Zina Hinkley, a friend of Oberly’s, said she is “beyond thrilled” with the appeal decision. Hinkley helped organize a protest of Skelly’s original sentence in Beaumont
Warning: this story contains disturbing details.
Court heard Skelly — who was 69 years old at the time of sentencing — agreed to destroy and hide Oberly’s remains to prevent her from being identified. His son, Kenneth Skelly, is charged with second-degree murder in her death and is scheduled for trial in late 2025.
“The sentence over-emphasized the respondent’s personal circumstances, and the effect that any sentence would have on him,” Justices Jack Watson, Frans Slatter and Alice Woolley wrote.
“Further, proper weight was not given to the element of obstruction of justice inherent in the offence. The sentence imposed was demonstrably unfit because it was disproportionally lenient given the respondent’s culpability and the harm caused by the offence.”
According to an agreed statement of facts, Skelly’s son arrived at his Beaumont home on July 15, 2023, with Oberly’s body. It was eventually decided Joseph Skelly would dismember the body in his garage to prevent Oberly from being identified by investigators, including destroying identifying tattoos, fingerprints, and dental evidence.
Over the course of the night, Skelly dismembered Oberly’s body with an axe, boning knife, and electric saw. He burned some of the remains in his backyard and dumped the ashes in a recycling bin. Because he had been drinking, Skelly waited until he was sober the next morning to drive the rest of the remains to a secluded rural area 200 km away. After returning home, he cleaned the garage and his truck and burned the tarps and mattress used to hide Oberly’s body.
Skelly eventually came clean and led police to where he had hidden what was left of Oberly’s body, but only after investigators seized his cell phone. He initially tried to deflect attention, calling Oberly a “nasty person” who had probably returned to the United States.
Oberly’s remains could only be identified by DNA. Skelly “essentially obliterated Ms. Oberly’s body as an intact entity,” the Court of Appeal said, making it impossible to determine her cause of death.
A key mistake was misstating the range of sentences available in the case law for interfering with human remains. Little disregarded cases in which the person who interfered with the remains was also responsible for the person’s homicide, despite there being “no principled reason” to do so.
Absent a homicide conviction, Little said sentences for committing an indignity to a body range from a conditional sentence to 18 months in jail. The Court of Appeal disagreed, finding the appropriate range for a case like Skelly’s is 18 months to four years, with a maximum sentence of five years (the Crown initially asked for 3-1/2.)
Little’s sentence also failed to address the “paramount” sentencing principles in indignity cases: denunciation and deterrence.
The Court of Appeal found Little committed an “error of principle” when he said that no sentence could bring Oberly back and that all he could change today “is how society treats Mr. Skelly.”
“While some ‘focus on the accused’ was appropriate, it was an error to say that the only objective in sentencing was ‘how society treats Mr. Skelly,’” the appeal court wrote.
“The sentence also had to reflect the impact of the crime on the victims, and denunciation …. of what the respondent did. It also had to deter other like-situated offenders from committing similar crimes.”
Little was also wrong to suggest Skelly had nothing to gain “other than a father’s instinct to attempt to protect his son.”
“Acting to protect a family member is not a mitigating circumstance,” the appeal court said, adding the destruction of a body is inherently an attempt to obstruct justice. “Further, this motivation is more egregious when the deceased was a member of the family of both the person potentially responsible for the domestic homicide and the person who offered the indignity.”
‘Justice is being served’
Zina Hinkley, a friend of Oberly’s, said she is “beyond thrilled” with the appeal decision. Hinkley helped organize a protest of Skelly’s original sentence in Beaumont.
“I feel justice is being served for him, even though it isn’t many years, it’s better than no prison time,” she said in a text. “I know Treasa is looking down and smiling.”
Skelly has been given until Oct. 28 to report to prison. He will receive a day’s credit for each day served under the conditional sentence, as well as 21 days’ credit for time in pretrial custody.