Langley's Davey Butorac will be back in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster on April 17, to fix dates for new trials for murdering two sex trade workers.
In October, 2013, Butorac was granted new trials, after winning an appeal of his conviction, for murdering two sex trade workers. The 35-year-old Aldergrove man had been found guilty in 2010 of murdering Gwendolyn Lawton, 46, of Abbotsford in March 2007 and Sheryl Koroll, 50, of Langley on July 7, 2007.
Lawton’s body was found on March 13, 2007 in a rural area of Abbotsford, while Koroll’s body was found in an industrial area of Langley City the morning of July 7, 2007.
The convictions were set aside by the appeals court on the basis that the trial judge erred in accepting “the evidence of each murder as similar fact evidence with respect to the other.”
Butorac’s lawyer had argued before the initial trial that the two murder counts should be separated. The judge disagreed.
DNA of the victims found in Butorac’s car and on his shoe led to his original conviction.
Butorac was sentenced to 23 years in prison for the murders.
Also this year, he will go to trial for the second-degree murder of Aldergrove’s Margaret Redford, whose body was found floating in Bertrand Creek in Aldergrove on May 20, 2006.
Jury selection for that trial had been planned for last February, but was postponed until November and now is scheduled to take place this year.