KITCHENER — Robert Badgerow has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Diane Werendowicz.

After 35 years, four trials and now two days of deliberations, the former Dofasco steelworker’s precedent setting journey through the Canadian legal system has arrived at this long awaited verdict.

The six men and six women of the jury began hearing evidence in mid-September.

Diane’s nephew, Karl Werendowicz and his mother Lorraine were often in the courtroom throughout the trial.

Badgerow, who has been living in Binbrook with his family, has been supported in court by his mother, father (and his girlfriend), his brother and his eldest son.

Badgerow raped, strangled and drowned Diane in a Stoney Creek ravine in June 1981.

Diane, a nursing assistant on a geriatric ward at McMaster hospital, was just days away from her 24th birthday when girlfriends talked her into going out for a few beers at Malarkey’s bar.

Diane left alone around midnight, saying she was heading home. She never made it there.

Children found her body face-down in a ravine creek behind her apartment. She was partially undressed and a tire had been placed on her head.

The case went cold for 17 years before new DNA testing determined Badgerow’s semen was inside Diane. He was charged with first degree murder.

Badgerow, 58, has always maintained he had anonymous, consensual sex with Diane in his car in a bar parking lot and that after she left him someone else killed her on her short walk home.

Badgerow’s defence lawyers have put forward Brian Miller, a convicted serial rapist who lived in Diane’s apartment building, as the alternate suspect. But his DNA was not found on Diane or at the crime scene.

The jury at Badgerow’s first trial in 2001 found him guilty but the verdict was overturned on appeal. Jurors at a second trial in 2010 could not come to a unanimous decision and so a hung jury was declared.

The very same thing happened again at his third trial in 2011.

After that, a judge stayed the charge against Badgerow, saying justice had run its course. But the Crown appealed and the Supreme Court of Canada upheld an Ontario Court of Appeal decision to allow another trial, making Badgerow the first person in Canada to be tried four times on the same first degree murder charge.

The jury at this trial heard evidence for the first time about the location of a phone booth where police and the Crown believe a 911 call was made from three days after the murder. The male caller knew intimate details of the crime scene.

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Past jurors had listened to the call, but were not allowed to hear that it likely came from a pay phone just steps away from where Badgerow worked at Hot Mill 1 at Dofasco and that the call was placed while he was working.

None of the four juries heard that Badgerow was once on trial for the attempted murder of another woman.

Debbie Robertson was attacked just seven weeks after Diane’s murder and within half a kilometre of where her body was found. She was fondled, beaten and stabbed through her ear with a screwdriver.

She told paramedics and police that she knew her attacker from high school. While in her hospital bed, she pointed the man out in her Orchard Park yearbook — Robert Badgerow.

Investigators interviewed Badgerow, but believed his alibi that he was watching TV with his fiancé when Debbie was attacked.

And so her case, and Diane’s, went cold for 17 years until another team of detectives linked the two attacks and collected cast-off DNA from Badgerow.

Badgerow went on trial for the attempted murder of Debbie. But by then, key witnesses had died and some evidence had gone missing. The judge stopped the trial after a few days and stayed the charge against Badgerow.

Nobody has ever been convicted for the attack on Debbie.