Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime

The Cleaner Who Watched Her: The Murder of Lisa Posluns

Ryan Dell Episode 9

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It was a Saturday night November 2, 2002. The kind of night when Yorkville, one of Toronto's most fashionable neighbourhoods, a place of boutiques and galleries and quiet, tree-lined streets,  empties out by ten o'clock.

Inside a 9-storey office building at 94 Cumberland Street, a 38year-old woman was still at her desk. She'd been there most of the day. She had a lawsuit to worry about, a client she'd lost, and a deal she wasn't going to give up on. That was Lisa Posluns. She worked like that. Evenings, weekends, early mornings. The building was mostly quiet. She was used to that.

At 7:49 that evening, she called her mother. It was a quick call. She said she'd be leaving soon. She promised to call when she got home.

It was the last call she ever made.

Seven hours later, a police officer discovered Lisa Posluns' crumpled body in a remote ground-floor equipment room. Her green coat was draped over her face. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed seven times in the torso, and her throat had been slit.


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It was a Saturday night November 2, 2002. The kind of night when Yorkville, one of Toronto's most fashionable neighbourhoods, a place of boutiques and galleries and quiet, tree-lined streets,  empties out by ten o'clock.

Inside a 9-storey office building at 94 Cumberland Street, a 38year-old woman was still at her desk. She'd been there most of the day. She had a lawsuit to worry about, a client she'd lost, and a deal she wasn't going to give up on. That was Lisa Posluns. She worked like that. Evenings, weekends, early mornings. The building was mostly quiet. She was used to that.

At 7:49 that evening, she called her mother. It was a quick call. She said she'd be leaving soon. She promised to call when she got home.

It was the last call she ever made.

Seven hours later, a police officer discovered Lisa Posluns' crumpled body in a remote ground-floor equipment room. Her green coat was draped over her face. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed seven times in the torso, and her throat had been slit.

She was still alive when he dragged her in there.

I'm your host, Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Today's story takes us to Toronto, Ontario, where a former office building cleaner stalked, sexually assaulted, and murdered a commercial real estate broker he had observed working alone in her Yorkville office building, a woman he claimed he barely knew. A woman whose DNA was later found on the knife sheath he carried for four and a half months after he killed her.

This is the story of Lisa Posluns, and the trial of Nelson DeJesus.


CHAPTER 1: LISA

Before we talk about the man who killed her, we need to talk about who she was. Because the Posluns family spent years watching the media reduce their daughter and sister to a headline, as a glamorous Yorkville career woman, the hard-driving businesswoman, the pit bull of commercial real estate. That wasn't the Lisa they knew.

Lisa-Ann Lauren Posluns was born in Toronto in 1964, the youngest of three children raised by Margie and the Avrum Posluns. From the age of 12, when she got her first job as a gift-wrapper at a department store, she always worked. She put herself through school, graduated from Ryerson in business management, and eventually carved out a career in commercial real estate leasing, which is a competitive, male-dominated field where she more than held her own.

She set up her own small brokerage and leased office space on the fifth floor of 94 Cumberland Street, not because it was glamorous, but because she got a terrific deal on the five-year lease. And she could walk to work from her apartment.

But away from the office, the woman her family knew was someone else entirely. Lisa played drums in a school band. She was a cheerleader. She loved Halloween, put out coloured balloons on her birthday, and was always the first one on the floor at a family gathering. She gave bear hugs, and, as her sister Helen recalled, would come over to their mother's house just to sit with her, music on, candles lit.

She talked to her mother several times a day. She had dinner with her mother every second Friday night. They sometimes took trips together. When her niece and nephews were small, she was the aunt who sat on the floor with them, who never missed a birthday.

"She was very much a glass-is-half-full sort of person," her mother Margie said. "Full of life and energy."

She was also security-conscious, she had a double lock on her apartment door. She told her family to be vigilant. But she believed she was safe in her office building. She was five floors up in a building with a security guard. She had no reason to think the man who mopped the lobby floors had been watching her, phoning her anonymously, waiting for his moment.

Her family paid for her gravestone in black granite and covered every inch of it, front and back, with tributes. They were trying to put on the record who she really was.

"We couldn't figure it out," Helen said of the media coverage. "Like what were they trying to say, that she deserved to be murdered?"


CHAPTER 2: THE CLEANER

Nelson DeJesus was 36 years old at the time of his arrest in March 2003. He had worked as a cleaner at 94 Cumberland Street during 2001 and parts of 2002, employed by a cleaning company contracted to maintain the building. He no longer worked there by the time Lisa was killed, the owner of the cleaning company had let him go months before the murder, after discovering DeJesus had a record for sexual assault.

He dressed well. He was tall, dark-haired. His cleaning supervisor at the time, Rui Marques, described him as looking like "the president”, dress pants, a clean white shirt, hair slicked back. He stood out among the other cleaners. Several people in the building recalled seeing him in the lobby, sitting around, chatting, even after he'd stopped working there.

And he knew that building inside and out.

He knew which doors could be opened with a tug. He knew that the ground-floor back door to a remote utility hallway could be pushed open without a key. He knew the stairwells and their locations relative to the elevators, relative to the offices, relative to the main lobby. He knew about a storage room not far from Lisa's fifth-floor office, a room that most people in that building didn't know existed. As Crown prosecutors Susan Orlando and Paul McDermott argued at trial, only someone with that level of insider knowledge would have taken Lisa Posluns down the hallway, around a corner, away from the closest staircase that leads to the lobby, and into the one set of stairs that descends to that isolated ground-floor equipment room, far from where any passing security guard would think to look.

But there was more to Nelson DeJesus than the people in building knew.

In 1995, DeJesus had been convicted of the gunpoint rape of a 17 year-old girl. He had lured her into a house, threatened her with death, handcuffed her to a bed, and sexually assaulted her at gunpoint. He was sentenced to nearly four years in jail. The jury in the Posluns murder trial never heard about this conviction, Justice Eugene Ewaschuk ruled it inadmissible as potentially too prejudicial, but it is part of the record, and it is important. Behavioural profiler Jim Van Allen, brought in by investigators when the trail went cold, would later say that the nature of the attack on Lisa suggested an offender who had likely "been convicted and probably served a considerable period of incarceration for previous sexual assaults”, and who had decided he would not leave a live witness to testify against him again.

That profile was a portrait of Nelson DeJesus.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: The cleaning company owner who eventually gave up DeJesus's name is a detail that deserves more attention than it usually gets. He had fired DeJesus months before the murder after learning about his sexual assault conviction, but when investigators came to him for a list of employees, he was, by the constable's account, less than cooperative. He couldn't spell his employees' names. Didn't know their addresses. He eventually remembered DeJesus almost as an afterthought. In major crime investigations, that kind of reluctant cooperation from people on the periphery can cost weeks. The behavioural profile pointing to a maintenance worker with a prior sexual assault conviction is what sent investigators back to that cleaning company. Without it, DeJesus might have stayed hidden much longer.


CHAPTER 3: THE PHONE CALLS

In the year before Lisa Posluns was murdered, someone made five cellphone calls to her office at 94 Cumberland Street. All of them were made after business hours, four on Sundays and one on a Tuesday night. All of them lasted less than a minute.

Three of those calls were made using what Rogers Wireless investigators identified as the "Star 67" call-blocking feature. The caller's number would not appear on the recipient's call display. You'd pick up the phone and hear nothing, or a click, or a hang-up. Someone testing whether you were there. Figuring out her patterns. Learning when she worked alone.

The calls were traced to Nelson DeJesus' cellphone. They were made between November 2001 and June 2002. In the months leading up to November 2, 2002, the night Lisa was killed, the calls stop. He had the information he needed.

When DeJesus was later questioned by homicide investigators, he told them he barely knew Lisa Posluns. He said she was just someone who worked in the building, he'd say hi when she said hi, and she'd say bye when she was leaving the lobby. That was it. Never really had any conversation.

Crown prosecutor Susan Orlando told the jury what those phone calls said about that statement: "He was trying to figure out the right time to execute his plan to sexually assault and kill Lisa Posluns."


CHAPTER 4: THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 2ND, 2002

It was a Saturday evening. Lisa Posluns had spent part of the day shopping at Holt Renfrew a few blocks away and visited a local deli before returning to her fifth-floor office to work. Crown prosecutors believe she was still there, working on her lawsuit, past 8 p.m.

At 7:49, she called her mother. Margie Posluns testified that her daughter said she was leaving soon and would call when she got home. "I said, 'Will you call me when you get home?' And she said, 'Of course I will.'"

It was the last time her mother heard her voice.

Nelson DeJesus had entered the building before the alarm was set. He made his way to a storage room not far from Lisa's fifth-floor office, and he waited. According to Crown prosecutors, it was around 8:15 when he made his move, intercepting Lisa on her way to the washroom before she could lock up and leave.

Armed with a knife, he forced her away from the obvious route, the staircase beside her office leading to the main lobby, and took her in the opposite direction. Around a corner. Down a different stairwell on the far side of the building. Down to the ground floor. Down to an equipment room that was remote, obscure, and nearly invisible to anyone who hadn't spent months cleaning every corner of that building.

What happened in that room is not easy to describe. Lisa Posluns was sexually assaulted. In a detail that speaks to something calculated and cruel, DeJesus allowed her to get dressed again afterward. And then he made sure there would be no witness left to testify against him. He stabbed her seven times in the torso. He slit her throat. He took her purse and keys and walked out the back exit into the night, leaving her green coat draped over her face.

The building's security guard was on duty didn’t notice anything.

At 12:20 a.m., unable to reach Lisa, her mother called Helen. Helen and her husband drove to the building, searched the street and nearby hotel parking lots, found Lisa's car still in the garage, and called police.

Constable Michael Walters arrived and went floor by floor through the nine-storey building, finally descending to the ground floor and finding one door unlocked, the janitor's closet, around the corner from the office where Lisa had worked. He opened it and radioed his partner.

"I noticed inside the equipment room, on the north wall, the body of a female," he testified. "I could see part of her face and I could see one of her eyes open. It was open, staring, fixed."

At approximately 4 a.m., Inspector Doug Grady received the call to attend the homicide scene at 94 Cumberland. En route, he received information that the victim was a female, early thirties, named Lisa Posluns. When he arrived, blood pooling surrounded her body. You could see, he said, areas where it looked like somebody had been dragged through the blood.

Grady went up to the fifth floor. Lisa's office was pristine. Uncluttered. Neat. Her cellphone was still at her desk. Her purse and wallet were missing. Grady wondered initially if it was a robbery gone wrong. But a closer look at the scene downstairs would change that.

Lisa's sweater was inside out. Her belt was undone. Her coat had been placed deliberately over her head.

This was not a robbery.


CHAPTER 5: THE INVESTIGATION

Inspector Grady and his team faced a difficult set of circumstances. They had a victim with no obvious connection to a violent world. They had a crime scene that initially pointed toward robbery. And they had a building full of people, tenants, cleaners, security staff, delivery workers, any one of whom could have had reason to be in those corridors.

The first strong lead came from the lab. DNA not belonging to Lisa Posluns was recovered from her underwear and jeans, evidence that quickly reframed the investigation as a sexual assault turned homicide. Identifying whose DNA it was became the central mission.

Investigators also found a thumbprint in the utility room. It was matched to the owner of the cleaning company contracted to maintain the building, a man with a criminal record who had keys and twenty-four-hour access. He told police he had nothing to do with Lisa's murder. He eventually agreed to give a DNA sample. It didn't match.

And investigators found a bloody footprint, a work boot print, distinctive and out of place in fashionable Yorkville. Behavioural profiler Jim Van Allen noted that it pointed toward someone with a background in maintenance or trades.

With Grady running the broader investigation, Constable Helen Dixon was assigned to interview people in Lisa's life and collect voluntary DNA samples from men she had known. Using Lisa's address book as a guide, Dixon ultimately collected close to two hundred cheek swabs. One of those men was Nam Lakens, a former business associate of Lisa's with whom she had a contentious relationship, she had filed civil suits against him. He agreed to the swab. His DNA didn't match either.

Not one of the nearly two hundred samples matched.

The investigation was growing cold.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: Two hundred voluntary DNA samples is an extraordinary undertaking. Officers going door to door, office to office, asking men to sign consent forms and submit to swabs. The compliance rate in the building itself was reported at ninety-eight percent. Most people, when you explain what happened and ask for their help, will give it. But the process takes weeks, and when two hundred samples come back negative, it can feel like the walls are closing in on a case. What saved this investigation wasn't a lucky break, it was the behavioural profile. Van Allen's conclusion that the offender had prior sexual assault convictions and intimate knowledge of the building sent investigators back to the cleaning company. That's good police work building on good profiling work.


CHAPTER 6: THE NAME

When Constable Helen Dixon returned to the cleaning company and pressed the owner for a complete list of every man who had worked for him in the past year, he was not particularly helpful. He couldn't remember names. Couldn't spell them. Didn't have addresses.

But eventually, almost reluctantly, he remembered someone. A man he had let go a few months before the murder, after finding out the man had a record for sexual assault.

He gave Dixon the name. He wasn't sure how to spell it. Nelson. Something like DeJesus.

Dixon checked various spellings. She got a hit. Nelson DeJesus had an extensive criminal record, convictions for sexual assault and sexual assault with a weapon. Investigators determined he was now working as a custodian at a Toronto hospital. The profiler's words came back with force: this offender would likely have been convicted and served time for prior sexual assaults. He had decided he would not leave a live witness again.

Dixon went to the hospital to interview DeJesus and request a consent DNA sample. Grady deliberately sent her in alone. She was younger, less experienced, and less threatening. He wanted DeJesus relaxed.

The interview went smoothly until the very end. Dixon walked DeJesus through the consent form, explaining each part. At the bottom of the form, the last question: do you want to speak to a lawyer?

DeJesus paused. Then he said he thought he would.

At that point, Grady stepped in. He looked at DeJesus directly and asked him: "Did you kill Lisa Posluns?"

DeJesus said he hardly knew her. He was, Dixon recalled, very cool, very calm. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't react. He simply avoided the answer.

They told him to call after he'd spoken with his lawyer, and they left. When Dixon shook DeJesus's hand on the way out, she noticed something. His handshake had changed completely from when they arrived. It was cold and clammy and sweaty. Which it really hadn't been at the beginning.

Outside, Grady turned to Dixon. He said: "We have got to be on him 24/7 from now on."

Surveillance was placed on DeJesus immediately. The concern was not just catching him, it was making sure he didn't hurt someone else.

Meanwhile, Dixon had seized DeJesus's work boots from his locker at the hospital. She pulled out the photocopies of the bloody footprints from the crime scene, turned over one of the boots, and compared the soles.

She was not a trained footwear specialist. But she looked at the photocopy, and she looked at the boot, and she thought: wow.

Then Dixon made a different kind of discovery. In the two boxes of evidence from DeJesus's 1995 rape trial still held by police, there was a report confirming that his DNA profile remained on file. She requested that the Centre of Forensic Sciences compare that stored profile to the DNA recovered from Lisa Posluns' clothing.

Two days later, the results came in.

It was a match.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: The moment Dixon went back to those 1995 evidence boxes is the moment this case broke open. In most investigations, you're building toward DNA evidence. Here, the DNA existed, it had been collected during a prior conviction, and the key was making the connection between this suspect and that existing profile. What strikes me is how close investigators came to missing him entirely. The cleaning company owner who let him go for having a sexual assault record didn't volunteer that information readily. If Dixon hadn't pressed, if the behavioural profile hadn't sent her back there, DeJesus might have walked free. The system worked, but barely.


CHAPTER 7: THE ARREST

Police moved immediately to arrest Nelson DeJesus. In the rush, and in the darkness of downtown Toronto, officers briefly detained the wrong man, an easy mistake when you're looking for a tall white male in a city of millions. DeJesus remained at large for a short period.

During that time, Detective Grady led a team to DeJesus's house on Euclid Avenue. They broke the door in. Nobody was home. Grady assigned two officers to stay through the night.

One of those officers was sitting inside the house, watching television in the early hours, when he heard a creak at the door. It opened slightly. Then it stopped.

He figured if it was another officer, they'd knock. He drew his pistol and screamed: "Nelson. Stop. Police."

DeJesus was at the gate between two houses. He had his arm draped over the fence and had dropped something on the other side, a knife, it would turn out, before the officer confronted him. He stood there with what the officer described as a strange look on his face. The officer later said he believed DeJesus was thinking about whether to attack him.

A second officer arrived with his gun drawn. He told DeJesus to get down on the ground or he would be shot. DeJesus got down.

When the officer told him he was under arrest for murder, DeJesus said: "What am I under arrest for?"

"Murder," the officer said.

Just like that. He said later it actually felt good to say it.

When officers searched DeJesus at a downtown police station, they found in his waistband a homemade knife sheath. A search of his home the following morning produced five handcuff keys. Both the sheath and a set of handcuffs he was carrying that night contained Lisa Posluns' DNA.


CHAPTER 8: THE DNA

The forensic case against Nelson DeJesus was built on an accumulation of evidence that the Crown described as overwhelming in its combined force.

The knife sheath found in the waistband of his pants at the time of his arrest contained a substance that tested positive for blood. The DNA in that blood matched Lisa Posluns. The probability that a randomly selected person unrelated to DeJesus would share that profile: one in 3.3 trillion.

The handcuffs found on DeJesus at the time of his arrest contained DNA consistent with Lisa Posluns, with a one-in-2.3-million probability of coincidence.

Semen found on the inside back panel of Lisa's jeans contained DNA matching DeJesus. The probability that a random unrelated individual would share that profile: one in 670 billion.

Saliva found on Lisa's underwear also matched DeJesus, with a one-in-65,000 probability of coincidence.

And the bloody work boot footprint found near the exit door of the ground-floor hallway matched the soles of the shoes seized from DeJesus's locker at the hospital, right down to two distinctive pinprick holes on the left sole that corresponded to marks in one of the prints at the scene.

Crown prosecutor Paul McDermott told the jury: "The great power of this evidence is not in looking at it individually. The great power of this evidence is its combined force."

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: When you hear statistics like one in 670 billion or one in 3.3 trillion, they can start to sound abstract. So let me put it plainly: the DNA on that knife sheath, on those handcuffs, on her clothing, it was hers. He was carrying it on his body every day. He had cleaned himself up, gone back to work, been living his life for four and a half months. And every day he was carrying a sheath with her blood inside it. There is no innocent explanation for that. There is no cross-contamination theory that accounts for it. That's why the Crown's case, for all the defence challenges to the forensic methodology, was as strong as it was.


CHAPTER 9: THE TRIAL

The trial of Nelson DeJesus opened in January 2006 at Superior Court in Toronto, presided over by Justice Eugene Ewaschuk. It lasted three months. Nelson DeJesus pleaded not guilty and did not testify in his own defence.

The Crown called cleaning supervisors, Rogers Wireless investigators, forensic specialists, DNA analysts, the paramedic who had examined Lisa's body, the officers who had discovered her and chased DeJesus, and, most painfully, Lisa's mother and her sister Helen.

Margie Posluns sat in court every day. During testimony about the contents of her daughter's clothing, when the forensic investigator described the bloodstains and the torn turtleneck, and the photographs were shown, Margie sat forward and looked away, comforted by Helen beside her.

One moment that stayed with trial observers came during testimony about the search of the building. Constable Michael Walters testified that as he descended to the ground floor and found the equipment room door closed but unlocked, he had no idea what he was about to find.

"I noticed inside the equipment room, on the north wall, the body of a female," he testified. "I could see part of her face and I could see one of her eyes open. It was open, staring, fixed."

Margie Posluns, sitting nearby, silently sobbed.

The defence mounted a vigorous two-pronged challenge: attack the science, and attack the investigation. They argued police had contaminated the crime scene, failed to test key items for months, and failed to obtain DNA samples from seven officers who had been at the scene in the early hours. They raised unidentified male DNA at the crime scene. They questioned the footprint evidence.

The defence also challenged Rui Marques, the cleaning supervisor who had identified DeJesus as his prime suspect,  partly because Marques had testified that after Lisa's death, he believed he saw an apparition of her while cleaning one of the offices, and that the apparition appeared to be pointing at a black desk where DeJesus used to clean. The defence asked the jury plainly: "Why should you believe a person who communicates with ghosts as part of his information?"

But on April 7th, 2006, after three months of trial, the jury began deliberating. One day later, on April 8th, they returned.

Guilty. First-degree murder.

DeJesus remained impassive as the verdict was read, as he had throughout the entire trial. He was sentenced to life in prison.

His lawyers announced they were considering an appeal.


CHAPTER 10: THE CASE AGAINST HIM — THE EVIDENCE EXPLAINED

Before we get to the appeal, I want to take a moment for listeners who may be wondering: how exactly does a jury arrive at a first-degree murder conviction when there is no confession, no eyewitness, and no video footage of the crime itself? Because that question is worth answering carefully. This was a circumstantial case, but circumstantial does not mean weak. It means the evidence points to a conclusion through a chain of facts rather than through one single smoking gun. And in this case, that chain was long, consistent, and pointed in only one direction.

Let me walk you through it piece by piece.

First: access and knowledge. Nelson DeJesus had previously worked as a cleaner in the building where Lisa Posluns was murdered. He knew the stairwells, the back corridors, the remote utility rooms. He knew which doors were faulty and which exits bypassed the lobby. Crown prosecutors argued, and the jury accepted, that only someone with that specific insider knowledge would have taken Lisa in the direction he took her that night. Away from the obvious route. Down to a room that most tenants didn't even know existed. That knowledge didn't come from nowhere. It came from months of cleaning that building.

Second: the phone calls. In the year before Lisa was killed, five cellphone calls were made to her office after business hours. All under a minute. Three made with call-blocking activated so she couldn't see who was calling. Those calls were traced to DeJesus's cellphone. He told police he barely knew her. The calls said otherwise. They showed a pattern of surveillance, someone learning her schedule, confirming when she worked alone, testing whether she was there.

Third: the footprint. A bloody work boot print was found at the scene near the exit door. It matched, in size, shape, pattern, and two distinctive pinprick holes on the left sole, the boots seized from DeJesus's locker at the hospital where he was working at the time of his arrest.

Fourth: the DNA on the victim's clothing. Semen found on the inside back panel of Lisa's jeans matched DeJesus's DNA profile. The probability that a randomly selected person unrelated to DeJesus would share that profile: one in 670 billion. Saliva found on her underwear also matched him, with a one-in-65,000 probability of coincidence. These were items she was wearing when she was attacked. His DNA on her clothing placed him in contact with her body.

Fifth: the DNA on the weapon. When DeJesus was arrested, four and a half months after Lisa was murdered, he was carrying a homemade knife sheath tucked into the small of his back. Inside that sheath, forensic scientists found a substance that tested positive for blood. The DNA in that blood matched Lisa Posluns at a probability of one in 3.3 trillion. He had been carrying a sheath containing her blood on his person, every single day, for four and a half months.

Sixth: the handcuffs. At the time of his arrest, DeJesus was also carrying a set of handcuffs. Those handcuffs contained DNA consistent with Lisa Posluns at a one-in-2.3-million probability. Five handcuff keys were found in his home. The Crown argued he used the handcuffs to restrain her during the assault.

Seventh: guilty conscious. When police came to interview DeJesus and request a DNA sample, he asked to speak to a lawyer, which is his right,  but his body told a different story. His handshake turned cold and clammy. When a Canada-wide arrest warrant was issued, he was placed under surveillance and observed ducking down alleys, making U-turns, attempting to evade police. When officers arrived at his home to arrest him, he fled on foot, dropping the knife over a fence as he ran, and only surrendered when two officers had their guns trained on him.

Eighth: the prior conviction. While the jury was not told about this, Justice Ewaschuk ruled it inadmissible, it forms part of the full picture. In 1995, DeJesus had been convicted of the gunpoint rape of a seventeen-year-old girl, for which he served nearly four years. The behavioural profiler who assessed this case predicted the offender had prior sexual assault convictions and had decided never to leave a live witness again. That profile was a precise description of Nelson DeJesus.

Taken individually, some of these pieces could be challenged, and the defence did challenge them. They questioned the forensic methodology, raised contamination issues, pointed to unidentified DNA at the scene. But as Crown prosecutor Paul McDermott told the jury: "The great power of this evidence is not in looking at it individually. The great power of this evidence is its combined force."

His DNA on her clothing. Her DNA on his knife sheath. His shoes matching the bloody footprint. His phone calls to her office. His knowledge of the building. His flight from police. His prior history.

When you lay it all out together, the jury's conclusion was not a difficult one. The only remaining question was what a reasonable person was supposed to make of a man carrying a dead woman's blood in a knife sheath for four and a half months. And the answer to that question was: guilty.


CHAPTER 11: THE APPEAL — AND THE END

Four years later, DeJesus tried to have his conviction overturned. His lawyers argued at the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2010 that DNA evidence found on underwear seized during his 1995 arrest should have been excluded, that subsequent DNA testing ordered by police in the Posluns murder investigation violated his Charter rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

In a quick oral decision, the three-judge appeal panel rejected the argument. DeJesus had no reasonable expectation of privacy in clothing seized during a separate, valid arrest. He had pleaded guilty to one of the 1995 sex crimes himself.

Helen Posluns and other family members were at the hearing. Helen told reporters the family had been praying they would not have to face another trial, that DeJesus would not have another chance for freedom.

They got what they prayed for. The appeal was denied.

Nelson DeJesus remains in custody, serving a life sentence.



Before I let you go, if you've been enjoying Canadian Crime Cast, I'd love to ask a small favour. This show is completely free and ad-free, and I want to keep it that way. The single biggest thing you can do to help me grow is leave a 5-star review wherever you're listening. It takes about 30 seconds, it costs you nothing, and it genuinely makes a difference in helping new listeners find the show. These are real Canadian stories that deserve to be heard, and your review helps make sure they are.

This episode was written, researched, and produced by me, Ryan Dell.

I love hearing from you. If you have a story I should cover, please send me an email. My email is: canadiancrimecast@gmail.com

This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

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*Sources: Toronto Star reporting by Peter Small, Michelle Shephard, Cal Millar, Nicholas Keung, and Diana Zlomislic (2002–2010); The Globe and Mail reporting by Christie Blatchford (November 1, 2004) and Joe Friesen (January 18, 2006); Ontario Court of Appeal decision on the DeJesus appeal, September 2010; 72 Hours: True Crime, Season 3, Episode 6.*