NEW WESTMINSTER — A Surrey woman who murdered her mother by stabbing her 24 times will be eligible to apply for parole after serving 12 years in prison.
Earlier this year Gloria Zerbinos, 30, was found guilty of second-degree murder, which carries an automatic life sentence. Justice Frits Verhoeven set her parole eligibility on Monday, in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster.
The former stripper stabbed her 43-year-old mother Panagiota “Yota” Zerbinos to death on Nov. 8, 2012, in her tiny basement suite in Fleetwood.
During the trial the court heard that at the tail end of a series of police interrogations after her arrest Zerbinos had told the officers her mom was involved in a conspiracy to chloroform her and pimp her out, and that she had to put a stop to it. “It sounds crazy, but it’s true,” she told the police.
She said her mom “pissed her off.”
Gloria was Panagiota’s only child. When the mother dropped off her daughter’s laundry, the court heard, the daughter confronted her about this sexual slavery conspiracy and that, Zerbinos told police, “went sour.”
The court had already heard testimony that Zerbinos had assaulted her mother on more than one occasion before the homicide, and that the mother had been afraid to be alone with her daughter in the months leading up to her death.
Zerbinos did not testify on her own behalf.
The court heard she suffered from psychotic delusions while living in Saskatoon several years earlier and claimed that evil spirits were coming through light sockets in her bedroom and trying to molest her. She set up toy cameras she’d bought from a dollar store, to catch them in the act, reasoning that the spirits didn’t know they were toys. She also blamed a boyfriend of being involved in a black-market sex slavery conspiracy against her.
She was arrested in Vancouver on Nov. 10, 2012, inside a Vancouver strip club called No. 5 Orange, where she’d worked as an exotic dancer about a year and a half earlier under her stage name, “Naudia Nice.”
tom.zytaruk@thenownewspaper.com
