Family in turmoil: Stepfather of murder victim
‘This is a very cruel system’
Michael Durant’s first court appearance in Niagara since he was granted new trials by the Ontario Court of Appeal was derailed Tuesday due to weather.
The 45-year-old had been serving a life sentence after being convicted of two counts of firstdegree murder in the deaths of Niagara women Diane Dimitri and Cassey Cichocki.
After his appeal was granted earlier this month, arrangements were made to have Durant, who is serving his time in a jail in British Columbia, returned to Niagara.
In Superior Court of Justice in Welland on Tuesday, Crown attorney Michal Sokolski told a judge the defendant was unable to attend his first court appearance because his flight from B.C. had to be diverted due to weather conditions and the plane had landed in Sudbury.
Durant is now scheduled to appear in court March 25 to answer to the charges.
Meanwhile, Dimitri’s stepfather, Kyriacos Kyriacou, said he is dismayed by the Court of Appeal’s decision.
“I was confident he was not going to get what he wanted,” he said. “This is a very cruel system.”
Kyriacou, who now lives in Quebec, plans to return to Niagara to attend the proceedings.
“There’s no way I wouldn’t be there,” he said. “Our family is again in turmoil.”
Kyriacou said his family still struggles to come to terms with the brutal death of Dimitri, the mother of four children.
“There is no such thing as closure. We’re missing that piece of the puzzle that made our family complete.”
Dimitri was 32 in August 2003 when she went to a party at Durant’s Niagara Falls home and was never seen alive again. Her body was later found in a ditch in a rural area near the boundary of Niagara Falls and Welland.
The body of 22-year-old Cichocki was discovered in an isolated area in the north end of Niagara Falls in January 2006. She was 22.
Durant was sentenced in 2012 to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years following a two-and-a-half-month-long jury trial in Welland.
In early February, Ontario’s highest court ordered new, separate trials, saying the matters should not have been tried together.
Court documents indicated both women, whose bodies were found more than 29 months apart, died from blunt force trauma to the head. Evidence at trial linked Durant to each of the deceased at times reasonably proximate to the last time they were seen alive.
While the two cases have some common features, the Court of Appeal said the trial judge was wrong to admit the evidence on each killing as evidence of a similar act on the other, and to proceed with only one trial.
Also, the appeal court ruled the judge erred in refusing to dismiss a juror who knew a relative of one of the victims, and in failing to leave manslaughter as an available verdict for one of the cases.