Less than a year after New Brunswick businessman Dennis Oland was found not guilty of killing his multimillionaire father, Oland’s wife applied for a restraining order, alleging her husband was prone to intimate partner violence.
The allegations are contained in an application for an emergency intervention order, which Lisa Andrik-Oland filled out on June 10, 2020 at a shelter for abused women in Saint John, N.B.
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The document, which had been protected by a publication ban until this week, includes her handwritten notes alleging Dennis Oland was an angry, violent man who was losing control and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I am not sure what he will do, but he has PTSD and has had many episodes where he is not controlling his actions and becomes aggressive,” Andrik-Oland alleges in the document.
“It is getting worse because he is less and less in control. He is not getting a reaction from me and he can’t handle it …. I am not safe in my own house.”
A specific allegation is included in the recounting of an incident during a visit to a Toronto hotel on June 8, 2018.
“People in the next room called police,” the notes say. “Dennis used a belt to tie my hands behind my back; there was a physical altercation.” The alleged incident happened five months before Oland’s second murder trial was set to begin, and Andrik-Oland says because of that she told police “everything was OK.”
In the same section of the document, Andrik-Oland refers to a “beach incident” in September 2019, during which Oland allegedly bound her hands and feet with rope and pulled her down a dirt path. At one point, Andrik-Oland alleges, her husband threw her over his shoulder and dropped her head first toward some rocks.
“A lot of blood,” the notes say. “Dennis started this with a mental breakdown.”
Dennis Oland’s lawyer, Bill Teed, declined to comment when asked about the allegations Tuesday.
In 2013, Oland was charged with second-degree murder, two years after his 69-year-old father, Richard, was found beaten to death in his Saint John, N.B., office. His skull had been shattered by repeated blows from a weapon that was never found.
Oland spent close to a year in prison after a jury found him guilty in 2015.
That verdict, however, was overturned on appeal in 2016. And a new trial by judge alone, which concluded on July 19, 2019, found Oland not guilty, with the judge ruling Crown prosecutors had failed to prove their case.
In the documents released Monday, Andrik-Oland says her husband hasn’t lived in the marital home in Rothesay, N.B., since February 2020. But Andrik-Oland alleges her husband entered the home without warning on June 7, 2020 and proceeded to place her personal items on the driveway.
“Dennis continued to sit at edge of property to monitor my movements for a few (hours),” the notes say. “He monitors my movements to my mother’s home.”
As well, Andrik-Oland accuses her husband of sending “hate email and text” messages.
“I felt threatened,” the notes say, adding that she had called police from inside a locked car outside the marital home on June 9, 2020. “I expressed my fear to police,” she wrote. “The police did not support my request to remove him.”
Andrik-Oland goes on to say she suffers from depression and PTSD and has suicidal thoughts. She has no money to pay for psychological treatment, the application says.
“I have no money to go to an alternate place,” she says, adding that Oland has been living nearby at his mother’s house since early 2020 and had asked for a divorce.
“He is claiming financial collapse if the house is not sold,” Andrik-Oland says. “I have no ability to move. I have no income. I am completely dependent on him.”
Andrik-Oland asked for a six-month restraining order that would have prohibited Oland from contacting or communicating with her. It would have also granted her the right to exclusive occupation of the marital home.
The order was issued by an emergency adjudicative officer on June 10, 2020.
But a judge with the New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench in Moncton decided the next day there wasn’t enough evidence to grant the order, and she scheduled a new hearing. On July, 17, 2020, the estranged couple agreed to drop the matter and the order was set aside by another judge with the family division of the Court of Queen’s Bench.
The publication ban on the application was lifted by a judge in January after two media outlets, CBC and Brunswick News, successfully challenged the ban in court.
Chief Justice Tracey Deware issued a decision saying the adjudicative officer did not have the jurisdiction to impose a ban. As well, she determined that a subsequent court order supporting the ban was inappropriate because it did not conform with the basic principles of an open courtroom.
The ban was officially lifted on Monday after Andrik-Oland’s lawyers dropped their bid for an appeal, CBC reported.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 4, 2021.
