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While the murder trial of Anne Norris was ongoing, members of the jury were often asked to leave the courtroom — as with any trial — while the judge and lawyers discussed legal issues.



The jurors were generally not given any more information than that, and what went on in the courtroom in their absence was banned, as it always is, from publication until the trial was over.



The subject of some of those discussions was a collection of prison cell recordings, in which Norris is heard talking about serial killers, making up murder stories, and calling herself “a psycho” and “a messy monster.”

Anne Norris is shown in provincial court in St. John's for a decision on her preliminary inquiry in November 2016. — Telegram file

There are about 50 hours of recordings in total, obtained by police through an agent wearing a wire while chatting with Norris in May 2017, a year after Norris had killed Marcel Reardon. Norris admitted to killing Reardon at the outset of her trial when it began in January; last Saturday, the jury found her not criminally responsible for Reardon’s death due to a mental illness.



Crown prosecutors Iain Hollett and Jeff Summers wanted to use the recordings as evidence, telling Justice William Goodridge they spoke to Norris’ credibility and her state of

mind. Defence lawyers Jerome Kennedy and Rosellen Sullivan argued the recordings should not be played for the jury, since they would likely taint the jurors and damage Norris’s character, ruining the possibility of a fair trial.



Goodridge chose to allow some of the recordings but excluded most of them, saying they didn’t have any relevance or would have “excessive prejudicial impact” on the jury.

Goodridge

Norris and the informant were being held at the Women’s Correctional Facility in Clarenville when the recorded conversations took place. Goodridge ordered many of the conversations excluded from trial, including instances where Norris and her cellmate agree to tell made-up stories about murder just to pass the time. In one instance, Norris makes up a rhyme, using the phrase “Goodnight, Marcel” and borrowing from actual details of his brutal death, mixing them with fiction. At times she is heard laughing.



“In the rhyme, Ms. Norris speaks easily and in gruesome detail of a killing,” Goodridge wrote in his decision. “The story will have high emotional impact; it exposes, in a fictional story, a cold-hearted woman killer. In this story, Ms. Norris makes light of the death. It is is a story that is in incredibly poor taste, making light of a tragic death. At the end of the story, Ms. Norris says, ‘I’m so bad at this.’ In the context she is announcing that (I am so bad at making up a fictional story). And when the two discuss writing the words down on paper, Ms. Norris says, ‘Like the f--k. It’ll sound like an admission of guilt for me.’ I take this last utterance to mean that the words of the rhyme were made up; they were the opposite of a confession; they were a bad joke.”



At the end of the rhyme, Norris is heard on the recording saying, “I’m a f--king c--t for saying that.”



“The prejudicial impact is very high,” Goodridge wrote. “The laughter alone, when discussing Mr. Reardon’s death, would be impossible to neutralize with a jury instruction.”

Goodridge agreed with Sullivan, who argued the made-up rhyme was black humour, and said it revealed nothing about Norris’s state of mind when she killed Reardon.



“The prejudicial impact is very high,” Goodridge wrote. “The laughter alone, when discussing Mr. Reardon’s death, would be impossible to neutralize with a jury instruction.”



In other parts of the recording Goodridge excluded from trial, Norris admits killing Reardon, and says things like, “It’s my own fault I’m in here” and “I’m a messy monster.” In another, the context of which is unclear, Norris talks about two men, including her ex-boyfriend, who testified for her defence at trial.



“F--kers. Oh, I’d love to kill someone. I hates that,” Norris says. Her cellmate asks, “When did you start feeling like that?” and Norris replies, “Years ago.”



Goodridge ruled that recording inadmissible due to the lack of context, making it unclear whether or not Norris meant “I’d love to kill someone” in the literal sense.



“In a trial of this nature, there is risk that the jury will leap to the context that it is meant literally, that ‘I would like to kill someone,’ but it is far from clear that it was intended that way,” Goodridge wrote.



Among the recordings Goodridge ruled admissible at trial, Norris is heard saying, “They kicked me out of the Waterford. Forced me to go there, certified me for 18 days for stealing a car and then forced me to leave. Idiots. Way too early. Idiots.” She speaks of her anxiety issues and her medication to treat them, and at one point tells her cellmate she became a “psycho” two years ago.



“I do have a lot of balls, actually. attacked somebody ... horribly wrong, beat to death with a f--king hammer,” Norris says. “I can’t believe I f--king did that, though.”



Goodridge chose to permit those comments on the basis that they “will give jurors a glimpse into Ms. Norris’s mind at the relevant time, as Ms. Norris is reporting it.”

At trial, Hollett and Summers chose not to use any of the recordings Goodridge had ruled admissible.

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Once the Crown wrapped its case, Norris’s lawyers asked the judge for a directed verdict: they wanted an automatic acquittal on the first-degree murder charge (leaving second-degree murder and manslaughter as possible verdicts), saying there wasn’t enough evidence to prove Norris had planned to kill Reardon. Goodridge disagreed and dismissed their application.



Having been found not criminally responsible for killing Reardon, Norris is being detained at the Waterford hospital’s forensic unit until a review panel deems her safe to live in the community.



tara.bradbury@thetelegram.com

Twitter: @tara_bradbury