Aldergrove’s Davey Butorac, who won an appeal last year to have two murder convictions overturned and new trials ordered, will be back in front of a jury in his new trial for the killings of two sex trade workers. It will be held in B.C. Supreme Court in March, 2015.
Twenty days have been set aside for the trial or trials.
In October, 2013, Butorac was granted new trials, after winning an appeal of his convictions in the killings of two prostitutes.
The 35-year-old Aldergrove man had been found guilty in a jury trial in 2010 of murdering Gwendolyn Lawton, 46, of Abbotsford in March, 2007 and Sheryl Koroll, 50, of Langley on July 7, 2007.
Lawton’s body was found on March 13, 2007 in a rural area of Abbotsford, while Koroll’s body was found dumped at a concrete plant in Langley City on July 7, 2007.
The convictions were set aside by the B.C. Court of Appeal on the basis that the trial judge erred in accepting “the evidence of each murder as similar fact evidence with respect to the other.”
Butorac’s lawyer had argued before the initial trial that evidence relating to the two murder counts should be separated. The judge disagreed.
DNA of the victims found in Butorac’s car and on his shoe led to his original conviction. A motive was never made known.
Butorac was sentenced to 23 years in prison for the murders.
Details about how the trial will go ahead, and whether they will held separately but at the same time, aren’t known at this time. But jury selection is planned for March 5, 2015 and the trial or trials are set for 20 days, starting March 23 of next year.
At some point, he will also go to trial for the second-degree murder of Aldergrove’s Margaret Redford, whose body was found floating in Bertrand Creek in Aldergrove on May 20, 2006.
Jury selection for that trial had been planned for February, 2013, but was postponed until November and still has not taken place No trial date has been set.
