Wayne Kellestine

Wayne Earl Kellestine (born 1 May 1949), better known as "Weiner" Kellestine, is a Canadian outlaw biker, gangster, and convicted murderer, currently serving a life sentence for first-degree murder for his killing six out of the eight victims of the Shedden massacre of 2006.

Early criminal career Kellestine is of German descent. He claims that his ancestors were Hessians hired to fight for the British Crown during the American Revolutionary War who settled in the British colony of Upper Canada (modern Southern Ontario) after the Revolutionary War ended in 1783. The journalist Peter Edwards, the crime correspondent for The Toronto Star, wrote that Kellestine is a pathological liar and though he is of German descent, there is no evidence to support his claims that his ancestors were Hessians. Kellestine has likewise frequently claimed to have served in the Canadian Army, but Edwards wrote that this claim is false.

Kellestine has a long criminal record going back to 1967. In 2006, the Toronto Sun reported that since he turned 18 in 1967 that: "Kellestine amassed convictions for three counts of assault causing bodily harm, three for assault, three for possessing unregistered weapons and more than a dozen counts for various weapons, property and breach and escape charges." In the summer of 1967, Kellestine as an unruly teenager went on a crime spree that led to three convictions for assault and assault causing bodily harm. When Kellestine was arrested in April 2006, a policeman told the journalist Timothy Appleby of The Globe and Mail: "He's a guy who if you were to meet him, the hair on your neck would stand on end. This is one scary individual."

On 1 July 1977, when the Outlaws gang expanded into Canada and opened a chapter in London, Ontario by “patching over” the Satan's Choice chapter, Kellestine attempted to join, but was refused as he was considered to be a "heat score", slang for a criminal who continually draws police attention. In 1978, Kellestine was considered a suspect in the murder of Giovanni DiFilippo, although he was never charged. Kellestine was allowed to start the Annihilators Motorcycle Club based in St. Thomas, which existed as a puppet club to the Outlaws chapter in London. The clubhouse of the Annihilators was on 54 Mondamin street in St. Thomas.

At Kellestine's 1982 trial for assault, one of the witnesses testified that it was widely known in criminal circles that Kellestine had in 1978 murdered Giovanni DiFilippo, a Woodbridge, Ontario, businessman. DiFilippo had been killed while answering his door by an assassin disguised as a pizza delivery man, who pulled out a gun and shot him in the head. A police investigation established that Kellestine had almost certainly murdered DiFilippo, but there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against him. In 1982, Kellestine left Thorndale and purchased for $50,000, a farm near Iona Station at 32196 Aberdeen Line, buying another 52.33 acres of adjoining farm land in 1987. Kellestine's farmhouse was disorderly with rusting automobiles lying on the front lawn, through the farmhouse itself with unpainted pine finishing in the kitchen; stone fireplace in the living room; and a sauna and cedar hot tub in the basement was described as charming and cozy. However the Confederate and Nazi memorabilia marked the farmhouse as different and within the walls was Kellestine's secret gun caches, which he held despite two lifetime weapons bans.

In 1984, Kellestine paid a $700 fine after he was convicted of assaulting a bouncer in a London, Ontario bar. In 1985 Kellestine was arrested after being found with some $350,000 worth of cocaine and LSD together with an unregistered handgun, but the case was not pursued in the courts.

Annihilators president Kellestine became the president of the Annihilators, having at first founded a gang called the Holocaust before becoming the Annihilators president. On the outside of his barn, Kellestine painted the logo of the Annihilators, a mailed fist clenching a lightning bolt that resembled the lightning bolt runes of the SS. One biker who knew him said of Kellestine "...he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer." Kellestine often annoyed visitors to the Annihilator clubhouse by throwing roofing nails on the parking lot to deter the police from getting too close, which he would forget where he had placed, causing the tires of his guests' vehicles to be punctured.

In 1989, at a motorcycle show in London, Kellestine got drunk, assaulted a police officer, and attempted to flee by hijacking a limousine, leading to a car chase down the streets that ended at the Outlaws' clubhouse and his arrest, an incident that confirmed his "wild man" reputation. In June 1991, Kellestine shot Thomas Roger Harmsworth, a biker with the Outlaws gang, putting four bullets into his body, and was charged with attempted murder. Harmsworth was dropped off at the St. Thomas-Elgin general hospital, bleeding badly. The attempted murder charges were dropped when Harmsworth refused to testify against him. Harmsworth chose to follow the outlaw biker code by never testifying against another biker even if he was the victim of a crime committed by the said biker, and instead gave Kellestine an alibi.

Two days after the charges were dropped against Kellestine for the attempted murder of Harmsworth in January 1992, the body of David "Sparky" O'Neil was found in a shallow grave with three bullets in his skull. O'Neil was wanted for the murder of police constable Scott Rossiter on 19 September 1991, and it is generally believed that Kellestine was in some way involved with O'Neil's murder and led the police to his body in exchange for the charges of attempted murder against Harmsworth being dropped. O'Neil had often visited Kellestine's farm looking for shelter after he killed Rossiter. It was widely believed in Iona Station that Kellestine had killed O'Neil. After O'Neil's murder, Kellestine started to wear a special patch consisting of the SS lightning bolt runes on his biker jacket on the front alongside his Annihilator patch, which in the outlaw biker subculture indicates that one has committed a murder. Likewise, Kellestine started to sign his letters with the SS lightning bolt runes as he normally closed with his letters with: "Your brother always, Weiner, 1%er, SS". Without naming Kellestine as the killer, an Outlaw-turned police informer, Michael Simmons, stated in an interview that the Annihilators had killed O'Neil, saying: "He [O'Neil] wouldn't stay put. So they put him on ice". Simmons, the younger brother of the Outlaw national president, Andrew "Teach" Simmons, visited Kellestine's farmhouse where Kellestine pointed a .45 handgun at one of his toes and asked for permission to shoot it off; Simmons replied that he would prefer being shot in the head as he disliked pain. Kellestine found that answer hysterically funny and lowered his gun.

In early 1992, Kellestine sold a handgun, cocaine and ecstasy pills to an undercover policeman. On 12 March 1992, during a police crackdown codenamed Project Bandito on both the Annihilators and the Outlaws, Kellestine was arrested at his farm outside of the hamlet of Iona Station, being found drunk and high in his living room surrounded by guns, cocaine, cash and Nazi memorabilia. An evaluation by the prison psychologist done on 11 January 1993 declared about Kellestine "Criminality appears to be a matter of choice of lifestyle" for him and that he was a paranoid narcissist. Kellestine was sentenced to six years in prison as a result of the Project Bandito charges. The parole board twice denied Kellestine's applications, citing concerns that he had repeatedly failed drug tests while in prison. In late 1994, Kellestine was released on parole. Shortly afterwards, the body of a London woman, Sonya Nadine Mae Cywink, was found murdered in the Southwold Earthworks, near Kellestine's farmhouse . Her murder was never solved, but Edwards wrote that rumors in Iona Station claimed she had "done something to annoy Weiner Kellestine shortly before her murder". Aside from Nazi memorabilia, Kellestine also collected Confederate and Montreal Canadiens memorabilia. Kellestine was much feared in south-western Ontario, being widely seen as a wild-man with an extremely bad temper and an unpredictable streak.

Kellestine had a certain local notoriety as the man who liked to introduce himself as: "Hi, I'm Wayne Kellestine. I sell drugs and I kill people". Visitors to his farmhouse noted he would shoot his wife Linda with an air-gun for no apparent reason. In 2009, one of Kellestine's neighbors, a farmer who did not wish to be named, told Appleby: "He didn't bother us too much most of the time, but everybody knew he was trouble, there was often biker types around, and there was always talk that he had killed people". Kellestine had a deeply paranoid streak with his farm being surrounded by various security cameras and alarms. More than once, he was thrown into a state of panic in the wintertime when frost buildup would set off the alarms on the motion detector cameras at night, leading him to run around with one of his guns looking for any possible enemies. In an interview with the journalist Yves Lavigne, published in The London Free Press on 18 April 1998, the Annihilators were described by Lavigne as having "a low profile, making money on the drug trade."

Alongside his criminal activities, Kellestine was widely known in Iona Station for being a racist, an anti-Semite and a homophobe with his farmhouse full of Nazi memorabilia. Kellestine traveled to London every year to protest the local Gay Pride Day by waving the Confederate battle flag (he wanted to use the Nazi flag instead, but did not because he could be indicted for violating hate-crime laws). Kellestine's closest friend was another biker, David "Concrete Dave" Weiche, whose father Martin K. Weiche was a German immigrant who ran a local construction company. The elder Weiche, a Hitler Youth alumni and a Wehrmacht veteran, had one of the largest collections of Nazi memorabilia in Canada and in the 1968 election had run for the House of Commons as a National Socialist, winning 89 votes. Through the Weiche family, Kellestine had connections with various extreme right-wing groups in Canada and mowed a giant swastika into his fields in emulation of the swastika that the elder Weiche had mowed into the grass outside his house. The swastika in the field, though only visible from the air, gave Kellestine a certain amount of attention in southwestern Ontario. Besides farming, Kellestine ran a security firm whose name, Triple K Security with the three Ks that were prominently displayed on his business cards were a conscious evocation of the white supremacist group. The business literature for Triple K Security promised "complete electronic privacy", "telephone taps", "home intrusion alarms", and "discreet professional services". Starting in the late 1990s, Kellestine claimed to have served in a regiment of the Canadian Army that was disbanded in disgrace, a clear reference to the Canadian Airborne Regiment, which was disbanded in 1995. The Canadian Airborne Regiment was disbanded after hazing videos were released showing white soldiers abusing black soldiers and the revelation that soldiers of the Airborne regiment had tortured and murdered a Somali teenager in March 1993. Kellestine was trying to imply that he was in some way involved in these activities, but Edwards noted that Kellestine was in prison at the time of the Canadian Airborne's ill-fated peacekeeping mission in Somalia in 1992-1993 and that his criminal record would have had disqualified him from serving in the Army.

David Weiche had founded an anti-gay group called Bikers Against Pedophiles, which equated homosexuality with pedophilia, and demanded homosexuality be made illegal again. Kellestine promptly joined Bikers Against Pedophiles, and was very active in the group, leading Bikers Against Pedophiles in their annual protests against Gay Pride Day, presenting himself as a defender of children against "deviant" homosexuals. Every June, Kellestine and Weiche would lead the Bikers Against Pedophiles group to London to protest Gay Pride Day while chanting "faggots" and other anti-gay slogans. Despite his claim to be a moral force protecting children from homosexual pedophiles, Kellestine made a home movie showing an obese man sexually assaulting a young woman at his farmhouse which ended with Kellestine ordering the woman to bare her breasts for his camera. In 1997, Giovanni "Boxer" Muscedere joined the Annihilators and became a protégé of Kellestine.

Facing the Hells Angels In the 1990s, the Hells Angels were steadily taking over the outlaw biker scene in Canada, causing other bikers turn to the Bandidos club based in Houston, Texas as a counter. On 7 April 1998, Jeffrey LaBrash and Jody Hart, two leaders of the Outlaws biker gang, were gunned down leaving a strip club, the Beef Baron, by two men known to be associated with the Hells Angels in London, Ontario. Besides real estate, Vecchio's fortune rested on the fact he was a loan shark and co-owner of a hardcore pornographic website with ties to both outlaw bikers and the Mafia. Kellestine was opposed to having the Loners join the Hells Angels because he knew that the Hells Angels would accept most of the Loners' chapter, but never him. In October 1999, the Hells Angels sponsored an attempt to murder Kellestine after he vetoed an offer from the Hells Angels to join their club. As a result of the mass "patch-over" in Montreal, with 168 bikers becoming Hells Angels, the greater Toronto area went from having no Hells Angels chapters to having the highest concentration of Hells Angels' chapters in the world.

Pointedly, the Chatham chapter of the Loners were not invited to join the Hells Angels, through many of the Woodbridge chapter of the Loners did join the Hells Angels. On 12 April 2001, the Hells Angels opened a chapter in London and promptly informed the Loners that they did not have the right to use Ontario on their patch, as the Loners were only a "regional" club. Unable to stand on their own, the Chatham Loners joined the Bandidos on 22 May 2001 as probationary members, becoming full members on 1 December 2001. However, it was agreed that even though the Danish branch of the Bandidos were responsible for the Canadian branch as their sponsors, the American branch would supervise the Canadian Bandidos.

At the time that Muscedere joined the Loners, he became close to another Loner and fellow Italian-Canadian, Frank "Bammer" Salerno, who to a certain extent displayed Kellestine as his best friend. In October 2001, Joey "Crazy Horse" Morin, president of the Edmonton chapter of the Rebels outlaw biker club, first contacted the Bandidos with the aim of "patching over". At a party at Kellestine's farm, Morin and the other Rebels were not impressed with Kellestine's eccentric behavior, seeing the Bandido treasurer Luis "Chopper" Raposo get high on various drugs and a "coked out" Muscedere lose his temper and beat up one of his "brothers" over a trivial matter. In July 2002, Kellestine was sentenced to two years in prison after being convicted of 22 counts of violating the laws governing guns, after the police discovered various illegal firearms at his farm in 1999. The crime journalist Yves Lavigne told The London Free Press: "On a scale of one to 10, this group of Bandidos rated somewhere between one and zero". After the meeting in the Peace Arch Park, Weiche chose to remain in Vancouver, though he regularly exchanged phone calls with Sandham.

On 25 March 2006, Sandham announced to his followers that he had received orders from Houston to act against the "no surrender crew" and they were departing for Kellestine's farm without telling him that they were coming. Sandham assured his followers that Kellestine had plenty of guns at his farm, but he brought along a bullet-proof vest and a box of surgical gloves, saying he needed them to leave no fingerprints on the guns that Kellestine would provide. When Sandham arrived at Kellestine's farm, he lied to him by claiming not to know why he had been sent there, and told Kellestine that he would receive further orders from Houston. Kellestine was surprised by Sandham's visit, but he quickly took charge of his guests and provided them with weapons from his hidden cache of arms he kept at his farm. Arriving to help Kellestine with "pulling the patches" were Sandham together with three other Winnipeg Bandidos, namely Dwight "Big Dee" Mushey, a kickboxer and boxer who owned and managed a strip club; Marcello "Fat Ass" Aravena, a tae kwon do enthusiast and a bouncer in Mushey's strip club; a former iron-worker from Calgary named Brett "Bull" Gardiner, whom Mushey had recruited into the Bandidos; and another man known only as M.H. Despite two lifetime bans on possessing weapons, the self-proclaimed "gun nut" Kellestine continued to collect guns and had a large collection of guns and ammunition at his farm. Kellestine also produced what he called his "wet work kit" for cleaning up after murders, consisting of hydrochloric acid and rubber gloves, saying he always used his "wet work kit" after he killed somebody.

Joining them was a man that Kellestine had recruited, a career criminal from New Brunswick with a long record for home invasions, Frank Mather, who was serving as his bodyguard. Kellestine had met Mather in prison and provided him with a home for himself and his pregnant girlfriend, Stefanie. Mather was a Bandidos supporter and hoped that Kellestine would sponsor him into the club. Mather was on parole after being convicted of attempting to steal a truck, and after being kicked out of a London motel for not paying the bills, Mather had arrived at Kellestine's farm. During the trial in 2009, the Crown Attorney prosecuting the case, Kevin Gowdey, took to referring to the men gathered at Kellestine's farm as the "farm crew" and it is by that name that they are known. Kellestine's guests complained that Kellestine's farmhouse was full of ticks, that the toilet barely functioned and that the only food to eat were frozen pizzas Kellestine had hijacked from a truck. Kellestine treated the junior Bandidos like Aravena and Gardiner like slaves, expecting them to do all of his housework for them. Gardiner was a man of very limited intelligence, whom Kellestine had once asked to supply him with pickles from a "pickle tree" growing on his farm, which led him to spend hours looking for the elusive "pickle tree" before telling Kellestine that he couldn't find it. Sandham and the other Bandidos later described Kellestine as an odd and eccentric character who liked to eat animal excrement to prove how tough he was as an outlaw biker, and that he always laughed madly as the others looked on with disgust as he devoured whatever excrement he found lying on the ground. Aravena recalled that Kellestine would smile and say "mm-mm good" before eating excrement, which led him to the conclusion that Kellestine was a "little bit of a weirdo".

At the beginning of April 2006, Kellestine accused one of the "no surrender crew", Jamie Flanz, of being a police informer. As Flanz was Jewish and the rabidly anti-Semitic Kellestine hated him for that, Muscedere did not take the allegation seriously, but to settle the matter, it was agreed that the "no surrender crew" would visit Kellestine's farm to discuss his claims. Most of the "no surrender crew" lived in the Toronto area, but Kellestine insisted that the meeting be held at his farm, and Muscedere agreed. Kellestine also stated that Sandham and some other members of the Winnipeg chapter were staying with him, which was intended as a "bait" as knew that relations between Muscedere and Sandham were very poor. Edwards wrote: "He would have known that the No Surrender Crew had failed in their bid not only to kill Sandham in Winnipeg, but to even locate him. The trap had been set. The hunters were now the hunted". Muscedere and the "no surrender crew" were planning to "pull the patch" on Kellestine, whose racist paranoia had become too much for them.

One of the bikers invited to the meeting, Paul "Big Paulie" Sinopoli, in the week preceding the meeting was overheard by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) listening in on his phone conversations repeatedly trying to find an excuse not to visit Kellestine's farm, saying he was feeling unwell. Salerno told Sinopoli that if he failed to attend the meeting and bring some $550 he owed in arrears to the club he would be expelled. Kellestine also phoned Sinopoli to tell him: "Uh, I haven't heard from you for a while. What's up, buds? You don't love me no more?" Kellestine then began to sing the 1960 Elvis Presley song "It's Now or Never", saying he wanted Sinopoli to prove he loved his biker "brothers" by coming to the meeting.

In a phone call recorded by the police, on 5 April, Kellestine phoned the mother of another Bandido, Cameron Acorn, to tell her she should tell her son: "Fire in the hold!" In a phone call to Acorn himself on 6 April, one of the principal suspects in the murder of drug dealer Shawn Douse, who was in the Central North Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene, Kellestine stated:

The people in the States are super, super, super fuckin' choked [biker slang for being angry] ... And don't say a word, just ... uh ... just leave it at that ... For some strange reason, they [the American leadership] seem to ... oh fuck ... anyways, there's going to be some major changes, man ... I'm telling you right now you protect yourself ... it's not my doing. I want no part of this, but I'm gonna trying to salvage as many guys as possible.

When Acorn realized that the "changes" that Kellestine was referring to was killing the "no surrender crew", he told him "That's fuckin' bullshit" while Kellestine told him "Love you buddy" before hanging up. Edwards argued that despite Kellestine's protestations that he was being forced to act that he appeared to be "gloating" in his call to Acorn. Kellestine had decided to "pull the patches" on the "no surrender crew", revoking their claim to call themselves Bandidos and then chosen to liquidate the "no surrender crew" when he realized that they would not take kindly to losing their prized Bandidos patches.

The massacre On the night before the massacre, Kellestine had his common-law wife, Tina Fitzgerald, and his daughter together with Mather's girlfriend leave his farm, saying no women could be present at the "church" meeting (in the world of outlaw biking a "church" meeting is a mandatory meeting for the chapter). On the night of 7 April 2006, a meeting at Kellestine's farm attended by the two factions began at about 10:30 PM, when the "no surrender crew" entered his barn. George "Pony" Jessome, a 52-year-old tow truck driver dying of cancer who only joined the Bandidos because he wanted some friends, went out next, not saying a word.

Sinopoli was taken to be shot, crying and screaming hysterically, saying that he had really wished that he not attended this meeting as he had wanted to. Sinopoli was shot and survived while Kellestine's gun jammed. Sinopoli continued to cry out his eyes and scream that he did not want to die, leading to Kellestine to shout: "Shut up and die like a man!". Aravena then had to fetch Kellestine another gun, which he then used to finish off Sinopoli who had been left bleeding and in great pain in the interval. One of the killers who later turned Crown's evidence, known as only as "MH", stated one of the victims, Frank "Bammer" Salerno, tried to shake his hand with MH testifying in 2009: "Bammer went to shake my hand. I didn't do it. Dwight did." Salerno also tried to shake Aravena's hand, but he declined, saying: "I'm not shaking your hand". As Salerno was marched out to be shot, his last words to his killers were to think of his newly born son, Mario.

As the victims had last been seen alive entering Kellestine's farm and the bodies were found close to his farm, he was considered to be a prime suspect right from the start. Shortly after the massacre, James "Ripper" Fullager, the mentor to the "no surrender crew", died of cancer and on his deathbed complained that the Canadian outlaw biking scene had gone downhill since his youth in the 1960s, as now most "bikers" didn't know how to ride motorcycles and the outlaw biker code no longer counted with biker "brothers" killing each other. Meeting with Atkinson on his deathbed, Fullager commented it was clear that Kellestine had committed the massacre as the bodies were found close to Kellestine's farm in south-western Ontario, all of the victims except Muscedere came from the greater Toronto area, and Kellestine was still alive. Fullager noted that if the Hells Angels had massacred the Bandidos in south-western Ontario close to Kellestine's farm, they would have killed Kellestine as well.

Investigation, trial, and conviction The same day the bodies were found, Detective Inspector Paul Beesley of the OPP, who was in charge of the investigation, had asked a judge for a search warrant for Kellestine's farm. At about 3:05 pm, two of Kellestine's friends, Kerry Morris and Eric Niessen, arrived at his farm to help him destroy the evidence and to discuss the alibi they were planning on giving him. The alibi was that Niessen and Morris had spent the night of 7 April drinking beer with Kellestine at his farmhouse and that was all that happened there that night. The police had stationed cars on the Aberdeen Line and observed Morris and Niessen helping Kellestine clean his barn. A journalist from the A-Channel TV in London, Sararh McGarth, called Kellestine to inquire if he had been killed, saying that there were rumors he was one of the victims of the massacre, only for Kellestine to mockingly tell her: "Hang on for a sec. Am I alive? Geez, I've been with a house full of people in here for the last two days. I think I'm alive." When McGarth asked him "Are you the Wayne Kellestine that's been involved in some of the shootings over the years?", he replied "no, hell, no". Later that day, Muscedere's younger brother, Cesideio, called Kellestine to ask him if he knew anything about his brother's murder. Kellestine in response asked him: "Have you been to the police?"

At about 7 pm on 8 April 2006, the OPP arrived at his farmhouseto take Kellestine in for questioning, leading to a tense stand-off as Kellestine at first refused to come out. When Kellestine finally came out, he was taken to the local OPP station for questioning. Kellestine was arrogant and cocky, telling the arresting detectives: "I am invincible. I am ten feet tall and invincible". Perhaps realizing his show of nonchalance and braggadocio was inappropriate for a man who was supposed to be grieving for his biker "brothers" who had been just massacred the previous night, Kellestine pretended to cry and told the detectives: "I wish that they would have put a gun to my head and killed me too". When the detectives pointed out that the cause of death for the "Shedden 8" victims had been not released to the media and asked Kellestine how he knew the victims had been shot, leading for him to say that he wished had been stabbed or killed in whatever the manner the victims had been killed.

At about 9: 07 pm, Detective Constable Jeff Gateman of the OPP's Anti-Biker Enforcement Unit started to interview Kellestine. Kellestine was combative, denying any knowledge of the murderers, at one point answering Gateman's question if he had committed the murders by saying: "That's a dumb fucking question. How could you say that to me?" Shortly after midnight, Kellestine was told that he was under arrest and facing 8 counts of first-degree murder. When Kellestine was taken to the court for face his arraignment, he expressed much fury about being mistaken in the media for his first cousin, Wayne Forest Kellestine, a career bank robber well known for his incompetence who always captured within minutes of his crimes. Kellestine made a point of insisting that he was Wayne Earl Kellestine, not Wayne Forest Kellestine. Edwards wrote that Kellestine's pride in not being his cousin was misplaced as it took the police about an average of 10 minutes to arrest Wayne Forest for his crimes while it only taken the police about 10 hours to arrest Wayne Earl for his role in the massacre.

A massive forensic investigation had begun on the Kellestine farm, and by May the police had found in the fireplace the charred keys to the houses and apartments of the "Shedden Eight" murder victims, and a partially burned business card reading ONICO, the name of Flanz's computer company. On 24 May 2006, Constable Al Dubro discovered under Kellestine's microwave a secret doorway, where the police found Kellestine's gun cache. Dubro called Beesley, who found 18 guns in Kellestine's gun cache. Ballistic tests showed some of the guns found in Kellestine's cache were the murder weapons. On one of the handguns, a Mossberg, was found microscopic traces of blood, which DNA testing showed came from Flanz, Kriarakis, Sinopoli, Jessome and Salerno while on another handgun, a Hi-Point .380, had microscopic blood traces from Trotta and Sinopoli. The floor of Kellestine's barn was found to be soaked in hydrochloric acid from Kellestine's "wet work kit". Inside Kellestine's farmhouse, the police found a ring that had skin flakes embedded in it; DNA testing showed that the skin came from Flanz.

On January 9, 2007, a preliminary hearing for all six suspects began in a court in London, Ontario, under extraordinarily tight security. On the first day of the proceeding, Kellestine gave reporters the finger and swore at a courtroom artist. A gag order was issued prohibiting media reports on the evidence presented in the hearing. On 27 March 2008, someone burned down Kellestine's farmhouse, through the barn was still standing.

Trial The murder trial for Aravena, Gardiner, Kellestine, Mather, Mushey and Sandham commenced on March 31, 2009, in London, Ontario, with all six of the accused entering pleas of not guilty. The senior Crown Attorney (prosecutor) on the case was Kevin Gowdey assisted by junior Crown Attorneys Fraser Kelly, Tim Zuber, David D'Iorio and Meredith Gardiner. Kellestine was defended by Clay Powell, a Toronto lawyer best known for defending Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones after he was arrested for heroin possession in Toronto in 1977.

During the trial, Powell and McMillian portrayed Sandham as a cold-blooded, ruthless schemer who manipulated Kellestine into committing the murders; Crawford and Cudmore portrayed Kellestine as a bloodthirsty, deranged psychopath who pressured Sandham into committing the massacre; and the lawyers for the rest blamed both Sandham and Kellestine for their actions of their clients. Kellestine's defense lawyers argued that he was merely the victim of the scheming Sandham and suggested that Sandham was planning to murder Kellestine. McMillan argued that far from being scared of Kellestine that the Winnipeg chapter had sought out Kellestine because of his eccentricies such as eating animal excrement. During the trial, there was much mutual contempt between Mushey and Kellestine with Mushey reportedly beating up Kellestine several times in jail as punishment for letting himself be arrested so easily. During the trial, Mushey took much pleasure in humiliating Kellestine in the courtroom and always broke out laughing as Kellestine fumed in fury at being made to appear a fool. Kellestine tried to have Aravena commit perjury, telling him the courtyard of the jail to "be nice to your Uncle Wayne", saying that Aravena should testify that Mushey, M.H. and Sandham had committed the murders.

During the trial, Kellestine sent a note to the journalist Jane Sims of The London Free Press, asking for a free subscription to her paper since he was doing so much to help sell her newspaper. Kellestine shared the same cell block at the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre with the child killer Michael Thomas Rafferty, charged with killing 8-year-old Victoria Stafford, which led Kellestine to complain to the media about being forced to share the same cell block with him, saying that either Rafferty should be moved to another cell block or placed in the same cell with him so he could murder him. In his final address to the jury, Powell portrayed Kellestine as the victim of the scheming Sandham who arrived at his farmhouse unannounced. Powell admitted that Kellestine was not the most likeable of men, but accused Sandham and M.H. of perjury in their testimony, claiming that they were the real killers.

On October 29, 2009, the jury returned 44 guilty verdicts for first degree murder and four for manslaughter, believed to be the largest number of murder convictions ever produced from a single criminal proceeding in Canada. When the jury announced that Kellestine was guilty on all counts, he shrugged his shoulders and gave an enigmatic smile. Kellestine appealed his verdict under the grounds that his collection of Nazi paraphernalia including the authentic "German swastika flag" he had hanging in his barn should not have been introduced as evidence at the trial. In 2009, the journalist Timothy Appleby described Kellestine's farm at 32196 Aberdeen Line as a "spooky place" that: "From a few hundred metres away, the crime scene looks like any other Ontario rural property on a late fall afternoon: Rolling fields, a clutch of buildings, cows grazing in the distance. But up close ... it feels decidedly more sinister". One who knew him stated "that's just Wayne being Wayne" as he made various complaints about prison life such as having to wear a prison uniform and living in segregation. However, the escaped Kellestine-who had wandered away from an old age home-was Wayne Forest Kellestine, the first cousin of Wayne Earl Kellestine, for whom he is frequently mistaken.

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