Three killings, a coroner’s inquest, and a wake-up call on intimate partner violence

Garvia Bailey Hi there. A quick warning. This episode deals with domestic violence and discusses details of abuse. Please listen with care. It’s impossible not to be shocked by the events that took place in rural Ontario on September 22, 2015. Three women, Anastasia Kuzyk, Nathalie Warmerdam, and Carol Culleton, all killed within hours of each other by one man. Seven years later, a coroner’s inquest has now been completed. 86 recommendations have been brought forward. What we do with those recommendations might very well be the key to ensuring a tragedy like this doesn’t happen again. Today, we’re going inside the inquest to unpack some of the key and surprising recommendations that were made and get into what happens next. For lawmakers and for us.

I’m Garvia Bailey. This is The Big Story. My guest today has been following this story over the past seven years. Sarah Boesveld has written about the Renfrew County murders for Chatelaine magazine, and Sarah is with me today.

Sarah Boesveld Hi, thank you for having me.

Garvia So let’s start at the beginning. What prompted an inquest into the deaths of these three women?

Sarah Boesveld So, the morning of September 22, 2015, a man named Basil Barutski left his home and drove to a cottage where his friend, I guess, used to be his partner. In a weird way, Carol Culleton had been living. And he entered into her home, killed her with a coaxial cable, and moved on to kill two other partners, former partners of his. Next was Anastasia Kuzyk, who lived in Wilno, Ontario. And he shot her. And then he moved on to Nathalie Warmerdam’s home and he shot her as well. That led to a huge manhunt in Renfrew County, and he was eventually captured and charged with three counts of first degree murder, and he was convicted in November 2017 and sentenced a month later.

This triple homicide is very rare. It is what we call a domestic homicide. So it involved three former partners of one person, pretty extensive trauma to the community and obviously the families. But what it also did was expose a lot of systemic problems in how intimate partner violence is dealt with leading up to a trauma as horrific as a triple homicide to happen in one morning in one community in rural Ontario. Sadly, these intimate partner homicides, domestic homicides, they continue and have continued at a great rate since then. The pandemic has made them worse. This case really crystallized what happens when there are systemic issues, when there are many aspects of intimate partner violence that are overlooked and not intervened on early enough and that do end in homicide for people involved in these relationships. It has really been an awful tragedy for the community and for the province and really nationwide, this has been happening.

Garvia Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about these women? Who were they to their communities and to their families?

Sarah Boesveld I’ll start with Nathalie Warmerdam, who was the third woman to be killed that morning, but had the longest relationship with Basil Barutski. So Nathalie Warmerdam was a mother of two children and she was a hospice nurse. She was very involved in our community. She volunteered in the library in Eganville, which is in Renfrew County. She had a little hobby farm to chickens, and she had a really warm personality and was really loved by so many and she really wanted to help. And she really saw Basal Barutski as someone who maybe did need a little bit of a hand, a loving partner. She did care for him deeply. They had a relationship that was obviously quite volatile, but one in which she really believed that he was the victim of a lot of circumstances and she really tried to help him.

Anastasia Kuzyk was the second woman murdered that day. She was a realtor. She was a server at the Wilno Tavern, which is the only place to get any food in Wilno, which is a very small community in Renfrew County, close to the border of Algonquin Park. And she had two sisters. She did not have children of her own. She had a history of very abusive relationships in her own life, and so she experienced that as well. With Basil Barutski. It was a much shorter relationship and she did actually charge him with some or he was charged with some crimes connected with her. And I can tell you more about that in another part of the conversation. But she was very well loved as well by the patrons of the tavern and certainly folks who were just friends of hers in the community and used her services as a realtor.

Carol Culleton was different from the others in that she was not actually really a resident or embedded in Renfrew County much. She lived in North Gower, Ontario. She’s a public servant. She’s just about to or just had just retired from her job in the public service. She and her husband had bought this cottage that was in Renfrew County on the shores of Lake Kamaniskeg, which is near Combermere, Ontario. They had lived there just been summers there. And she was widowed, though, and so that’s why she and Basil Barutski ended up connected to one another. But part of what happened in the weeks running up to the triple homicide was that she had connected with another boyfriend, reconnected with someone that she had been seeing before, and that really angered Basil Barutski. And so that was deemed one of the reasons why he may have gone on that rampage that day, a trigger for him.

Garvia And you alluded to this that there were many red flags surrounding the perpetrator of this crime. He had been charged with intimate partner assault and had charges dropped. He had been vocal about a desire to kill his ex wife. His threats and harm went back 40 years so why is it so hard for these red flags to be addressed in meaningful ways?

Sarah Boesveld Yeah, it’s really complicated. There is an attitude in society that intimate partner balance is the personal business of two people and a couple. What happens behind closed doors stays behind closed doors, as it were. That is definitely an attitude that seems to be more prevalent in certain cultures. And I would call rural Ontario in a rural community a certain culture. There is also the criminal justice system’s response to this, which is informed by society’s attitudes very much about intimate partner violence. So a judge sitting in front of a court saying, that doesn’t sound so bad to me, or he says that he’s sorry, so let’s kind of let this slide.

And then also there have been changes in the responses in the criminal justice system to intimate partner violence in that. Back in the 1980s, a woman had to say, look, I will charge him, like it was a decision that was on the woman. And, you know, in some ways she has autonomy, but when the pressures to not have him be charged are so strong, she knows that she might be at greater harm. And we have great research to back this up if she is at greater harm, if she does pursue charges, as it were. That did change in the 90s to something called mandatory charging, which has its own problems, though, as we found. If the woman says usually a woman, I’m not saying that’s always a woman being assaulted can sometimes be someone obviously of a different gender, but any interaction with the justice system can be aggravating to that perpetrator and come at a certain cost to that woman. Say he’s the only breadwinner, say there’s children involved. How are they going to kind of keep life moving ahead if he’s tied up in the criminal justice system and he’s pissed off about it? And so that can actually put her in greater harm.

So that was present in this case as well. And something like probation. He refused to sign a line on essentially a restraining order that Anastasia Kuzyk that had been done in the criminal justice case that she was involved in, and he just refused to sign it and nothing was done about that. There’s no follow up. His probation officer, he was assigned a probation officer, but there was no real supervision or follow up of him. That was meaningful. He gained the system big time. The police who testified at the inquest said that he was really good at manipulation. So he would just say he was staying at one residence and make footprints leading up to the door in the snow. He wasn’t actually there, but he would pretend that he was there.

And there was also intimate partner violence. Red flags aside, he had a huge list of people that he said openly that he wanted to kill or harm. And that was found by police that day. And so there were actually lockdowns much broader than just that community. Ottawa, there was a courthouse in Ottawa that had to be under lockdown because he had this huge list of people he said that he wanted to harm or kill. And so that was well known that he had this like, hit list. And so that is another red flag. And there is something there’s a system in Ontario committee called the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee. So after these intimate partner homicides happen, there is an analysis of that and they actually go through the red flags. He had something like 40 red flags out of 51. This is again, in hindsight though, so there are some problems there, right? Like this is something that we know later, but it’s not collated for later. But they were all quite present in the lead up to these murders.

Garvia Incredible. So the inquest, what was it meant to accomplish? And if you could just take us inside. What the inquest like? Who is involved? How does an inquest like this work?

Sarah Boesveld Yeah, so this is a coroner’s inquest. So the coroner obviously has its role of kind of dealing with deaths of any manner in Ontario. They have a responsibility or an option. They don’t have to call an inquest on every desk, of course, but if they see that there are some issues and some potential things to investigate as to how can we prevent these deaths in the future, then they take a close look at it. So there was a corners inquest called into this triple homicide, and it involved the corner as the council, like the chief lead council, and it had people who could have something called standing, legal standing. So that was end violence against women in Renfrew County. That was essentially the sexual assault center in Renfrew County. And the shelters and the victim services, they got involved because a lot of the systemic problems affect them and the population that they serve.

And then Valerie Warmerdam, who is the daughter of Nathalie Warmerdam, also had legal standing. So what standing really means is that they can stand up and ask questions. So witnesses are called kind of like in a criminal trial and there is a jury kind of like in a criminal trial or say a civil trial, of course. But it’s different in that it’s not about finger pointing per se, or finding blame or fault. It’s more about really looking at the systemic problems and just taking putting a fine tooth comb on it, asking questions about sort of what is supposed to happen, what did happen in their circumstance, and how can we look at doing it better? And so the job of the jury at the end of the three weeks, it was three weeks long, was to really come up with some recommendations so that the province, the federal government, other systemic bodies, even the coroner’s office, what could be done that would be different to potentially protect other folks who are subject to intimate partner violence. How do we prevent these deaths from happening in the future? So that is the scope of the coroner’s inquest. And the jury did come up with a huge slate of recommendations that were, of course informed by what those other three parties had suggested to based on what was heard.

Garvia So there were 72 recommendations?

Sarah Boesveld That was what the three parties put together.

Garvia Right, but then the jury accepted all of them and then added 14 more.

Sarah Boesveld Yeah, that was pretty stunning, actually.

Garvia Now, how common is that in an inquest? What does that say about this jury?

Sarah Boesveld Well, I’m not sure how common it is. This is the only inquest I’ve covered in depth, in any depth. But the jury was really amazing to watch. It was five regular folks from Renfrew County. And the other thing about this inquest is that they’re not always held in the community. They can be held in a boardroom in Toronto or Ottawa, like the major cities. But it was really particular to this community. It was really unique in that they really involved the community in this inquest. There was a community consultation that happened before and they physically had it in Pembroke, Ontario, which is probably the biggest town in Renfrew County, which is just west of Ottawa, and extremely rural, huge, the size of Prince Edward Island.

And so these are just regular folks called the same way that most juries are called. Like if you get a jury notice in the mail, that’s how folks are selected. And then they sat and listened to all this testimony and it was really amazing. They had the opportunity to ask questions of the witnesses. And these were witnesses that were the police, that were people from probation, there were people from the chief firearms office and experts on intimate partner violence. So they really learned a lot about the nuances and dynamics of this type of violence, maybe for the first time ever. And so they were extremely engaged. And then they went away and deliberated for about a day or so with the 72 recommendations to work with and came up with some more based on what they were hearing and questions and concerns they had. And their recommendations were very impressive. And some of them, you wonder how realistic it would be, but if you are kind of coming up these issues for the very first time and some of them were quite creative and really meant to sort of turn the dial on this issue and change things for the better, they really seemed passionate about that.

Garvia Can you tell me one of those creative sort of recommendations that came from the jury? Because we’re going to get into some of the nitty gritty of the recommendations. But because you said this, I really am curious now what the jury came up with.

Sarah Boesveld Yeah, so the very first one, number one, recommendation of that huge number, 86 all told, was asking the province of Ontario to declare intimate partner violence as an epidemic in Ontario. And sure, you could look at that and say those are words, right? That’s hopefully an easy thing for the province to do. You make a declaration. But what was really amazing and powerful about that was that words obviously carry a huge amount of weight and responsibility and expectation that should flow from that. So if the province of Ontario did do that, from there flows all the rest of the recommendations. If we take this seriously as a province, if we say and commit to acting on it, that’s very powerful. And that could be really transformative for a lot of our people living with this violence in Ontario. And as someone with the media background, I also was very impressed because that was the headline and all the news stories after. And I said, these are very savvy in Renfrew County. And it was their recommendation, it was their idea to do this. It wasn’t led to them in any way. It was really just them saying, oh my gosh, I did not appreciate the extent of this violence in my own community in Ontario.

It was said at the inquest during testimony that 111 more women and girls have died in Ontario since this triple homicide in September 2015. And I mean that’s a lot. And the pandemic has made it worse. And because of isolation, well intentioned stay at home order, right? Like, let’s protect people from COVID. But isolation is a gift for abusers and a lot of tracking online. If everything is virtual, that’s easy for an abuser to track. So for having the jury to want to declare this as something that is systemic, problematic and extensive in Ontario was really powerful.

They also had ideas like create a safe room for high risk situations. They have these things called high risk tables where in communities these experts gather and they talk about a plan and also just have funding for these things that are called like mobile tracking devices. So it’s something that Nathalie Warmerdam had. It was like a pager type thing where if she was in real trouble, she should hit it and then 911. It’s basically like calling 911. And the sad truth of it is that if somebody has one of those tracking devices, they’re probably going to be dead in Renfrew County before being reached. That was heard in testimony because it is very vast, the resources are very scant.

But that was their idea to make sure that that funding is there and extensive for something like a tracking device. They had added a few other things. Have a Royal Commission on changing the way that victims participate in criminal court, because we know the way the criminal justice system is set up. If you have a crime perpetrated against you, you are involved somehow, but really at an arms length and not actively. You have no legal representation. You’re just kind of sitting on the sidelines about this thing that has happened to you. The Crown is representing the province, and then the defendant obviously has their liberty at stake, so they have a lot of resources. But this royal commission that they suggested the jury was to like, let’s look a lot closer at how victims rights are sort of protected in that whole experience, if there’s any agency at all to a victim. And that could be much broader than sexual violence or intimate partner violence issues, because we’ve seen that that’s been a problem or an issue in a lot of cases involving sexual assault and domestic violence, too. So these ideas have been pretty interesting, transformative. You know, they really need political will to be acted upon, though.

Garvia You have recommendations that are so powerful from the savvy jury of one’s peers, but so often recommendations like this, they don’t actually lead to change, and there needs to be political will behind them. How can we make sure that there’s actual follow through on the part of the provincial government? How does that happen?

Sarah Boesveld That’s the biggest challenge, Garvia. And the first chunk of the recommendations was all about accountability. There’s a lot of skepticism that this can just end up in bureaucrats in boxes, right? Like they say, hey, follow these recommendations. It will really change things. And they’re like, yeah, we’ll get to it. And then if the political parties of the day don’t really care about intimate partner violence or see it as an issue, then it will just languish. And Valerie Warmerdam, in the press conference after the recommendations came, after the verdict from the jury, said her motivation for being involved was that there was one thing she thought would be really easy to change. Which was let’s make sure that people sure it is. Which are people that are supposed to kind of watch over somebody who’s out on probation or out on bail. Make sure that they don’t have access to guns if that person is living in their home. That seems really easy. Right?

Her mother had acted as a sturdy for Basil Barutski when he was in and out of jail on one of his many counts, and she had kept his guns safe because they were family heirlooms, and that’s the case often in rural areas. But guess what? He had easy access to weapons and could threaten her with them all the time. She said that would be a very easy thing to change. Let’s just change the rules to make sure that these guys do not have access to weapons if they’re out on bail via their partner or somebody else. Didn’t she do her research before getting involved in this inquest process and found that very same recommendation in the May-Iles inquest, which was an intimate partner violence foreigners inquest from the 90s. Has that changed at all? No, nothing has changed. She was furious, she’s angry, and rightly so.

There needs to be political will that changes things. And there have been changes in the past from these inquest reports. Domestic Violence Test Review Committee is one that has come from a prior inquest. But there needs to be action that is easy to take or very hard to take, transformative to take. There are a lot of recommendations in here that won’t be that difficult if there is just some motivation. Ideally, even the local MPP in this writing would take some real action. I was live tweeting this inquest as often as I could and I would often tag those MPPs and ministers that are in charge of these issues. They need to really take this on. And some of these things could be really cost saving and also just something that would help the systems run a bit better, like how come government bodies and ministries don’t talk to each other? There’s so much siloing that happens and I think a lot of our experiences in life, but certainly in government, a lot of the people that really need help dealing with intimate partner violence are also accessing welfare. Social assistance are also struggling to access housing.

And a huge problem in rural Ontario with these issues is that there’s no transportation to get from point A to point B. It’s very isolating. There is access to guns very easily. There are things that can be changed that are quite simple in terms of investments that could change things for folks and really be transformative. One of the recommendations that I really liked and thought was pretty powerful was stop funding services for women fleeing violence as if they’re just projects. These are people’s lives. They have to reapply for funding every year and they are burnt out trying to support survivors in the community and they’re very under resourced. And another one is that even just funding in governments in general, the way it works is per capita. So not that many people live in Renfrew County compared to Toronto. Toronto gets a lot of money, and sure, we need a lot of money here in Toronto to fund a lot of things, and we’re starved for a lot of resources too. But out there the needs are incredible. And because there are few people living there, they get scraps in terms of resources. So that needs to change as well.

These are things that can be done with the stroke of a pen in Toronto, at Queens Park, in Ottawa, Parliament Hill, and they just need a real champions. And so part of what I’ve been interested in and following this inquest, I think it’s really possible, if we’re allowed enough about these issues, if we understand that they are affecting us in our communities, in our families. And I honestly, that is actually something that came out of the jury. They realized that this had been happening in their own families and their own communities and just had not seen and appreciated the extent of it in the ways that are factually true. A sister in law or a partner of a friend. That this is happening to them and if things don’t get intervened on early enough and actively enough. Potentially could end in this horrible violence that shook the entire expanse of Renfrew County and continues to. I hope that this process of the inquest has been healing in some ways, but there’s a lot in terms of how to act on this.

Garvia Perpetrators were addressed in the recommendations and I just want to know about the importance of that and how that is meant to shift the needle, move the mark on this.

Sarah Boesveld I was really struck by the prominence of this in the inquest. Valerie Warmerdam was one of the first people to testify on the first day. And when she talked about her experience of this and what she really cared about, it was, let’s get help for people like Basil Barutski and those who aren’t perhaps not as extreme or as damaged, but she saw him as a human being, not a monster necessarily, despite this horrific act that he took on that day. How could someone who is at risk of perpetrating such violence get some help earlier? There was a huge problem in this case in that there was a court order program that Basil Barutski was sent to by a judge called the Partner Assault Response Program, the power program. That is something Ontario has implemented connected to probation. Let’s get these guys in a room to deal with their issues, like talk it out, talk to somebody who’s trained as a counselor.

The problem is that it’s court mandated and we know from a lot of addiction issues or a lot of programs like that, if you really don’t want to be there, you don’t see that you have a problem. It’s just not a headspace you’re in yet. You’re not going to go or you’re not going to benefit from it. Basil Barutski just didn’t show up to this program despite being court ordered to go, that’s a problem on its own. Can we actually bring some of these programs into the community and be something that folks can interact with prior to things escalated? One of the suggestions, and I can’t remember if it was among the 72 presented, or if it was the jury’s idea, was like a hotline or a place for folks to call if they are finding that they are carrying out their anxieties and frustrations out on their partner. Because we heard from an expert who testified that most men, and I’m going to say men, and I know that is the bulk of the perpetrators are men, most men will only assault once or twice and they will see that as problematic behaviour and they will want to change.

So how do we support those men earlier on in the process? Because we know relationships are complicated. We know people are dealing with a lot of stress. We know that abuse is cyclical. Maybe they had abuse in their home as children or were abused themselves or saw their mother abused and they just learned that as that’s the appropriate way or that’s okay to carry out. How do we sort of nip that in the bud? And there is, of course, a lot of recommendations, and there has always been a lot of talk about education, schools, how do we talk about consent and healthy relationships? But even as men, how do we provide a better culture, more supportive culture? So there’s a lot too, about bystander intervention. Like, let’s make sure that people can speak up and will speak up, because that did not happen in this case with Basil Barutski.

And also, if people are in prison, in jail for intimate partner violence, how do we engage them in that setting, perhaps, which is quite a hostile setting, but can there be support programs within that space? Because the other part of the problem with the partner assault response program in a community like Renfrew County, one of the towns in Renfrew County is Eganville. That’s where Nathalie Warmerdam was working. That’s the only place where they were doing this part program. So he would have to show up right down the street from where she was supposed to be working. And that was terrifying for her. So, yeah, like perpetrator response was a really interesting avenue that this inquest went down. And Valerie said, we need to create a system that is not designed to only respond to monsters or treat these people like monsters. Because in our lives, in our communities, that’s not what they are. Until something horrible happens like this, they are our loved ones. We want to support them.

Garvia Absolutely. One of the recommendations that I want to touch on before I let you go is recognition of femicide in the criminal code is also mentioned. And I want to get into that just a little bit and why that is so important, why language. It’s a shift in language. It’s one of those recommendations that you talked about that takes the stroke of a pen, but it’s very powerful. So I wonder if you could just get into that.

Sarah Boesveld Yeah. Adding femicide to the criminal code of Canada will be something that the federal government would need to do. What the experts involved in the testimony in the inquest said will be so powerful about that is that it would codify this type of violence as something connected to misogyny. So the hatred of women and girls, it is a term that is new to a lot of folks that is used around the world though latin America, Europe. Femicide is a way to sort of connect misogyny and targeting of a certain person because of their gender with that crime, with that killing specifically. So femicides would include something like being murdered by your partner or your ex partner, or often the way this violence carries out is children are killed by their partners too, as a way of getting back at the mother of the children, which is such a horrific crime.

It’s also in terror as well. There was some killings at a spa in Toronto a few years ago in the early part of the pandemic where women were targeted, sex workers were targeted. And that has happened, it happened in Atlanta as well, a few years ago. And so adding femicide to the criminal code would identify these crimes as hate motivated in a way, because misogyny is a form of hate. And so there would be some consequences that flow from that in the criminal justice systems that are responsible for carrying out imprisonment and programs and things like that. Like in Ontario, right? It’s the federal code, but the Ontario justice system is responsible often for dealing with those. So there would be a lot of trickle down effects from that. Maybe the impacts on the communities and the perpetrator would be a bit different than dealing with a sort of typical homicide track. Because the other frustrating thing is when there’s a domestic homicide, it is not called that early on in media reports. It’s just like there’s no risk to the public, it just reinforces. And now we’ve come full circle on it being a private matter, right? And that’s problematic for a lot of reasons. It keeps this hidden. It keeps this something that is not acknowledged as a real systemic problem and it keeps people perpetrating it.

Garvia Last question. This feels like a very important case, a very important inquest. So for you as a journalist, why is it important to be there to document it and be in the moment?

Sarah Boesveld Well, Garvia, I hate to say this, but there are very few journalists paying attention to intimate partner violence in this country. There are obviously a lot of problems in this world. Democracy is dying, sure, there’s been a global pandemic, anti black racism is rampant, and indigenous issues, and so on and so forth. This is something that actually touches on so many other aspects of our society as well. Affordability poverty. And so I see this as an issue that needs to be part of the conversation in a way that it has not been. These women deserve to be alive still. These families deserve to be protected from the trauma that affects so many beyond just that intimate partner relationship, it affects communities, and that has been very clear in Renfrew County.

This has been highly traumatic for everyone there, and it has lingered nearly seven years later. I covered this initially for Chatelaine when I was a senior writer there, and it has just haunted me, this story. It has just stayed with me as something that was so entirely preventable. Complex nuanced, to be sure. But those are the stories that we need to be looking at closely and especially when there is something that can be done to prevent future homicides, there is action that can be taken. This corner of the question is a really good step in that direction. There are 86 recommendations that can be acted upon. Who knows how many will how many will continue to be shoved? I see my role as being someone who can shine a light on these ideas and try to push for accountability, because those early recommendations about accountability, they’re very possible.

These are things like, let’s ensure that in a year’s time, the relevant ministers and the relevant actors, I guess, that should be doing something on this inquest are doing something. So I will be, in a year’s time, making sure that I’m tuned in and seeing what have you done? And if they haven’t done anything or very little, we should be loud about that in our communities. We should be loud about that on social media. We should be loud about that with our local representatives. So I think there are rules that all of us can play, never mind just me, but sort of shining light on it and being engaged with it, I felt has been important to you.

Garvia Thank you so much for doing exactly that, Sarah. And thank you so much for being with us here today on The Big Story. I appreciate your time.

Sarah Boesveld Well, thank you for having a segment on this. I really appreciate it too.

Garvia Sarah Boesveld is a freelance journalist. You can find her byline in Flare, Today’s Parent, Refinery 29, The Local, and many others. Sarah has written multiple pieces on the Renfrew County murders for Chatelaine magazine that was The Big Story. For more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN, talk to us anytime via email [click here!]. And of course, you can call us at 416-935-5935. If you’re able to review this podcast, please do so. It’d be really nice to hear from you. I’m Garvia Bailey, sitting in for Jordan Heath-Rawlings this week. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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