Fake letter sinks Post-Mortem killer’s parole
Spectator series remembered: Body of Ramkissoon’s wife was dumped in a field near African Lion Safari
A man who murdered his wife and dumped her body in a field near African Lion Saf ari has had his request for full parole denied after he put a fake letter in his parole board file.
Mohan Ramkissoon bludgeoned his wife Yvette Budram with a hammer and strangled her in the fall of 2000 in Mississauga.
Her death became a Hamilton police homicide case when her decomposed body was discovered a year and a half later by a jogger off a country road in Flamborough.
The investigation resembled an episode of television’s “CSI” — a McMaster University forensic anthropologist and a forensic entomologist (insect expert) helped identify the woman and her death timeline, and a critical step was a rehydration technique that led to a fingerprint from her mummified remains.
The story was told in detail in a 25-part Hamilton Spectator series and published in the book “Post-Mortem.”
A twist in the case was that Ramkissoon inadvertently provided a critical clue linking him to the murder: Budram’s fingerprints were on a police database because he had charged her with assault one month before he killed her.
In 2004 in Hamilton, Ramkissoon was convicted of second-degree murder. He was eligible to apply for parole last year.
Parole Board of Canada documents say he has been well-behaved in prison apart from a conviction for hoarding pain medication for kidney stones.
He was moved to a minimum security facility.
The board added that he deserves credit for finally admitting his guilt in the murder. He said he killed Budram because she was having an affair after having long pointed the finger at his wife’s lover as the killer.
The parole board said it had been prepared to grant him full parole in addition to deporting him to his native country of Guyana. But Ramkissoon sunk his own case by trying to pass off a supportive but fraudulent letter to the board, purported to be signed by a police officer.
The letter, from a police service — presum- ably in Guyana, but the name is blacked out in the document — said officers would ensure he checked in with them upon his release.
Ramkissoon denied he had concocted the letter, saying his brother had provided it; his brother told the board a friend had given it to him.
The board said: “In light of the issues surrounding the fictitious letter from the (name redacted) Police Force, the Correctional Service of Canada now has serious concerns.”
It was in January that the board rejected Ramkissoon’s appeal of the decision to deny him parole.
He will be eligible to begin the reapplication process in one year.
Ramkissoon, 51, moved to Ontario in his mid-20s from Guyana after living in the U.S. for nearly two years, first in Miami, and then the Bronx in New York City — where he allegedly killed a woman named Rampati Chattergoon in 1987.
(NYPD homicide detectives told The Spectator that Ramkissoon admitted to the murder in prison in Canada when they interviewed him, but that he refused to sign a confession.)
Chattergoon’s daughter, Radhica, now 45, told The Spectator she cries each day for her mother and does not want Ramkissoon to ever be released from prison.
“The parole board needs to know that he has killed someone else before (Yvette Budram),” she wrote in an email. “He cannot be let free.”