Toronto police have released a video of a possible suspect wanted in connection with the double homicide investigation of billionaire couple Barry and Honey Sherman from 2017.
Brandon Price, a detective with the Toronto police homicide squad, held a press conference Tuesday morning asking anyone who recognizes the person in the video to come forward.
“Facts are not persuasive; stories are,” the famed American trial lawyer Gerry Spence – who claims never to have not lost a criminal case in his 50 years practising – once said when asked the secret to winning over a jury.
If Mr Spence is right, Ghislaine Maxwell may well be in trouble.
After an extraordinarily short opening statement and a shaky first few days, the prosecution seemed to turn it around with blockbuster testimony from three of the British socialite’s alleged victims this past week. Accuser after accuser detailed a pattern of sexual abuse they say they suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and his “partner-in-crime” Ms Maxwell.
Four years after the murders of billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman, Toronto homicide detectives are releasing images and other information from their case for the first time in the hope that the public can help them solve the crime.
This information – police will not say what it is – is sealed in search warrant documents the Toronto Star is arguing in court that have been released shortly after the investigation began.
Inspector in charge of murder. Hank Idsinga and principal investigator Det.-Sgt. Sources say Brandon Price will provide information and updates about his investigation on Tuesday morning.
A series of headline-grabbing crime stories — mobs of people smashing windows and grabbing luxury purses in the downtown Union Square shopping district and daytime shootings in the touristy Haight-Ashbury — has only exacerbated a general feeling of vulnerability. Residents wake up to news of attacks on Asian American seniors, burglarized restaurants, and boarded-up storefronts in the city’s once-vibrant downtown.
Last year, the United States suffered its largest-ever single-year homicide increase, causing crime to now poll as a top voter concern.
This carnage has many so-called “criminal-justice reform” advocates struggling to convince Americans that things aren’t so bad, despite data proving otherwise.
Prosecutors at Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial called her Jeffrey Epstein’s “partner in crime” as they wrapped up two weeks of testimony in federal court in New York.
The British socialite, 59, is accused of grooming teenage girls for abuse by the late Epstein. She’s pleaded not guilty to all the charges, which cover a period from 1994 to 2004.
The first fortnight of the trial heard emotional testimony from some of the alleged victims of Epstein and Ms Maxwell. But there were also claims that Ms Maxwell was being targeted because Epstein, whose 2019 death in jail was ruled to be a suicide, could no longer face trial himself.
Some are surprised at the prosecutors quick wrap up, the trial was expected to last up to 6 weeks. Speculation is that the case is weak.
The head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s union issued a dire warning to visitors. In an interview Wednesday, Jamie McBride of the Police Protective League warned tourists against visiting the city amid a surge in violent crime. He emphasized they simply cannot “guarantee your safety” as things have gotten out of control.
At least 12 major U.S. cities have set annual murder records in 2021 even as there are still several weeks remaining in the year, data shows.
Philadelphia, one of the largest cities in the United States, saw 525 murders in 2021, according to police data. That’s higher than the previously set record of 500 murders in 1990.
A key question arising from the death of a gunsmith near Port Dover involves the “customer” who was in his shop Nov. 3 when the gunsmith died in a hail of police bullets.
Questions about the mysterious customer have circulated now for more than a month.
This smells bad.
Toronto Mayor John Tory is defending a series of tweets in which he described a judge’s decision to grant bail to the man charged in the death of a plainclothes police constable earlier this year as “questionable,” amid a complaint filed against him at the Ontario Civilian Police Commission.
On Monday, the Law Union of Ontario’s policing committee announced it had filed a complaint with the quasi-judicial oversight agency over Tory’s comments on the decision by Superior Court Justice Jill Copeland to grant bail to Umar Zameer. The union is a voluntary organization of approximately 200 lawyers, legal workers and law students, whose policing committee monitors decisions about policing and oversight, as well as advocates for reforms.
This case keeps getting weirder.
Vice Admiral Haydn Edmundson has been charged with sexual assault and indecent acts, the Department of National Defence announced Tuesday.
… Stéphanie Viau told CBC that Edmundson, who was a lieutenant commander at the time, exposed his genitals to her while on a navy ship during an exercise. Viau, at the time, was a 19-year-old member of the Canadian Navy.
She alleges that several days later Edmundson raped her onboard HMCS Provider while the ship was docked in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Edmundson has denied the allegations.
CNN host Don Lemon is getting blasted for covering his pal Jussie Smollett’s trial on his late-night show — without mentioning his own central role in tipping off the “Empire” star that he was being investigated by police.
As he took the stand Monday, Smollett, 39, had told the court that he first knew that police doubted his race-hate attack was real after getting a text message from Lemon, saying that was key in his decision not to hand his phone records over to cops.
On Tuesday afternoon, Liberal Justice Minister David Lametti will hold a news conference on Parliament Hill detailing the Trudeau government’s position on reducing sentences for a number of crimes, including gun offences.
The second accuser in the New York sex-trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell alleged on Monday the Briton asked her to find young women for sexual encounters with the financier Jeffrey Epstein, because his demands were insatiable.
The accuser, who testified in federal court in Manhattan under the pseudonym Kate, said she was 17 when she met Maxwell in Paris around 1994. She gave Maxwell her phone number, she said.
The Briton struck her as “very sophisticated and very elegant”, she said, adding: “She was very impressive … everything that I wanted to be.”
The graphic testimony presented to jurors in Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal sex abuse trial last week seemed at times to mesh and then detach from broader theories – criminal, conspiratorial or both – about the nature of Jeffrey Epstein’s world.
Whether prosecutors and defense attorneys are successful in separating criminal conspiracy from the conspiracy theories that run through the entire Epstein-Maxwell narrative may determine how the criminal complaint against the 59-year-old former British socialite is ultimately resolved.
