A biker gang member was sentenced to 13 years in prison yesterday after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in the grisly June 1999 killing and dismemberment of Eric Thorne in Gatineau.
Nelson Carey, 28, was to have been tried for first-degree murder this week in the satanic killing of Mr. Thorne, 25. Mr. Carey's sentence will be served concurrently with a nine-year sentence for robbery he has been serving since 1997.
The killer, Yan Osborne, known as the Butcher of Gatineau, said he worshipped Satan and claimed he planned the murder as a satanic "human sacrifice." Mr. Osborne, 31, received a life sentence for the killing in 2000.
Assistant Crown attorney Genevieve Depassille said evidence presented in court yesterday showed Mr. Carey told Mr. Osborne, while both were in prison, that he wanted Mr. Thorne killed. Ms. Depassille said there was no evidence to show that the murder was done for money.
Investigators determined the motive was a dispute over a woman.
"The new girlfriend of Mr. Carey was the old girlfriend of Mr. Thorne," Ms. Depassille said. Mr. Carey "was using her to get him drugs in jail in 1999."
In a letter introduced in court during Mr. Osborne's trial in 2000, Mr. Carey threatened to have Mr. Thorne killed for beating and threatening his ex-girlfriend, who had become close to Mr. Carey. "You have threatened my future wife ... and in doing so, have declared war against me," Mr. Carey wrote. "We are dreaming of seeing you in newspapers with '7' holes in your body."
During his trial, Mr. Osborne coldly confessed, saying that Mr. Thorne was meant to be a human sacrifice to Satan.
Mr. Osborne described smashing the victim's head repeatedly with a metal bar and jumping on the body in a fit of joy as blood splattered on the walls.
He later drank the victim's blood, then sawed his body into six pieces, using a knife to decorate them.
The Crown prosecutor at the time told reporters he believed Mr. Osborne concocted the macabre story to distract attention from his connections to a Rock Machine biker gang member the prosecution believed ordered the hit.
"What I wanted to do with that moron (Mr. Thorne) was make a human sacrifice. But you can't do a sacrifice with a dead body," Mr. Osborne said.
He said he had participated in satanic rituals for years.
Mr. Thorne was killed on June 10, 1999.
But because of a slight overdose of the hallucinogenic drug PCP, Mr. Osborne said, it was nearly two days later before he got around to drinking his former friend's blood and sawing his body into pieces.
After the dismemberment, he took Mr. Thorne's head and propped it on a table while he ate his dinner.
"I got hungry, so I made pork chops," Mr. Osborne told the court.
"I grabbed the head, and put it on the table (because) I didn't have anybody to talk to. I told him I was happy to have killed him because he was ugly.
"I don't have a remorseful conscience," he added.
Mr. Thorne's body parts were found stuffed into garbage bags in the bathroom of a Maloney Boulevard apartment in Gatineau.