One of the women who lived with the man accused of killing a woman and stuffing her body in a barrel teared up as she recounted the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of the accused murderer.
Renee Rose took the stand in the first degree murder trial of Perez Cleveland, who is charged with killing Jennifer Barrett in August of 2016.
Barrett’s body was found by police three months later in a barrel outside the Waverley Heights home Cleveland had rented.
Rose told the court Wednesday she met Cleveland in 2009, when she was working at a grocery store in Toronto.
The pair began dating in May 2010, and Rose moved in soon after, saying Cleveland was “very, very charming” and had sent flowers to her work on several occasions.
Rose says she tried to run after the abuse began — telling the Manitoba courtroom she still has a scar from where Cleveland hit her with a belt buckle nearly a decade ago.
But after she did flee, pretending she was taking out the garbage, she said Cleveland kidnapped her, brought her to a house and tied her to a chair, threatening her with weapons and a blow torch.
Over the next few years, Cleveland moved numerous times with Rose, Sullivan and his daughter — with Jennifer Barrett joining them when they lived in Gatineau, QB.
Rose told the court Cleveland routinely beat all of the women in the home — with increasing intensity as he became paranoid they were cheating on him.
He was particularly suspicious Barrett was being unfaithful, and beat her for hours after she ran away in mid-August, said Rose.
“She was all different colours — purple and blue,” Rose says of Barrett when the woman emerged from the basement, where Rose says Cleveland regularly beat her as well.
“When I seen her again, she was black and blue. Her hair was matted to her bloody skin.”
Cleveland has plead not guilty.
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