A murderer of 3 women dies in prison. Is that justice? Not for some

Last week, Basil Borutski died in prison where he was serving consecutive sentences for murdering Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk and Nathalie Warmerdam in a single-day, rage-filled spree in the Ottawa Valley.

It was an end the Superior Court judge and the assistant Crown attorney (himself now an Ontario Court justice) at the courthouse in Pembroke, Ont., envisioned after a jury found him guilty in 2017. 

After all, Borutski had been sentenced to 70 years of parole ineligibility — three consecutive terms.

But was it justice?

Not for Tracey McBain, Warmerdam's best friend.

And not for Kirsten Mercer, the lawyer who represented a Renfrew County group working to end intimate partner violence at the 2022 inquest into the three murders.

Borutski died on March 28 at a maximum security prison west of Kingston, Ont. He was 66 years old, and the cause appears to be natural, according to the Correctional Service of Canada.

The federal agency is reviewing the circumstances, as it said it always does when an inmate dies, and the coroner's office is investigating.

"This is just time doing what time does," McBain said in an interview with CBC News Tuesday. "This is just a sad end to a sad life."

She said the families — including Borutski's — "are experiencing a very complicated grieving process right now. And so my heart goes out to them."

"It cannot be easy to be on the other side, and to have cared for someone who has committed such terrible crimes. I can't imagine what they're going through," McBain said.

At the same time, she said part of her is bothered that every time Warmerdam's name is brought up, "it will always be tied to that man."

"But I won't let it diminish that spark that was her. She was a wonder. She didn't always feel it, but she was ... and I wish she was here right now so that I could tell her," McBain said.

Reached by phone Tuesday, one of Borutski's siblings, William Borutski, declined to comment.

Mercer, in a separate interview Tuesday, said it would be a mistake to call Basil Borutski's death justice.

"Although the system worked in the way that it's designed to work, justice has not been served for Carol, Anastasia and Nathalie yet. And it won't be until we bring an end to this epidemic that is in our midst and that we do have tools to end," she said.

"We know better, and we need to do better."

Incarceration not the answer

For Mercer, throwing offenders in jail or in prison is not a fix to the societal ill of intimate partner violence.

Most cases never see a courtroom, she said, and in the rare case that they do and a conviction is secured, most sentences aren't long enough to make people safe for life.

Part of the solution is to intervene early, before perpetrators become fixed in this form of crime, Mercer said.

In Borutski's case, his ex-wife Mary Ann Mask brought several charges against him during their 26-year relationship from 1982 to 2011 — charges Borutski successfully fought or were dropped. A 2011 divorce filing characterized their marriage as "wretched," and the judge wrote Mask alleged "a steady regimen of domestic violence."

"Save for the first trial [in which Borutski was acquitted], the pattern that repeated itself over the years is that after reporting an assault, true or not, they would patch things up and [Mask] recanted, either before or at trial," the judge wrote.

Mercer said she often wonders what would have happened if there had been a "meaningful" intervention with Borutski decades before the murders.

"I think we should all feel sad about the failings and what it cost us, and what it costs the community, and ... the survivors of that man who still live in Renfrew County, and who probably until today woke up every day a little bit afraid that somehow he would get out and that somehow he would harm them," she said.

Mercer also thinks often about a metaphor written by Warmerdam's son, Malcolm Warmerdam. He compared sending abusers to jail with sticking a hornet in a jar, shaking it up, and setting it free again.

"Until we're doing that prevention work ... we're dealing with the system that's going to keep cycling through, and that's a real problem," Mercer said.

Mixed review on inquest recommendation uptake

Borutski was convicted in 2017 of two first-degree murders and the second-degree murder of Culleton, after a weeks-long jury trial in which he refused to participate.

He had been on probation for threatening Warmerdam's family in 2012 when he beat and choked Kuzyk in 2013 and 2014. And he was on probation for the offences against Kuzyk when he murdered her, Warmerdam and Culleton in 2015.

A weeks-long inquest into the murders was held years later in 2022. The inquest's jury produced 86 recommendations, many of them sweeping in scope.

The recommendations included improving the way Ontario's probation service monitors high-risk perpetrators of intimate partner violence, for Ontario to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic, and more.

"We're just going around in circles," McBain said.

"I really feel that when it happens again, it'll be the same calls and they'll go through the same hoops and it'll just be different names. And that's the sadness of it. ... We don't seem to be getting through."

Mercer said Tuesday that governments still aren't moving quickly enough "on the stacks of recommendations that exist," but that there has been some progress at the local level.

Nearly 100 municipalities have declared intimate partner violence an epidemic, while the province has not.

Mercer also said that some high-risk tables, which are groups of stakeholders from different sectors that come together when there's a high-risk case, are functioning better.

"We know that more attention is being given and more space is being created for the front-line workers and the expertise that they bring to that process," she said, adding that it's been a powerful and hopeful surprise.

"[These communities] decided they weren't going to wait around for government to pick it up."

Would have been able to apply for parole in 2085

If he had lived, Borutski would have been eligible to apply for full parole in 2085, according to correctional service records.

By then he would have been 127.

The records indicate Borutski either did not apply to seek parole after 25 years — which would have been in 2040 — or that if he did apply for that relief, he was unsuccessful.

He'd had that right since 2022, when the Supreme Court ruled that it's unconstitutional for multiple murderers to be handed consecutive periods of parole ineligibility, instead of concurrent periods.