Was victim silenced over an earlier murder?
It was a bone collector’s bonanza.
A bunch of long bones and more scattered bits strewn about.
Michael Paquet took them home because that’s what he does, strange as the hobby might seem to most of us.
And, got to say, Paquet — with his long mournful face, the shaved scalp and sprout of dreadlocks — looks like someone who might sleep in a coffin.
A week later, he returned to the area, in the Junction. “It’s pretty fruitful for finding dead things,” he said on Monday from the witness stand.
Mostly animal bones that Paquet harvests for his morbid collection — rodents and raccoons and birds.
Because there was an abattoir located nearby, he assumed the long bones came from slaughtered livestock.
But second time around, Paquet noticed a plastic bag resting against a tree in the woodsy section along Lavender Creek Trail.
“There were bones sticking out of it, part of a skull, ribs.” Clearly human remains. Collecting the haul, Paquet moseyed home, dropping the skull on the way; stuffing the detached mandible into his backpack.
The jaw he took into his bedroom, setting it down near the taxidermied cat, the giant ceramic vulture and the mounted . . . antelope heads? That’s what they look like, with their straight horns. Only then did Paquet call police. Never know what you’ll learn about the human species at a murder trial.
These bones, turned out, were the remains of Rigat Ghirmay.
Paquet found them on April 27, 2016 — three years after retired roofer Francis McNullen had discovered a duffel bag in the Black Creek Flood Control area, resting on a grassy knoll near the channel. “I kicked it. It didn’t move.”
The zipper was broken so he stuck a finger inside and practically reeled away from “the smell of death.” Maggots covered the plastic bag inside the duffel bag.
That was the partial torso of Rigat Ghirmay, her identity determined by following the clue from a receipt also found in the bag.
Police believe 28-year-old Ghirmay was killed on May 15, 2013, murdered and dismembered in her apartment tub.
And that was seven months after another woman — Nighisti Semret — was viciously stabbed to death in Cabbagetown, as she walked home in the early morning rain from her night job as a hotel cleaner.
Semret and Ghirmay knew each other. Both had resided for a time at Sojourn House, a shelter for refugees. Both were immigrants from Eritrea.
And both had crossed paths with Adonay Zekarias, also Eritrean. Semret had helped him fill out documents; Ghirmay had attended English classes with him and, for a short time, they shared an apartment, apparently in a “brothersister” relationship.
In June, 2015, Zekarias was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in the death of Semret, who’d fought hard for her life, as Zekarias wielded the knife, striking him with her umbrella. He fled the scene when a Good Samaritan attempted to intervene.
Zekarias, 45, is now on trial for the Ghirmay murder.
No motive for the Semret slaying has ever been determined. But the prosecution has a theory for why, months later, Ghirmay was killed: She knew too much. She had — the theory goes — begun to put together the pieces. She had to be silenced.
These are interconnections a jury might never have heard, the details severely prejudicial to Zekarias. But last week the defendant changed his mind and asked to proceed with a judge-alone trial, the Crown agreeing.
So now, although Justice Michael Brown has yet to rule on a motion to exclude “discreditable conduct evidence” — including the murder conviction, the entire murder narrative flowing out of that — there are no jurors’ ears and eyes to protect, thus the evidence record can be reported.
One unforeseen consequence that jumps out from the prosecution theory, as outlined in the Crown’s factum, is that Ghirmay’s grotesque fate may have been sealed on the day that a Toronto homicide detective revealed crucial details about the suspect they were then seeking. Contrary to what police had earlier said, the person they were looking for was not white, according to DNA found on Semret, and it was likely the man had suffered slashing wounds to his arms or hand during the attack. A $50,000 reward was offered. At that time, Ghirmay was a poor woman, living in subsidized housing, with $500 credit in the bank.
That press conference was held on May 6, 2013 — nine days before Ghirmay was last seen alive on video surveillance, entering her apartment building with Zekarias.
She would leave, says the Crown, in pieces, stuffed into that duffel bag McNullen later discovered. Zekarias is seen, on surveillance video retrieved by investigators, leaving Ghirmay’s apartment on the morning of May 16, returning an hour later with what appears to be an empty suitcase, leaving again rolling the suitcase which now looks heavy and leaking.
He returns to the elevator minutes later to wipe away spots using a rag.
The Crown maintains that Zekarias killed and dismembered Ghirmay in the preceding 12 hours. Police found cutting marks in the tub.
Between Sermet’s murder and Ghirmay’s vanishing, the latter was often seen in company with Zekarias at both of their apartment buildings. With him by her side, she bought a TV for her new flat. They both obtained cellphones.
For a time — between December 9, 2012, and February 20, 2013, Zekarias was in Germany. Ghirmay went with him to buy the plane ticket. When he returned to Canada, police were still looking for a white man with a limp. And while away, as police would learn when they later seized his laptop — which both Zekarias and Ghirmay had used — he’d searched for stories about the Semret murder investigation.
Most crucial to the prosecution’s theory, there is this: On the morning Semret was killed, Oct. 23, 2012, Zekarias called 911 from his apartment on Humber Ave., claiming he’d injured his hand lifting something. Ghirmay was with him. She stayed with Zekarias as he was transported to hospital by paramedics. At the hospital, he told medical staff he’d been injured by a door slamming on both his hands.
But staff was suspicious because he didn’t have “crushing” type injuries, which would have resulted from such an incident. They presented like sharp force injuries, as if made by a knife. Zekarias was unwilling to provide further details. The following day he underwent surgery on both hands.
It didn’t add up for the medical team.
But it might have started adding up for Ghirmay, if not then — she didn’t yet know that Semret had been murdered — perhaps later.
Theoretically, all Ghirmay had to do after her suspicions were aroused was make a call to police about a friend who came home with extensive wounds on his hands mere hours after their mutual friend had been killed.
And then, months later, police announced that enticing reward.
For a wary man who’d already killed once, that might have loomed as temptation too far. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.