Stephane Parent’s revisionist history doesn’t fit with the facts of the case
You have to give convicted Calgary murderer Stephane Parent an A for effort.
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Unfortunately the Quebec native, who is serving a life sentence for the Valentine’s Day, 2002 murder of his then-girlfriend, Adrienne McColl, gets an F for accuracy.
Parent was before the Alberta Court of Appeal last week, for the purpose of updating judges on whether he intends to continue to pursue his sentence appeal and where that application is at.
But Parent spent most of his time before a panel of three judges, appearing remotely by video from the federal prison near Quebec City where he is serving his life sentence, ranting about the injustice of his conviction.
Despite repeated admonishments from the court, mostly ignored by Parent, he insisted his conviction for second-degree murder in McColl’s death should be overturned.
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On several occasions Chief Justice Ritu Khullar had to tell Parent she wasn’t going to stop talking until he stopped jabbering on, eventually getting him to shut up long enough so he could be told his conviction appeal had failed and he had the option of taking his case to the Supreme Court.
Undaunted, Parent continued to rail against the Alberta justice system, claiming he couldn’t have murdered McColl and the jury which found him guilty was “poisoned” by a friend of the victim’s family, a juror he claimed he outed during the trial.
Sadly, Parent’s revisionist history doesn’t fit with the facts of the case.
For one thing, juror number 10 raised the fact he knew McColl’s stepfather, John McGee, in passing after the man’s name was mentioned by Crown prosecutor Shane Parker in his opening address in the trial.
It was McGee’s vehicle in which Parent made his escape to the Calgary International Airport after murdering McColl in her stepfather’s Calgary residence before dumping her body in a ditch west of Nanton.
“I recognized juror number 10,” Parent told the Court of Appeal judges.
“He was a regular at Studio 82. He played billiards with the victim’s stepfather,” he said. “You guys are telling me in Alberta your friends can be on a jury in a murder trial?”
But the juror, who said he had met McGee, wasn’t even aware the stepdad had died in 2010, long before Parent stood trial for McColl’s murder.
Parent stuck to his story that he couldn’t have murdered the victim based on the testimony of pathologist Dr. Anny Sauvageau, who testified lividity — the settling of blood after death — led her to conclude McColl was killed sometime between the afternoon of Feb. 15, 2002, and when her body was found two days later.
If Sauvageau’s opinion was correct, Parent would not have been able to have murdered McColl as he boarded a one-way flight to Ottawa early on Feb. 15.
But Dr. Elizabeth Brooks-Lim testified for the Crown that post-mortem lividity was not a reliable indicator of time of death.
Sauvageau’s opinion also contradicted much of the evidence the prosecution presented against Parent, including the fact McColl’s “footprints of life” ended on the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2002, pointed towards his guilt.
Parent had access to McGee’s vehicle as the stepfather was in Arizona on a golfing trip at the time. A time-stamped ticket found in the car at the airport showed it was parked about an hour before Parent paid cash for a one-way flight to Ottawa.
His fingerprints were found on the trunk liner along with a pair of sandals belonging to McColl, whose corpse was found shoeless and a pair of jeans discovered two stalls away had Parent’s DNA and the victim’s blood on them.
Perhaps Parent has somehow convinced himself that his actions two decades ago couldn’t have happened, but it’s time for him to realize that the evidence uncontrovertibly shows they did.
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