A Kelowna woman who admitted to fatally stabbing her husband in the back as he slept, said Monday she still loves him and is willing to accept the consequences of the violent act she’s yet to make sense of.
“I didn’t wake up that morning to do this. I did love him with all my heart and I still do to this day,” Billie-Jo Bennett told the court as she was sentenced for the manslaughter death of her husband, James Bennett.
“I have so much guilt because I took him away from (his brother and sister-in-law).”
She told the court that they were his only relatives and that her family has nothing to do with her now, meaning she lost all loved ones in one act.
That, she said, is why she chose to avoid a trial, enter a guilty plea and accept a relatively stiff sentence, allowing all involved to get some “closure.”
As per a joint submission from Crown counsel and defense, Bennett, 56, was sentenced by BC Supreme Court Justice Alison Beames to 14 years in prison less time served. Given credit for 537 days already behind bars at a rate of one-and-a-half, her sentence amounts to 11 years and nine-and-a-half months. She will be eligible for parole halfway through her sentence.
According to an agreed statement of fact, on Oct. 18, 2021, at about 7 a.m., Bennett called 911 and told the dispatcher that she had just killed her husband.
When police arrived at the Bechard Road home that the couple lived in, Bennett was outside “on the phone calmly smoking a cigarette,” the court heard.
She waved them in and was immediately arrested for attempted murder.
When it was confirmed that James, who weighed a mere 68 pounds and suffered from curvature of the spine, had died, she was rearrested for second-degree murder, a charge that was reduced to manslaughter only today with a plea deal.
The couple had met in high school, were intimate partners since 1984, and were married in 1987.
“By all accounts (James) loved his wife and had never been violent or abusive towards her,” Crown counsel said, adding that Bennett was the dominant member of the pair and would often “tell James what to do.”
Over the years, the court was told they had experienced significant financial challenges, which hadn’t improved in the months before the killing.
Bennett was the one who managed the couple’s finances and after paying rent and a damage deposit on a basement suite they’d just moved into, they were in dire straights and facing the loss of both their car and phone for missed payments.
“This was not the first time they had been in that situation. (Bennett) was afraid to tell her husband the true extent of their financial problems,” Crown counsel said.
“In the past he had become angry with her and gone quiet with her over what he perceived to be her failure to manage the finances.”
On Oct. 17 2021, “feeling overwhelmed by their circumstances,” Billie-Jo took all of her own and her husband’s prescriptions and tried to kill herself.
She survived and woke up the next day and decided to kill her husband. The court heard she saw her husband sleeping in their bed, went into the kitchen and came back with three knives from the kitchen knife block.
“She looked at her sleeping husband then returned two knives to the kitchen and proceeded back to the bedroom with one of the knives,” the court heard.
“She put her hands around his neck for a moment in a position to choke him, she then plunged the knife into the right side of her husband’s back just below the arm.”
The blade of the knife struck the fourth to six ribs, puncturing the right lung and the aorta, resulting in his death.
“After stabbing her husband and hearing the resultant gurgling sounds of his labored breathing, (Bennett) left the bedroom went outside and began smoking a cigarette,” the court was told.
Then she called 911 and told police what happened.
After being arrested she was released from custody on Oct. 19, 2021, at which time she was committed under the Mental Health Act as a person at risk of harming themselves.
She was rearrested on Dec. 8 2021 on a charge of second-degree murder, and has remained in custody since that time.
While it was not confirmed by a diagnosis, a mental health report on Bennett indicated that she may have been suffering from the early stages of dementia, relating to diabetes and two heart attacks she had suffered.