by Gary Dimmock
Ottawa Citizen
Adrian Daou was condemned to life in prison on Wednesday for the 2010 axe killing of Jennifer Stewart, a 36-year-old Vanier mom he chose as his ‘perfect score’ in a murder plot for notorious hip-hop fame.
Daou wanted to trade his dead-end job as a crack dealer for the life of a “billionaire rap star” and figured he needed to kill the frail and tiny Stewart, weighing just 80 lbs and turning tricks to feed her crack habit. He said he wanted to kill so he could nail down the ‘real killing rhymes.’
The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder after deliberating for three days.On Wednesday, her parents trembled the moment the foreman read the guilty verdict.
Their brief victim-impact statement was read in court by an emotional John Monette, the lead detective on the case. Their “precious” daughter had met her end in the “most violent” way and “nobody deserves to die like that,” her parents wrote in their statement.
The guilty verdict brought “some justice for Jen,” they said. “We love and miss you, Jen.”
When Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger afforded Daou, 24, the opportunity to say anything before the mandatory sentence was passed, he simply replied, “No.”
Maranger described the slaying as the “senseless, vicious murder of an innocent human being.” Daou will not be eligible for parole for at least 25 years.
The case was anchored in Daou’s confession to police in February 2013 after he’d spent 22 days in an isolation cell at the Ottawa Carleton Regional Detention Centre, where he was serving a sentence on a drug conviction. He had told an older guard that he’d like to confess to a murder.
In his first of what would be a series of confessions, he said he had used a “military knife” to kill Stewart, when in fact she was killed with an axe. Police have yet to recover the weapon used to kill Stewart and have no DNA linking Daou to the killing. In fact, the jury heard, another man’s DNA was found on Stewart’s body.
Daou, who was suicidal and under a psychiatrist’s care at the time, was relieved to be out of the “the hole” and asked police — who provided him with plenty of coffee and pizza during his interview — if he could get an overnight transfer out of isolation at the provincial jail to a federal prison.
Nine days later and still desperate to get out of Innes Road jail, Daou confessed to another killing, but detectives had already solved that homicide through DNA evidence.
The jury was also shown a Canadian Tire receipt for the items Daou said he used in the slaying, including an axe, that he said he bought about two weeks before killing. A search of Canadian Tire records found one matching the four-item transaction, from two months before the killing. Police were unable to retrieve security video of the purchase.
Daou’s defence team — Robert Carew and Annik Wills — told the jury that his confession was unreliable and that there wasn’t a shred of physical evidence against their client. Wills said the Crown said detectives had held back details that only Stewart’s killer would know but that all the facts Daou gave police were readily available in newspaper stories. Court heard that he was reading stories about the slaying online when he told an ex-girlfriend he was the killer.
Wills also said the axe the prosecutors held up for the jury wasn’t the actual weapon but one police purchased to show jurors what it looked like. She also reminded them police never bothered to track down and interview the man who Daou said dumped the weapon, beyond leaving a single voice mail.