Eerie echo of a half-forgotten horror

Sleep Murder, the made-for-TV flick that CTV has been shooting in Iqaluit this week, is built around a plot-line inspired by a gruesome double-murder that left Iqaluit residents reeling with shock nearly 17 years ago.

In the movie, Jason Priestly plays Peter Radwell, a young Toronto lawyer sent to defend a young Inuk man, Jimmy Tarniq, played by Natar Ungalaaq. Ungalaaq’s character is charged with the brutal murder of two family members.

Priestly’s character is faced with overwhelming evidence pointing to his client’s guilt. So he creates a defence based on the theory that Tarniq did the killings while suffering from a rare kind of sleepwalking disorder.

That sounds a lot like the defence that Yellowknife lawyer John Bayly mounted on behalf of Jopie Atsiqtaq, also known as Jopie Peter, an Iqaluit man who killed a mother and her son inside their Iqaluit home in November 1986.

At the time, Iqaluit residents were already reeling from the unsolved murder of Mary Ann Birmingham, a teenaged girl whose lifeless body had been found at her home near the beach rowhouse area of Iqaluit in the spring of that year.

To ensure that Atsiqtaq received a fair hearing, the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories chose a 12-person jury in Rankin Inlet, then flew them to Iqaluit for the trial, which was held early in 1988.

The evidence they heard and saw was horrifying. Atsiqtaq stabbed his victims repeatedly, then disemboweled them.

Giving evidence on his own behalf, Atsiqtaq admitted to the killings, but gave no explanation for what he did, saying only that he had an “urge to kill.”

Bayly, relying on psychiatric evidence, developed the theory that his client did the killings while in a kind of walking-sleep state – known as “somnambulism.”

To find out what happened to Natar Ungalaaq’s character in Sleep Murder, we’ll have to wait until it’s broadcast on CTV.

But in Atsiqtaq’s real-life case, the jury didn’t buy the defence lawyer’s arguments.

They found Atsiqtaq guilty on two counts of second-degree murder, and the court sentenced him to life imprisonment, with no possibility of parole for at least 10 years.

Atsiqtaq was later charged with murdering Mary Ann Birmingham, but after a preliminary inquiry, a territorial court judge concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to justify sending him to trial. No one else has ever been charged with the crime.