Medical examiner presents autopsy findings at trial of trio accused of murder in Bay Roberts continues

Warning: This story contains graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers

Last Monday, they were 14 out of more than 100 people summoned to the Supreme courthouse in downtown St. John’s for jury selection, with no idea of the case or the details.

On Thursday, Oct. 15, they were three days into the evidence at a murder trial, looking at forensic photos of a gruesome scene and images of an autopsy.

As a sheriff’s officer handed individual folders to the jurors — 12 of them, plus two alternates whom Justice Irene Muzychka will dismiss before deliberations — prosecutor Colin Sheppard warned that the photos inside were graphic.

Some jurors opened their folder immediately, reviewing the pages with a furrowed brow or a hand on their chin. Others kept the folder closed in their lap until the minute they needed to open it.

On one side of the courtroom gallery, loved ones of 42-year-old Michael Fillier also sat through the explanation of the images as medical examiner Dr. Chris Hough testified about his autopsy findings.

On the gallery’s other side sat the loved ones of Terry Cole, Matthew Kavanagh and Stephanie Noftall, who are accused of murdering Fillier in a truck before setting the vehicle on fire.

The three accused, who have pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and committing an indignity to a human body, watched Hough from the prisoner’s dock as he testified.

The pathologist told the court Fillier’s cause of death was ligature strangulation. The manner of death, he said, was homicide.

In his opening remarks to the jury earlier in the week, Sheppard said he and fellow prosecutor Alex Marshall will prove Cole, Kavanagh and Noftall were with Fillier outside a Bay Roberts gas station in the early morning hours of Sept. 30, 2024, and strangled him to death in a pickup before driving his body to a nearby dirt road, setting the vehicle on fire and fleeing the scene in a gray Honda Civic.

RCMP officers have testified they responded to a report of a vehicle fire on Country Road and kept security at the scene while firefighters doused the blaze, no one realizing there was a person inside.

Even when the fire was out and they had seen something inside the remains of the charred truck, it was unrecognizable as a human body until the smoke cleared and it was cool enough for a closer look.

The court heard Fillier was found face down over the centre console, a wire wrapped three times around his neck with the other end wrapped around a front seat headrest post.

RCMP forensics specialist Sgt. Jonathan Moran described photographing the truck with a hand-held camera and a low-flying drone, and calling in forensic anthropologist Janna Andronowski to help identify and remove Fillier’s remains from the vehicle.

Andronowski told the court she sifted through burned debris for bone fragments, then helped prepare the victim’s remains for transportation to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John’s.

Hough conducted the autopsy two days later and presented his 10-page report at trial.

Most of Fillier’s body had been burned to some extent, and there was extensive heat damage to his skull and other bones, the pathologist said. The skin on Fillier’s neck had mostly been spared, and Hough noted there were indentations where the wire had been wrapped, fractures of the neck cartilage, and bleeding into the muscles at the back of the neck under the wire.

When a person dies in a fire it’s usually due to the inhalation of smoke and other airborne substances that kill them, Hough explained. Soot is found in their airway and their carboxyhemoglobin level – the amount of carbon monoxide in their blood – is high.

Fillier had none of that, suggesting he was dead before the fire started.

Hough noted Fillier had suffered no other significant trauma and showed no sign of natural disease.

The legal teams for the defence – Jason Edwards and Courtney Mills for Cole, Stephen Orr and Iain Hollett for Kavanagh and Jon Noonan and Trevor Murphy for Noftall – cross-examined Hough Friday morning, questioning him about his findings, conclusions, and the possibility that other things could have contributed to Fillier’s death or caused the abnormalities noted in the autopsy report.

The pathologist said drugs found in Fillier’s system, including an opiate painkiller, sleeping pill, benzodiazepines, cocaine and THC, may have affected his level of consciousness but did not contribute to his death. He ruled out the possibility of the drugs causing a heart attack, saying there was no evidence of it.

The trial will continue Monday with the cross-examination of another Crown witness who took the stand Friday: an Upper Island Cove woman who said she and her partner had given Kavanagh their gray Civic the day before Fillier was killed, with the plan that Kavanagh would repair the muffler and return it to them.

She told the court Kavanagh never brought the car back and was unreachable when she tried calling him. The next thing she heard anything about the vehicle was when police called, she said.