{"id":311449,"date":"2025-11-28T02:20:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T02:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/311449\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T02:20:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T02:20:09","slug":"new-trial-ordered-in-1989-murder-of-darla-thurrott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/311449\/","title":{"rendered":"New trial ordered in 1989 murder of Darla Thurrott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Updated:\u00a0November 27, 2025 at 7:38PM EST<\/p>\n

Published:\u00a0November 27, 2025 at 4:58PM EST<\/p>\n

OTTAWA \u2014 The Court of Appeal for Ontario has ordered a new trial for a man convicted of killing 10-year-old Darla Thurrott in 1989.<\/p>\n

In a decision issued Thursday, the court concluded there was a miscarriage of justice in the case and set the conviction aside.<\/p>\n

In 1990, Timothy Rees was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 15 years.<\/p>\n

\"\"Timothy Rees Timothy Rees, now 60-years-old, can be seen above. (Handout by James Lockyer) <\/p>\n

In 2023, the federal justice minister referred Rees\u2019s conviction back to the Court of Appeal for Ontario<\/a> after the \u201cidentification of new information.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It says that \u201cthere 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 <\/p>\n

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 27, 2025.<\/p>\n

Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Updated:\u00a0November 27, 2025 at 7:38PM EST Published:\u00a0November 27, 2025 at 4:58PM EST OTTAWA \u2014 The Court of Appeal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,713,47,44,11867,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-311449","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-justice","10":"tag-national","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-ontario-quebec","13":"tag-top-news","14":"tag-top-stories","15":"tag-topnews","16":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}