A 49-year-old chilly case murder was put to relaxation inside a Calgary courtroom on Monday with each the killer and his teenage sufferer’s daughter — who was simply seven months previous on the time of her mom’s dying — talking publicly for the primary time since homicide fees have been introduced.
Initially charged with homicide, Ronald James Edwards, now 75 years previous, pleaded responsible to manslaughter within the deadly stabbing of Pauline Brazeau, a 16-year-old who was killed in 1976.
Court docket of King’s Bench Justice Robert Armstrong accepted prosecutor Patrick Bigg and defence lawyer Pawel Milczarek’s joint proposal for a 6½-year sentence.
Edwards has 4½ years left to serve with credit score for the time he is spent in custody.
Each Brazeau and Edwards are of Métis heritage.
‘There aren’t any recollections’
“There aren’t any recollections,” mentioned Brazeau’s daughter Tracy, studying from a sufferer affect assertion. “Nothing shared between her and I, no laughs, no smiles.
“We did not get the possibility to share the love of a mom and daughter.”
In 2023, Edwards, who was 26 years previous on the time of the killing, was arrested at his Sundre house after investigative genetic family tree (IGG) work performed by each RCMP and Calgary law enforcement officials.
‘I am sorry’
A smaller man with darkish hair and a protracted gray beard, Edwards was supplied the possibility to handle the court docket on Monday. He supplied a tearful apology to Tracy.
“I am sorry that your mom was taken from you earlier than you had an opportunity to know her,” he mentioned.
“I used to be a drunken younger man … I do not suppose I used to be able to feeling something, I simply drank them away.”
In 1976, Brazeau had simply moved to Calgary from Yorkton, Sask., along with her toddler.
She was hanging out with family and friends on the night time of Jan. 8 and into the early morning hours of Jan. 9, 1976.
The group ate at Peppe’s Pizza on seventeenth Avenue. Brazeau misplaced her gloves and returned alone to search for them round 3:30 a.m.
Particulars of the crime come from an agreed assertion of details learn aloud by Bigg.
In accordance with the doc, Edwards was driving round within the space of seventeenth Avenue and Second Road that night time and picked up his sufferer, believing she was a prostitute.
Teen stabbed, left alone to die
In quest of a abandoned highway, Edwards drove her outdoors Calgary metropolis limits, the place the 2 had “consensual sexual activity,” in accordance with the agreed assertion of details.
Edwards was drunk that night time “and doesn’t keep in mind many particulars of what occurred.”
He is admitted to utilizing a four-inch buck knife, stabbing Brazeau outdoors of his automobile. Assuming she was useless, Edwards drove away.
Hours later, two hunters found Brazeau’s physique on Leaping Pound Street, about 20 kilometres west of town.
9 stab wounds
She was utterly bare however for a black coat protecting a part of her decrease physique.
Her blood stained clothes was close by.
An post-mortem decided Brazeau had defensive wounds on her palms and had been stabbed 9 instances.
The primary “in depth investigation” went chilly. Police revisited the case quite a few instances Within the a long time that adopted.
By the mid-Nineteen Nineties, police had a DNA profile of their suspect based mostly on a semen swab taken from Brazeau’s physique after her dying. In 2022, investigators used IGG to search out kin of the killer, figuring out Edwards as their suspect.
‘Very rewarding’
On Oct. 17, 2022, officers grabbed a glass mug utilized by Edwards from the Sundre A&W, examined it and confirmed it was a match to the profile of their suspect.
Every of Brazeau’s 5 relations who wrote affect statements thanked the RCMP and Calgary police for sticking with the case.
“It is very rewarding to listen to as an officer who labored on the case, but additionally we have now to understand that it is not simply the officers immediately. It was the officers that have been on the scene in 1976. It was the officers from process forces in the ’90s in addition to 2000s,” mentioned Sgt. Ferrah Yeager with the RCMP’s historic murder unit.
“It is superb to see a decision to one thing that is 49 years previous.”
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