Bourguignon was charged with first-degree murder in the disturbing death in June 1989 of 2½-year-old Paul Bourguignon Jr., Claude’s nephew. The youngster had been sodomized and strangled, his body subsequently wrapped in a garbage bag in a Pampers diaper box and discarded in a dumpster near his west-end Ottawa home.
On June 2, 1989, the body of Paul Bourguignon Jr., 2-1/2, was found in a dumpster near his Ottawa home. His uncle, Claude Bourguignon, was found guilty of the murder.The trial had gone extremely well for the prosecution, with Claude having to challenge the testimony of numerous witnesses in an effort to maintain his innocence. The neighbour who testified seeing him outside at 6:30 a.m.
“Sorry,” the flustered foreman explained to the court. “I blew it.” Claude Bourguignon was found guilty. The other case was a brutal sexual assault that occurred in Ottawa in September 1988 and went to trial early in April 1989. Also prosecuted by McCormack, it marked the first time in Canada that DNA evidence at a trial led to a conviction. It was also first time that DNA in a criminal trial had been tested in Canada, by the RCMP.Article content
Although it was dark on the night of the attacks, the woman could make out enough of her assailant by the weak light of an outdoor streetlight to identify him. Her visual ID of the man was augmented, she added, by his smell. He was the same man, she said, who had been at her home a month earlier to tile a floor. She recognized the odour of the adhesive glue he used in his trade.Article content
Hilary McCormack became Crown Attorney for Ottawa in 2000. She later became Ontario’s director of Crown operations. She left the ministry of the Attorney General in 2015 to become chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission. She retired in 2021.The DNA evidence in the case, McCormack says, was crucial. Without it, the judge’s instructions to the jury about the reliability of visual identifications may have carried more weight.
“ had agreed, although not entirely voluntarily,” McCormack recalls. “Every other family member went and gave blood. He was kind of shamed into it by his family, by his mother.” “They were testing in England and had started to do it in the U.S.,” she recalls. “And so I phoned up my investigating officer and said I wanted him to go to the RCMP lab and get our samples.” She had made a special presentation to the ministry to justify the expense. “I said I think this is worth a chance because it was a really very brutal sexual assault — really, really brutal — and we ought to be investing in this. We would have been negligent not to do this.
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