The Crown and defence agree — Dylan Pountney was in the grips of psychosis when he stabbed Jennifer Winkler to death in front of her classmates.
Whether that psychosis prevented him from forming the intent necessary for murder, however, is now up to a judge to decide.
The 22-year-old is accused of murdering Winkler, 17, during their social studies class at Leduc’s Christ the King High School on March 15, 2021.
Court of King’s Bench Justice Eric Macklin is expected to give his verdict in the case Friday.
Pountney was seen on a security camera exiting the classroom during a break, donning a pair of gloves and running back inside with a large butcher’s knife. After stabbing Winkler, he fled the school and hid under a deck in a nearby neighbourhood, where police found him a short time later.
The key piece of evidence in the trial is Pountney’s post-arrest statement to police, in which he made multiple admissions about killing Winkler, the daughter of his deceased mother’s partner.
“My intention was to kill her,” he told an RCMP interviewer.
“She was just a little innocent kid, I obviously regret what I’ve done, but I felt I had to do it.”
He also expressed a desire to “inflict pain” on the girl, and said he felt death or jail “would be better than the place I was in.”
Pountney made a variety of other bizarre statements, including asking for a single grain of rice and claiming his teachers were Hells Angels.
Marc Nesca, a forensic psychologist retained by Pountney’s defence team for a not criminally responsible assessment, said there was “clear” evidence Pountney was experiencing psychosis at the time.
In the RCMP interview, however, Pountney displayed an ability to understand his actions and appreciate that they were wrong, Nesca said.
“He understood what he did, the moral situation, the legal situation of what he did,” he testified last week. “He understood what was happening, while still being mentally ill.”
Pountney was previously treated for mental health issues, including in January 2020 when he was involuntarily hospitalized while experiencing delusions about mind control and “astral travel,” Nesca said. He was treated for substance-induced psychosis later that year.
Nesca assessed Pountney in 2023 and found that at that time there was evidence he was making up or exaggerating symptoms.
The arguments
Crown prosecutor Jeff Rudiak said the evidence establishes Pountney’s actions were planned and deliberate, regardless of whether he was psychotic at the time.
The judge in that case found there was “no dispute” Moss was having a psychotic episode at the time of the murder.
However, “being psychotic does not, in and of itself, negate intent,” he concluded. “A person does not have to possess a clear and cogent understanding of reality to commit murder.”
Pountney’s statement is “replete” with examples showing he understood what he did and that it was wrong, Rudiak said. There was also evidence of planning — Pountney admitted he had thought about killing Winkler for several days, brought a knife to school and donned gloves moments before the attack.
Nesca’s assessment, meanwhile, failed to find any evidence that Pountney was experiencing “significant detachment from reality” at the time of the killing, Rudiak said. He noted Pountney seemed normal to his grandmother the night before the attack, and that he even participated in a class discussion that morning about genocide.
Defence lawyer Derek Anderson argued the Crown had failed to prove intent beyond a reasonable doubt and urged Macklin to convict his client of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
He said Pountney’s admissions about his intentions when he stabbed Winkler were “largely in response to leading questions” from the RCMP interviewer.
He also suggested Pountney could simply have intended to inflict serious injury on Winkler, not kill her. Anderson argued Pountney’s RCMP statement was unreliable, noting he misstated where exactly he stabbed Winkler.
“Whatever delusions (the accused) may have been experiencing did not interfere with or negatively impact his understanding that he did not have to speak to the police and that whatever he said may be used against him,” the judge said.
If Pountney is convicted of first-degree murder, he faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no parole for 25 years.