Man gets life after raping murdered parole officer

JOHN THOMPSON

An Igloolik man received a life sentence in a Yellowknife court last month for the brutal murder of his parole officer, who he bludgeoned with a hammer, strangled with twine, and then had sex with after she was dead.

In late February, Eli Ulayuk pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for killing Louise Pargeter in October 2004. She was the first parole officer in Canada to be killed during a home visit.

A judge sentenced Ulayuk, 38, to life in prison, recommending no parole for 25 years.

According to a report written by the Correctional Service of Canada and the National Parole Board, Pargeter was put in “undue risk” when she visited Ulayuk’s home alone. Pargeter had cancelled Ulayuk’s day parole three years earlier, after he had been violent and sexually aggressive with a girlfriend.

Her death also may have been averted if Ulayuk’s violent past was better understood.

At the time, Ulayuk was on parole for manslaughter, a charge dating back to August 1988, when he killed a 23-year-old woman in Igloolik by stabbing her repeatedly, then strangled her with a rope. Police discovered her body beneath a heap of caribou skins in a shed outside, with her clothes torn and underwear missing.

When arrested, he told police that after drinking 14 cups of home brew, he had the sudden urge to have sex with the victim’s dead body, and killed her for that purpose. But he maintained he changed his mind and never had sex with the corpse.

He was first convicted of second-degree murder, but this was later dropped on a technicality. He later pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment — an unusually harsh sentence.

“Of the many cases of manslaughter to come before this court in the last 35 years, I cannot help but class this as the worst in terms of its extraordinarily horrible facts,” Justice De Weerdt said during the sentencing.

“Of the many offenders who have come before the courts in the Northwest Territories over the past 30 or more years, there are very few whom I remember to have been potentially as dangerous to the public as Mr. Ulayuk.”

Despite these words of warning, the federal report found that the threat of Ulayuk causing more violence was “minimized” by decision makers in the corrections and parole system, who believed that necrophilia — Ulayuk’s fantasy of having sex with the dead — had been ruled out as a problem by the time of his release on day parole.

Past psychiatric reports that concluded Ulayuk was a dangerous necrophiliac appeared to have never been passed along to some institutions, although copies of them remained in Ulayuk’s file at the Yellowknife courthouse, and are available to the public.

Because he was never proved to be a sex offender, relapse assessment and treatment was never available to him.

He agreed to undergo a high intensity sex offender program in 1995, but afterwards he continued to deny he was a sex offender.

After several psychologists warned he was a high risk, in 1999, another psychologist, with no sex offender training, recommended day parole. His counseling with Ulayuk had focused on adjustment in prison, rather than dealing with sexual offences.

The federal report recommends that parole officers be accompanied by others on home visits, and that dangerous offenders be flagged in the computer system. Corrections officials have said some of the changes have already been introduced, although some employees have questioned how strictly the new rules will be enforced.

The report also recommends that parole officers receive special training to deal with Inuit offenders.