Murder trial hears of stripper scheme

The young Orléans woman was easy pickings for Carson Morin, a 20-year-old in the suburbs who wanted to build a network of strippers.

She was making minimum wage at The Shoe Company and had a cocaine and weed habit to finance, so she jumped at Morin’s offer to become a stripper at The NuDen. Morin billed it as a fun way to make lots of money, a courtroom heard Thursday.

Their deal was that she would live with Morin, pay half the condo rent and utilities and pay him $40 to drive her to her shifts at the strip club, where she danced four to five nights a week.

And, as she told Morin’s firstdegree murder trial, the money “was a lot better than The Shoe Company.”

To supplement her minimumwage earnings, and feed her own habit, she told court, she used to sell drugs — mostly marijuana and the odd cocaine deal — about five times a day, seven days a week.

Morin stuck to his business plan and installed a stripper pole in one of his bedrooms, fitting it with mirrors so his new, “enthusiastic” recruit could practise her trade.

Morin is on trial for the May 15, 2013, killing of Michael Wassill, whose throat was slit at the front door of his Orléans home as he tried to protect the stripper, who by that point was trying to get away from Morin.

The 20-year-old victim stumbled into the kitchen and collapsed. He died days later in hospital.

The prosecution’s theory is that Morin, enraged that the stripper was trying to break free of his grip, stalked her and showed up at Wassill’s front door armed with a box-cutter and wearing surgical gloves.

Prosecutors’ star witness, who saw the killing, took the stand Thursday.

She has yet to recount her eyewitness account, but she detailed how her life had changed “the day Mike died.”

“My family changed, my friends changed. It pretty much changed my life upside-down,” testified the woman, whose name is shielded by a publication ban.

She then told court that she has turned her life around.

“I put my life back together, found a good job, nothing illegalwise,” she testified.

Earlier on Thursday, prosecutors called a friend of the victim to help portray the accused killer as an angry, hostile man who would pace around and storm out of a room before losing his cool.

Morin, who is being defended by Natasha Calvinho and Leo Russomanno, has pleaded not guilty. The prosecution — led by Lia Bramwell and Jason Neubauer — continues its case Friday in Courtroom No. 35 at the Elgin Street courthouse.