A man on trial for second-degree murder told an investigator he woke up drunk and confused as the friend he had been staying with stood naked — a knife in his hand — and made a sexual advance toward him.
A videotaped interview of Cory Bird by police in Montreal was played in B.C. Supreme Court yesterday (Feb. 5) in front of a 12-person jury.
The interview occurred in August 2007, about a week after the Crown alleges Bird killed Albert Michell at his apartment on the Siska Indian Band reserve between Lytton and Boston Bar.
Bird fled the province and was arrested in Montreal after causing a disturbance and shouting that he had a gun.
Bird was interviewed for hours by Commander Patrice Carrier, who today heads Montreal’s major-crime unit.
Carrier asked Bird to recount the incident with Michell, as well as the days leading up to it.
The last person to see Michell alive, other than Bird, was a neighbour who testified earlier he drank three beer with Bird and Michell in an uneventful evening, during which the three watched a movie.
The Crown alleges Bird killed Michell some time after the neighbour left and the next morning on Aug. 13 or Aug. 14, 2007.
This is Bird’s second trial.
In the interview Bird told Carrier he woke up, still drunk after consuming eight beer and half a bottle of liqueur, to see the 40-year-old Michell watching pornography in the room.
Bird said he complied with Michell’s demand to take off his shorts and the older man sat beside him.
“He kind of came at me,” Bird said on the video recording played in court.
“From there, I was in a rage. He had a knife.”
A pathologist testified this week that Michell suffered 73 stab wounds in his trunk and neck areas, on both sides of his body.
Bird, 20 years at the time, appeared distraught and anxious in the interview. At other times he smiled and laughed nervously.
During the trial, Bird has often been seen hunched forward, hanging his head for long periods of time and staring at the floor.
Bird described a grisly scene in which he grabbed Michell’s knife in a panic and picked up another steak knife in an effort to protect himself. After he killed Michell, he sat in the shower with the water on for a half-hour, he estimated during the interview, before falling asleep in Michell’s bed.
When he woke up, Bird said he wasn’t thinking straight.
“I was going to call my parents . . . I didn’t know what to do.”
Eventually, Bird returned the borrowed movie to the neighbour he drank with before hitchhiking away from the Fraser Canyon community and fleeing to Eastern Canada.
Bird also described to Carrier how he met Michell earlier that month while hitchhiking on the Trans-Canada Highway en route to Kamloops to get work for a few days. Michell gave him his phone number and Bird stopped for more than a week on his way back home to Agassiz.
With no money, he lived off Michell for eight or nine days, working out, playing video games and reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment beside the Fraser River during the hot August days.
During the evenings, the two would socialize and drink.
Bird told police Michell made no sexual advances on him prior to that evening.
The trial is expected to continue today and into next week.
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