How could somebody who had already been found criminally responsible for one death kill again?

That was the question Justice Gerald Taylor posed, without having an answer for, at Thursday’s sentencing hearing for Derrick Lawlor.

“All murders are senseless,” Taylor said.

“This one is particularly senseless.”

Earlier this week, jurors needed only four hours to convict Lawlor of first-degree murder in connection with the 2014 death of Mark McCreadie.

The night he died, McCreadie had gone to Victoria Park in Kitchener to have sex with another man. Lawlor showed up a while later, eventually telling the third man that it would be OK to leave him and Lawlor alone, and then strangled McCreadie with a scarf in what Taylor called a "brutal murder".

Lawlor was sentenced to four years in prison in 1985 in connection with the suffocation death of a man in Newfoundland and Labrador. He was later pardoned for that offence.

First-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. With the sentence not in doubt, Thursday’s sentencing hearing was a chance for McCreadie’s relatives to address Lawlor directly.

His daughter, Tammy McCreadie, told the court that she can no longer form new relationships because she cannot trust the motives of other people.

She said that McCreadie had initially moved to Waterloo Region to take care of his ailing mother. Since her father’s death, that duty has fallen to Tammy McCreadie – as has that of taking care of Mark McCreadie’s father, who slipped into a coma during the trial.

“My father was a caring, charming family man,” she said.

“He would do anything for friends and family.”

Tammy McCreadie also explained how walking past treed areas or seeing deaths on TV reminds her of her father, and how she is angry at herself for not spending more time with him.

Asked if he had anything to say prior to his sentencing, Lawlor quietly answered “not at this time.”

With reporting by Nicole Lampa