By Kamloops This Week
Calling the attack “brutal” and “determined,” a B.C. Supreme Court judge has ordered a Clearwater man who admitted to stabbing his wife to death to spend 13 years behind bars before becoming eligible for parole.
Iain Drummond Scott sat silently in the prisoner’s box on Thursday morning as B.C. Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Austin Cullen delivered his sentence.
Scott, 44, pleaded guilty earlier this year to second-degree murder.
He killed his estranged wife, 33-year-old Angila Wilson, on April 20, 2014, as two of the couple’s three children looked on.
“I think we’ve been, as a family, struggling with Angila’s loss,” Dey Stewart, Wilson’s aunt, said after the decision. “As horrible as it is to hear in court how she suffered, it is curiously settling.”
Scott and Wilson had been separated for more than a month when she was killed. The murder took place in Wilson’s Clearwater home on Easter Sunday, a short time after she put her three children to bed.
Court heard Scott entered the home as Wilson was on the phone with Scott’s sister. The phone line went dead.
Crown prosecutor Adrienne Murphy said the couple’s seven-year-old son told police he peeked out of his bedroom and saw the attack taking place. The couple’s seven-year-old daughter said she saw what she thought was red paint on the walls of Wilson’s home, but no paint can.
Murphy, who had been seeking a parole-ineligibility period of 14 to 15 years, said she wasn’t disappointed with Scott’s sentence.
“I think it’s a reasonable parole-ineligibility period,” she said. “The judge touched on the pertinent parts and I consider it reasonable.”
Cullen cited an “unexplained element of strangeness” in the attack.
Court heard Scott had been drinking and using drugs in the days leading up to the murder and he reported hallucinations to police. He was also hospitalized on two occasions in the weeks before the slaying, but was released by a psychiatrist both times.
“There are certain aspects that we can only speculate about what occurred,” Murphy said. “We do know that Mr. Scott says he doesn’t remember what occurred.”
For his part, Scott apologized in court.
“No words can describe how sorry I am,” he said. “I can’t understand how I could even come to do something so horrific. It absolutely sickens me. It’s so difficult to comprehend or imagine being capable of such a thing. I never would have imagined.”
Stewart said the family is looking to move forward and is expecting a family court decision on the custody of Wilson and Scott’s children in the coming months.
In the meantime, the kids are staying with Wilson’s family in Hope.
“They’re doing remarkably well,” Stewart said. “They’re in school, in sports. Our main concern was that there would be enough time for the children to grow up without there being any chance of parole. I think that was met.”