Ex-stripper guilty of mother’s murder
‘LETHAL INTENTION’: Victim stabbed, left to die
A former exotic dancer who stabbed her mother 24 times and left her to die on the floor of a basement suite with the knife stuck in her chest has been found guilty of seconddegree murder.
Gloria Zerbinos, 30, wore a blank expression as B.C. Supreme Court Justice Frits Verhoeven described the attack, in which the victim was repeatedly stabbed through her heart after she stopped by to drop off her daughter’s laundry.
“It is clear the attack was extremely violent and at least somewhat prolonged,” the judge noted.
Zerbinos’ “lethal intention,” he said, “could hardly be more emphatically demonstrated.”
Crown prosecutor Craig Yamashiro said during the trial that a pathologist found Zerbinos had stabbed her mom with the force of “pounding a nail into hard wood.”
Earlier this year, Verhoeven rejected Zerbinos’ defence that she should be found not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder in the Nov. 8, 2012, stabbing death of her 43-year-old mother Panagiota ‘Yota’ Zerbinos.
She was arrested in Vancouver Nov. 10, 2012, in a Vancouver strip club called No. 5 Orange, where she had worked as a dancer about for about 11/2 years earlier under her stage name Naudia Nice.
She faces a mandatory life sentence, but will be back in the New Westminster courthouse on Dec. 4 when the Crown and defence lawyers will make submissions on when she should be eligible to apply for parole.
During the trial, the court heard that Zerbinos had told police her mother was involved in a conspiracy to chloroform her and pimp her out, and that she had to put a stop to it.
“It sounds crazy, but it’s true,” she told the police.
Court heard that, on the day of the murder, Gloria Zerbinos confronted her mother about the alleged sexual slavery conspiracy and the conversation, Zerbinos told police, “went sour.”
The trial heard testimony that Zerbinos, an only child, had assaulted her mother on more than one occasion before the homicide, and the mother had been afraid to be alone with her daughter in the months leading up to her death. Zerbinos did not testify on her own behalf. Verhoeven noted that psychiatrists had difficulty arriving at a common diagnosis for Zerbinos.
The judge also noted witnesses who had seen Zerbinos before and after the killing found her to be normal, pleasant and polite.
He found there is a “real possibility” she invented the delusions to explain the stabbing.
The court heard Zerbinos displayed a considerable capacity for deception. The judge found she “had a strong need to justify her horrific actions.”