The family of a Port Moody, B.C., woman who disappeared more than five years ago is wondering if there will ever be any justice in her case.
Trina Hunt, 48, was reported missing to the Port Moody Police Department on Jan. 18, 2021.
Her body was found on March 29, 2021 near Hope, south of Silver Creek.
On Feb. 4, 2025, her husband, Iain Hunt, was charged with one count of indignity to human remains by allegedly disposing of her body in the woods at or near Port Moody and Hope on Jan. 16, two days before he reported his wife missing.
No one has been charged in her death and the cause of her death remains a mystery.
Iain Hunt has made dozens of court appearances since, with the trial continuously pushed back.
Global News has now learned that Iain Hunt’s trial will not take place until October 2027.
“I think at a certain point I stopped counting,” Stephanie Ibbott, Trina Hunt’s cousin-in-law, said on Wednesday.
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“I just stopped believing that anything would happen. We travel to the mainland from the island for all of these, just to find out at the last minute it’s been cancelled, so you almost start to give up hope and certainly with the trial date being so far away, it makes the whole situation feel very hopeless that there will ever be justice.”
Iain Hunt will be tried 32 months after he was charged in February 2025.
Under Supreme Court of Canada guidelines, provincial court trials should conclude within 18 months of charges being laid; however, criminal lawyer and former Crown prosecutor Rob Dhanu, K.C. said it’s not a stopwatch calculation.
In this case, Dhanu said court records show a defence-initiated adjournment when trial dates were set this month.
“What that likely means is that the defence requested more time for the trial to be set, most likely due to their own calendar,” Dhanu, K.C. told Global News. “What that means in turn is that that 19 months between March 2026 and October 2027 would not count towards that 32 months, so we are quite a bit under the Jordan (decision) guidelines.”
The BC Prosecution Service (BCPS) said the Crown has been making efforts to have the Iain Hunt matter proceed expeditiously, and it has not received a notice of an application under section 11(b) of the Charter for a stay of proceedings.
According to Section 11(b), an accused person has the right to be tried within a reasonable time, and unreasonable delays can lead to charges being stayed or dropped.
“The timelines set by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Jordan decision…relate to net delay (i.e. after appropriate deductions for periods of defence delay, waived delay, discrete events and exceptional circumstances),” the BCPS said in an email.
Iain Hunt had no comment to Global News when he was reached on Wednesday.
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