Man who lived with girlfriend’s corpse in apartment for a month denies killing her
A Vancouver man accused of murdering his girlfriend and living with the decomposing body for nearly a month admitted Thursday he was in the suite when the slaying happened but denied the murder.
Daniel Alphonse Paul, who has pleaded not guilty to the January 2015 second-degree murder of Rose Paul, told a jury he believed someone broke into the East 22nd Avenue apartment and killed his girlfriend.
He testified he believed the killers were from the same group who he said had in November 2014 confronted and fought him and Rose Paul following a dispute at a bar.
Paul, 45, said he discovered the body of Rose Paul, who has the same surname as him but is not married or related to him, after the couple had been drinking heavily and he got up in the night to go to the bathroom.
As he came back to bed, he said he saw Paul lying on the floor and wanted to wake her up.
“Just as I was reaching down to grab her, there was blood all over the place,” he said. “I was, ‘Holy shit,’ and I stepped back.”
He said he gave Paul a nudge and there was no response so he grabbed her arms and checked for a pulse. “I couldn’t find any pulse. So I tried the other arm. Again there was no pulse.”
Paul, who was employed as a safety officer in construction and had training in first aid, said he then lifted up Paul’s head and tried to get a pulse on her neck but there was no pulse.
“I didn’t know what to do. I’m sitting there, looking at everything. What had happened? There was so much blood. I sat there in front of her. ‘Oh my God, babe, what happened?’”
Under questioning from defence lawyer John Turner, Paul said he checked himself to see if he was injured and found no injuries on himself and sat in shock before taking a big drink from a rum bottle.
“I’m shocked, I’m nervous, I’m scared, horrified by what I just woke up to.”
The accused told the jury he checked the front door and found it unlocked, adding he and Paul never left the door unlocked.
Asked by Turner what conclusions he reached, he said he felt the killing was going to be blamed on him and he would be charged with murder.
“Why is that?” Turner asked. “Because I’m the only one there,” he replied. “I had nothing to say anybody else was there.”
He said he was too fearful to call police as he believed he faced a possible life sentence and as an Aboriginal man, he’d never get a fair trial in Canada.
The accused admitted he stayed at the apartment for nearly a month while the body was decomposing and did nothing to clean things up, but said the majority of the time he was not inside the apartment.
He admitted he lied to Rose Paul’s daughter in the weeks following the slaying when she contacted him to find out where her mother was.
The Crown’s theory is Paul beat his girlfriend to death and is guilty of murder.
Under cross-examination by Crown counsel Daniel Mulligan, Paul denied a suggestion he came up with the story about the “mystery” killers to explain away what happened in the apartment.
Mulligan told Paul he could have contacted the police and shown them that he had no injuries on his hands or anywhere on his body, but the accused said he knew he was going to be “suspect number 1” with the police.
Paul denied a suggestion by Mulligan that he would say anything in the case to avoid any responsibility for killing his girlfriend.