Man pleads guilty to manslaughter in death of Monica Burns

The man accused of killing a woman, wrapping her body in two area rugs then ditching her body outside of Prince Albert, Sask., has pleaded guilty.

With credit for time already served, Todd Daniel McKeaveney will spend the next 10 years and three months behind bars after entering a guilty plea to manslaughter and offering an indignity to human remains in the death of Monica Burns.

“We know Todd McKeaveney will get to go home after his sentence is served and we’ll never get Monica back,” Pat Cook, Burns’ aunt, said outside of court on Tuesday.

READ MORE: Man charged with second-degree murder in death of Monica Burns

On Jan. 28, 2015, McKeaveney was arrested by RCMP and charged with second-degree murder after Burns’ body was discovered on a snowmobile trail outside of Prince Albert.

Evidence processed at the scene approximately 15 kilometers northwest of Prince Albert in the RM of Buckland included two black area rugs that police would later link to McKeaveney.

On Tuesday, McKeaveney would plead guilty to a lesser charge after months of negotiations between counsel.

“This isn’t the result of a plea bargain but rather the result of, I think, a conclusion that all parties came to, that this was the right resolution for this particular case and that’s why we came to the decision to have a manslaughter sentencing at the higher end of the range,” McKeaveney’s lawyer, Brian Pfefferle, said.

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Pfefferle added that rarely do you see people demonstrate the level of significant remorse as his client did right from the start but that he became ‘a bit of a lawyer’s nightmare’ having confessed multiple times to the crime from the very beginning.

“It’s really what those facts amounted to – was it a manslaughter or was it a murder?”

“In our view, there was never any planning, never any deliberation, there was significant intoxication issues as well as issues with respect to provocation and some issues in respect to self-defence,” Pfefferle said.

READ MORE: Rugs may be connected to murder of Saskatchewan woman

For those reasons, counsel concluded it was manslaughter and expected a jury would as well.

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“We want you to remember Monica as a beautiful young woman, warm, loving, caring. She had a little girl that she loved dearly and she may have been dealing with some issues but she definitely was a beautiful person,” Cook said.

Monica’s daughter, who only recently began to speak since her mother’s death, is in counseling and will be 20 years old when McKeaveney is released.

“Some days I don’t even know what to tell her, we just lay in bed together and cry because that’s the only I thing I can do for her – I can’t bring her mom back,” Monica’s sister, Michelle, said.

The family said it also never loses sight of other missing and murdered indigenous women and men – still out there.

“We pray for those families as well that they’ll find some sense of comfort and relief in knowing that one of our women has now been vindicated.”