WARNING: Some of the details in this story are disturbing, discretion is advised.
A woman accused of the murder of her twin sister has been found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
The partial remains of 36-year-old Ivy Chen were found in Coquitlam, B.C.’s Minnekhada Park in March 2020.
RCMP officers had been called to reports of a suspicious fire around 6 a.m. on March 10.
Her sister, Tracy Chen was charged with first-degree murder and committing an indignity to a dead body.
The court heard Thursday that Tracy was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and heard voices in her head, telling her to kill her sister.
“In this tragic incident, Tracy Chen killed her sister Ivy and then cut up her body and tried to burn it,” Jay Fogel, Crown counsel told Global News.
“And so the court was addressing the murder trial today, found that the evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt that Tracy Chen had killed her sister in a premeditated murder, so factually guilty of first-degree murder and indignity to human remains.”
He added that two psychiatrists found Tracy was suffering from schizophrenia and other mental disorders at the time and therefore was found not criminally responsible for reasons due to a mental disorder.
Evidence indicates Tracy stabbed her sister to death in the apartment they shared and then tried to dissolve her remains in acid.
When that didn’t work, she put them in cooking pots and took them to the park and set them on fire.
Fogel said it appears Tracy believed her sister Ivy was not really her sister and that her sister and the Canadian government were going to kill her. “So she believed the only way to save her life was to kill her sister at the direction of the voices she was hearing at the time,” he said.
Chris Johnson, counsel for Tracy, said this was a very tragic case with some shocking facts.
“It’s clear on both of the reports from both of the very experienced psychiatrists that at the time of this killing, my client was so mentally ill that she wasn’t able to appreciate that what she was doing was mentally wrong,” he said.
Johnson added that from the assessments done, it appeared Tracy suffered from some form of mental illness for several years and that seemed to increase over time.
“Ultimately, as she came to believe, really different thoughts, that some entity had taken over her sister and it wasn’t her sister and that entity was trying to kill her,” he said.
Tracy will remain in a psychiatric facility and her condition will be reviewed on a regular basis, according to court documents.