WARNING: This story contains disturbing details. Reader discretion is advised.
A B.C. man has been convicted of manslaughter in the 2020 fatal stabbing of his common law partner near Fort St. John in 2020.
Sarah Foord, 38, was last heard from on July 6, and reported missing four days later. Her remains were found weeks later in a remote area about 75 kilometres north of the northeastern B.C. community.
John Wendell Keyler, 35, was originally charged with second-degree murder and indignity to a body in the case.
But in a judgement issued Tuesday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice James Williams ruled Crown prosecutors failed to prove his intent to kill, instead convicting Keyler of the lesser charge.
According to the ruling, Keyler fatally stabbed Foord with a Leatherman multitool in the bathroom of her trailer on July 7, after the two had consumed large amounts of alcohol, cocaine and methadone powder.
A coroners report later determined she’d suffered about 50 stab wounds to her neck, face, abdomen, shoulder, hands and arms, and chest. Most of the wounds were superficial, but two to the chest proved fatal.
Keyler transported her body to a remote gas well site near Buick creek where he buried her in the bushes and threw the multitool into a nearby body of water.
On July 21, he confessed to police and took them to the location of her body. Police divers later recovered the Leatherman, which had Foord’s DNA on it.
The question at trial hinged on Keyler’s state of mind at the time of the fatal assault.
The Crown argued Keyler was angry and jealous of Foord’s relationship with other friends. It argued evidence showed a “protracted, sustained and deliberate attack,” and that “the extensive nature of the attack and the repeated thrusts of the weapon are highly probative of a persistent and specific intent to kill.”
Keyler’s lawyers argued he was in a state of drug-induced paranoid psychosis, and that he believed someone was outside the trailer trying to get him. Defence argued he believed Foord was somehow part of the threat, that pulling her into the bathtub with him would offer protection, and that he stabbed her when she resisted.
In delivering his judgement, Williams said did not find Keyler a particularly credible witness.
But he said expert evidence from a forensic psychologist suggesting elements of both Crown and defence’s arguments contributed to the killing was possible and raised reasonable doubt that he was in a state of drug-induced psychosis at the time of the deadly attack.
“I, therefore, have a doubt that he understood the true circumstances as they existed at the time he stabbed Ms. Foord,” he ruled.
“The proposition that Mr. Keyler acted on a distorted perception of reality is a reasonable possibility.”
Under the Criminal Code of Canada, there is no minimum prison term for manslaughter, though the crime can carry a life sentence.
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