The prosecutor ended his opening statement to the jury with a blistering question.
“The Crown will ask you to consider this: If you stab someone 15 times to the head and neck and they die as a result, are you intentionally trying to kill them?” Crown attorney Kene Canton asked. “I submit, you intend the consequences of your actions.
“Here, you only need to apply your common sense.”
Listening in the prisoner’s dock was accused killer Kenneth Bellamy, who has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in the stabbing death of his intimate partner Tracy Iannuccilli, 44, sometime between June 28, 2023, and June 30, 2023. Court heard as an agreed statement of fact that Bellamy admits to causing her death.
At issue, it seems, will be his intent.
“There were a lot of wounds. Vicious wounds — 15 alone to the head and neck area. There were others to her arms and hand,” the prosecutor said in his opening address.
Court heard Iannuccilli was discovered “naked and wrapped in towels under the sink in the bathroom.” In a closet by the door, bloody bed linens and clothing were found in a garbage bag which allegedly had Bellamy’s fingerprint on it.
Canton told the jury that video footage will show Iannuccilli is not seen after June 28, 2023, while Bellamy was seen several times, in particular on June 29, 2023, when he was recorded twice visiting the garbage room on the 10th floor. Forensic officers are expected to testify that there was an attempt to clean up blood in the unit and a mattress had been flipped over.
The Crown’s first witness was Const. Ryan Young, who arrived at the former Edward Village hotel on Yorkland Blvd. on June 30, 2023, at about 12:30 p.m. in response to a call for an unwanted guest at the homeless shelter. On his body-worn camera shown to the jury, Young tells other officers that Bellamy had an outstanding warrant for assault and shelter staff told him nobody had seen Iannuccilli “for some time.”
The couple had originally been set to be discharged from the city shelter that day, but after a water leak was reported by another tenant two days earlier, Canton said, the discharge had been replaced with an eviction notice.
Court heard that Young knocked on their 10th-floor unit, but Bellamy, 43, had barricaded the door and refused to open it.
“Are you by yourself in there?” the officer asks him in the footage.
“Yeah, I’m by myself,” he replies through the door.
Const. Adam Yurkiw also tried to cajole him into coming out so they could talk. Bellamy says he’s “scared,” is originally from Brampton with nowhere to go and complains, “People come in here, staff come in and look at my woman naked.”
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Meanwhile, court heard that shelter staff had given Iannuccilli’s cellphone number to the police, but there was no reply.
As Yurkiw calmly continues his attempts to get Bellamy to open the door, Bellamy utters a threat he then repeats several times: “Open that door one bit, I’m going out the f—ing window.”
Fearing they had a suicidal suspect and “there may or may not be a female inside,” the officers on the video decide to call in the emergency task force.
With remarkable patience, ETF Const. Yiorgo Christodoulou takes over the negotiation on the footage and eventually succeeds in having Bellamy slide a knife under the door and then remove the barricade.
An hour and seven minutes after police first arrived at the shelter, Bellamy was under arrest. Wearing a blue hoodie, he seems dazed in the footage and an officer, who told him he seemed “pretty high,” asks what he’d taken. “Fentanyl,” he replies, “which I buy in this place.”
Canton had told the jury that unlike the victim discovered under the sink, Bellamy had only some “superficial marks” on his body. Young testified that when he booked the accused killer at 32 Division, he had blood on his shoe and the cuff of his pant leg, small cuts to his left hand and a scrape on his forehead.
His partner, a mother of two, had died of multiple stab wounds to the neck.
The trial continues.