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Clearwater man pleads guilty to killing wife

Iain Drummond Scott pleaded guilty to the April 2014 second-degree murder of Angila Wilson
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Angila Wilson in 2011.

By Keith Fraser

Canadian Press

During a brief appearance in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver on June 23, Iain Drummond Scott pleaded guilty to the April 2014 second-degree murder of Angila Wilson, 33. He’d initially been charged with first-degree murder.

His voice, choking with emotion, Scott told Associate Chief Justice Austin Cullen that the world was a “much better” place with his wife in it and that he was sorry for his actions.

“This is a really unfortunate situation, my 794th consecutive day of crying. Although I don’t have any recollection of the actual event, I’m confident that the evidence put forward during the preliminary hearing means that it was definitely me that committed the crime. Just because you can’t remember something doesn’t make it excusable. Still I can’t imagine why I would do something like that.”

The judge had Scott confirm that he intended to kill Wilson, intention being an element necessary to prove the offence of second-degree murder.

Crown prosecutor Adrienne Murphy told the judge that the couple had been together for a lengthy period and that it was a relationship with some difficulty. Eventually, Wilson broke up with Scott and moved out of their home, taking their three children with her.

Just 11 days before the murder, somebody called Wilson and complained to her about the way Scott was driving their kids home from school. Wilson confronted Scott and he got angry, throwing a 20-pound bag of rock salt through the windshield of a car.

Later, he contacted her to say he had attempted suicide. Scott was taken to hospital in Kamloops. Police alerted the Ministry of Children and Families, who met with Wilson. She was placed in a safe home. When she went to go to Kamloops to apply for a protection order against Wilson, she found sugar had been placed in the gas tank of her vehicle, rendering the vehicle inoperable. Scott had researched ways of disabling a car. A protection order was granted five days before the slaying.

“The Crown concedes that Mr. Scott had not been served with the protection order, but had been advised of it” by the time of the slaying, said Murphy.

On the night of the slaying, Scott’s sister phoned Wilson and talked to her about Scott and his well-being. While she was on the phone, Wilson told her that her brother had arrived. Then the phone went dead.

When a woman came by the home the next day to pick up Wilson, no one answered the door. The woman noticed blood on the door and called police. Police arrived and entered the home, finding Wilson under a blanket in her daughter’s bedroom. She’d been stabbed 11 times, including two wounds to the face and two to the back.

An alert was made since no one knew where the children were. After it was established the kids were at the couple’s matrimonial home, the police emergency-response team was summoned. After several hours of a police standoff, the kids were rescued and Scott arrested.

Ian Donaldson, Scott’s lawyer, said the children were never harmed and were properly cared for during the incident. He told the judge that by the time of the slaying, Scott had had a pattern of injuries, including head injuries, and was “very substantially” impaired at the time of the murder.

The case has been put over to July 13 to fix a date for sentencing. Second-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison, with a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 25 years of parole ineligibility.

Article courtesy of Kamloops This Week.