New trial ordered in 1989 murder of 10-year old Toronto girl
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OTTAWA – The Court of Appeal for Ontario has ordered a new trial for a man convicted of killing 10-year-old Darla Thurrott in 1989.
In a decision issued Thursday, the court concluded there was a miscarriage of justice in the case and set the conviction aside.
In 1990, Timothy Rees was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 15 years.
In 2023, the federal justice minister referred Rees’s conviction back to the Court of Appeal for Ontario after the “identification of new information.”
The appeal centred on a tape that the police had not disclosed that recorded a conversation between an officer and the landlord of the building, who lived in the same home as the victim.
The Ontario court decision says the disclosure of that tape would have helped the defence make its case, pointing to the landlord as a third-party suspect.
It says that “there is a reasonable possibility that withholding the content of that tape from the appellant diminished the overall fairness of the trial process by denying him the ability to further advance his third-party suspect defence.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 27, 2025.