Advisory: This stories contains details of a homicide.
VANCOUVER — A Nanaimo woman who allegedly killed and dismembered her boyfriend because he threatened to kill her didn’t show signs of being a battered partner acting in self-defence, the Crown prosecutor said in his closing remarks.
Paris Laroche, 28, is charged with first-degree murder and interfering with human remains in connection with the March 2020 killing of her ex-boyfriend, Sidney Mantee, 32.
The case is being heard by Justice Robin Baird in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver.
The trial heard how the five-foot-five woman hit Mantee, who was a head taller and about 100 pounds heavier, in the head with a hammer while he was sleeping. She kept his body in the apartment and over six months dismembered his remains using a sledgehammer and other tools, including household knives and a saw, before disposing of the body parts in city parks in Nanaimo and in the Pacific Ocean.
Barber at one point put on blue latex gloves and dramatically showed a large claw hammer and sledgehammer.
“These are significant items,” he told Justice Robin Baird. “This is not a weak and vulnerable woman.”
He noted that Laroche told two undercover police officers that she used the sledgehammer on the body was while it was in the bathtub. The officers had befriended Laroche on the pretext of wanting revenge against Mantee for abusing their fictitious sister and daughter.
Barber argued that Laroche’s behaviour didn’t suggest she was afraid to leave Mantee because of his threats and had no other option except to kill him to save herself. For example, he said, she didn’t write about the abuse in her journal the night before Mantee was killed.
On the day before the killing, she wrote that she was going to go to the ocean with her crystals, light an “abundance candle” and utter an intention while she wrote about wanting to end her relationship.
“If you were in an abusive relationship, wouldn’t you write something much harsher?” Barber asked.
Recapping defence evidence from the trial, which last sat two months ago, Laroche’s lawyer on Thursday said she was in constant fear because of her belief Mantee would carry out his threats against her, her friends and family, and her cats.
In his closing statements, Glen Orris referenced cases of women who were acquitted under the battered spouse defence, which was first used in Canada in 1986 when Angelique Lavallee was found not guilty for shooting her abusive partner in the back of the head after a psychiatrist testified she felt she would be killed if she didn’t fight back.
Orris said the fact that Laroche killed the heavier and larger Mantee and then had to deal with the body and to purchase tools to dismember it shows she didn’t really think out her plan to kill him.
He said the charge of manslaughter would be more appropriate than first-degree murder, which requires proven premeditation and carries an automatic life sentence without eligibility for parole.
Barber on Friday said court heard no examples of when, where or how Laroche was abused by Mantee, and her journal entries after the killing included how she has to clean behind the heat registers and get rid of the mattress while meticulously laying out what she’s doing with the body parts.
There was evidence there was abuse in the relationship “but it’s not so extensive that it’s lawful justification for what she did,” Barber said.
Baird, the justice, addressed Laroche directly at the end of the trial and told her he had lots of evidence to go through and he couldn’t say how long it would take to deliver his verdict.
“I’m going to think about this long and hard, OK?” he said.
