A Nanaimo woman who confessed to her best friend that she had killed her boyfriend also told her she had killed him in “self defence” and she worried people wouldn’t believe that he abused her.
On Day 3 of her trial in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver on Wednesday, Paris Laroche sat in the prisoner’s dock in front of a packed public gallery as Robyn Bartle, who said Laroche was “like a sister,” was cross-examined.
Laroche, 28, is on trial for first-degree murder and interference with human remains in the 2020 killing of her boyfriend of five years, Sidney Mantee, 32.
Bartle, a nurse who has known Laroche since Grade 8 and remains her friend, said she watched her change from a vivacious, active, fun-loving person to a withdrawn, emaciated and isolated woman, stressed from working two jobs.
Bartle also told court she was shocked at her mom’s birthday party on April 18, 2021, when Laroche “word-vomited” her confession to her while they were carrying dishes into the kitchen and people were relaxing around a fire pit in the yard.
“She said she had just finished getting rid of him,” court heard during Bartle’s cross-examination.
Bartle told Laroche they needed to go for a walk, because “she kind of word vomited at me quickly and I had numerous concerns,” she testified.
Laroche’s former boss, Terry Boyle, testified earlier that Laroche told her she killed Mantee with a hammer while he slept and kept his body in the fridge. She told Boyle she had carried pieces of his body out of her apartment in a backpack and scattered them in Neck Point and Pipers Lagoon parks over six months, from March to August 2020.
Bartle encouraged Laroche to go to police, but she said she wouldn’t. So Bartle went to the police the next day.
“I knew that I was going to report her,” she testified. “It wasn’t a comfortable feeling. I was literally shaking for hours.”
Before Bartle contacted them, police had been treating Mantee’s disappearance as a missing person’s case, court heard.
After Laroche’s lawyer, Glen Orris, read from Bartle’s police statement: “Highlight in capitals: He was abusive,” he said to Bartle: “Those were your first words. That’s the first thing you wanted the police to know?”
Later in the statement, Bartle was quoted as saying, “I mentioned the psychological and verbal abuse. Please highlight that.”
Bartle testified Laroche told her when she confessed that Mantee had been threatening her, her cats and her family, and that he was “strangling and beating her where the bruises weren’t visible,” Orris said, reading from Bartle’s statement to police on April 19, 2021.
Bartle said while Laroche was dating Mantee, “She looked emaciated, you could count her ribs, her hair had got dried and looked like a bird’s nest.”
Bartle encouraged her to eat, but she said, “ 'I’m fine, it’s just a rough patch.' She would dismiss it and that was one of the bones of contention with us.”
She said Bartle reassured her about her relationship with Mantee when Bartle expressed concern: “We’re in love, we’re soulmates.”
After Mantee disappeared, Bartle said, Laroche “looked healthy and happy, she was gaining weight, starting to glow again.”
Reading from Bartle’s statement, Orris said she told police that Laroche “was really, really scared” and that she said she wanted to get her life together and she worried no one would believe her story of abuse.
In her statement, Bartle had told police, “I asked her and she goes, yeah, it was self defence.”
Jillian Bartle, Robyn’s mother, also testified, telling court she considered Laroche her foster daughter.
She said she heard Mantee call Laroche names like stupid, clumsy, lazy and said that she couldn’t do anything right, which she called “verbal abuse.”
She didn’t see Mantee physically hurt Laroche but said she was alarmed and worried about Laroche’s safety after Mantee stated at the dinner table at her house that in his First Nations culture, it was OK for him to “beat his women.”
The trial continues.
