A Port Coquitlam man convicted of murdering his wife in 2014 has been denied an appeal in a case where the defendant claimed he was locked in a dissociative state of “automatism” at the time of the killing.
In their decision to uphold the second degree murder charge, the judges traced the months leading up to the killing, noting Irinel Ghiorghita had a strong motive to kill his wife, Andra Ghiorghita, and lacked any history of dissociative events.
According to court documents, the couple's relationship had started to fall apart when, two months earlier, Irinel Ghiorghita had discovered his wife had sexual relations with another man in their townhouse while he was away on a hunting trip.
Two weeks later, the couple sent their young son back to Romania to spend time with his paternal grandparents while the couple worked out their relationship.
Irinel Ghiorghita, according to the court decision, remained suspicious, and within a week, he hacked his wife's email and cellphone, planting software to listen in on her conversations and GPS tracking to trace her movements. After finding sexual messages, secret vacation arrangements with her new partner, and a plan to gain full custody of their son, the Ghiorghitas' relationship troubles came to a head.
“[Our son] will go to you over my dead body,” said Irinel Ghiorghita, to which Andra Ghiorghita replied, “No problem.”
The night before the murder, Andra Ghiorghita asked her husband to pick up some clothes and shoes for her upcoming vacation in Cuba. He testified that he did not remember much after that.
Crucially, the appeal was doomed by a series of relatively complex tasks Irinel Ghiorghita completed in the lead-up to the murder, from downloading and setting up a Yahoo! Messenger application on his cellphone to emailing his mother in Romania, saying: “Keep [our son] there, do not send him back to Canada. Here, there is nothing more.”
According to the document, Irinel Ghiorghita said he remembers a black gun case but not the gun. He testified that he did not remember loading the gun’s magazine but, like his neighbours, did remember the sound of a shot and someone screaming.
Around 6 a.m. on the day of the killing, Irinel Ghiorghita left the townhouse on foot, arriving at the Coquitlam RCMP detachment two hours later, where he confessed to the murder. When the police arrived at the Ghiorghita’s townhouse, they found a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun in the hallway and eight spent casings in the bedroom. Andra Ghiorghita was found dead.
The court denied the appeal, writing that the complex series of tasks Ghiorghita conducted before he shot his wife outweighed the defence’s argument that he acted in a dissociative state.
