A Nanaimo man has pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the May 2021 death of his girlfriend whose body was found by police in a wooded ravine below a cliff near Nanaimo City Hall.
Kyle Ordway, 39, entered a guilty plea in B.C. Supreme Court Wednesday in the death of 27-year-old Amy Watts.
Watts died of extensive head injuries as a result of blunt force trauma consistent with falling from a significant height, Crown prosecutor Basil McCormick told the court.
Ordway and Watts had a “complicated” domestic relationship for several years before her death “mired with drug addiction, homelessness and violence,” McCormick said, reading an agreed statement of facts.
Witnesses told a preliminary hearing in December 2023 the couple was fighting at the time of Watts’s death over allegations Watts was stealing money from Ordway.
Watts and Ordway were captured on security video on May 8, the last day Watts was seen alive, on Dunsmuir Street walking toward a path along a cliff in the area of Wallace and Albert streets, McCormick said.
Ordway later told multiple people he and Watts had been arguing on May 8 and he subsequently pushed her and she fell off a cliff. He told at least one person he didn’t realize there was no railing in the area where he pushed Watts. Those he talked to, some of whom worked for Ordway as drivers making drug deliveries, described him as being distraught, McCormick told the court.
Given a chance to speak, Ordway addressed Watts’s parents in the courtroom directly, apologizing to them for her death.
“I’m truly sorry this horrific freak accident happened that should have never happened and I’m truly sorry for Amy being gone this early in life,” he said.
Reading a victim impact statement, Watts’s mother, Janice Coady, said the sun doesn’t shine as bright anymore without her daughter.
“My future without Amy will always leave me broken,” Coady said. Watts was Coady’s only child and her death has been “emotionally crippling,” she said.
“There’s not a moment that my heart doesn’t hurt.”
Watts was extremely smart, making the dean’s list at Vancouver Island University, she said.
Coady said she struggles knowing she can no longer look forward to seeing her daughter’s “sweet smile,” hearing her voice, sharing movie nights or receiving a text or a funny meme.
Coady read the last Christmas card she received from her daughter, telling the court she wants Watts to be remembered for the loving person she was.
“I’m sad we’re apart for Christmas but we have years of past memories and many more to come in the future. I always think about you and will love you forever,” Coady read.
Crown and defence counsels, in a joint submission for sentencing, suggested four years minus credit for time served since June 2023, leaving a remaining sentence of about two years and two months.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Power declined to sentence Ordway Thursday and instead ordered a pre-sentence report to be prepared by a probation officer.
Court heard Ordway has a lengthy criminal record mostly consisting of offences involving drug possession, property crime and breaching conditions of release. He has one previous conviction involving violence after he and Watts were charged with assaulting a woman they lived with. Watts died before the case went to trial.
Ordway was born and raised in the Comox Valley and went into foster care at a young age after his father died by suicide and his mother struggled with drug addiction, defence lawyer Bobby Movassaghi told the court. He has struggled with drug addiction on and off since he was a teenager, he said.
After stabilizing at one point, Ordway lost his job during the pandemic and relapsed, living in and out of homelessness in the years since, Movassaghi said.
Movassaghi said Watts’s death was closer to a “near accident” than a “near murder.”
“This was not at all what Mr. Ordway wanted to do at the end of that day,” he said.
Ordway has his next court appearance Sept. 23 to set a new date for sentencing.
