LJ_Reloaded
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But.. MEN DO IT, TOO! Right? So I guess that makes it SEXIST to report on this.
http://www.theprovince.com/news/Special+report+women+kill/5843265/story.html#ixzz1gFK9XNBN
October 12, 2011.
In recent weeks, B.C. courts have dealt with four women charged with cold, calculating crimes.
The offences, along with another one in the courts last year, stand out for their apparent premeditation — all but one arranged to have men do the killing for them — and lack the more common defence of the battered wife who kills because she fears being killed.
Female murderers are rare. A 2008 Statistics Canada report noted that women made up, on average, 11 per cent of all those charged with homicide between 1998 and 2007.
Simon Fraser University professor Jennifer Marchbank said there is a dearth of current studies on violence by women and agreed much of it in North America dates back to the 1980s and 1990s.
B.C. experts prepared to comment on the recent cases said nothing indicates there is a trend of increasingly violent female killers.
“There aren’t murderous women behind every bush that we have to be worried about,” said University of Victoria professor Sibylle Artz, who has studied violence by female teens.
There are usually multiple reasons for committing violence, including murder, said Sibylle. “There is no single predictor that creates violence,” she said.
Women who commit violence may be at the end of their rope, with what they see as no other options, especially when they’ve been abused or have witnessed abuse and have no support system, she said.
“Their only response to violence is violence,” she said. “That isn’t an excuse. That’s an explanation.
“Murder is an act borne out of no option but this one, and the fact that it is wrong, that the laws exist to punish killing, doesn’t change how people make sense of their own situation.”
Marchbank agreed and said murder for women is usually “an act of absolute desperation.”
Catherine Murray, the chair of the gender, sexualities and women’s studies department at SFU, said the reasons for violence are usually rooted in stresses — including economic and social stresses — within relationships.
And what she said is an increased access to guns in Canada means “it’s easier to find someone who is more likely to be in a position to use one.”
Marchbank also said the hiring of hit men isn’t exclusive to female murderers. However, she speculated women may turn to men because they may not feel physically capable of killing someone likely larger than they are.
She also dismissed the idea the calculated killings were influenced by the proliferation of TV police dramas.
“They may reduce our sensibilities to violence, but it’s ridiculous to assume that because CSI is on five times a week instead of two that people are going out and murdering more,” she said.
The lack of current data is evidenced by the latest research on the issue on the Corrections Canada website, called the Patterns of Violent Crime by Women. Written in 1998, the report deals with cases in the 1970s and ’80s.
“Among both men and women, charges for murder or manslaughter are rare, and were laid against 486 men in 1991 and 48 women,” the report said. “Among women charged with homicide in 1993, 71 per cent of the victims were related to the offender domestically, compared with 24 per cent of the men.”
And 1993 research cited by the report found “changing work patterns, child-rearing and marital and divorce patterns [are] likely to induce more stress in the lives of women and men and lead to more anger and aggression on a daily basis.”
That, it said, could have contributed to the rise in violence from 1970 to 1991, when charges against *women for violent offences rose to 13.6 per cent from eight per cent of all charges against women.
Liza Joylene Belcourt
The 34-year-old Surrey mother was found guilty last month of conspiring to hire two hit men to murder her ex-common-law husband, Rick Noniewicz.
She and her accomplices, David Dean Laidlaw, 41, and Jordan Joseph Doiron, 25, were each convicted of one count of conspiring to murder Noniewicz, with whom she was locked in a lengthy
custody battle over their son.
Belcourt had hired Laidlaw and Doiron to carry out the murder and the plot was discovered by police on a wiretap.
“What kind of price to put one’s lights out?” Belcourt was overheard asking them in a conversation about a “MAC-10 that whispers,” or a submachine-gun with a silencer.
Belcourt, who had recently won a $23,000 Insurance Corp. of B.C. settlement, offered to pay the men $20,000.
Police told Belcourt they knew of the plot; it was never carried out.
She has not yet been sentenced, but conspiracy to commit murder carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Jean Ann James
The 72-year-old Richmond*woman was found guilty last month of first-degree murder in the 1992 slaying of her friend, Gladys Wakabayashi, 41, because she believed Wakabayashi, the daughter of a billionaire, was having an affair with her husband.
“I slit her throat,” she calmly tells an undercover cop in a confession that police taped as part of the so-called Mr. Big sting they devised to convict her.
James was sentenced to the mandatory *sentence of life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years.
She has filed an appeal, seeking to have her conviction overturned and a new trial ordered on grounds including that the trial judge erred in failing to exclude the Mr. Big confession.
Meena Jouhal
The Surrey woman was sentenced last year to seven years in jail after she pleaded guilty to trying to hire someone to murder her ex-husband, Navtej Jouhal.
Her husband’s parents filed a civil lawsuit against her and co-accused Baljit Buttar claiming damages for “past, present and continuing personal injury, psychological trauma and other damages arising out of a conspiracy . . . to
murder the plaintiffs’ son” to collect on his life-insurance policy, according to a writ filed in court.
The writ said the RCMP discovered the plot and “were able to prevent the defendants from killing the plaintiffs’ son.”
Navtej Jouhal also filed a separate lawsuit against Meena Jouhal, 33.
The civil suits were filed in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster on Aug. 28, 2009.
Amarjit Kaur Lally
The Surrey woman tried to hire hit men to kill an ex-boss to whom she owed *money and her mother-in-law, who was apparently making her life miserable and on whom she had taken out a $20,000 life-insurance policy.
The hit men turned out to be undercover police officers. Lally also agreed to run drugs over the border for them because she didn’t have enough money to pay their fee.
The 46-year-old woman pleaded guilty to one count of counselling to commit an offence and faces up to seven years in jail. She is scheduled to be sentenced in the new year.
Prosecutor Satinder Sidhu is seeking a sentence of five to seven years of incarceration.
“The accused blames everyone but herself for her predicament,” Sidhu said.
Lally borrowed a disputed sum of money — from $1,000 to $10,000 — from her former employer Gurcharan Singh Brar and his wife, *Harbans, and was unable to pay an exorbitant rate of interest on the loan. She was concerned her family, particularly her husband, with whom she had a history of domestic abuse, would find out.
She went to an acquaintance to find a hired killer to murder Brar and he went to police, which led to an undercover sting. The officers showed her a picture of Brar, who posed with a faked bullet wound in his head, and Lally also asked the officers to kill her mother-in-law.
Lally had a troubled family life. She was reportedly asked to divorce her husband in 2001 so she could be married to one of his relatives in India to help him immigrate to Canada, and her husband then secretly *married another woman in India.
Under family pressure, he later divorced his second wife and remarried Lally, only to assault her at her workplace nine days later.
Beverly Ann Earhart
She was denied the chance this month to appeal her 2010 conviction for first-degree murder in the slaying of her common-law husband.
Earhart was found guilty in the murder of Jeffrey Sabine, with whom she’d been *living for five years. Court heard she had devised a plan with her daughter’s boyfriend to kill him.
In 2006, the boyfriend, Jeffrey Ashmore, and his friend, Christopher Cyz, *strangled Sabine, 26, in a Surrey apartment and dumped his body into the Fraser River off Annacis Island in Delta.
Two days later, Earhart reported Sabine missing and told police she was worried because he had been suicidal when he left for a walk the last time she saw him. His body washed up that day.
Earhart eventually told police she strangled Sabine. She was initially charged with second-degree murder, but police noticed inconsistencies in the statements of the others involved and they launched a *so-called Mr. Big undercover sting against her. She told undercover officers that she had planned the murder but had not executed it. After she was arrested, she confessed to police again.
Her lawyers argued on appeal that police had tricked her into confessing and her rights had been violated so the confession should be tossed out. It didn’t work.
Ashmore, Cyz and Ashley Hiebert, *Earhart’s daughter, were also convicted in the crime.
http://www.theprovince.com/news/Special+report+women+kill/5843265/story.html#ixzz1gFK9XNBN
October 12, 2011.
In recent weeks, B.C. courts have dealt with four women charged with cold, calculating crimes.
The offences, along with another one in the courts last year, stand out for their apparent premeditation — all but one arranged to have men do the killing for them — and lack the more common defence of the battered wife who kills because she fears being killed.
Female murderers are rare. A 2008 Statistics Canada report noted that women made up, on average, 11 per cent of all those charged with homicide between 1998 and 2007.
Simon Fraser University professor Jennifer Marchbank said there is a dearth of current studies on violence by women and agreed much of it in North America dates back to the 1980s and 1990s.
B.C. experts prepared to comment on the recent cases said nothing indicates there is a trend of increasingly violent female killers.
“There aren’t murderous women behind every bush that we have to be worried about,” said University of Victoria professor Sibylle Artz, who has studied violence by female teens.
There are usually multiple reasons for committing violence, including murder, said Sibylle. “There is no single predictor that creates violence,” she said.
Women who commit violence may be at the end of their rope, with what they see as no other options, especially when they’ve been abused or have witnessed abuse and have no support system, she said.
“Their only response to violence is violence,” she said. “That isn’t an excuse. That’s an explanation.
“Murder is an act borne out of no option but this one, and the fact that it is wrong, that the laws exist to punish killing, doesn’t change how people make sense of their own situation.”
Marchbank agreed and said murder for women is usually “an act of absolute desperation.”
Catherine Murray, the chair of the gender, sexualities and women’s studies department at SFU, said the reasons for violence are usually rooted in stresses — including economic and social stresses — within relationships.
And what she said is an increased access to guns in Canada means “it’s easier to find someone who is more likely to be in a position to use one.”
Marchbank also said the hiring of hit men isn’t exclusive to female murderers. However, she speculated women may turn to men because they may not feel physically capable of killing someone likely larger than they are.
She also dismissed the idea the calculated killings were influenced by the proliferation of TV police dramas.
“They may reduce our sensibilities to violence, but it’s ridiculous to assume that because CSI is on five times a week instead of two that people are going out and murdering more,” she said.
The lack of current data is evidenced by the latest research on the issue on the Corrections Canada website, called the Patterns of Violent Crime by Women. Written in 1998, the report deals with cases in the 1970s and ’80s.
“Among both men and women, charges for murder or manslaughter are rare, and were laid against 486 men in 1991 and 48 women,” the report said. “Among women charged with homicide in 1993, 71 per cent of the victims were related to the offender domestically, compared with 24 per cent of the men.”
And 1993 research cited by the report found “changing work patterns, child-rearing and marital and divorce patterns [are] likely to induce more stress in the lives of women and men and lead to more anger and aggression on a daily basis.”
That, it said, could have contributed to the rise in violence from 1970 to 1991, when charges against *women for violent offences rose to 13.6 per cent from eight per cent of all charges against women.
Liza Joylene Belcourt
The 34-year-old Surrey mother was found guilty last month of conspiring to hire two hit men to murder her ex-common-law husband, Rick Noniewicz.
She and her accomplices, David Dean Laidlaw, 41, and Jordan Joseph Doiron, 25, were each convicted of one count of conspiring to murder Noniewicz, with whom she was locked in a lengthy
custody battle over their son.
Belcourt had hired Laidlaw and Doiron to carry out the murder and the plot was discovered by police on a wiretap.
“What kind of price to put one’s lights out?” Belcourt was overheard asking them in a conversation about a “MAC-10 that whispers,” or a submachine-gun with a silencer.
Belcourt, who had recently won a $23,000 Insurance Corp. of B.C. settlement, offered to pay the men $20,000.
Police told Belcourt they knew of the plot; it was never carried out.
She has not yet been sentenced, but conspiracy to commit murder carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Jean Ann James
The 72-year-old Richmond*woman was found guilty last month of first-degree murder in the 1992 slaying of her friend, Gladys Wakabayashi, 41, because she believed Wakabayashi, the daughter of a billionaire, was having an affair with her husband.
“I slit her throat,” she calmly tells an undercover cop in a confession that police taped as part of the so-called Mr. Big sting they devised to convict her.
James was sentenced to the mandatory *sentence of life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years.
She has filed an appeal, seeking to have her conviction overturned and a new trial ordered on grounds including that the trial judge erred in failing to exclude the Mr. Big confession.
Meena Jouhal
The Surrey woman was sentenced last year to seven years in jail after she pleaded guilty to trying to hire someone to murder her ex-husband, Navtej Jouhal.
Her husband’s parents filed a civil lawsuit against her and co-accused Baljit Buttar claiming damages for “past, present and continuing personal injury, psychological trauma and other damages arising out of a conspiracy . . . to
murder the plaintiffs’ son” to collect on his life-insurance policy, according to a writ filed in court.
The writ said the RCMP discovered the plot and “were able to prevent the defendants from killing the plaintiffs’ son.”
Navtej Jouhal also filed a separate lawsuit against Meena Jouhal, 33.
The civil suits were filed in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster on Aug. 28, 2009.
Amarjit Kaur Lally
The Surrey woman tried to hire hit men to kill an ex-boss to whom she owed *money and her mother-in-law, who was apparently making her life miserable and on whom she had taken out a $20,000 life-insurance policy.
The hit men turned out to be undercover police officers. Lally also agreed to run drugs over the border for them because she didn’t have enough money to pay their fee.
The 46-year-old woman pleaded guilty to one count of counselling to commit an offence and faces up to seven years in jail. She is scheduled to be sentenced in the new year.
Prosecutor Satinder Sidhu is seeking a sentence of five to seven years of incarceration.
“The accused blames everyone but herself for her predicament,” Sidhu said.
Lally borrowed a disputed sum of money — from $1,000 to $10,000 — from her former employer Gurcharan Singh Brar and his wife, *Harbans, and was unable to pay an exorbitant rate of interest on the loan. She was concerned her family, particularly her husband, with whom she had a history of domestic abuse, would find out.
She went to an acquaintance to find a hired killer to murder Brar and he went to police, which led to an undercover sting. The officers showed her a picture of Brar, who posed with a faked bullet wound in his head, and Lally also asked the officers to kill her mother-in-law.
Lally had a troubled family life. She was reportedly asked to divorce her husband in 2001 so she could be married to one of his relatives in India to help him immigrate to Canada, and her husband then secretly *married another woman in India.
Under family pressure, he later divorced his second wife and remarried Lally, only to assault her at her workplace nine days later.
Beverly Ann Earhart
She was denied the chance this month to appeal her 2010 conviction for first-degree murder in the slaying of her common-law husband.
Earhart was found guilty in the murder of Jeffrey Sabine, with whom she’d been *living for five years. Court heard she had devised a plan with her daughter’s boyfriend to kill him.
In 2006, the boyfriend, Jeffrey Ashmore, and his friend, Christopher Cyz, *strangled Sabine, 26, in a Surrey apartment and dumped his body into the Fraser River off Annacis Island in Delta.
Two days later, Earhart reported Sabine missing and told police she was worried because he had been suicidal when he left for a walk the last time she saw him. His body washed up that day.
Earhart eventually told police she strangled Sabine. She was initially charged with second-degree murder, but police noticed inconsistencies in the statements of the others involved and they launched a *so-called Mr. Big undercover sting against her. She told undercover officers that she had planned the murder but had not executed it. After she was arrested, she confessed to police again.
Her lawyers argued on appeal that police had tricked her into confessing and her rights had been violated so the confession should be tossed out. It didn’t work.
Ashmore, Cyz and Ashley Hiebert, *Earhart’s daughter, were also convicted in the crime.
