglas Brown, 23, made a much better suspect. James’s mother reportedly lived in the apartment next to Debbie’s — and he had made advances toward Debbie; she refused him. He was also said to be obsessed with Debbie (which makes it strange that she didn’t identify him on her 911 call — perhaps because it was too dark or the trauma confused her).
James had breaking-and-entering convictions in his past and had spent some time incarcerated. He reportedly tried unsuccessfully to enter Debbie’s apartment through a window on one other occasion.
Little came up on the internet about James’s early history. According to a Medium post by writer Sai Ezra, who lived in Collingwood, James had grown up with a father, but there didn’t appear to be a mother prominent in his life.
As previously mentioned, James was a well-liked star athlete. He had competed in wrestling in Japan. He also took part in martial arts, but he was so physically imposing that most prospective opponents forfeited Judo matches rather than fight him, Ezra said.
Still, James was a nice guy until a gig as a bouncer at a strip club led to drug and alcohol use, according to Ezra.
As for Debbie’s murder, James said he had an alibi, that he was at a hotel where a stranger robbed him, assaulted him until he lost consciousness, and drove him hundreds of miles from Collingwood. James said he woke up on the side of a road. Scratches on James’s face came from the male attacker, claimed the powerfully built 6-foot-3-inch-tall James.
Here’s where the tomato came under scrutiny. In James’s car, police found a pair of Czechoslovakian-made blue and white shoes purchased by the Canadian government for inmates. The size 13 shoes had a herringbone tread pattern that matched the impression left on the tomato from Debbie’s kitchen.
There was also the matter of a pair of glasses, not Debbie’s, found at the scene. Jim Brown wore glasses — and he didn’t have them on during questioning for Debbie’s murder; he said he lost them. At first, a discrepancy between the color of the frames in a photo of James wearing similar glasses cast doubt on whether the ones from the crime scene really came from him. But lab tests and study by a University of Waterloo School of Optometry professor soon led investigators to conclude that they were indeed the same ones.
Investigators believe Debbie opened her window before going to sleep on the night of the murder. According to a Canadian Press account, James ripped through the window screen, knocking the tomato to the ground, where he accidentally stepped on it. He grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen, found Debbie in the bedroom, and sexually assaulted and stabbed her. While rushing away from the apartment, James accidentally dropped his glasses.
Then Debbie telephoned for help and died.
Five police officers escorted James into a provincial courtroom where he was charged with murder on July 27, 1989. The trial didn’t kick off until January 1992.
James’s lawyer, Jim Fleming, claimed that the murder resulted from a drug conspiracy owing to Debbie’s testimony at Ronald Osborne’s trial.
The jury didn’t buy it, and convicted James of first-degree murder, meaning a mandatory sentence of life with no parole consideration for 25 years.
“I didn’t do it,” he said as he left the courtroom.
But authorities said that James had “led a lifestyle of interpersonal intrusiveness” marked by anger and lack of impulse control, according to Simcoe.com. At some point, had kneed a corrections officer in the stomach.
Those problems didn’t stop him from snagging a wife while serving his sentence in 1994.
During a parole hearing in 2010, James admitted to murdering Debbie and to being intoxicated that night. “At first, I wanted to scare the hell out of her,” he told the parole board. But, he said, as he walked toward her bedroom with the knife, “I decided, by then, I would kill her.”
The confession apparently counted in his favor. Starting in 2015, Jim was allowed unescorted temporary absence, or UTA, to take counseling, see his family, and attend to other matters. He did some type of community volunteer work, according to BradfordToday. It looked good on his record.
Debbie’s daughter, Lacey, who by that time was in her early 30s, was not happy about the leniency shown toward James Brown. “I wish I could remember what it was like to have a mom,” she said in a statement. “When people ask me how my mother died, how do I tell them she was murdered?”
In 2019, the Parole Board of Canada granted James full parole under the condition that he stay away from drugs and alcohol.
According to parole documents addressing James:
“You attributed your progress to your strong work ethic. This is to your credit as it speaks to your commitment to be a productive person while also minimizing financial stress in your reintegration process.…Overall, you attribute most of your successful reintegration to the support of your wife. The board finds your wife to be an important protective factor in your reintegration.”
In 2023, the parole board permitted him to go into bars as long as he didn’t drink alcohol there.
But life behind razor wire hadn’t changed James Brown quite enough. He accrued a number of new violent offenses including a road range incident, a brawl with three men, and shoving a woman, according to Canadian news source OrilliaMatters.com.
Before he had a chance to commit murder again, authorities revoked James’s parole and sent him back to prison where, let’s hope, stepping on tomatoes is the most damage he will do to any fellow life-forms.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
