Testifying in his own defence, Kenneth Bellamy, all tears and the occasional righteous snivel, insisted he never intended to kill his partner.
Instead, he said, Tracy Iannuccilli was stabbed to death when he fell on her during a struggle for a knife.
According to the man who has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, it was Iannuccilli, 44, who ripped off the small knife he wore on a chain around his neck and was trying to stab him in an uncontrollable rage after he accused her of caring more about drugs than their two children taken into care.
It was during the ensuing struggle, as he battled to get the knife out of her hand, that he said they tripped over the bed and the blade pierced her throat.
“I remember her eyes opening wide when I fell on her. I didn’t see where the knife went in,” he said. “I did not try to stab Tracy. I did not try to kill her. I loved her. I did not want her dead.”
Both of them were “really high” on fentanyl at the time, he said, and he didn’t realize Iannuccilli had been fatally wounded.
He told the court he put her in the shower and blacked out and when he came to, he realized she was dead. Not wanting her to be left naked, Bellamy said he covered her with blankets and that’s how Toronto Police found her when the ETF finally talked him out of barricading himself inside their room at the converted hotel-turned-homeless shelter in North York on June 30, 2023.
Court has heard as an agreed statement of fact that Bellamy admits causing her death but denies it was intentional.
Projected on the screen in the downtown courtroom were diagrams prepared by a forensic pathologist of Iannuccilli’s many wounds. In his cross-examination, Crown attorney Kene Canton itemized them all for Bellamy: there were 10 on the left side of her face and neck and eight on the right — including the two lethal wounds to her neck, one 2.7 centimetres and the second, 3.8 centimetres.
Bellamy, a large man in an ill-fitting grey suit, contended that he didn’t stab his partner anywhere in the face because they were best friends. “This is a tragedy,” he said tearfully.
“It is,” the prosecutor agreed, “that you caused.”
Canton suggested that all of Iannuccilli’s stab wounds couldn’t have happened while the couple was standing and wrestling over the knife as he contended.
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“Mr. Bellamy, I suggest the reason Tracy has all these wounds and an equal distribution on her face and on her neck, is because she couldn’t react. Right? Isn’t that right?” Canton demanded.
And there was a reason she couldn’t defend herself, the prosecutor continued.
“She couldn’t react because you had her pinned to the bed,” he charged. “You were on top of her. You see those two bruises just below her shoulder blades? One on either side? I suggest to you, is that where you put your knees?”
Bellamy vehemently denied his accusations. “Absolutely not. You have a vivid imagination,” he retorted.
“Did she scream?” the prosecutor asked quietly.
“If she was screaming, the whole place would have known, because she was loud. And she would have screamed if I was coming at her with a knife,” Bellamy argued. “She was trying to get me.”
Canton wasn’t buying it.
“I suggest to you that you have the knife in your hand, and you just brutalized her. And I’ll put it to you straight. The only reasonable explanation here for stabbing her so many times, in the hands and particularly in the neck, is because you meant to kill her. Isn’t that right?
“No, never. Never.”
The trial continues.