WARNING: This story comprises graphic particulars.
An hour earlier than dawn on March 10, 2020, firefighters in Port Coquitlam, B.C. chanced on a grotesque scene — metallic pots containing physique components set on fireplace and a younger woman standing close by “distant and withdrawn.”
According to court docket paperwork, when she was requested what she was burning, Tracy Chen replied “stuff I did not need.”
The physique components belonged to her twin sister and roommate — Ivy.
This week, Tracy was found not criminally responsible for Ivy’s demise and dismemberment — the ultimate act in a household tragedy virtually unimaginable to ponder.
Tracy’s lawyer says her dad and mom reside in Taiwan. As they grieve one daughter, they’re nonetheless decided to like the opposite.
“They’re extraordinarily heartbroken about what occurred,” Chris Johnson advised the CBC.
“But being dad and mom, they’re nonetheless the dad and mom of their remaining baby and so they’ve tried to be supportive of her regardless of their grief over shedding their different baby.”
‘An entity created by the Canadian authorities’
Tracy Chen was charged with first-degree assassination and committing an indignity to a lifeless physique two and a half years in the past.
On Thursday, a New Westminster B.C. Supreme Court choose found the 39-year-old not criminally responsible on account of psychological dysfunction in relation to each counts after a joint submission from Crown and defence.
Ivy Chen was a therapeutic massage therapist. Tracy did administrative work for her sister.
According to an admission of details, Tracy stabbed her sister to demise of their shared condominium, which was owned Ivy Chen.
A downstairs tenant advised RCMP she heard frequent arguments within the unit above: “principally one aspect, shouting … type of spouts of rage” and a “barrage of aggression.”
On the day Tracy killed Ivy Chen, the downstairs tenant stated she and her boyfriend had been awoken by loud noises.
“The noise was described because the sound of a feminine ‘wailing on this despair’ within the bed room immediately above her,” in line with the admission of details.
Johnson stated Tracy was examined by psychiatrists for each the Crown and defence.
Both concluded she had schizophrenia and was within the midst of a deep melancholy and was not able to telling proper from fallacious — the requirement for a discovering of not criminally responsible.
Chen believed Ivy had develop into possessed by an entity that deliberate to kill her.
“She was unclear at occasions as to what the entity was, however she did say on multiple event that it was an entity created by the Canadian authorities as a way to experiment on her lifeless physique,” Johnson stated.
“She believed that this needed to be achieved by her birthday, which was in May of 2020, and that led her to buying the instruments that she finally used to dismember her sister with.”
‘I simply wanted to do away with this’
Records taken from Tracy’s cellphone and laptop computer confirmed that she had researched assassination weapons, dismembering instruments and methods to eliminate and burn a physique.
When they searched the condominium after the invention of Ivy Chen’s physique, police found a reciprocating noticed, a chainsaw, a machete and two hatchets. They additionally found a four-litre container of muriatic acid within the lavatory.
According to the assertion of reality, Tracy Chen tried to eliminate Ivy Chen’s physique by dissolving it within the condominium. But when that failed, she put the remaining components in metallic pots and loaded them into her black Ford Fiesta.
She drove to Minnekhada Regional Park, an enormous wooded space to the west of the Pitt River, simply earlier than daybreak.
“After parking the Fiesta, she proceeded to a spot throughout the close by forest, positioned the components of the corpse contained in the metallic pots and set them on fireplace,” the assertion of reality says.
Firefighters confirmed up shortly after, discovering Tracy Chen standing close to the spots with a stick.
“I simply wanted to do away with this,” she advised them. “I bought to do away with it.”
Chen was arrested inside an hour of the invention of her sister’s physique. She gave two statements to police. She advised one officer she took eight kinds of treatment day by day however hadn’t had any for 48 hours on the time of her arrest.
As a results of the not criminally responsible discovering, Chen has been despatched to the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital in Coquitlam.
Johnson says his shopper “continues to undergo from schizophrenia and melancholy.”
“She’s a very quiet, sad particular person, might be the easiest way to explain her,” he stated.