WARNING: Some of the details in this story are disturbing, discretion is advised.
A woman accused of murdering her twin sister has been found not responsible by reason of mental illness.
The partial remains of 36-year-old Ivy Chen were found in Minnehada Park in Coquitlam, British Columbia, in March 2020.
RCMP officers were called to reports of a suspicious fire around 6 a.m. on March 10.
Her sister, Tracy Chen, was charged with first-degree murder and indignity to a dead body.
The court heard on Thursday that Tracey suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and heard voices in her head telling her to kill her sister.
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“In this tragic incident, Tracy Chen killed her sister, Ivy, and then cut up her body and tried to burn it,” Crown attorney Jay Vogel told Global News.
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“So the court that dealt with the murder case today found that the evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt that Tracy Chen killed her sister in premeditated murder, so she was actually guilty of first degree murder and desecration of human remains.” “
He added that two psychiatrists found that Tracey was suffering from schizophrenia and other mental disorders at the time and was therefore not found criminally responsible on grounds of mental disorder.
Evidence suggests Tracy stabbed her sister to death in the apartment they shared and then tried to dissolve her remains in acid.
When that didn’t work, she put them in cooking pots and took them to the park and set them on fire.
Vogel said Tracy seemed to believe her sister Ivy wasn’t really her sister and that her sister and the Canadian government were going to kill her. “So she believed the only way to save her life was to kill her sister in the direction of the voices she was hearing at the time,” he said.
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Chris Johnson, Tracy’s lawyer, said it was a very tragic case with some shocking facts.
“It is clear from both reports from the two very experienced psychiatrists that at the time of this murder my client was so mentally ill that she was unable to appreciate that what she was doing was mentally wrong,” he said.
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Johnson added that it appeared from the assessments that Tracey had been suffering from some form of mental illness for a number of years and that it appeared to have increased over time.
“Eventually, as she came to believe, really different thoughts, that some entity had taken over her sister and it wasn’t her sister and this entity was trying to kill her,” he said.
Tracy will remain in a psychiatric facility and her condition will be reviewed regularly, according to court documents.
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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