VERDICTS IN GRISLY SLAYING
Jury rules on fate of three accused in Reno Lee murder.
A Regina jury has found three men guilty in the 2015 shooting death of 34-year-old Reno Lee.
Andrew Bellegarde, 24, Bronson Gordon, 33, and Daniel Theodore, 34, stood trial over a seven-week period at Regina Court of Queen’s Bench on two charges: first-degree murder and offering an indignity to human remains.
Shortly after 7 p.m. — approximately 9½ hours after deliberations began — the 11-person jury returned with its verdict, finding all three men guilty of first-degree murder. Only Theodore and Bellegarde were found guilty of the offering an indignity charge.
During the trial, court heard Lee, on April 16, 2015, was taken against his will from Gordon’s Angus Street apartment to the basement of a house on Garnet Street. There, he was bound and held for some time before he was shot twice in the head.
Lee’s dismembered and decapitated body was found later that month in a shallow grave on the edge of the Star Blanket First Nation.
The Crown put forward a number of theories as to motive, including one that Lee was taken out of play in order to eliminate competition between drug dealers, or that an in-debt Gordon was looking to get his hands on Lee’s supply of drugs — described by one witness as sizable following a pickup in Alberta shortly before his death.
The Crown alleged Gordon directed the confinement, kidnapping and murder of Lee, bringing others on board to help carry it out, and that his two co-accused were involved in the plan. Witnesses testified Bellegarde was one of two armed men lying in wait for Lee upon his arrival at Gordon’s, and that Bellegarde and Theodore were among those who took Lee to Garnet Street. (Gordon, court heard, was on electronic monitoring at the time and so was unable to leave his apartment.)
Witnesses described Lee being bound and gagged with tape while Bellegarde stood watch over him. Court heard contact continued between Gordon and Theodore, as well as others, throughout the night, although there is no physical record of what was contained in those messages and conversations.
One witness told the court she was upstairs in the house when she awoke to the sound of a gunshot. She testified both Bellegarde and Theodore emerged in turn from the basement and that, later in the morning, she heard the sound of sawing coming from the basement where the two men had returned.
The woman said she helped Bellegarde and Theodore dispose of various pieces of evidence and bury Lee’s remains.
While neither Bellegarde nor Theodore took the stand in their own defence, Gordon did, telling the court he had no idea what was going to happen to Lee that night and describing himself as a “scapegoat.”
Crown prosecutors Bill Jennings and Adam Breker took a different position, arguing all three men were guilty of the planned and deliberate killing, and that Bellegarde and Theodore could also be found guilty in terms of active participation in Lee’s death during his unlawful confinement.
Defence lawyers for the men — Mike Buchinski for Bellegarde, Marianna Jasper for Gordon and George Combe for Theodore — argued their clients had not plotted Lee’s death and that key Crown witnesses were unreliable due to the amount of drug use that night.