The trial looking into the 2021 killing of a Kelowna, B.C., man at the hands of his purported friend is months from concluding.
Gabriella Sears, who was arrested as Dereck Sears, is expected to head back to trial for second-degree murder of Darren Middleton at some point in July to potentially next September, Crown counsel David Grabavac said.
The latest in a long list of delays comes in the aftermath of the trial judge, Justice Carroll Ross, telling the court she will have retired by the time the trial was set to conclude. Taking her place will be Justice Miriam Gropper.
Already, the court has seen multiple bumps in the path of the trial that started last November. Sears fired her legal counsel weeks into the trial, then was ordered to have a fitness assessment, which she passed.
Her new lawyer, Mark Swartz, will either have to start the trial process from scratch or catch up on weeks of testimony before the trial resumes.
The complicated trial had been ongoing for weeks, following a voir dire in which Sears’s then-lawyer, Jordan Watt, successfully argued to have her jailhouse confession to the killing ousted from the evidence the Crown could draw on in its case.
Since then, the judge has heard from RCMP officers and witnesses about the gruesome crime and repeatedly looked at video from the scene.
A Louisville Slugger baseball bat and box cutter were found next to the body of Middleton on June 17, 2021, Brenda Adams, Middleton’s common-law spouse of four years, told the court.
Adams and Middleton had known Sears, a transgender woman who transitioned only days before Middleton’s death, for around five months, Adams said. They were friends, and Sears worked for the couple, helping with manual labour around their property. In turn, they paid Sears in food and drinks.
One day, when Middleton failed to come home when he said he would, Adams thought she should check in with Sears and drove to her house.
When she arrived at the Sycamore Road home, Adams saw Middleton’s truck in the driveway. She “could hear water running inside the residence and nothing else,” Crown counsel Grabavac told the court.
That’s when she came across the body, which had been castrated.