A jury has finally begun hearing evidence in a trial involving the murder of Juthlande Pierre, a 42-year-old woman who was killed more than two decades ago in the West Island.
Dieuseul Jean, 56, is alleged to have killed Pierre, his girlfriend, on Dec. 25, 1995, and is charged with second-degree murder. As prosecutor Jacques Dagenais explained in his opening statement to the jury at the Montreal courthouse on Tuesday, it took 22 years to bring the accused to trial because he was living in hiding, under a different identity, for years in the U.S.
Dagenais said Jean’s true identity was discovered in 2013, after he applied for a driver’s licence in the U.S. and was required to supply fingerprints. Jean had been the subject of an Interpol warrant for two decades because the Montreal police knew he had travelled to New Jersey soon after Pierre was killed in Roxboro.
Dagenais said an autopsy done on Pierre’s body, discovered several days after she was killed, revealed she had been stabbed, but the cause of death was determined to be by strangulation
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