Jury begins deliberations in Marc Leduc murder trial

The fate of a man charged with killing two sex-trade workers was put into the hands of a jury Tuesday as they began their deliberations.

Marc Leduc, 59, has pleaded not guilty to two first-degree murder charges in the killings of 39-yearold Pamela Kosmack in 2008 and 23-year-old Leeanne Lawson in 2011.

Both were strangled after violent struggles, found naked from the waist down, had been severely beaten, and were dragged away from the scene of the initial struggle, court heard.

“They were strangulations marked with violence of an extreme nature,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Hugh McLean told the jury. In his final instructions to the jury, McLean said they must decide whether prosecutor James Cavanagh proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Leduc intended to kill the women or knew that an assault could lead to their death.

The jury must also be satisfied that the sexual assault of the two women occurred in the same sequence of events as the killings for Leduc to be found guilty of first-degree murder, McLean told the jury.

McLean said that “extreme violence” was involved in the attacks of the two women who were addicted to drugs and worked as sex trade workers.

Both of the killings included signs of struggle, and foreign objects that were “readily available” at both crime scenes — a stick and a plastic bag — were inserted in to the victims. “This was not quick struggle,” McLean told the jury.

The jury must also decide whether Leduc had a motive for the killings, McLean said. The prosecutor had alleged that Leduc had such a hatred for sex trade workers that his face went red when he talked about them, which defence lawyer Ian Carter called a “red herring.”

The jury heard on Monday that Leduc’s DNA was found in nine different spots at both of the homicide scenes. Leduc’s DNA was found on one of Kosmack’s breasts, on glasses left at the crime scene and on both of the bite marks on her body, Cavanagh said.

Leduc’s DNA was also found on Lawson’s neck and breasts, and his blood was found on her jeans, Cavanagh said.

The bite marks found on Kosmack had Leduc’s DNA but that could have been from sexual contact with her before her death, Carter told the jury.