Man convicted of killing wife on Lake Erie sentenced to life
Posted Dec 11, 2018 12:03 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
ERIE, Pa. — A Pennsylvania man convicted of killing his wife and tossing her body into Lake Erie has been sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
Erie County President Judge John Trucilla imposed the mandatory sentence Tuesday on 49-year-old Christopher Leclair and added three years and nine months to 17 years for charges including abuse of a corpse, evidence-tampering and false reports, the Erie Times-News reported.
“There was almost a recognizable gasp in this community when this crime was committed,” Trucilla said. “The depravity and depths that you went to calculate this murder are unlike any this court has ever seen.”
Prosecutors in Erie County said the Albion resident was having an affair and killed his 51-year-old wife, Karen Leclair, in the summer of 2017 because his girlfriend had given him an ultimatum to choose between her and his wife.
Authorities said Leclair reported his wife missing in June 2017, but dock surveillance images showed the two leaving and him returning alone. He went out on the lake the next day and put out a distress call saying his wife had apparently fallen overboard.
Her body was found in July a few miles from Dunkirk, New York, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometres) northeast of Erie. Authorities said she had been shot in the head, tied up and an anchor attached to her body.
Defence attorney Bruce Sandmeyer, who argued that Karen Leclair killed herself because she was upset that her husband had been cheating on her, told the judge Tuesday that his client “continues to assert his innocence.”
The defence conceded that Leclair tied his wife’s body to the anchor and dropped her into the lake, but Sandmeyer argued that his client dumped the body because he didn’t want anyone to know that his actions had caused his wife to take her own life.
Authorities, however, presented testimony that Leclair had also told acquaintances of a plan to kill his wife and drop her body into Lake Erie on several occasions before his wife disappeared. The judge ordered him to pay $705,974 in restitution to the Coast Guard for the search.
The Associated Press
