Guilty on 11 counts for brutal attack
Couple stabbed in home invasion
A jury deliberated a little more than a day before convicting a man of attempted murder for breaking into the home of two complete strangers on their wedding anniversary and attacking them with knives.
A dejected-looking Richard Blake hung his head in the prisoner’s box as the jury foreperson announced they had convicted him of all 11 charges he faced, including two counts each of aggravated assault, robbery, forcible confinement, and one each of break-and-enter, theft and failing to stop for police.
The woman whose throat he slashed, Amalle Thomas, sat in the front row of the courtroom crying and holding hands with her husband, François Renaud, who was stabbed about 20 times after Blake broke into the couple’s west-end Ottawa home in the middle of the night. They hugged after the verdict.
The couple had picked Blake out of a photo lineup from their hospital rooms a day after being held captive for two hours by a stranger who climbed through a kitchen window before binding them with duct tape and plastic zipties.
Blake was caught by police hiding up a tree after they pursued the couple’s stolen SUV minutes after Renaud escaped the attack by throwing himself out a bedroom window and running to his brother-in-law’s nearby house for help.
A box cutter and latex gloves stained with their blood and Blake’s DNA sat on the SUV’s front seat. Renaud’s blood also stained the front of the red T-shirt Blake was wearing when he was arrested.
“Your verdict was predictable and justified,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Albert Roy told the jury after they found Blake guilty.
Prosecutor Meaghan Cunningham said the Crown intends to seek a psychiatric assessment to help determine whether to launch dangerous offender proceedings, which could see Blake locked up indeterminately.
“I am clearly of the view that obviously Mr. Blake should be undergoing some type of assessment or psychiatric evaluation of some sort,” said Roy, before adding that the assessment the Crown planned to request was “about as indepth as you can get.”
The verdict signalled that the jury didn’t buy Blake’s story that he became an unwitting “dupe” when he encountered an affectionate stranger with “movie-star white teeth” late at night who hugged him and gave him the SUV stolen from Renaud and Thomas.
The Ford Explorer was taken after an intruder broke into the couple’s Rideout Crescent home at 3 a.m. on June 26, 2010. Renaud tried to escape once and was stabbed in the kidney.
Thomas described how she was taken to the basement, bound to a chair and then had her throat cut. She mustered all her strength to slip her bindings and climb the basement stairs before being found by her brother.
A doctor testified the slash came within a millimetre of her carotid artery and near certain death. Renaud said doctors weren’t sure his wife would ever speak again.
During the ordeal, the man taunted Thomas, telling her they were going to play a game where she was going to kill her husband. He also asked her if he had “scarred her for life” before cutting her.
As Cunningham told the jury, the evidence against Blake was “simply overwhelming.”
Police arrested Blake after chasing the stolen Ford on Hwy. 417. Blake fled on foot after ramming a cruiser but was tracked by a dog.
Plastic ties, duct tape, latex gloves and knives from the same set as one of the knives used in the attack were found in Blake’s Baseline Road apartment.
The lead detective, Ken Williams, credited the patrol officers who arrested Blake for making his job easy. “The patrol officers deserve all the credit,” he said.
Blake will next appear in court March 1.