Woman was storing – not disposing of – six infants’ remains, lawyer tells Appeal Court justices By: Kevin Rollason Posted: 12:11 PM CST Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 Last Modified: 5:41 PM CST Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 Updates

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A Winnipeg mother was not disposing the remains of six babies when she put them in a rented locker; she wanted to keep them and was simply storing them.

That’s just one of several reasons defence counsel Greg Brodsky gave the province’s highest court Wednesday in arguing that Andrea Giesbrecht should win her twin appeals against being convicted of six counts of concealing a child’s body and receiving an 8 1/2-year prison sentence.

Brodsky said if Giesbrecht wanted to dispose of the infants, she would have buried them in her backyard or rented a small, unheated storage locker instead of the larger heated one in which they were discovered.

“The remains were not disposed,” he told three justices on the Manitoba Court of Appeal. “They were stored and placed in a rented locker.”

Brodsky said she might have placed them there so she could visit, and argued that the onus wasn’t on Giesbrecht to explain why she stored them, but on the Crown.

Appeal Court Justice Chris Mainella said he had a problem with Brodsky’s argument.

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“I’m having difficulty with the concept you can’t be convicted of the offence if you’re good at hiding bodies,” he said. “Isn’t renting a storage locker disposing? She wasn’t keeping her vinyl record collection here. She had the storage locker to keep dead bodies.”

Brodsky disagreed, explaining that when he put his judicial robes in a locker he wasn’t disposing of them.

“The (trial) judge had to find reasonable doubt she disposed of the body — she stored them,” he said.

Provincial court Judge Murray Thompson convicted Giesbrecht, 44, last year and sentenced her to a total of 9 1/2 years; six months for the first count, a year for the second and two years each for the remaining four convictions, but then reduced the total sentence by a year because it would have been “crushing” to Giesbrecht.

She has been serving her sentence since.

The human remains were discovered when employees opened the locker at the McPhillips Street U-Haul and called police in October 2014.

The bodies of the full- and near-term fetuses — all had been delivered by Giesbrecht — were so badly decomposed that medical experts could not determine cause of death, which is why the charges were not upgraded to more serious offences that could have included homicide.

Brodsky, who has filed 43 grounds for appeal — including that the charges should have been stayed because it took more than 23 months to get to trial and sentencing — also argued the sentence should not have exceeded two years.

“We say the offences were not separate and distinct. The offence was one — it was storage,” he said. “It is an offence with six products of conception.

“If she was the worst person in the world, she would get the maximum; she got more than the maximum.”

But Crown attorney Jennifer Mann rejected all of Brodsky’s arguments and said both the convictions and sentence should stand.

“She was able to thwart a police investigation into these deaths six times,” Mann said. “Any act of concealing a child who has been born, even in your house in an attic, is an offence… people are legally obligated to say they have given birth.”

And, noting that Giesbrecht didn’t testify at her trial, Mann said “this evidence cries out for an explanation and she presented no evidence.”

Justices Mainella, Marc Monnin and Jennifer Pfuetzner reserved their decision.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Kevin Rollason
Reporter

Kevin Rollason is a general assignment reporter at the Free Press. He graduated from Western University with a Masters of Journalism in 1985 and worked at the Winnipeg Sun until 1988, when he joined the Free Press. He has served as the Free Press’s city hall and law courts reporter and has won several awards, including a National Newspaper Award. Read more about Kevin.

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