Appeal bid lost in husband’s murder
Maria Figliola was appealing her conviction for the second time after 2013 retrial
Maria Figliola’s luck ran out with appeal No. 2.
The Hamilton killer, who had successfully appealed her murder conviction once before, has had a second appeal tossed out of court.
Ontario’s Court of Appeal unanimously rejected Figliola’s bid to overturn her 2013 conviction for first-degree murder after her husband Frank was found dead on a secluded waterfront path in Stoney Creek on Aug. 7, 2001, with his skull smashed in. He had been battered with a pool cue.
Figliola, now 62, was convicted of first-degree murder in May 2006 but that verdict was set aside in 2011 and a new trial was ordered.
In 2013, a jury again convicted Figliola of first-degree murder following a five-month trial. She was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 25 years.
Figliola then appealed a second time.
Michael Lacy, Figliola’s lawyer, said his client is “devastated” by the decision. “She has always denied having anything to do with her husband’s death and she continues to maintain that.”
Lacy said it’s too early to say if Figliola will make a last-gasp attempt to seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
“We’ll have to digest the decision,” he said.
Figliola’s most-recent appeal centred on alleged errors made by the trial judge when instructing the jury as well as how the judge handled evidence from one of the witnesses.
But the three appeal judges dismissed those concerns.
“The appellant’s trial was not perfect. No trial is,” Justice David Doherty wrote on behalf of the Court of Appeal.
“The minor errors,” he added, “had no impact on the fairness of the trial and give no cause to doubt the verdict.”
The second trial heard from 85 witnesses but Figliola wasn’t one of them.
“While the evidence was lengthy, the issues the jury needed to resolve were few and straightforward,” the Court of Appeal noted.
“Mr. Figliola was murdered. No one suggested otherwise.
“There were only two possible verdicts,” the judges stated. “Either the appellant was guilty of first-degree murder or she was not guilty.”
The jury in 2013 refused to accept Figliola’s story that her husband was killed over unpaid gambling debts he had racked up.
Instead, the jury accepted the Crown’s version that Figliola was having an affair with a younger man and knew that her husband was about to leave her. She decided that she wasn’t going to let him leave the marriage alive and that her husband was worth more to her dead. She stood to gain nearly $700,000 from his death.
It’s believed she hired a hit man to kill her husband and that hit man was alleged to have been Daniele Di Trapani.
He, too, won an appeal from his original 2006 murder conviction.
In a surprise turn of events in 2014, Di Trapani pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder and Hamilton police announced Frank Figliola’s hit man was still on the loose.
Maria Figliola was also convicted in 2008 of embezzling $1 million during the 1990s from the Stoney Creek bank where she worked.