Opening up about a murder plot
Richmond Hill woman writes about prison and plan to kill her husband
When faced with life-altering circumstances, humans often become philosophical about their existence.
It is with this kind of introspection surrounding her very public arrest and trial that Marina Ray, the Richmond Hill woman who is soon to be sentenced for trying to hire a hit man to kill her husband, decided to speak out about life, her conspiracy and why she did what she did.
It was Dec. 7, 2013, that Ray was first arrested after an undercover sting filmed her sitting in a car attempting to enlist the service of a man she thought was a professional hit man, but was actually an undercover York Regional Police officer.
In the video shown as evidence in court, she tells the undercover cop she wants her husband, Michael (formerly Khavkin) Ray, dead, motioning with her fingers in the form of a gun to her head at one point.
During the trial, Marina Ray, who promised to pay the officer $10,000, claimed that her now ex-husbandhad been dishonest with her, spending thousands of her cash on outlandish ideas including a golf course and an online furniture business.
Furthermore, she claimed to have caught him doing drugs, using her credit cards and alleged he froze her accounts and took legal action to get half of the sale of her home, something he never ended up getting.
It was in the lead-up to the failed murder plot that Ray says she was essentially under the threat of losing her home, which contained her only means of income — a basement workshop where she produced custom drapery — and under such deep stress that she suffered some sort of breakdown.
Court heard it was at this point that Ray broached the subject with acquaintance Viktor Sokolovski, who went to the police.
She claims he used what she characterized as a throwaway comment that she was “ready to kill” her husband as a pretext to arrange the sting with York Regional Police.
Ray believes the two men — her ex-husband and Sokolovski — conspired together to have her put in jail. The conspiracy claim was included in her entrapment motion affidavit.
Undercover video shows she then met with a police agent on two occasions, very meticulously coming up with a plan to have her husband murdered.
Despite this, she insists her state of mind was not all it should have been.
“I found that during deep stress the brain might just shut down in order to protect itself from further damage,” she wrote to yorkregion.com.
Her effort to have the conviction thrown out with an entrapment application against the police was dismissed on April16 by the judge in the case, Justice Anne Mullins. However, Ray continues to insist the police’s actions were wrong.
“It is wrong for police officers to provide the opportunity to commit a crime for a person who has no criminal history and no criminal tendencies and do it at the time when this person is going through the terrible ordeal,” she added.
Ray described four-and-a-half years in the judicial system, which included many months for her entrapment motion, as far too long and said she was under “tremendous stress” for that time.
She further paints a bleak portrait of Canada’s prison system, describing her five months of incarceration as “hell.”
“My cellmate happened to be a slightly crazy woman, a shoplifter,” she wrote in an excerpt from a self-published book.
“(She) had the unbearable habit of talking to me — and to herself — in broken English,” Ray wrote while in prison.
“Rap music blared at an intolerable volume ... She tried to speak over it, basically screaming. I did not cry aloud. I stood silently, but tears ran like a waterfall down my swollen face. More than anything, I wanted quiet. It was torture!”
To this day, Ray refuses to accept any responsibility for the plot. She has been on house arrest for more than four years, and expects to be sentenced before the end of the summer.