‘You shed no tear for their losses’
Judge addresses convicted killer as Richey’s’ family speaks at sentencing
Tess Richey spent the last two hours of her life with Kalen Schlatter, and by the time he killed her he would have known what a warm, kind, trusting and funny person she was, her mother told a courtroom Wednesday.
“I will never understand why anyone would hurt another person the way that Kalen Schlatter hurt my daughter,” Christine Hermeston said in an emotional victim impact statement. “But I especially can’t understand it because after spending those hours with her, he would have known exactly what he was taking.”
On Monday evening, a jury found Schlatter, 23, guilty of first-degree murder for strangling and sexually assaulting 22-year-old Tess Richey in an alley off Church Street in the early hours of Nov. 25, 2017.
On Wednesday, in sentencing Schlatter to the mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, Superior Court Justice Michael Dambrot referenced evidence of Schlatter’s interest in violent sex and choking which he did not allow the jury to hear.
“Your sexual appetite led you literally to take an innocent young woman by the hand down a path to her death,” he said in his brief decision. “To satisfy your lust, you took her life … you stole a large piece of the fabric of the very being of the members of her family and friends and, I could not fail to observe, you shed no tear for their losses.”
Richey was reported missing by her sister after she didn’t respond to texts after she spent a night out dancing with a friend at a club in the Gay Village.
The family’s frantic search and the discovery of Richey’s body four days later at the bot tom of an outdoor stairwell in a Church Street laneway, not by police but by her mother, prompted outrage over how police conduct missing persons’ investigations.
Varina Richey, Richey’s oldest sister, said her sister was going to achieve great things in her life, but “sadly, it is from her murder that she changed the world — a safer city for women, new missing persons’ bureau in Toronto and she helped get justice for all those lost in the Village.”
Richey’s disappearance and murder came at a time when Toronto’s queer and trans community felt vulnerable and afraid, said Becky McFarlane, a senior director with the 519 community centre located opposite where Richey’s body was found.
It was “a time when we did not know why men were going missing from our community, and that a serial killer was responsible,” she said.
Schlatter, who identifies as a bisexual man, betrayed his own LGBTQ community in an “unimaginable, unthinkable way,” she said. He violated spaces that were supposed to be safe, like the Church Street bars he frequented, including Crews and Tangos, where both he and Richey had gone separately on the night he killed her.
Schlatter’s self-described practice of picking up straight women at gay bars is a “disquieting and insidious assertion,” McFarlane said.
“To imagine that there are women who seek out spaces where they might be objectified in less aggressive ways, where they can dance without being hit on or groped by men in the same ways they are used to in straight clubs — and then to imagine that there are men like Kalen Schlatter who take advantage of that fact is as chilling as it is enraging,” she said.
In a courtroom that would have been packed without the social-distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic, Richey’s mother, four sisters, brothers-in-law and friends shared their memories of Tess Richey or, as they called her, “Tessie” — the baby of the family.
As she read one statement on behalf of a friend of Richey’s, prosecutor Bev Richards began to cry.
“Tess was very kind and generous and giving,” Richey’s mother said. She loved animals, adopting two dogs and converting her mother into a vegetarian.
She was an organ donor. She donated her hair. She ran marathons for charity and campaigned for animal rights. She was a doting aunt to her nieces. She earned a diploma she never got to see as she pursued her dream of becoming a flight at tendant and travelling the world.
But she was so much more than that, her sister said.
“Lost are the times she was silly to make someone comfortable, the compliments delivered in earnestness and sincerity that made you feel special, or the times where she stood up for someone who was being bullied or unfairly treated,” said her sister Rachel Richey.
“Growing up in a house full of women is exactly as you would imagine it to be: chaotic, warm, happy, unpredictable and empowering. My sisters and I were fibres that were woven together to make a cloth,” she said. “Losing her, I lost a part of myself.”
Richey’s family described the agony and lasting pain they continue to experience, and the fear they carry for their daughters and nieces.
“In a world that has been desecrated and destroyed, I’ll recreate and rebuild this brokendown life into something beautiful for her,” said her sister Hailey Richey. “Although this pain will never leave and my heart may never heal, I know true love. I know Tess.”
At end of the Wednesday hearing, Schlatter was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs for the final time.
Richey’s mother said she made eye contact with Schlatter as she spoke in court, but he never showed any emotion.
Schlatter declined to say anything prior to being sentenced.
Outside court, Varina Richey thanked the jurors for continuing the trial to the end as the courthouse shut down due to the pandemic. The trial was the last one in Toronto, and likely the province, to conclude.
“It was a big ask on them,” she said. “I really do thank them.”
The trial is over, two-and-ahalf years after Richey was killed, but the calendar in her mother’s kitchen is stuck on November 2017.
“I will never change it,” Hermeston said. “I will never move on without my Tess.”