Just hours after the home of a Calgary homicide victim was torched, one of his alleged murderers confessed to his sister, court heard Thursday.
Roseanne Boucher said she picked up her brother Justin at his Calgary home around noon on Feb. 18, 2022, and drove him to her High River residence.
Earlier that morning Calgary firefighters made the grisly discovery of the bound body of Chad Kowalchuk in his Douglasdale residence in the charred remains of his master bedroom.
The sister, who at the time considered her brother her best friend, asked him why he’d been unavailable to see her for several days.
“I kind of asked him why he’d been avoiding me,” Roseanne Boucher said.
“He told me he had to take care of things first, but he’d taken care of them,” she told Crown prosecutor Vicki Faulkner.
“He told me why he hadn’t been coming around … It was a pretty deep, dark conversation.”
Before explaining himself, Justin Boucher asked his sister to turn her phone and radio off.
“His friend Ronnie hired him for a job … and that they’d taken care of a pedophile, a man was having sex with an 11-year-old girl and he went to beat that guy up,” she testified.
Earlier, Faulkner told jurors a woman who found a picture of her daughter on Kowalchuk’s phone and without evidence told others the victim was a pedophile.
“The woman had shown my brother, or somebody, pictures … and convinced my brother the man was having sex with an 11-year-old,” Roseanne Boucher said.
“He told me him (and two other men) hogtied a man and took turns kicking him in the ribs,” she said.
“They punched and they kicked him.”
Justin Boucher said at one point they ripped or cut off the victim’s fingers.
“I asked him if he felt good and he said the guy couldn’t touch another kid.”
Boucher, who along with Robert Sims and Ronald Abraham face a charge of second-degree murder in Kowalchuk’s beating death, told her he and two other men returned to the home earlier that day with the plan to dismember the body and remove it, but one began gagging and they “went to a plan B.”
The sister, who said she has ended her relationship with her brother, said she inquired whether he was sorry for what he did.
“I asked him, ‘Do you feel any remorse?’ And he said, ‘No, the guy was a pedophile.’”
Under cross-examination by defence counsel Pawel Milczarek, the witness agreed what her brother told her was a drunken, high, rambling statement that didn’t make much sense.
Milczarek also noted multiple inconsistencies with what the woman said what she was told and the facts of the case, including Kowalchuk’s basement tenants were dead at the bottom of a lake, the victim’s arm had been cut off and all his fingers had been removed.
The trial is scheduled to last into next week.