HUNTER: Northern Ontario mom claims killer 'got away with bloody murder'

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The dreary Canadian justice system played out as expected for the family of Ashley Lafrance in a northern Ontario courtroom.

And while the result wasn’t good, it was par for the course.

Lafrance, 29, vanished from Kirkland Lake on Sept. 7, 2022. Fifty-three days later, her body was discovered in a wooded area about 45 km west of the northern mining town.

OPP homicide detectives arrested a trio of local knuckleheads even before the beloved mother’s remains were found. Cops hinted the motive was drug-related, a common ticket to trouble in Kirkland Lake.

In an agreed statement of facts, the court heard that Lafrance was driven to the bush by three assailants before she was brutally attacked and left for dead.

If Lafrance’s mother, son and friends expected a modicum of justice in the old Haileybury Courthouse on Monday, they were sadly mistaken.

Mark Anderson, 60, had been charged with first-degree murder but was allowed to bargain his way down to manslaughter and out of a life sentence. With time served, the lovely Mr. Anderson will be out within six months. A free man, the second of the trio to skate out of trouble with a two-minute minor.

Not a bad deal for taking someone’s life.

Ashley Lafrance’s devastated family? They weren’t impressed.

“There ain’t no justice. You just witnessed it right in there,” her mother, Marion Effenberger, told CTV News Northern Ontario outside the courthouse. “He got away with bloody murder. He gets to breathe. He gets to see the sun. My daughter doesn’t even get to see her son.”

Lafrance’s 15-year-old son, Liam, wrote in his victim impact statement: “She’ll never see me grow up or tell me ‘I love you.’ She wasn’t perfect, but she was my mom.”

The dye was cast when Chantal Aube, 43, also facing a first-degree murder charge, pleaded guilty in 2024 to the significantly lesser charge of being an accessory to murder after the fact by helping Anderson and a third man.

Aube’s deal was two years minus a pre-trial custody credit calculated at 1.5:1. Of course, she has conditions she must follow in her deal, but in this country, they mean less than the paper they’re written on.

Anderson and Aube had been something of a drug trafficking tag team around Kirkland Lake. In 2021, both were charged with trafficking fentanyl and methamphetamines, although the value was peanuts.

Both were also dinged with failure to comply with probation orders. The pair were also busted in 2019 on a slew of dope charges. The outcome of both cases is unknown.

That leaves the last man standing in the Lafrance killing. He is Darcy Shail, 43. And already, the bargaining is underway, CTV reported, with his charges being dropped from first-degree murder to second-degree murder.

The allegations against Shail have not been proven in court. His trial is slated for Haileybury Superior Court on June 2.

It would be nice if we could say the junk justice meted out to Ashley Lafrance and her family in Haileybury was a rarity, a blip. We cannot say that.

What we can say is that the killer comes first approach in the justice system is the rule, not the exception.

“I will never forgive and I will never forget what they’ve done,” Lafrance’s mom said outside the court.

It wasn’t clear whether she talking about those who stole her daughter or those who failed to defend her in death.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun