‘Hearing voices before I shot my wife,’ testifies accused in Sanikiluaq murder trial

An accused killer testified in his own first-degree murder trial Monday, saying that he had “started hearing voices” before he shot his wife.

Danny Paul Eyaituk, 40, was arrested on April 19, 2024, after his wife Annie Tracy Oqaituq, 36, was found dead in their Sanikiluaq home.

The accused was defence lawyer Alan Regel’s first witness on Monday, the sixth day of his trial.

Eyaituk, who provided most of his testimony in Inuktitut through an interpreter, blamed the deceased for his drug problems. He said he and Oqaituq sold cocaine and cannabis out of their home.

He had worked as a carpenter and wanted to stop selling drugs, but his wife would not let him, he testified.

“If I tried to quit she would not be happy, so I kept on taking drugs because that is the only way she would be happy,” Eyaituk said.

He implied that Oqaituq was jealous of a woman from a previous relationship, with whom he had fathered four children.

On the night his wife was shot, Eyaituk said he used cocaine while watching television.

He said that he started seeing worms and spiders coming out of the television and that he heard voices. From this point, he said, he blacked out.

“No one else could see them, but I saw them seeping out from the television,” he said. “I went out to smoke, and then I blacked out, and the next time came back to reality, my wife was dead.”

Last week, a young eye-witnesses described the evening as fairly normal before Eyaituk suddenly went “crazy” — a word that Regel used while interrogating the witness — and shot his wife.

Regel asked Eyaituk about his childhood, as well.

At about the age of 13 or 14, Eyaituk began to see and hear things that were not there, he said. He described a misty black apparition that appeared to him periodically during his teenage years and into early adulthood. It scared him, he said.

These hallucinations became scarier as time went by, he said. They disappeared when he reached his twenties, but returned when he started doing drugs later in life, he said.

Regel asked him, “How are you now feeling about drug use?”

“I have no clue,” Eyaituk said.

“Do you think you will go back to using drugs,” Regel asked.

Eyaituk said he doesn’t want to “hear anything” about drugs anymore.