Body found in barrel

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This article was published 16/02/2017 (2872 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Three people who shared a Waverley Heights home with a woman whose decomposing remains were found in a barrel on the property, face charges in her death and the shocking effort to destroy the body.

Jennifer Barrett, 42, was beaten to death over several days in August, and her body was put into a 45-gallon drum barrel along with “several chemical agents which hastened the decomposition,” police said about the homicide, which was not made public until Friday.

Perez Adaryll Cleveland, 43, a Canadian citizen born in the United States, has been charged with first-degree murder. His former common-law wife, Jessica Elizabeth Reid, 34, of Winnipeg, and Holley Alyssa Sullivan, 28, of Calgary, have both been charged with accessory after the fact to murder.

Police know little about Barrett, who arrived in Winnipeg from Ontario.

“She was not known to police prior to this,” Const. Rob Carver said, adding it’s not clear how long she’d been in Winnipeg. She was not reported as a missing person, and no one appears to have been looking for her, he said.

Police executed a search warrant on Dec. 1 after being tipped off about human remains in the backyard of the house at 38 Forest Lake Dr., which has been vacant since the end of November, he said. The victim and three accused lived there together for a time in 2016. Carver said police are not certain about the relationships between the others involved.

“This was a difficult and complex investigation,” he said, adding police chose not to report the homicide publicly until after Thursday arrests. As well, they were waiting for the results of forensic tests that identified Barrett’s remains.

Police said Cleveland was charged while in custody at Headingley Correctional Institution. He is accused of committing violent assaults from Aug. 14 to Sept. 27 and was arrested in the North End in December. He’s charged with numerous offences, including assault causing bodily harm, assault with a weapon and possession of a weapon.

Reid was arrested at a residence in Winnipeg, and Sullivan was arrested by Calgary Police Service. They face charges of being accessories after the fact to the murder because police believe they were both involved at the time of the murder or immediately afterward.

On Oct. 18, Reid, Cleveland’s common-law wife, applied for a protection order for her and her 11-year-old son. The order was granted, banning Cleveland from being within a city block of her home or workplace.

In September, police asked for the public’s help locating Cleveland.

The protection order wasn’t served until his arrest on the assault charges in December. In the order, Reid wrote of an incident on Sept. 26 when he “threaten to kill me and beat me.”

“He had a homemade weapon in his hand and swinging it towards me. I ran out of the house because he has really hurt me before and I was scared… I called the police with neighbours that help me.”

Reid also wrote that Cleveland had been assaulting her for six months and, “has pulled a gun and different types of weapons on me. I have been burnt by vice grips and a blow torch.”

In a 2012 Canadian Press article that appeared in newspapers across the country, Reid said she went from foster care to drug addiction, to having her son cared for by others before finding a happy ending that she traces back to one loving soul.

Reid, who at the time was studying child and youth care at Red River College while raising her then-six-year-old son, credited a respite worker she met in Gimli when she was 13 for helping to turn her life around.

“She actually cared,” Reid was quoted as saying. “I want to be that person for somebody else. She was there for me.”

She said she never knew her biological father and when she was seven, her mother left her and three siblings with a boyfriend, causing her to spend most of her childhood in foster care.

She gave up drugs while she was pregnant, but lost custody of her son when he was 18 months old. After battling addiction for two more years, she was able to get him back.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.caalexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca