The Factual Evidence

WARNING: Contents of this trial coverage could offend readers.

He boarded the Greyhound bus in Edmonton just after midnight last July 29, leaving a note in the apartment he shared with his ex-wife.

“I’m gone. Don’t look for me. I wish you were happy,” Vincent Li wrote, according to testimony heard Tuesday at his second-degree murder trial.

Li — travelling under the bogus name of Wong Pent — had a one-way ticket to Thunder Bay. But he got off the bus in the early evening in Erickson, Man.

He would spend the next 24 hours in Erickson, spending most of the time sleeping and sitting on a park bench. Li also sold and burned many of his possessions, later telling a psychiatrist that he was acting on God’s orders.

Li called his ex-wife around 6 a.m. on July 30 but made little sense. (more…)

Society can’t take risk of his ‘recovery’

Vince Weiguang Li is one seriously psychotic dude. He hears voices he says commanded him to kill a man, instruct him when to board buses and tell him he’ll have to take part in his own demise one day.

He’s not really sure if it’s God’s voice or an evil spirit tricking him. What he is sure about is the voices told him to stab, mutilate and dismember a travelling carnival worker on a Greyhound bus last year. (more…)

She was back in the community in six months

It was a crime so horrific it shocked and sickened people across the country. Newspaper headlines all over Canada reported the brutal Manitoba slaying. Months later, many people were upset when it became clear the accused was going to be declared not criminally responsible instead of being handed a long prison sentence as punishment.

But it’s not last summer’s stabbing and beheading of Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus by Vince Weiguang Li that we are talking about – it’s the slaying of four-year-old Skylar Trevor Wiebe by his own mother, Donna Lynn Trueman, with a broom handle more than 17 years ago.

During a three-day hearing this week, Li is expected to be the latest person who committed a criminal offence in Canada to be found not criminally responsible for his actions.

In 1992, Trueman was the first to be sentenced under the then-new federal law. It had just replaced the former verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.

The main change had to do with who looks after the patients.

Under the old law, provincial politicians determined what happened to those found not criminally responsible for their crimes. Under the new law, a system of forensic review boards was set up in every province.

Trueman, a Winnipeg mother, choked her son with a broomstick handle before thrusting it through his head in October 1991.

She said she did it because she believed her son was possessed by the spirit of Adolf Hitler. (more…)

Mental illness no excuse says mother

“Once the crime has been committed, I still believe they need to be held responsible, otherwise what sort of a message are you sending?”

Experts anticipate Li’s lawyers, who have said they don’t dispute Li is responsible for McLean’s death, will try to prove that Li was not criminally responsible for his actions due to mental health issues.

If successful, Li would end up with no criminal record (more…)

Mother of Victim Pushes for Change as Trial Approaches

Her son was sleeping peacefully, listening to music on his earphones as the Greyhound bus drove across the Prairies last summer.

Minutes later, horrified passengers heard Tim McLean “scream bloody murder” as he was repeatedly stabbed and eventually decapitated.

Seven months later, McLean’s mother Carol De Delley is steeling herself to face the man charged with second-degree murder in her son’s brutal slaying as Vince Li goes on trial in Winnipeg Tuesday.

But she doesn’t expect closure from the proceedings, regardless of the outcome.

“There is no possible good outcome for me,” she said in an interview with The Canadian Press. “The trial to me seems like another thing we have to endure – a formality that we have to sit through.”

That’s because the sole issue at the three-day trial, which is being heard by a judge without a jury, will be whether Li is criminally responsible for his actions. (more…)