Luc Leclair, lawyer representing Luka Rocco Magnotta leaves the Montreal Courthouse in Montreal, Thursday, October 16. Photo: Graham Hughes/Postmedia News MONTREAL — Two Canadians with nothing in common but that they have famous or infamous relatives testified Friday at the Luka Magnotta murder trial.
Hubert Chrétien, son of former prime minister Jean Chrétien, and Logan Valentini (nee Lori Homolka), sister of the convicted killer Karla Homolka, appeared via video link from courthouses near where they live respectively in Gatineau, Que., and St. Catharines, Ont.
It was their real names and addresses which Magnotta wrote in the “sender” box on two packages he mailed in May of 2012 to two Vancouver schools.
In each package, and in two others he sent to Conservative and Liberal party headquarters in Ottawa, were the severed hands and feet of 33-year-old Lin Jun, the Chinese student Magnotta has admitted killing and dismembering on May 25, 2012.
Magnotta made these admissions through his lawyer Luc Leclair at the start of the trial, but is pleading not guilty.
Leclair says he will prove that his client suffers from a severe mental illness that rendered him unable to appreciate what he was doing or that it was wrong.
Neither Chrétien, who is 49, nor Valentini, now 43, had ever met Magnotta, they told Quebec Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer and the jurors.
Their combined testimony — merely to confirm that they didn’t know Magnotta and hadn’t mailed the packages but that the addresses on them were theirs — lasted about 20 minutes.
In this television image, Karla Homolka is interviewed in Montreal, July 4, 2005 after her release from prison.
CP PICTURE ARCHIVE/Radio-Canada
The only revelation came from Valentini, who told Leclair in cross-examination that she had seen her sister “recently” and that she was now living in Quebec.
The last time Karla Homolka, who was convicted with her first husband Paul Bernardo in the deaths of teenagers Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French and her own baby sister Tammy, was much in the news was about two years ago.
At that time, journalist Paula Todd had tracked her and family — she is married to Thierry Bordelais, brother of her former Montreal lawyer, Sylvie Bordelais — down to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Todd wrote an e-book, Finding Karla, about her search.
Both Chrétien and Valentini (that’s her married name, but she also changed her first name about the time of Bernardo’s trial, at which her sister was the key witness) said they were unsettled by finding themselves foisted into the limelight.
In this 1993Canadian Press file photo, Karla Teale (Homolka) and her sister Lori (left) leave the provincial courthouse in St. Catharines, Ont.
Chrétien, who runs a not-for-profit company offering scuba lessons for the disabled, said he was surprised to learn his name (the first misspelled as “Hurbert”) and address had been used by Magnotta.
“It was not agreeable that my name would be used like this,’’ he said.
“I was kind of stunned,” Valentini said about her reaction to the call she received from Montreal police two years ago. “I didn’t know why I would be dragged into something – again – that had nothing to do with me.”
She said originally, she’d changed her name because “I just didn’t want to be associated with something I didn’t do and had no knowledge of,” adding that she had “just wanted to live my life, quietly, and free.”
But in the enormous publicity surrounding the Bernardo case, she said, it was in the media “that I changed my name and what I changed it to … Everybody knows,” she said wearily.
Karla Homolka was sentenced to 12 years in prison for her role in the deaths of the three girls; she completed the sentence and was released from a Quebec prison. Bernardo, who was also convicted as the once-notorious “Scarborough rapist,” is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder.
The Magnotta trial resumes Monday.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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