Crown aims for fourth Badgerow murder trial

Ex-steelworker could be first person in Canada to be tried four times for first-degree murder

After filing up to 5,000 pages of transcripts and a nine-volume appeal book with the Court of Appeal of Ontario, the Crown is one step closer in its bid to take suspected killer Robert Badgerow to trial for a fourth time.

If the Crown is successful, Badgerow, 54, may be the first person in Canada to be tried four times for first-degree murder.

On Monday, Randy Schwartz of the Crown law office in Toronto filed between 4,000 and 5,000 pages of transcripts from Badgerow’s previous court proceedings, which began in 1998 when he was arrested and charged with the murder of Diane Werendowicz and the attempted murder of Debbie Robertson.

The appeal book contains “all the exhibits and other materials filed in the court ... that are capable of reproduction,” Schwartz says.

He now has 90 days to file his factum on the appeal, which is the Crown’s written argument, although Schwartz is hopeful he will file much sooner. Once that happens, the court will set a date for the appeal to be heard. Then, counting backward from that date, Badgerow’s appeal lawyer, Frank Addario of Toronto, must file his case three weeks prior.

“There is some urgency in this case,” says Schwartz.

He is right, of course. Badgerow, who is now a free and innocent man in the eyes of the law, has the enormous weight of this appeal hanging over his life.

Yet it has taken more than three decades to get to this point, and a decision from the court is likely still months away.

Diane, a nursing assistant just shy of her 24th birthday, was found strangled, drowned and partially undressed in a Stoney Creek ravine on June 19, 1981. She had been at a bar with girlfriends but left to make the short walk home.

Her homicide grew cold for 17 years until DNA evidence led police to arrest Badgerow, a steelworker and family man, in 1998.

He admits it was his semen found inside Diane during her autopsy, but insists he had anonymous, consensual sex with her in his car in the bar parking lot. He says she walked away from him afterwards and he never saw her again.

At his first murder trial, the jury found Badgerow guilty. That verdict was overturned on appeal, and a statement he gave to police was ruled inadmissible at his next two murder trials — both of which resulted in hung juries.

Badgerow spent nearly 11 years behind bars.

Last fall, the murder charge against him was stayed. Since then, he has been living without any restrictions in the Hamilton area.

When he was initially arrested, Badgerow was also charged with attacking another young woman a few weeks after Diane was killed.

Debbie Robertson was stabbed in the head with a screwdriver and left for dead by a man who she identified to police as Rob Badgerow, her former high school classmate. When the case finally came to trial two decades later, the charge was stayed because some key witnesses had died and others had trouble remembering things from so long ago. Both cases remain unsolved. Legal experts including Leo Adler and Boris Bytensky, who defended Badgerow at each trial, along with top criminal lawyer John Rosen and Alan Young, associate professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, know of no first-degree murder case that has gone to four trials.

Scott Conway was tried four times for the second-degree murder of his ex-girlfriend’s new lover in Nepean. He was convicted in 1990.