Walsh denies wielding knife in park murder
Angela April Walsh, 25, admitted she stabbed Clark Ernest Hunter Greene 19 times, signed document to that effect, but now says she wasn’t there when victim was killed
Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of a violent crime.
“I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison for something I didn’t do.”
The woman who said that before a New Brunswick Court of Appeal judge Wednesday was also the one who admitted earlier this year to repeatedly stabbing a Fredericton man in the face and chest in 2020 and who signed an agreed statement of facts filed as evidence before a judge.
Angela April Walsh, 25, AKA Ali Morningstar, formerly of Kings College Road in Fredericton, is serving a life sentence in federal prison for second-degree murder.
She pleaded guilty earlier this year to the crime, stemming from the April 2020 stabbing death of Clarke Ernest Hunter Greene, 31.
Murder convictions carry automatic life sentences, although at sentencing, Court of King’s Bench Justice Kathryn Gregory ruled Walsh would be eligible to first apply for parole after serving 13 years.
Despite her guilty plea, though, Walsh filed a handwritten, intended notice of appeal with the Court of Appeal in September, arguing she should have been convicted of manslaughter rather than second-degree murder.
However, she filed that notice of appeal after the 30-day deadline, so before she can seek an appeal, she needs the province’s top court to grant her an extension of time to file.
However, the provincial Office of the Attorney General opposed that extension, and a hearing was held Wednesday before Court of Appeal Justice Raymond French to see if he’d grant it.
Walsh - appearing in court by video-conference from the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont. - didn’t appear to understand the purpose of the hearing, thinking that filing the paperwork was all that was needed.
French explained to her that before he can grant the extension, she has to meet a four-pronged legal test: that Walsh intended to file an appeal within 30 days, that she should offer a reasonable explanation for the delay, that the delay wouldn’t present an undue prejudice against the attorney general and that there is merit to the appeal.
The judge said the Crown, in a letter filed with the court, concedes the first three points, but opposes the extension because it says there’s absolutely no merit to Walsh’s intended appeal.
As she’d noted in her notice of appeal, Walsh reiterated Wednesday she never had the intent to kill Greene, only to rob him.
“What I did resulted in his death, so I’m at fault,” she said.
“I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison for something I didn’t do.”
She said she never stabbed Greene, claiming that happened after the robbery.
“I robbed him and took off,” Walsh said.
It was her ex-spouse - Zachery David Murphy, 23 - who did that, she said.
Dramatic twist at trial
Walsh stood trial in January before a Court of King’s Bench judge and jury on a charge of first-degree murder in Greene’s death.
A star Crown witness early in the trial was Murphy, who’d previously pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and provided a police statement and preliminary-inquiry testimony indicating it was Walsh’s plan to rob Greene.
Murphy had previously given sworn evidence Walsh lured Greene to the gazebo in Wilmot Park and that he’d approached unseen and struck the victim in the head with a pipe.
His original evidence was that’s when Walsh grabbed a knife out of Greene’s pocket that she knew he carried, jumped on top of him and stabbed him 12 times in the chest and seven times in the face, including blows that gouged out the victim’s eyes.
But when the time came for Murphy to testify at the trial, he said he’d been the one to stab Greene and that Walsh had nothing to do with it.
That halted the trial, and after discussions between the Crown and defence, Walsh pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and admitted in an agreed statement of facts filed with the court as an exhibit that she planned the robbery and stabbed Greene repeatedly.
Murphy is serving a life sentence as well. He’ll be eligible to apply for parole after serving 11 years.
Walsh argued Wednesday that Murphy’s admission in her scuttled jury trial was grounds that she wasn’t the one who killed Greene and as such, merits a lesser conviction for manslaughter.
Intended appeal devoid of merit
Government lawyer Joanne Park, representing the attorney general, opened her arguments by suggesting Walsh’s notice of appeal was flawed because it focused on the sentence imposed, not formally seeking an appeal of the conviction for murder.
But French countered that while Walsh’s phrasing might have suggested that initially in her notice of appeal, she specifically mentioned reducing the crime for which she was serving time to manslaughter to second-degree murder.
“That doesn’t read to me like an appeal of sentence,” the judge said.
What really renders Walsh’s intended appeal moot, Park argued, was the fact she admitted on the court record and in a signed statement of facts that she committed second-degree murder and that she was the one who killed Greene.
The offender’s argument that she never planned to kill Greene is consistent with a second-degree murder conviction, the government lawyer said, as second-degree needn’t include premeditation.
In her notice of appeal, Walsh cited a number of elements she claimed was in the evidence that also ran contrary to the second-degree murder conviction. She noted her hair colour was reported incorrectly, that there was information about her having a driver’s licence when she didn’t have one.
She’s also asserted she’s right-handed, so she couldn’t have alternated hands when stabbing Greene over and over again.
Park said those were all “irrelevant factors” that didn’t form part of the agreed statement of facts. It’s not even clear, she said, if any of that information was before the court during the derailed trial or just things she recalled from the contents of the full Crown file that would have been disclosed to the defence earlier in the case ahead of trial.
Walsh’s notice of appeal is devoid of merit, Park argued, and for that reason, the appeal court should deny her requested extension.
French reserved his decision on Walsh’s application to an unspecified date.
Don MacPherson can be contacted at ftonindependent@gmail.com.
Her light bulb doesn’t look to bright,even if on