This much is undisputed: Godfrey Sig-Od admits he brutally killed his ex-wife and their daughter, slashing and stabbing each more than a dozen times by the side of Bathurst St. in broad daylight on that August afternoon in 2022.
What the jury must now decide is whether plunging two knives into the face, head and body of Elvie and Angelica Sig-Od was the result of his unintended “explosion” of blind rage which he couldn’t control or the culmination of a long-planned double murder he’d first threatened to commit 19 months earlier.
Sig-Od, 48, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. His offer to plead to manslaughter at the start of the trial last month was rejected by assistant Crown attorneys Rochelle Liberman and Victoria Di Iorio.
“I suggest that the crime in Mr. Sig-Od’s case was an act of impulse, uncontrollable impulse,” defence lawyer Daniel Brodsky said in his meandering closing address. “There’s no direct evidence of planning.”
Sig-Od has testified he exploded in anger while they were all in his ex-wife’s car because Elvie wouldn’t help renew his Philippines passport and permanent resident card until he repaid the $3,500 she’d spent sponsoring him to Canada. And he was furious with his 20-year-old daughter for refusing to send money to help her paternal grandmother, saying she only cared about her mother’s side of the family.
“My client is a human being who felt all ordinary human feelings,” his lawyer said. “He felt love. He felt passion. He felt hope. He felt anger. He felt jealousy… In one split second on a clear, sunny day in broad daylight, it all got to him. In the grip of sudden passion, he lost self-control when he lost the capacity for cool reflection and restraint.
“In that instant, this terrible thing happened, this stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, this homicide, this manslaughter. Terrible. Tragic.”
The jury has heard the couple had been separated since Elvie left the Philippines to work in Hong Kong in 2004. She eventually immigrated to Canada and sponsored their daughter while he had other women and another child in the Philippines. At the urging of her mother-in-law, Elvie agreed to sponsor Sig-Od in 2019, but their attempt to reconcile soon proved impossible.
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Angelica met with York Regional Police in October 2020 to ask about a restraining order against her father after she alleged he told her he would have killed her long ago. The following month, Elvie gave a videotaped police statement alleging Sig-Od threatened to kill her when she went to his workplace to pick up divorce papers he was supposed to sign.
Feeling abandoned and humiliated, the Crown argued, Sig-Od lured Elvie and Angelica to pick him up and take him to the Philippines’ consulate with the fake promise that he had the cash he owed. “He armed himself with two knives and carried out a plan that he had dreamt up 19 months earlier,” Liberman said in her closing.
Witnesses testified Elvie’s car jumped the curb north of Sheppard Ave. and they saw Sig-Od repeatedly stabbing both women, Elvie 14 times, and Angelica, 19. He then confessed to a bystander, “I killed her because she cheated on me.”
Liberman insisted the vicious slayings were planned and deliberate, and insisted he’s guilty of first-degree murder.
“I want you to ask yourself why someone would bring two knives on their way to renew a passport or to go to the gym? Why someone would stab someone 14 and 19 times? Why someone would prevent a bystander such as Royi Flescher from assisting one of the women on the ground?” she asked.
“I would submit to you that the reason why someone would do all of these things is because they clearly intended the acts that they committed.”
Whatever the jury decides, there is something else Sig-Od’s lawyer alluded to in his closing address that’s also tragically self-evident: two women may still be alive if police had done their job and executed the warrant they had to arrest him for his alleged death threat against Elvie in 2020.
“It sure does make you shake your head,” Brodsky told the jury.
“I suggest that it is reasonable to assume that a purported threat by a person uttered to a soon-to-be ex-wife, ostensibly made on the day she comes to have him sign divorce papers, was not taken particularly seriously by the police.”
The jury is expected to begin deliberations tomorrow morning.