Second-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence, with a minimum of 10 years in prison before an offender can apply for parole.
A Nanaimo woman convicted of killing her partner while he slept, and then telling police and his mother that he had left town while she kept his remains in their fridge and freezer, received a life sentence Thursday with no chance of parole for 12 years.
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Lawyers for Paris Laroche, 29, had argued she killed 32-year-old Sidney Mantee in self-defence after their once-happy relationship deteriorated into what B.C. Supreme Court Justice Robin Baird described as “a toxic and profoundly dysfunctional dynamic,” marked with verbal, emotional and physical abuse, from which they were unable to peacefully disentangle themselves.
After the March 2020 murder, while Mantee remained a missing person, Laroche told undercover officers, posing as family members wanting revenge against Mantee for abusing their fictitious sister and daughter, that Mantee had threatened to kill her and her family if she ever left him.
While Baird accepted Laroche believed Mantee was capable of carrying out the threats he had been making for some time and that it was either her life or his, he found, at the time of the killing, she was not defending herself, calling it instead an “act of fury and vengeance probably fuelled by a multitude of past transgressions.” In particular, she believed Mantee had abused her cat the night before, Baird said during Laroche’s sentencing for second-degree murder and interfering with human remains.
“The violence of her attack was extreme and unmistakably punitive. I do not accept that at the material time it had anything to do with thoughts of self-preservation or the protection of others,” Baird said.
Second-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence, with a minimum of 10 years in prison before an offender can apply for parole.
Despite having harsh words for Laroche’s crime, Baird rejected the Crown’s submission of 15 years before parole eligibility, finding her moral blameworthiness was reduced because, according to a forensic psychiatrist who testified at trial, she displayed many symptoms of the legal definition of battered spouse syndrome, including chronic anxiety, avoidance, fear and heightened startle response.
Residents of the couple’s apartment building testified at trial they often heard a man yelling and a woman crying in Laroche and Mantee’s apartment, and evidence suggests Laroche had become isolated from friends and family, Baird said.
Self-defence under the Criminal Code does not necessarily require imminent violence by another person to justify self-defensive acts, Baird said, but Laroche knew Mantee had no ability to hurt her as she stood over him with a hammer. “Even if Ms. Laroche may have feared future violence and threats from him during his waking hours, for her to kill him unilaterally, in this extremely violent and punitive way while he slept, was not reasonable.”
Laroche, who was 24 at the time of the murder, received a four-year concurrent sentence for interfering with Mantee’s remains.
Baird stressed that, while Laroche will be eligible to apply for parole after 12 years, prisoners convicted of murder are often denied parole for years after they become eligible, and the most serious and dangerous offenders are never released.
Denials of wrongdoing are significant impediments to receiving parole, Baird said.
On the morning of Mantee’s murder, Laroche woke up early and went about her usual morning routine to get ready for work at the fish processing plant where she had met Mantee six years earlier when she was 18 years old.
Mantee was sleeping on a mattress in the living room, because their relationship had deteriorated to a point where they were essentially separated but living together.
“She heard the hooing of an owl, and for some reason, she interpreted this as a sign that the time had come for her to murder Mr. Mantee. That she set about doing this with single-minded determination and enormous violence has never been disputed,” Baird said.
Laroche armed herself with a hammer she had hidden in a kitchen cupboard, in case, as she said, Mantee ever attacked her again. She delivered three heavy blows to Mantee’s head as he lay sleeping. When she realized she had not succeeded in killing him, she cut his throat with a hunting knife, then called in sick to work and cleaned up around Mantee’s body.
Over the course of a year, she cut Mantee’s body into pieces and disposed of it in various places around Nanaimo in a “painstaking and grimly macabre process,” that at times involved carrying parts of the body in Ziploc bags in her backpack, Baird said.
Laroche told the undercover officers about the murder “in a strangely matter-of-fact and sometimes oddly enthusiastic way,” he said.
She took police on a tour of places where she had disposed of Mantee’s remains, including the downtown Nanaimo waterfront and the bathroom in a shopping mall.
Mounties recovered bones in the ocean around Neck Point Park and Pipers Lagoon Park that were confirmed through DNA testing to belong to Mantee.
Earlier, Mantee’s mother read a victim impact statement in which she called Laroche “the evilest person I know.”
She described the agony of receiving news, after months of worry, of his murder and dismemberment, saying he was thrown away like garbage.
The violent death of her son and inhumane treatment of his remains are a “source of enormous and never-ending pain and anguish” for Emma Mantee, Baird said.
Laroche declined to address the court during her sentencing.