Charles Lassonde’s lawyer, Me Martin Latour, began his cross-examination on Wednesday afternoon. He began by returning to the drugs that the repentant witness used when she was a teenager, contradicting her version during interrogation where she mentioned that she had started using at 18 years old. She mentioned that every time she flew, it was to consume.
In the space of a few seconds, she told the jury that she had gone six or seven years without committing a crime, and then that she had committed crimes throughout her life.
Me Martin Latour and Me Camille Blanchette-Sinotte represent Charles Lassonde. (Jean Roy/La Tribune)
“Are you an honest person?” asked Me Latour of the 51-year-old woman. Stuck, she replied that she “was not an honest woman” after a long hesitation.
“I am not here to explain to the jury what I did in my childhood, but to tell the truth what happened on the night of July 6 to 7,” said the witness who was to confront on several aspects discussed at the start of his interrogation in chief.
Return to the scene of the crime
In the morning, the ex-spouse of the accused and repentant witness who participated in the crime said she returned to the scene of the crime with the hope that the victim had escaped.
The woman would have placed two logs to identify the place where her friend nicknamed “Bibitte”, possibly buried alive, was. She had taken this step in case she decided to call the police. The day after the crime, Dubois asked the accused to take her back to the Danville quarry where Serge Boutin had been wrapped in a plastic sheet and buried.
“He didn’t persist, he brought me back,” she told the 14 jurors who took their seats directly in front of her.
The couple therefore jumped over a barrier, walked five minutes and found themselves near the body of Serge Boutin. “It all happened in silence,” explained the 51-year-old woman.
“I had hope that he had been able to push himself out of there, that he was still alive and that he could have escaped,” she described with emotion. His legs were not tied. I always held out hope that he would have been able to push his legs and get out. There wasn’t that much land. But when I arrived and saw that my pieces of wood were placed in the same way, I knew that he was dead, that he had not escaped.”
History and lies
Immediately after the crime, Lana Dubois, who worked as a cleaner in businesses in Victoriaville, went to work. “It was starting to get light. It must have been 4:30 in the morning. We were heading towards Victoriaville. I didn’t realize what was happening.”
When acquaintances asked them questions about Serge Boutin, Dubois and Lassonde allegedly shared the same story. “It was said that a guy was looking for Bibitte for a drug debt. We said that we had gone to give it to some guys from Sherbrooke.”
At Lassonde’s initiative, they then headed to a landfill site. They dug a hole. “He wanted to scare me. If I told anyone where Bibitte was, I would be next. I was digging the hole for myself,” she said.
-Crown prosecutor Stéphanie Landry conducted the interrogation of Lana Dubois, which lasted a day and a half. (Jean Roy/La Tribune)
The woman then returned to work. However, paranoia took hold of the couple. “When Charles came to pick me up, he told me he had been walking around town and there was spinning everywhere. I didn’t believe it that much, it seemed like paranoia to me,” she recalled.
“Everything Charles told me, it seemed so true,” she continued. […] It made me experience stress and anxiety. He didn’t want to leave me alone, because if we got arrested, he wanted us to be arrested at the same time. So I didn’t sleep much. I tried to get back to normal life, but I was having nightmares and reliving it over and over again. The words that Bibitte said kept coming back to me. As soon as I closed my eyes, I felt like I was being followed by the police.”
Lana Dubois then wondered if she was “going crazy.” She allegedly decided to talk about the situation with her sister via a game of billiards on Facebook, so that Charles Lassonde could not see her conversations.
“He told me that there were microphones in the apartment,” said the woman who had hidden the shoes they wore on the evening of the crime in the concierge room of Charles Lassonde’s employer.
“I couldn’t keep it all to myself. So I was texting how I was feeling and how I was experiencing it.”
“I feel caught in this. I couldn’t leave him any longer, because I was stuck in the impasse of knowing if I needed him to guide me through this. I can’t go to the police or tell anyone about it.”
Search notice and arrest
On August 1, she learned from her daughter-in-law that a wanted notice had been launched in the media to find Serge Boutin and a couple in their fifties.
Dubois therefore told the same lie to his son. The couple, however, felt heat on them. So they decided to consult Charles Lassonde’s father, a retired lawyer. He advised them to speak to a lawyer and turn themselves in. They decided to do it the next day.
However, that same evening, the police beat them to it. While she was finishing her cleaning in an optometrist’s clinic, the Tactical Intervention Group of the Sûreté du Québec arrived. “I left the room, I raised my hands and I did not resist my arrest,” she said. It went pretty well. I cared about where I worked. I didn’t understand why they didn’t wait until I got out of work.”
What followed was “a long night of interrogation”.
A few weeks into the trial, faced with the impossibility of holding a trial full of lies, she decided to turn around and tell the police where the body was. The places had changed a lot in two and a half years, but the woman managed to tell the investigators.
