Charges have been stayed against a now-retired B.C. coroner who had been accused of improperly examining Langley City murder victim Laura Lynn Lamoureux.
Kenneth Glen Mattinson, 63, was charged in October 2010 with two counts each of interference with a dead body and breach of trust by a public officer. At the time of his arrest, the RCMP said a forensic identification officer at a crime scene in Langley “noticed what appeared to be a pattern of questionable and possibly criminal behaviour in the manipulation of bodies.”
The investigation, police said, involved examinations at crime scenes after two separate murders: the shooting of 21-year-old Brianna Helen Kinnear in Coquitlam in February, 2009 and the shooting a month later of 36-year-old Lamoureux in a residential area of Langley City.
Last January, Crown counsel said it did not feel there was enough evidence to go ahead with a charge in the Kinnear case.
It has now made the same decision, to drop the charges against Mattinson in the Lamoureux case. That decision was announced on Jan. 23 in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster.
— with files from Sheila
Reynolds, Surrey Leader
