A Winnipeg man has abruptly halted his Queen’s Bench murder trial by pleading guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter.
Charles Harold Gamblin, 43, will be sentenced Thursday for the October 2005 killing of Cornelius Fisher inside a Spence Street rooming house.
Gamblin was originally charged with second-degree murder and pleaded not guilty Tuesday at the opening of his trial.
Crown attorney Christina Kopynsky gave her opening statement to jurors and was about to start calling evidence when Gamblin suddenly changed his mind and struck a deal.
Fisher, 57, bled to death after being stabbed several times with a machete -- including one wound which completely penetrated his upper thigh.
“It was a through and through,” Kopynsky told jurors.
Police arrived at the run-down home to find no electricity and a bloody scene inside the darkened main-floor room.
Fisher was slumped on a couch, covered in blood and apparently dead. Gamblin and his common-law wife sat nearby, a machete near his feet.
Two other men, both severely drunk and passed out, were in another room.
Kopynsky had warned jurors that getting some of the evidence was going to be difficult because some of the witnesses are reluctant to testify, have difficulty expressing themselves and may have foggy memories because of intoxicants.
But other evidence -- including Gamblin’s fingerprint found on the machete -- would have proven valuable to the Crown’s case, she said.
Some witnesses were also expected to testify about a heated argument they overheard inside the room, in which a man believed to be Gamblin said “sit down, you’re not going anywhere, I’ll (expletive) stab you, I’ll kill you all’.”
Kopynsky said a witness also saw a man she believes was Gamblin wiping down the blade of the machete outside the home prior to police arriving on scene.
There was also a conversation overheard about blaming “the white guy” -- an apparent reference to one of the passed out men found inside the home, she said.
Kopynsky said Fisher, Gamblin and the others had spent the hours preceding the killing drinking alcohol, smoking crack cocaine and abusing other drugs.
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