Badgerow murder appeal set for March
Man convicted four times for the same murder could have charges stayed if his lawyer wins
Killer Robert Badgerow has five more months of freedom until his bail is revoked and his appeal is heard at the Court of Appeal for Ontario.
The former steelworker’s hearing is set for March 28. He is to surrender into custody the night before, according to Davin Garg of the criminal Crown law office in Toronto.
The surrender is meant to eliminate the chance of Badgerow going AWOL if the court does not rule in his favour.
Though convicted of firstdegree murder in the 1981 rape, strangulation and drowning of Diane Werendowicz, Badgerow has been out on bail since August 2017, pending his appeal.
He has been quietly living with his mother and brother in Binbrook.
His bail has been extended twice while his lawyer prepared an unusually long factum for the court, outlining the evidence in the precedentsetting case and laying the grounds for the appeal. Ingrid Grant, who represented Badgerow at trial, has argued that the judge made numerous legal errors and new evidence — never before put in front of a jury — ought to have been allowed in.
That exculpatory evidence involves a statement from a couple who heard a woman’s screams the night Diane was killed.
If the court needs time to consider its decision regarding the appeal, Badgerow would be released on bail again, pending judgment, according to Garg. Sometimes it can take the Appeal Court weeks or even months to render a decision.
This is just the latest in a decades-old saga that has placed Badgerow in the history books for being the first person in Canada to be tried four times for the same first-degree murder.
Diane’s murder went cold for 17 years until Badgerow was arrested. Developments in DNA science led to a match between him and semen found inside Diane.
Since his arrest, Badgerow has conceded he had sex with Diane the night she died. But he maintains he met her outside a bar in Stoney Creek and they had consensual, anonymous sex in his car in the parking lot. He claims she left him to make the short walk home to her Stoney Creek apartment, and that someone else raped and killed her on the way.
The unheard statement regarding a woman’s screams was made by the couple who were landlords at Diane’s apartment building. The timing of the screams appears to support Badgerow’s timeline about Diane stopping to have sex in the parking lot before the murder occurred.
A jury at Badgerow’s first trial found him guilty of first-degree murder. That conviction was overturned on appeal and a second trial took place. The jury at that one couldn’t come to a unanimous decision and Badgerow was acquitted with a hung jury. The very same thing happened at a third trial.
At his fourth trial, which took place in Kitchener in the fall of 2016, the jury again found Badgerow guilty. He spent about eight months in prison before getting out on bail pending appeal, a rare privilege for convicted killers in this country.
If Badgerow’s appeal is successful, his lawyer is not asking for a history-making fifth trial. Instead, she is asking for the charge against her client to be stayed. Even that isn’t new legal territory in this case. After the hung jury at his third trial, a judge stayed Badgerow’s charges. It was a rare legal option eventually overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada which ruled that key evidence involving an anonymous 911 call to police should not have been kept from previous jurors. A fourth trial was ordered, jurors heard that evidence for the first time, and Badgerow was again found guilty.