Greg Slewidge was killed near Carleton Place as he was about to be patched into the notorious motorcycle club, a court has heard.
It was supposed to be a banner month for Greg Slewidge.
In September 2020, a Perth courtroom heard Tuesday, Slewidge was operating a roofing business, held a legal licence to grow marijuana, and was about to become a full patch member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club after years of striving.
“Those were Greg’s choices to make and his life to live,” Crown attorney Carl Lem said during his address to open the first-degree murder of the two men accused of killing Slewidge, 39.
On Sept. 23, 2020, Lem said, two masked men — one armed with a gun and the other holding a length of yellow rope — slipped into the Beckwith Township building that was home to Slewidge’s marijuana grow-op, and attacked him.
Slewidge’s body was found the following day on the floor of the grow-op with a yellow, nylon rope around his neck and a knife in his back. Forensic evidence will show he died from strangulation, Lem said.
Michael Clairoux, 50, of Nepean, and Lee Marrazzo, 41, of Luskville, Que., have been charged jointly with first-degree murder in the case, and are being tried together in the Perth courthouse.
Both men have pleaded not guilty.
Lem told the jury that the OPP initially had few leads in the case, but investigators earned a breakthrough when a forensic officer discovered the building’s old security system was still connected to a working digital recorder in the attic of the grow-op, accessible only by a stepladder.
The officer was able to retrieve footage from the recorder, which captured scenes of the masked and gloved killers entering the grow-op and leaving 13 minutes later.
Evening Update
A key issue in the trial, Lem told the jury, will be the identification of the two men in that footage.
Based on an extensive OPP investigation, he said, the Crown will call evidence to establish that the men on trial are those pictured.
Lem said the Crown will call evidence to tie a black 2009 Cadillac CTS, captured by the video, to Marrazzo, along with a pair of tan boots with black toe caps. DNA evidence, drawn from the yellow rope, will also be connected to Marrazzo, he said.
The Crown will also call evidence to show that Clairoux was known to wear a baseball cap, advertising Tijuana sweet tequila liqueur – the same kind of hat worn by one of the men pictured in the video. Other evidence will show Clairoux had sneakers with three stripes, similar to those seen in the video.
Further evidence will show, Lem said, that Clairoux ordered chrome knuckle gloves from his Amazon account in the weeks before the murder.
The suspects were followed by police and their phones tapped, Lem said, and evidence from those efforts will be used to understand their friendship.
“We ask you to bear with us because building this case took a long time for the police and will take several weeks for us to construct for you,” he said.
Lem said the Crown will ask jurors to consider “facet upon facet, and layer upon layer.”
“Although there are other people who may have been aware of the plan or part of the plan, it was Mr. Marrazzo and Mr. Clairoux who executed it,” he alleged.
The victim in the case is the son of Lyndon Slewidge, the former OPP officer whose thunderous versions of the national anthems used to punctuate the opening of Ottawa Senators’ home games.
Slewidge’s youngest daughter, Heather Bal, was the trial’s first witness. A water systems technician, Bal said she was close to her only brother, Greg, particularly when they were younger.
Her brother had an eight-year-daughter, Elianna – he called her “the baby” – of whom he was immensely proud, she said. He was also in a relationship with a woman, Natalie Laberge, although she had recently moved out of his trailer on Scotch Corners Road, near Carleton Place.
Bal told court she last saw her brother on Sept. 19, 2020 as she was making arrangements to attend the funeral of their grandmother in Sault Ste. Marie. He told her, she said, he was going to be “patched in” to a motorcycle club the following Friday.
She found out about her brother’s murder as soon as she arrived in Sault Ste. Marie.
OPP Sgt. Nicholas Ariss told the court he was dispatched to a building on Scotch Corner Road on the morning of Sept. 24 based on information from a caller who said he had just found his friend murdered.
Ariss said he arrived on scene, met the distraught man and was directed to the building’s rear entrance. The building’s interior inside was “maze-like,” he said, with a series of small rooms connected by multiple doors. Some had hydroponic lights and marijuana plants.
In one narrow room, he found the victim, lying on his right side on the floor beside a white chest freezer. There was a knife sticking out of the upper middle portion of his back, he said, and a yellow rope wrapped tightly around his neck.
He was cold to the touch.
The case is expected to last about five weeks.
Andrew Duffy is a National Newspaper Award-winning reporter and long-form feature writer based in Ottawa. To support his work, including exclusive content for subscribers only, sign up here: ottawacitizen.com/subscribe
