The money sat until 2017, when an officer found it when he was assigned to dispose of the exhibits related to the case
The $30,000 a Burnaby woman paid to a hired gunman to kill her ex-daughter-in-law has been forfeited to Canada’s attorney general more than three decades after she and three accomplices were convicted of first-degree murder.
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Alexandra Pesic, 25, a former beauty queen, was gunned down outside a Coquitlam dental clinic where she worked in August 1992. She had been in a custody battle with her ex-husband over their son.
After trial, the $30,000 cash was moved with other trial exhibits to an RCMP locker, Judge Sandra Sukstorf said in a recent B.C. Supreme Court ruling.
It sat there until 2017, when an officer found it when he was assigned to dispose of the exhibits related to the case, she said. The next year it was deposited into a bank account under the Receiver General of Canada.
But the money remained under the authority and control of the court, and the federal attorney general applied on behalf of the RCMP for an order to forfeit it. Sukstorf heard the application this month.
Nenadic didn’t respond, but Jelka Pesic said she had no claim on the money because she had nothing to do with the murder.
Sukstorf said she balanced the interests of the public with the property rights of individuals and concluded Jelka Pesic and the three co-convicted shouldn’t get to keep property obtained or used unlawfully.
In forfeiture cases, courts do not allow money or property linked to illegal activities to be kept by offenders, which protects the fairness of the legal system and supports the public interest in justice, the judge wrote.
The package of $30,000 in bills became evidence after it fell from Nenadic’s waistband during his arrest five days after the murder, just after he had met with Jelka Pesic, according to the judgment.
The case was made into a U.S. TV movie, The Perfect Mother, which aired in the late 1990s.