Lawyers say Crown failed to tie Slewidge murder suspects to security video

Lawyers for the two friends charged with killing biker Gregory Slewidge contend the Crown has failed to prove they’re the masked men seen in security video captured at the crime scene.

In her closing address Monday, defence lawyer Diane Magas told jurors at the first-degree murder trial to consider what evidence is not before them.

Magas said there’s no DNA evidence or fingerprints to tie her client, Michael Clairoux, to the scene of the homicide.

The Crown’s case relies heavily on matching Clairoux’s clothes with “person number one” in the video, but Magas cautioned against making definitive conclusions based on that evidence since it’s possible her client was framed.

“Someone else set him up to be the fall guy: they took some of his things or all of his things to do that,” Magas told the jury.

Clairoux, of Nepean, is a former member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and a convicted marijuana trafficker.

He testified during the two-month trial and denied committing the homicide, saying he’d never been near the crime scene and was in a woodworking shop at the time of the killing.

Magas highlighted the fact that cellphone records, obtained by police, show Clairoux’s phone never “pinged” on the cellphone tower nearest the homicide scene.

It’s the Crown’s theory that Clairoux and his friend, Lee Marrazzo, of Luskville, Que., were hired by a member of the Red Devils Motorcycle Club to kill Slewidge, a former club member, to end a feud.

Court has heard that two masked and gloved men — one holding a length of yellow rope and the other with a gun — entered an industrial building on Scotch Corners Road in Beckwith Township on the afternoon of Sept. 23, 2020, and attacked Slewidge.

The building housed a legal marijuana grow-op owned by Slewidge.

The following day, Slewidge’s body was found on the floor of the grow-op with a yellow nylon rope around his neck and a knife in his back.

Clairoux and Marrazzo have been charged jointly with first-degree murder, and are being tried together in the Perth courthouse. Both men have pleaded not guilty.

At the time of his death, Slewidge, 39, 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 after years of striving to join the notorious motorcycle club. He was also the father of an eight-year-old daughter.

The victim is the son of Lyndon Slewidge, the former OPP officer who often performs the national anthems at Ottawa Senators home games. Slewidge and his family have faithfully attended the trial.

In his address to the jury, Marrazzo’s defence lawyer, Paolo Giancaterino, said his client must be acquitted given the lack of direct evidence against him.

“This case is about circumstantial evidence,” he said.

In such cases, Giancaterino told the jury, the Crown must disprove reasonable inferences that can be drawn from evidence inconsistent with his client’s guilt.

Given that anyone could readily access Slewidge’s grow-op without being caught on surveillance cameras, he said, it’s open to jurors to find that the real killers entered the building sometime after the masked men were captured on videotape.

He agued “real and reasonable” alternative theories about Slewidge’s slaying have not been addressed by the Crown.

Giancaterino suggested Slewidge may have been killed by Hells Angels bikers or by those involved in his grow-op business, which produced 12 to 20 pounds of marijuana every six months.

“Lee (Marrazzo) did not have any motive whatsoever to be involved in Gregory Slewidge’s death,” he argued.

Magas told the jury Clairoux also had no motive to kill Slewidge. But by leaving a knife embedded in his back, the killers, she argued, clearly sought to send a message that Slewidge “was a backstabber.”

Magas told jurors police targeted her client early in their investigation, intercepting more than 5,000 of his cellphone messages and calls, and planting a bug in his Jeep.

“No evidence from all of these intercepts hint in any way whatsoever that Mr. Clairoux was involved in this murder,” she argued.

What’s more, Magas insisted the video of “suspect number one” does not exhibit the physical ticks that her client possesses, nor his neck moles.

Crown attorney Carl Lem has told the jury 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 video of the masked men entering the grow-op and leaving 13 minutes later.

A central issue in the trial has been the identification of the two men in that footage.

The Crown contends the men on trial are those pictured.

Crown attorneys Matthew Humphreys and Lem are expected to make their final submissions to the jury Tuesday.

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