Family of murdered Vancouver Island man suing prison officials over inmates' escape

The daughters of a 60-year-old Vancouver Island man who was found dead in his home in 2019 are suing the Correctional Service of Canada, claiming negligent prison officials allowed two men to escape from a minimum-security penitentiary and murder their father.

Police found Martin Payne dead in his rural Metchosin, B.C., home on July 12, 2019, after the mail courier failed to show up for work.

Five days earlier, two federal inmates – Zachary Armitage and James Lee Busch – escaped from the nearby William Head Institution, triggering a two-day manhunt that ended when the pair unwittingly struck up a conversation with an off-duty RCMP homicide detective, who recognized the escapees and immediately called police.

Payne's red Ford F-150 pickup truck had been found hours earlier, abandoned on Woodburn Avenue in Oak Bay, B.C.

Multiple police agencies, led by the Vancouver Island Integrated Major Crime Unit, investigated Payne's death for nearly a year before both inmates were charged with first-degree murder.

Calla and Jessica Payne, the slain man's daughters, have now filed a civil suit in B.C. Supreme Court, seeking unspecified damages from the correctional service and the wardens of William Head and Mission Institution, the medium-security prison where the men were held prior to their transfer to the island.

The daughters allege that on the night of the escape, Armitage and Busch walked around a prison fence along the shoreline at low tide, passing by an empty guard tower and out into the community.

Prison officials did not discover the men were missing until a routine head count more than four hours later, according to the suit.

Armitage and Busch, who both had violent criminal histories prior to their escape, had been reclassified from "medium" and "high" security risk levels to "low" risk, due to system overrides by corrections officials, the daughters allege.