There is no reason to give a second trial to Ron Cyr, Dennis Zvolensky and Nashat Qahwash, Ontario’s top court has ruled.
The Ontario Court of Appeal has dismissed the appeal of the three men, all of whom were convicted of first-degree murder in 2012 in connection with the shooting death of Nadia Gehl three years earlier.
Gehl was killed while waiting at a bus stop in the Ottawa Street and Fischer-Hallman Road area of Kitchener on Feb. 2, 2009.
During the trial of the three men, it emerged that Cyr – Gehl’s husband – had masterminded the murder, while Zvolensky and Qahwash carried it out.
All three men were given automatic life sentences for a murder.
They appealed the verdict on more than a dozen different grounds, including claims that they should have been tried separately, that one juror should have been deemed ineligible to serve because he had been an auxiliary police officer in Hamilton more than an hour earlier, and that the testimony of an undercover police officer who befriended Cyr shouldn’t have been admitted.
Another line of argument was that the verdict should be overturned because jurors were seen together unsupervised and drinking alcohol the night before they began their deliberations.
The court struck down each of these arguments.
Gehl’s father, Nick Gehl, attended every day of the appeal hearing.
Speaking to CTV News, he said he was “quite satisfied” with the outcome, but concerned because he had been told his daughter’s killers will likely try their luck in appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada.
“We’re just going to have to go through this all over again,” he said.
Because the appeals have meant that the case has not been considered closed in the court system, the Gehl family has been unable to collect on her life insurance policy. Cyr was the sole recipient of the policy, and the payout of approximately $500,000 was cited as the reason he decided to kill Gehl.
With reporting by Nicole Lampa
