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Christine LePage
Is she guilty
of a crime or victim of an unscrupulous sting?
Christine Lepage found
guilty of murder
Paul Cherry, Montreal
Gazette, March 10, 2005
Christine Lepage appeared stunned
as a jury convicted her of murder that dates back more than two
decades.
While in its fourth day of
sequestered deliberation the jury came back with guilty verdicts
in the April 28, 1981 murder of Germain Derome, a 56-year-old
funeral home director and the attempted murder of his partner
Julien Bessette.
Superior Court Justice W. Claude
Décarie informed Lepage of the automatic life sentence,
with no chance of parole until after having served 25 years,
that accompanies a first-degree murder conviction
"I'm surprised that we've
everything we presented not even a piece of doubt entered the
minds of the jury," Olivier said adding he has already prepared
an appeal based on evidence that was deemed inadmissible before
the trial started. The evidence includes media interviews and
police statements Bessette gave after Derome was killed.
Olivier said Bessette gave
six different versions of what happened that night. Bessette,
a television actor, died of cancer in 1999, when he was 69.
When Lepage testified in her
defence she admitted to being at Derome's home the night of the
murder but as a call girl. She said Derome had paid her up front
for sex but Bessette walked in on them while they made small
talk.
Lepage said she walked out
on the pair while they argued. Her fingerprints were recovered
from the scene but were not matched to her until 2000.
"I would have loved to
have had Mr. Bessette (on the stand)," Olivier said. "Let's
just say he would have had a long, long day with me."
The Gazette is following this
story. Please read Friday's paper for all the details.
© Montreal Gazette 2005
Woman given life sentence
for 1981 murder
Case of slain funeral director finally solved
By INGRID PERITZ, March
11, 2005
MONTREAL -- It took nearly
a quarter century and an RCMP sting for the law to catch up with
Christine Lepage. Almost 24 years after the crime was committed,
the 49-year-old woman was convicted yesterday of murder.
Ms. Lepage was led away from
a Quebec courtroom to begin serving a life sentence for the death
of Germain Derome, a funeral director she killed in 1981 after
getting into his home by posing as a survey taker.
Ms. Lepage was also convicted
of the attempted murder of actor Julien Bessette, Mr. Derome's
live-in companion.
"Justice never stops advancing,"
Crown prosecutor Josée Grandchamp said in an interview
after a jury delivered its verdict. "It's very comforting
for family members to see that this whole story is finally solved."
Ms. Lepage's defence had suggested
that Mr. Derome's partner, who died of cancer in 1999, was the
killer. Mr. Bessette's relatives, who gathered at the Longueuil
courthouse on Montreal's South Shore for yesterday's verdict,
voiced relief that his name was cleared.
"I hope this verdict teaches
a lesson to young people who've pulled off a dirty trick. They'll
know that justice is fair and [the law] has a long arm,"
Mr. Bessette's niece, France Gosselin, told reporters.
Ms. Lepage, found guilty of
first-degree murder, will be ineligible for parole for 25 years.
The case took a nine-month-long
RCMP sting operation to help convict Ms. Lepage.
Jurors heard that in 1981,
Ms. Lepage talked her way into the South Shore home of Mr. Derome,
55, by saying she was doing a survey on funeral homes. She had
a glass of water before going to the bathroom, where she put
on gloves and returned to shoot Mr. Derome and Mr. Bessette with
a revolver.
Investigators lifted fingerprints
off the glass but they went unmatched for 19 years because police
ran them through a database that contained only men's fingerprints.
Police checked again in 2000
-- this time with women's fingerprints -- which led to an elaborate
sting operation. In a secretly videotaped confession to an undercover
RCMP officer posing as someone trying to recruit her for a criminal
gang, Ms. Lepage admitted to the crime. She said she pulled the
trigger for her "tough-guy" boyfriend and claimed she
didn't know who ordered the murder, or why.
But "if someone is ready
to kill you, it's because generally you're a damn backstabber,"
she concluded.
Ms. Lepage's defence was that
she was at Mr. Derome's house not as a hit woman but as a call
girl, and Mr. Bessette came in and surprised them. The defence
also argued that the RCMP cornered her into confessing.
But Ms. Grandchamp, the prosecutor,
said the defence's arguments were implausible and the RCMP video
played a determinant role in Ms. Lepage's conviction.
The defence says it plans to
appeal the verdict.
Jury must decide if woman
was hired killer or call girl
By TU THANH HA, Globe and
Mail, , March 7, 2005
MONTREAL -- Was Christine Lepage
just a call girl? Or was she a female gun for hire?
For nearly two decades, the
unsolved case sat in Denis Brunet's desk, haunting the crime-scene
technician.
"For 19 years, each time
I opened my drawer, I could see that file. I never forgot it,"
the now retired Mr. Brunet recalled recently.
He was testifying last month
at the start of an extraordinary murder trial in Longueuil, south
of Montreal.
A jury will begin deliberating
this week the fate of Ms. Lepage, accused of the 1981 killing
of funeral director Germain Derome.
Mr. Brunet had retrieved fingerprints
on a glass at the scene of the crime and sent them to the RCMP
but there was no match.
He later learned that the RCMP
had searched only a database that held men's prints.
It was not until 2000 that
another check led police to Ms. Lepage, whose prints had been
on file since 1974, for shoplifting.
An elaborate sting operation
was then initiated.
The Quebec Superior Court jury
has been shown a 2002 RCMP videotape in which Ms. Lepage, now
49, bragged about carrying out a contract hit on Mr. Derome.
When she made those revelations,
she thought she was speaking to a mobster.
But she had been duped into
speaking to an undercover agent, and the conversation was secretly
recorded.
On the videotape, she described
how, on the evening of April 28, 1981, she was in Brossard, south
of Montreal. Posing as a pollster, she persuaded Mr. Derome,
55, to let her into his house to conduct a survey.
She said she went to the bathroom,
put on gloves and came out firing her revolver at Mr. Derome;
his partner, 51-year-old actor Julien Bessette; and their German
shepherd.
Defence lawyer Claude Olivier
says his client was at Mr. Derome's house -- but as a call girl.
He says Mr. Derome was alive
when she left, and he suggested, without naming him, that the
now-deceased Mr. Bessette killed his partner out of jealousy.
Mr. Bessette told police at
the time that the shooter was a young blond woman and that he
survived by shielding himself behind a chair. He died of cancer
in 1999 .
Ms. Lepage says she embroidered
her recollections during the meeting that police videotaped because,
thinking she was dealing with a gangster, she was afraid and
wanted to look tough.
On the videotape, she tells
the undercover agent that she carried out the killing at the
behest of her "tough-guy" boyfriend of the time.
She did not know who had ordered
the hit or why someone wanted Mr. Derome dead.
"I didn't even ask the
question. Because it was clear for me, if someone is ready to
kill you, it's because generally you're a damn backstabber,"
she says on the video.
She said she later burned the
clothes she wore.
However, Mr. Brunet, working
for Brossard Police, found her prints at the scene. Although
he specified that the suspect was a woman, they were checked
against a men's database and no match were made.
It was not until 2000 that
a colleague of Mr. Brunet, working for the Sûreté
du Québec, asked whether Mr. Brunet had old prints he
wanted the provincial police to check. This led Brossard Police
investigators to Ms. Lepage. But unable to buttress their case,
they turned again to the RCMP.
The RCMP set up a nine-month
sting that began in a similar fashion to the ruse Ms. Lepage
is alleged to have used to enter Mr. Derome's house.
A female undercover agent visited
Ms. Lepage by posing as a cosmetics saleswoman who wanted to
conduct a survey.
Later, Ms. Lepage was told
she had won a beauty-products contest that included a three-day
trip.
During that trip, agents pretended
to recruit her into what she thought was a criminal gang, eventually
leading to the videotaped meeting with what she thought was the
gang's boss.
© Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All
Rights Reserved.
- Visit for sex, not murder,
woman claims
Lepage accused
of contract hit; Testifying in own defence, she tells jury she
had visited victim as a call girl
PAUL CHERRY, The Gazette,
March 03, 2005
Christine Lepage stood yesterday
before the jury that will decide her fate and admitted to being
in Germain Derome's house the night he was killed.
The 49-year-old also admitted
to being paid to be at Derome's home that night in 1981, but
not for the reasons that led her to be charged with Derome's
murder.
The alleged hitwoman said her
fingerprints were found on a glass at the scene of the fatal
shooting because Derome paid to have sex with her and not because
she was hired to kill him.
Lepage detailed in Quebec Superior
Court how her life spiralled downward from 1979, when she was
found to have cancer while pregnant. She and her husband split
up, and she slipped into a depression.
Shortly after giving birth
to her daughter, Lepage told her murder trial in Longueuil yesterday,
she essentially ended up homeless and contacted an old friend
who owned a call-girl agency. By September 1980 she was working
as a prostitute.
On April 28, 1981, the night
Derome was killed, Lepage said she "did two clients"
before being chauffeured to a home in Brossard about 9:30. "I
recognized the house because I had worked there before - about
two weeks before," Lepage said.
She said Derome, a funeral
director, paid her $110 up front and offered her a drink. She
declined and asked for a glass of water. As they sat in the living
room making small talk, a man walked in.
"(Derome) jumped out of
his seat like he wasn't expecting him," Lepage said, adding
she would later learn the man was Derome's live-in partner, television
actor Julien Bessette.
"He asked, 'What is she
doing here?' " she told the jury. Derome told Bessette she
was doing a survey about funeral homes.
Lepage said she decided to
play along with what Derome said but left the house quickly as
Bessette and Derome argued.
When she got back inside her
chauffeur's car, he remarked that she had been with her client
for only 10 minutes.
"I told him his boyfriend
walked in on us. We even laughed about it," Lepage said,
adding she was then driven to another customer's home. After
that she went to a brasserie and then home to sleep.
When she woke up the next morning,
news that Derome had been killed was on television. From the
reports, she realized Bessette was claiming a woman had slain
Derome.
"I knew it was going to
be put on my back," she said.
Bessette died in 1999 of cancer.
Lepage's lawyer, Claude Olivier,
then asked why she didn't go to the police immediately. She said
her boyfriend at the time told her the police would never believe
a call girl.
Earlier in the trial, while
cross-examining police investigators, Olivier highlighted inconsistencies
in Bessette's statements after the murder.
Lepage's fingerprint was lifted
from the glass but it wasn't matched to her until 2000. The Brossard
police then asked the RCMP to set up an elaborate sting operation
to make Lepage believe she was being recruited into a major crime
gang.
The operation ended with Lepage's
arrest after she was videotaped admitting to carrying out a contract
to kill Derome.
But the version of events to
which she admitted contradicts much of what actually occurred.
For example, Lepage told the
man who she thought was "the big boss" of the organization
that she threw the firearm in a river. The weapon was actually
recovered near Derome's home.
Asked why she would admit to
"Dan," who she believed was the head of a criminal
gang, that she committed a murder, Lepage said she feared for
her life.
She said the RCMP's double
agents were so convincing, she thought her life was in jeopardy.
She said she believed people who worked in crime gangs that big
usually end up dead.
Lepage said she went to a Nov.
21, 2002, meeting with the "big boss" intent on leaving
his gang. She had been told by another double agent that "Dan"
had the power to "erase" crimes.
As the police videotaped the
meeting, "Dan" confronted her about the 1981 killing
and pretended he had got the information from a police source.
Lepage said she felt the only
way out was to own up to the killing, hoping they would no longer
be interested in her because of the attention it would draw on
them.
Final arguments are to begin
tomorrow.
pcherry@thegazette.canwest.com
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2005
Fingerprints Matched
by New Equipment
Clipped from The Montreal
Gazette , By IRWIN BLOCK November 23, 2002
Canada - A 20-year-old murder
case has finally led to charges, and the forthcoming trial could
answer the still cloudy question of motive.
Why was Germain Derome, a soft-spoken
funeral-home director, gunned down at the Brossard home he shared
with a well-known Quebec actor?
Longueuil police, who arrested
Christine Lepage, 47, Thursday night near her east-end Montreal
residence, were not speculating yesterday on motive in this case.
But they attributed Lepage's
arrest to the merger of South Shore police forces and a decision
in June to take another stab at solving this and other cold cases.
According to police and the
late actor Julien Bessette, who shared the house with Derome,
55, a slight, blond female came to the door and asked for water.
When she got it, she pumped
two bullets from a semi-automatic .22-calibre pistol into Derome,
a third into the rump of their 5-year-old German shepherd, Santa,
who was not seriously hurt, and fired a fourth shot at Bessette.
Bessette, who was playing the
role of a priest on the weekly television program Terre Humaine,
suffered a cut on the forehead from a piece of wood sent flying
when a bullet hit a chair.
Bessette - well known for his
roles in the long-running Radio-Canada television series Les
Belles Histoires des Pays d'en Haut and Le Sorcier - agreed to
take a lie-detector test, which cleared him of any suspicion.
(He died of throat cancer at age 69 in March 1999.)
In June, Longueuil police called
on the sophisticated fingerprint-matching services of the Sûreté
du Québec and RCMP to get a match, which led them to identify
a suspect. "We had some leads, but never were able to match
the fingerprints on the glass," said Longueuil police Constable
Pierre Quintal.
But with the match, police
tracked down the suspect. "We do not know the motives for
the crime, though robbery is not one of them," Quintal added.
Lepage was arraigned in Quebec
Court in Longueuil yesterday on charges of first-degree murder,
plotting to commit the crime with one Benoît Baillargeon,
since deceased, and using a weapon while committing a criminal
act. She is scheduled to appear in court for her preliminary
hearing Dec. 5.
© Copyright 2002 Montreal
Gazette
'Make-believe'
world trapped alleged assassin
CanWest News Service, February
25, 2005
MONTREAL (CNS) -- Quebec RCMP
created an elaborate "make-believe" underworld in an
effort to ensnare an alleged female assassin, the jury heard
Thursday at the murder trial of Christine Lepage.
Lepage, 49, is charged with
first-degree murder in the April 1981 death of Germain Derome,
57, in his home on the south shore of Montreal.
Serge Coulombe, the man responsible
for creating such make-believe worlds for the RCMP's economic
crimes division in Quebec, told Quebec Superior Court how the
Mounties got her to confess to "the big boss" of a
fictional criminal organization.
Lepage's fingerprints were
lifted from a glass at the scene of Derome's murder over two
decades ago. But the police only matched her fingerprints to
those stored in a police database during the summer of 2000.
By then, Derome's partner Julien Bessette -- the only eyewitness
to the crime -- had died of cancer.
To get more evidence, the Brossard
police asked the RCMP for help in getting someone to win Lepage's
confidence.
"It's like writing a book,
with chapters that follow one another," Coulombe said in
describing the series of "scenarios" undercover agents
put Lepage through for months before setting her up for a meeting
with a man they nicknamed "the big boss."
The RCMP's operation began
with surveillance on Lepage for more than two months in 2001.
He explained that Lepage was
asked to do a variety of tasks that created the appearance she
was becoming part of a crime gang.
After a few months, the RCMP
felt Lepage was ready to meet "the big boss." The premise
in the scenario was that he would pretend to be someone who didn't
want people in his organization who drew police attention.
Coulombe said that during the
meeting, "the big boss" told Lepage he had a police
source who informed him she was a suspect in a 1981 murder in
Brossard, Que. To stay in his organization she would have to
tell him what she knew of this.
That is where Coulombe's testimony
ended Thursday.
In her opening statements to
the jury earlier this week Crown prosecutor Josee Grandchamp
said Lepage admitted to murdering Derome to the undercover agent.
(MONTREAL GAZETTE)
© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2005
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
