Lovers accused in Aylmer slayings
Quebec provincial police and a Crown prosecutor both cautioned Wednesday that murder charges against two lovers in the drug-linked slaying of an Aylmer couple didn’t signal the end of the investigation. Their words quickly proved true. Just hours after René SamsonVon Richter, 24, appeared in court to face first-degree murder charges in last year’s killings of Amanda Trottier and boyfriend Travis Votour — the same crimes Samson’s girlfriend had been charged in a day earlier — police announced that a third person had been arrested.
The Sûreté du Québec said the third person — a 34-year-old man — was arrested in Gatineau. If also charged, the as-yet-unidentified man is expected to appear in court Thursday.
The police theory on the startling crime has yet to be detailed publicly. Police insist the specifics — such as who was present inside the town house where the two 23-year-old victims were killed and whether all those arrested are believed to have participated in the killing — are for a court of law to hear.
Nonetheless, it’s clear from the charges laid that police believe Samson and girlfriend Sonia Vilon, 39, planned the attack.
It’s believed that both Trottier and Votour were killed within a day of their bodies being discovered on Jan. 6, 2014, according to informations to obtain arrest warrants for both Vilon and Samson sworn by investigator Sylvain Jean.
Though Trottier’s mother, Victoria Lebrasseur, said she didn’t know the woman accused of killing her daughter, she told the Citizen on Wednesday that Samson and Votour knew each other and that there was bad blood between the two.
“I heard him talking to Travis one time for a couple of minutes on the phone,” Lebrasseur said. “Travis seemed unhappy about something, so I figured right there and then they don’t like each other, that’s for sure.”
The now dead man referred to Samson as “King” months before the killings, Lebrasseur said. She said she couldn’t be certain but that she believes she heard Votour questioning the person on the other end of the line.
“What are you going to do, bring a gang after me?” Lebrasseur recalled Votour asking.
Lebrasseur didn’t hear Samson’s name again until Wednesday, when police said he was accused of conspiring to kill her daughter. Her family believes that at the time of the killings, Vilon and Samson lived near the Eardley Terrace home where Votour and Trottier were killed.
In December, almost a full calendar year after the homicides, police set up a command post in that neighbourhood. Police had received information suggesting that both Trottier and Votour were caught on videotape stealing drugs from an organized crime outfit in Quebec.
Police said they had reason to believe that members of that outfit had been staking out the couple’s townhouse in the days before the killing as a result of the alleged drug ripoff. Police said a suspicious vehicle had been spotted near the home right before the deaths. That townhouse would later become a crime scene, with neighbours saying they heard what sounded like gunshots, and the bodies of Trottier and Votour left for her parents to discover on the main floor. Trottier’s then-three-year-old daughter, Savanna, was found unharmed and asleep in an upstairs bedroom.
Quebec’s provincial police force took control of the investigation in the early days after the killings, saying they were probing potential links to organized crime. On Wednesday, despite three arrests, they wouldn’t confirm any mob links.
Gatineau court staff printed off a 95-page list of Samson’s dealings with the Quebec justice system, ranging from guilty pleas in break-and-enter cases to multiple drug-related charges, which have been catalogued under various iterations of his last name — Samson, VonRichter, Samson-Von-Richter and even Wonrichter. He has no convictions on record in Ontario.
His co-accused and girlfriend, Vilon, was arrested at her Gatineau home Monday morning. Samson was arrested Tuesday while already in custody at a detention centre. He was scheduled to have a bail hearing Thursday on another set of charges. A neighbour told the Citizen that Samson hadn’t been seen at the couple’s rue du Crepuscule apartment for weeks.
Samson appeared briefly in court Wednesday, neatly dressed in a black shirt, before he was remanded into custody.
A few minutes later, as reporters waited downstairs to speak to lawyers in the case, a young man who was present at the courthouse identified himself as having shared a prison cell with the man now accused of two counts of first-degree murder. Maxime Foley said he had just learned of the charges against his former cellmate.
“It was a shock. I never thought he was that kind of guy,” Foley said.
Foley said Samson was in jail for drug possession, but as far as he knows Samson wasn’t a dealer. He said Samson wasn’t violent in prison, opting instead to spend his time drawing. His girlfriend, Sonia Vilon, an artist, had gone to visit him.
It was a whirlwind two days for the family of Amanda Trottier, who went from hoping that there would be a break in a case that has left them reeling for 16 months to learning of three arrests within 36 hours.
“It means peace, justice, more answers to what I’ve been wondering all this time,” Lebrasseur said. “Every day I wake up in the morning, I go to bed at night, wondering, ‘Who did that and why?’ It keeps you in the dark, in the shadows. Any parent would want some kind of justice, peace,” she said.
On what would have been Trottier’s 24th birthday, her now four-year-old daughter blew out birthday candles in her memory, Lebrasseur said.
“She knows she had a mother. She loved her mother,” Lebrasseur said.
The co-accused are scheduled to make their next court appearances May 22, where they could be joined by yet another person.