Thirty-two-year-old Brett Overby of Winnipeg was found guilty May 8 of second-degree murder in the 2016 killing of 21-year-old Christine Wood from Oxford House.
Overby admitted during the trial that he killed Wood but said that he didn’t remember what happened and hadn’t meant to hurt her, the Canadian Press reported. Jurors heard that Wood was stabbed 11 times and had her throat slit and her skull and legs broken.
Overby and Wood met through the dating website Plenty of Fish and went for drinks before going back to Overby’s house and trying to buy some cocaine, the Canadian Press said. Overby claimed they had sex and that Wood began behaving erratically, punching him in the face and pressuring him to have unprotected sex. He claimed Wood came at him with a knife when he took her into his basement to show her a mouse skeleton and that he blacked out at that point.
Wood’s body was found in the rural municipality of Springfield in June 2017. Overby had been charged with her murder a couple of months earlier after being arrested on an unrelated matter and Winnipeg police executing a search warrant at his residence.
Wood was with her parents in Winnipeg to accompany another family member to a medical appointment at the time she went missing. The former University of Winnipeg student went out for the evening on Aug. 19, 2016 and never returned, with calls and texts to her cell phone going unanswered.
Second-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence in prison, though the number of years that must be served before applying for parole can vary from 10 to 25 years for adults.
