When Bill Harrison, a healthy 65-year-old Mississauga man, was found dead in his family home eight years ago, a pathologist listed the cause of death as “acute cardiac arrhythmia.”Years later, after two more suspicious deaths in the same family, Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist reviewed his colleague’s 2009 autopsy and gave a markedly different opinion. While there is not enough information to come to a conclusion about how Harrison met his end, the findings suggest he took “heavy blows” to his head and the front of his chest around the time of his death, Dr. Michael Pollanen testified Friday in a triple murder trial in Brampton. The best explanation, according to Pollanen: “They were caused by another party through an assault or an inflicted injury.”Melissa Merritt, 37, and her common-law spouse, Christopher Fattore, 40, are on trial for the first-degree murder of Merritt’s estranged husband, Caleb Harrison, in 2013, and his mother, Bridget Harrison, three years earlier.Fattore alone is charged with second-degree murder in the 2009 death of Bill Harrison, Caleb’s father. All three Harrisons died years apart in the family home on Pitch Pine Cres.Merritt has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Fattore pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder charges, but attempted to plead guilty to manslaughter in the death of Caleb Harrison. The Crown rejected the manslaughter plea.The prosecution alleges the crimes were committed in relation to a years-long custody battle between Merritt and the Harrisons. A taped police interview will show that after Fattore was arrested in 2014 he confessed to killing Caleb and Bridget, Crown prosecutor Eric Taylor said in his opening address in September.Pollanen said in court Friday that he did not have enough information to reach a conclusion about how Bill Harrison died. In his April 2015 report examining all three deaths, Pollanen wrote the cause of Bill’s death a ...
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