VANCOUVER — A Dawson Creek woman who savagely killed her mother-in-law has been acquitted of second-degree murder.
Instead, Candice Dawn Shearer will be sentenced for manslaughter.
According to a Supreme Court of B.C. ruling released on Monday, Shearer was living with her common-law partner, Berry Sheppard, and his mother, Anna Sheppard, in Sheppard’s home when she beat and stabbed Sheppard to death on Nov. 12, 2016. A seven-day trial on a charge of second-degree murder was conducted in December 2019.
In the reasons for judgment, Justice James Williams said Shearer and Anna Sheppard had a difficult relationship.
“Not infrequently, there were disagreements; there were sometimes arguments and on occasion, there was physical violence between them,” Williams wrote. The violence was directed primarily toward Sheppard, with the court seeing photos of the woman with a blackened face.
The court heard that on the evening of Nov. 12, 2016, Berry Sheppard returned home to find Shearer sitting on a set of stairs “looking like a little girl who ‘was afraid to tell her father that she had done something wrong.’”
Shearer told her partner not to go upstairs to the bathroom. Berry Sheppard did go to the bathroom, where he found his mother’s bloodied body.
“I am satisfied that on the afternoon of Nov. 12, 2016, sometime after approximately 2:30 p.m., Ms. Sheppard returned to her home from the library. After she arrived, and once she was inside the house, there was a confrontation between herself and Ms. Shearer, likely instigated by Ms. Shearer,” Justice Williams wrote.
“The confrontation turned physical. In the course of the confrontation, which occurred principally in the bathroom, the defendant violently attacked Ms. Sheppard. The attack initially consisted of blunt trauma, likely inflicted by fists and, I suspect, stomping. After Ms. Sheppard was no longer able to defend herself, Ms. Shearer attacked her with a sharp-bladed instrument, probably a knife, and inflicted a total of eight wounds. Seven of the wounds were in the approximate area of the neck. The eighth was very significant and went across the throat.
“Following the attack, as Ms. Sheppard was dead or dying, Ms. Shearer attempted to clean up the bloody scene in the bathroom.”
Shearer admitted that she killed Sheppard. However, her defence team claimed that she had a mental disorder.
Justice Williams concluded “I have a real doubt that when Ms. Shearer inflicted the wounds upon Ms. Sheppard, she was mentally competent as the law requires to prove the necessary subjective foresight to establish the offence of murder.”
