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“He didn’t even have a bed to sleep on. Amanda and him slept on the floor,” she said. “I don’t know why they would be plotting something. Someone was brainwashing them.”

Ms. Korody is originally from St. Catharines, Ont., but is estranged from her family. “Honestly, I haven’t seen her in 20 years. I can’t really say anything,” her uncle told the National Post.

Mr. Nuttall, originally from the Okanagan, was raised in Victoria by his grandmother, and seems to have had little connection with his parents.

Stefano Sxdryv, drummer for the Victoria punk band the Lust Boys, first met Mr. Nuttall in the late 1990s while they were playing together in the band Headrush.

“He didn’t have a sense of fear, he would stand up for his friends to the bitter end,” he said. “I always thought that was something honourable about him, but also a little crazy.”

After Headrush broke up, Mr. Sxdryv said Mr. Nuttall sort of dropped out of sight for the next 15 years.

The drummer saw him only once during the period, around the late 1990s, when Mr. Nuttall was homeless on the streets of the B.C. capital. “He asked me if I had anything to give him,” said Mr. Sxdryv

During the same period, Mr. Nuttall also racked up a record of violent offences. In 1996, he was handed an 18-month sentence for beating a man so severely he had to have his kidney removed.

Mr. Ladret said Mr. Nuttall was behind another beating that left his friend, poet and author Lawrence Braithwaite, suffering from brain damage.