National Post (National Edition)
‘Butcher of Gatineau’ gets parole
Transgender woman heads to halfway house
O T TAWA • Khaled Farhan, dubbed The Butcher of Gatineau by the press in 1999 after killing and then dismembering his lover days later, has won parole with the hopes of starting a new, quiet life as a transgender woman at an undisclosed halfway house.
Farhan, now 46 and legally named Zahra Farhan, was found guilty in 2000 for the second-degree murder of her live-in girlfriend Karina Janveau, 24.
After a hearing in January, Farhan was granted day parole for six months to help her reintegrate into society.
Farhan, who now has a visual impairment, wants to get a Seeing Eye dog and devote her life to helping the blind and transgender community, according to parole documents.
“You are assessed as a low to low end of moderate risk for both general and violence recidivism,” the parole board wrote of Farhan, whose brutal killing and mutilation of Janveau nearly 20 years ago shocked Ottawa.
In her short life, the victim had more than her fair share of hardship — and that was before she met Farhan. Her parents divorced when she was nine, her mother killed herself at Christmas, she had a partially paralyzed leg, a crippled arm and a drug habit.
In all of this, Janveau was described by family and friends as generous and loving.
Janveau had only been with Farhan for a year. It was a volatile relationship that ended in murder.
Some nights Farhan left her bruised. Other nights Farhan threatened to kill her, according to witness testimony at trial.
In her final moments of life, Farhan subjected her to an uncontrollable, cocainefuelled rage.
She lay dead in their basement apartment for days and when the smell became impossible to ignore — neighbours were complaining — Farhan started cutting up the body with a kitchen knife because he figured it would be easier to get rid of it in pieces. It took him two hours to cut up the corpse in the bathtub. (He showed no emotion as he detailed the gruesome deed on the stand at trial.) An autopsy confirmed that Farhan also stabbed her multiple times after she was dead.
To conceal the crime, Farhan tossed half of the corpse and the right arm in a dumpster a few metres from their apartment. Farhan stuffed the other half of the body in a duffel bag and dumped it a few hundred metres away in a field by railway tracks in Gatineau, where Farhan had moved two months earlier from Ottawa.
After the killing, Farhan presented himself for local television stations as a worried husband pleading for the public’s help to find his missing common-law spouse. Farhan lied a lot in those days, telling newspaper and TV reporters that he last saw Janveau leaving for a camping trip with a so-called dangerous drug dealer.
Farhan’s attempts to deceive were futile. The police arrested him right after a building superintendent discovered some of the discarded body parts in a dumpster.
One of the first Gatineau police officers on the grisly scene was Sgt. Guylaine Larose, who stared at the bloody, decomposed body long enough for it to haunt. She was looking at what was left of her younger sister.
Larose was too distraught to work at the time but summoned the courage to sit through every day of a six-week trial that sent her sister’s killer to prison. She cried out in joy when the jury returned with a guilty verdict.
In an interview after the trial, Larose said her sister’s murder haunted her day and night. Larose was popular among cops, as well as crime reporters, who called her several times a day in the late 1990s for news.
The police officer later killed herself with a service revolver at home.
Farhan was sent to a men’s prison, and spent some time in solitary confinement. According to prison files, she was put in solitary confinement in 2010 after sending sexually inappropriate le tters to guards.
Farhan was also placed in solitary confinement at her own request after she expressed a fear for her life because she identified as a trans woman. Farhan had no problems after being transferred to a women’s prison.
Her parole conditions require her to live at a halfway house, abstain from drugs and booze, and report any relationships she enters.
However, Farhan told the parole board she has “no intentions of being in a relationship” as she wishes to focus on herself.
LOW TO LOW END OF MODERATE RISK FOR ... RECIDIVISM.