Accused in Vancouver double-murder trial withdraws mental-disorder defence
Credit to Author: Keith Fraser| Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2020 01:55:59 +0000
Lawyers for a Vancouver senior who was convicted by a jury of murdering two of his West End neighbours have abandoned a defence that their client was not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder.
The defence for Leonard Landrick was first raised after the B.C. Supreme Court jury in November found him guilty of the July 2017 second-degree murders of Sandra McInnes, 57, and Neil Croker, 51.
Before B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ronald Skolrood, the trial judge, could enter the convictions, one of Landrick’s lawyers stood up and said that he wished to proceed with a hearing to determine whether his client had a mental disorder and was not criminally responsible.
The Crown objected to the move and the judge excused the jury but did not discharge them.
A psychiatric report was ordered by the judge and then made available to the Crown and defence, but, when the parties appeared before the judge on Tuesday, Landrick’s lawyers advised the judge that they were no longer proceeding with the not-criminally-responsible defence. The judge then entered the convictions.
Sentencing has been put over to a later date. Second-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with between 10 and 25 years of parole ineligibility.
The two victims were found stabbed to death in their apartments at the Ocean Towers highrise on Morton Avenue.
Vancouver Police at the Ocean Towers apartment block on 1835 Morton Avenue in Vancouver, July 10, 2017.
A neighbour had been alerted that something was up when she got a distraught voice message from another female resident saying that she hadn’t been able to get hold of McInnes in her suite.
After the bodies were discovered, one of the neighbours told police that she knew “right away” that Landrick was involved.
The Crown’s theory was that Landrick’s motive to kill the two victims involved a mistaken belief that they had rendered him unconscious using a date-rape drug and that Croker had then raped him.
Prosecutors pointed to DNA evidence on bloody jeans discarded in a dumpster and a bloody shirt found in the bushes at a nearby hotel that they said linked Landrick to the murders.
Landrick testified in his own defence and denied that he had killed his neighbours. The trial heard that McInnes had been a long-term resident of the building and had served on the co-op board and that Croker was the building’s caretaker.
The accused was also a long-term resident in the building who had had an active role in the maintenance of the highrise.