THE MURDER OF CHRISTINE DEMETER

INTRODUCTION

It's just before 9:45 pm on a Wednesday night in July of 1973. A Mercedes turns onto a quiet dead end street in Mississauga, Ontario, a street so hidden behind trees and a ravine that most people who lived nearby couldn't have told you it was there. Inside the car is a wealthy home builder, his dog, and 5 house guests he's just taken shopping. He pulls into the driveway of his own home, a big colonial house he built himself, and he tells the people in the car that they're right on time. He'd promised his wife they'd be home by now.

He presses a button. The garage door starts to rise.

And there, in the beam of his own headlights, is his wife, Christine. She's lying face down on the concrete floor of the garage in a pool of her own blood, her skull broken open by a series of blows from something like a crowbar or a tire iron.

Her killer is never caught. Not that week. Not that year. Not ever.

But her husband is.

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

This is part 1 of a 2 part series, because the case you're about to hear is only half the story. Today we're covering the murder itself, in order, from the night it happened through to the verdict: the marriage, the affair on both sides of it, the arrest, and an 11 week trial that became, for a while, the most talked about court case in the country. Next episode picks up exactly where this one leaves off, with a man who got a second chance at life and did something almost nobody could have predicted with it. For now, though, we start where the story starts. In a garage, in Mississauga, in the summer of 1973.

This is the case of Peter Demeter.

CHAPTER ONE: The Garage

To understand what the police walked into that night, you have to understand who Peter Demeter was on July 18th, 1973. He was 41 years old. He'd built himself a small empire in the Toronto home building business, running a company called Eden Gardens Custom Builders, and he lived with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, Andrea, in a $100,000 house on Dundas Crescent in a house so private that the Credit River sat on one side of it and a golf course on the other.

That evening, Peter and Christine had 5 house guests staying with them. Two young girls visiting from West Germany, a 16-year-old girl from the United States, and a family friend, Dr. Sybille Brewer, of West Hartford, Connecticut. Christine stayed home with their daughter while Peter took his guests, and his dog, out to Yorkdale Shopping Centre, 22 miles away, to find her a gift.

At around 8:15 pm, Peter had to run his dog back out to the car because pets weren't allowed inside the mall. A few minutes later, he ducked to the back of a Birks jewelry store, to look at gifts for his wife. One of his teenage guests, Viveca Esso, later told the jury she saw him on the phone back there. He waved her away. A little while after that, she came close enough to hear him. He was talking to Christine. It was around 8:30 pm, and by every account, she sounded completely normal.

They finished shopping and drove home. As they turned onto the street, Peter checked the clock. 9:45 pm. He told his guests they were right on time, because that's when he had promised Christine they would be home.

He hit the garage door opener.

Christine was on the floor beside his Cadillac, lying in a pool of blood so wide it was draining toward the garage doors. Her skull had been struck repeatedly. There was no weapon at the scene, no sign of a struggle that made sense, and no sign anyone had broken in.

The first officer through the door, Constable Wayne Pollitt, arrived thinking he was responding to a possible suicide. He found Peter hunched over near the garage, and he heard him say, to Dr. Brewer, "she must have fallen, she must have fallen." Pollitt checked for a pulse and couldn't find one. When he told Peter his wife was dead, Peter didn't cry. He got, in the officer's words, "quite annoyed," and demanded to know why nobody was doing anything to help her.

Sergeant John Murray arrived a few minutes later and got the same reaction. Peter nodded toward the garage and asked him, "well, can't you get her out of here?" Murray would later tell the jury he was struck by how calm Peter was. "I could not picture a man in his position being so calm, direct, as though nothing had happened."

At the police station that night, in a 2.5 hour conversation with an officer, Peter offered his own theory almost immediately. She must have been reaching for something up on the rafters, he said, and fallen. He also mentioned, unprompted, that he'd insured his wife for a large amount of money. Then he asked the officer a question that would follow him for the rest of his life.

He asked whether the officer thought he had killed his wife.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: I want to be careful here, because demeanor alone never proves anything. Grief looks different on everybody, and plenty of innocent people go quiet with police when they're in shock. That's not what flags a case like this. What flags it is when the demeanor doesn't match the story. A man who thinks his wife just fell off a ladder reaching for a garden hose is a man who's confused and frightened. He is not, in my experience, a man who gets irritated that the police won't hurry up and remove the body, or who volunteers, unasked, how much life insurance he had on her. Those aren't signs of guilt on their own. But they're the kind of small, specific details that make a good investigator go back and look again, instead of thinking this is "grieving husband" and moving on.

CHAPTER TWO: A Marriage Running Out

Christine Demeter was 33 years old when she died. She'd been a fashion model in Europe, Austrian born, and by most descriptions a striking, sociable woman who'd left behind a glamorous life on the continent to build a home in the Toronto suburbs.

Peter Demeter's own story started a long way from Mississauga. He was born in Budapest, the son of a man who ran a Hungarian insurance company. During the Second World War, when Peter was around 11 years old, an air raid buried him in the rubble of his own home. His father and one of his brothers was killed in that raid. Another was shot by Soviet soldiers a few weeks later. By the time Peter was 12, he was, in his own words, the only man left to support his mother.

In 1954, as a teenager, he escaped to Vienna. He trained for a time as a drama student at Budapest's Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, and later worked as a journalist and propagandist for Radio Free Europe, covering the 1956 Hungarian uprising from just across the border. That same year, he and his mother emigrated to Canada with, by his own account, about $8 to his name.

Within a decade, Peter Demeter had remade himself into a wealthy Toronto builder. He married Christine in the late 1960s, and the two of them settled into the house on Dundas Crescent with their daughter, Andrea. By outward appearances, it was a marriage of money and glamour. Peter bought her Mercedes cars, furs, jewelry. He would tell a jury, years later, that Christine had been "a very expensive proposition to maintain on an everyday basis," and he meant it as a simple fact, not a complaint.

Underneath the surface, the marriage had already come apart on both sides. A Mississauga businessman named Nicholas Van Berkel testified that he and Christine had been intimate a handful of times in 1970 and 1971, an affair that had ended roughly 2 years before her death. And Peter Demeter, it turned out, had never really let go of a woman he'd met back in Austria before he ever married Christine at all, a model named Marina Hundt, who he'd kept writing to for years even as their romance stayed one sided.

Here's what makes this part of the story different from a simple case of two unfaithful spouses drifting apart quietly: Christine found out. In June of 1973, just weeks before she died, she went through her husband's study and found what she was looking for, letters from Marina Hundt, and 2 photographs of her. She ran to a neighbor's house in tears, telling her that her husband didn't want her anymore, that he'd insured her for $1 million, and that she'd found enough in his papers, in her own words, "to put him in jail for 15 years." On June 11th, 1973, Christine went to see a Toronto lawyer, referred to her by a private investigator, to ask what her rights would be if she filed for divorce. She wanted to know about spousal support, custody of Andrea, and what a divorce might mean for her immigration status. Days earlier, when Peter asked to borrow her Mercedes for a trip to Montreal, she'd refused outright, furious, and a screaming argument followed. He drove off in the Cadillac instead.

She never followed through on the divorce filing. Five weeks later, she was dead.

CHAPTER THREE: A Reward, an Arrest, and a Second Life in the Same House

In the days after the murder, Mississauga police posted a $3,000 reward for information leading to Christine's killer. Peter added to it personally, bringing the total to $15,000, and telling reporters he wanted his wife's murderer caught as badly as anyone. Superintendent William Teggart told the press they had "some suspects" and were working through a list of people connected to similar crimes. For a month, that's where things stood: an open case, a growing reward, and a grieving, cooperative widower giving interviews.

On the morning of August 17th, 1973, that changed. Superintendent Teggart and Detective Sergeant Chris O'Toole arrived at the house on Dundas Crescent and arrested Peter Demeter for the murder of his wife. He was the only person home besides the housekeeper. He was taken to the Mississauga station, charged with non capital murder, the pre 1976 legal category for a killing that didn't carry the death penalty, and brought before a justice of the peace. Reporters watched him walk out of the station in handcuffs just after noon, wearing a charcoal suit, an open necked shirt, and silver framed glasses, for the 15 minute drive to the Peel County Jail in Brampton, where he'd be held without bail for the next week.

At a bail hearing on August 23rd, Mr. Justice Thomas Callon set bail at $75,000, ordered Peter to surrender his passport, stay within York and Peel counties, and report to police once a week. Andrea, just 3 years old, was placed in the care of Peter's cousin, a social worker named Dr. Steven Demeter, and his wife Marjorie, a high school home economics teacher, who lived in North York. Hold onto that name. Steven Demeter and his family are going to matter again, much later in this story, in a way nobody in that courtroom in 1973 could have possibly imagined.

Peter made bail and went home. Home, at that point, still meant the house on Dundas Crescent, the same garage where his wife had died. And within months, he wasn't living there alone. Marina Hundt, the woman from Vienna, flew to Canada and moved in with him while he awaited trial, a fact the Crown would make sure the jury heard about in detail.

CHAPTER FOUR: The Austrian Girl

Marina Hundt met Peter at a cocktail party in Vienna years before he married Christine, when she was barely 20. By her own account, he crossed the room, sat down beside her, and told her, "we have one thing in common. I love you, and so do you." She didn't reciprocate, not then. Peter married Christine on the rebound, prosecutors would later say, and for years afterward he kept writing to Marina anyway.

In December of 1972, according to trial evidence, something shifted. Marina began writing back. Peter visited her in Vienna that summer, and in June of 1973, just 5 weeks before Christine was killed, she flew to Canada to meet him in person, her airfare paid by him. The two of them checked into a Montreal hotel under a false name and spent several days driving together through Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, and Niagara Falls. It was on this trip, the trial heard, that they became physically intimate for the first time in their 7 year acquaintance. She flew home to Vienna around the middle of June. In a letter to her afterward, Peter wrote that he was counting the days until she came back, that he awaited her arrival "like children await the coming of Christmas." They'd already made plans for her to return that September, and for him to eventually move to Europe to be with her.

At the same time, the Crown would tell the jury, Peter had insured his wife for roughly $1 million across several term life insurance policies, with an additional $100,000 payable if her death was ruled accidental. Which meant that if Christine's death could be made to look like a fall, the payout got bigger, not smaller.

It's worth sitting with that for a second, because it's exactly the story Peter told the first police officer on the scene. She must have fallen. She must have been reaching for something.

Prosecutor John Greenwood, opening the Crown's case, put the theory to the jury plainly: an unhappy marriage, a mistress waiting in Vienna, and $1.1 million insurance  policy. Motive, on its own, proves nothing. But it was about to be joined by something far more damning: the voice of a man who said he'd been listening to Peter plan this for 5 years.

CHAPTER FIVE: What the Wire Caught

His name was Csaba Szilagyi. Hungarian born, raised in Austria, he'd known the Demeter family since he was a child, when his father worked alongside Peter's at Radio Free Europe in Graz. Szilagyi came to Canada in 1969 and lived with Peter and Christine for several months, working around the house so he wouldn't feel like a freeloader. He knew them both well.

Just 3 days after the murder, before anyone had been charged with anything, Peel Regional Police put a wire on Csaba Szilagyi and sent him to the funeral home to talk to his old friend. They followed him afterward in an unmarked panel truck loaded with recording equipment, paying him $150 a week for his cooperation. Nearly 20,000 words of tape came out of those conversations over the following months, all of it gathered a full year before the trial that would eventually play it back to a jury.

What that tape captured was a pattern going back 5 years. Szilagyi said that starting not long after he moved in, and continuing right up until the spring of 1973, Peter kept coming to him with ideas for killing his wife. Not vague complaints about an unhappy marriage. Specific plans. Push her down the stairs. Hit her over the head and run her over with the car. Set her car on fire with her trapped inside. Electrocute her in the backyard pool. Fake a break in, shoot Christine, and wound Peter himself somewhere non vital to make it look convincing. Have someone else kill her, and then have Szilagyi kill that man too, to close the loop. Rig her car to detonate over a hidden set of shotgun shells. Close to a dozen different methods, by Szilagyi's count, over 5 years.

Szilagyi said he turned every idea down as impractical, but for years he didn't have the heart to tell Peter to stop asking, because he didn't want to make an enemy of him. When he finally did cut him off, in April of 1973, Peter reportedly became "very, very upset and hurt."

The detail that carried the most weight with the jury, though, was much more recent than any of that. Two days before Christine was killed, Szilagyi testified, Peter phoned him at midday and asked him to keep his girlfriend away from Christine that afternoon, since the two women had plans to meet at a doctor's office downtown. Szilagyi said he was too busy to help. Between 4:15 and 5 pm that same day, Peter called back, agitated, and told him he'd just lost $10,000 because he'd received a call from a man who said "the deal was for one, not two girls." Szilagyi understood, right then, that Christine's life was in danger. He said nothing to her. She visited his apartment the very next day, and he still said nothing.

Within 48 hours, she was dead.

Here's a detail that only came out because police happened to already be listening. Three nights after the murder, in the early hours of July 22nd, 1973, Peter phoned his lawyer, Joseph Pomerant, in the middle of the night, his voice close to breaking. He said he'd just received a threatening call, 30 seconds earlier, from a man with a "heavy immigrant" voice, who told him 3 words: "your daughter is next." He asked Pomerant, in a panic, whether he could withdraw the reward he'd offered for his wife's killer, worried it was putting Andrea in danger. Peter asked his lawyer if he thought police could pull tapes of the phone call.  Pomerant, groggy and skeptical, told him he doubted the phone was even tapped.

It was tapped. Deputy Chief William Teggart had authorized a wiretap on Peter's home phone starting less than a week after the murder, and it stayed in place for 6 months. Detective Sergeant Joseph Terdik later testified that the recording equipment on that line was working perfectly that night, start to finish. No threatening call was ever received. Peter had invented the entire thing, on a phone he didn't know was being recorded, 3 days after his wife's murder.

Of roughly 100 conversations captured on that home wiretap over 6 months, only 11 or 12 tapes ultimately survived. Teggart said he'd destroyed the rest because he didn't consider them useful to either side, a decision the defence argued should never have been his to make alone. But the tapes that did survive were more than enough.

POLICE PERSPECTIVE: A single overheard conversation is interesting. A friend who can testify to one bad night is useful. What you're really looking for, when a case like this comes across your desk, is a pattern that holds up over years, because a pattern is much harder to explain away as a joke or a moment of anger. Csaba Szilagyi wasn't describing one conversation. He was describing a routine that started not long after he moved into that house and kept going for half a decade, right up until 2 days before the murder, with a phone call about a deal for "one, not two girls" that Szilagyi didn't take seriously enough to act on until it was too late. And then, on top of all of that, you have a man inventing a kidnapping threat against his own daughter on a phone he doesn't realize is being recorded, 3 days after his wife's death. That's not nerves. That's not grief. That's a man laying groundwork, and doing it badly, because he didn't know anyone was listening yet.

CHAPTER SIX: Eleven Weeks in London

Peter Demeter's preliminary hearing wrapped up in early 1974, and he was formally committed to stand trial. He hired 2 lawyers who would both go on to become well known names in Canadian law: Joseph Pomerant as lead counsel, and a young Edward Greenspan, who'd go on to become one of the most famous defence lawyers this country has ever produced. The Crown's case was led by Peel Crown attorney John Greenwood, with assistant Crown attorney Leo McGuigan second chairing.

If that second name sounds familiar to any of you who've been with this show a while, it should. He's the same Leo McGuigan who put Donald Armstrong away a few years after this trial, in a case we covered on this show. It’s a small world.

The trial was moved out of the Toronto area entirely, to London, Ontario, because of how much coverage the case had already generated in Brampton area newspapers. It opened in September of 1974 and dragged on for 11 weeks, making it, at the time, the longest criminal trial in Canadian history. The Crown alone called 81 witnesses.

Jury selection took days on its own. Pomerant and Greenspan grilled prospective jurors about whether they were prejudiced against Hungarians, whether they resented wealthy people, and, most pointedly, whether knowing that Peter stood to collect $1 million in life insurance on his wife would affect their presumption of his innocence. The defence even asked, unsuccessfully, that the jury be sequestered for the entire trial to protect them from press coverage that Pomerant himself admitted was "certainly sensational." As it turned out, the judge did order the jury sequestered anyway, for the final weeks of deliberation, keeping all 12 jurors together in a local motel, barred from newspapers, television, and radio, with a sheriff's officer escorting each one home for a few supervised hours so they could see their own families before the verdict came down.

The jury that was finally selected, 9 men and 3 women, was about to spend 11 weeks hearing some of the strangest testimony a Canadian courtroom has ever recorded.

CHAPTER SEVEN: What the Jury Heard

Marina Hundt took the stand in early November, and it was, by every account, a courtroom moment. She wore a black silk blouse open at the throat, tight black slacks, and a large gold crucifix on a thin chain. She testified in a soft, almost child-like voice that she loved Peter, that she wanted to marry him, and that she believed completely in his innocence. Asked why she'd moved to Canada to live with a man on trial for murdering his wife, she said simply, "because I want to stay with Peter." Asked why, she said, "because I love him." She told the jury she'd never once seen any sign he had anything to do with Christine's death, and that if she had, she wouldn't have come back at all.

A neighbor named Joanne Tennent testified about the afternoon in early June when a distraught Christine showed up at her door, having just found Marina's letters and photographs. "She said he didn't want her anymore," Tennent told the jury. "She told me that he had insured her for $1 million... she said she had found enough in his papers to put him in jail for 15 years." Pomerant objected immediately, and the judge agreed, instructing the jury to disregard the statement entirely as hearsay, telling them plainly it wasn't Tennent's fault, she was a layperson repeating what she'd heard, but that it had "nothing to do with this case." The jury was told to put it out of their minds. Whether 12 people can actually do that once they've heard it is, of course, a different question entirely.

Tennent's own husband, David, testified to something almost unbearably poignant by comparison: he'd seen Christine swimming in her own backyard pool on the afternoon of July 18th, hours before she died, and she'd seemed, in his words, "quite normal and quite cheerful."

Then came the strangest thread of the whole trial, the question of who actually swung the weapon, and it produced, almost unbelievably, evidence that Christine herself might have been plotting something too.

Ferenc Stark, a 50-year-old contractor and former French Foreign Legion member, testified that Peter had pestered him about 6 and a half months before the murder to find someone who could "cause an accident" to Christine. Stark eventually recruited a gambler named Imre Olejnyik, known around the community as Kacsa, which is Hungarian for "Duck," who was sent to a house on Dawes Road that spring to push Christine down a flight of stairs. Instead, according to testimony, Olejnyik simply took a roll of house plans said to contain $10,000 in cash and disappeared. But Stark also testified to something else: that a few months after that first approach, Christine Demeter came to him separately, with her own offer, $3,300 for a rifle and an alibi for Csaba Szilagyi. Stark said that was when he realized she was planning to kill someone too.

On the afternoon Christine was actually murdered, a witness testifying under the pseudonym Tom Smith, so afraid of retaliation that he appeared in court wearing a hood with slits cut for his eyes and nose, said he'd seen Olejnyik betting $300 and $400 a race at the Woodbine track, carrying $4,000 to $5,000 in cash. The next day, drinking with him at the Silver Dollar bar on Spadina Avenue, the same witness said Olejnyik seemed emotional and shaken. By the time police connected the dots, Imre Olejnyik was gone, back in Hungary, and Canadian authorities spent months trying, unsuccessfully, to extradite him. Peter, for his part, spent decades afterward insisting Olejnyik couldn't have done it, claiming the man was already back in Hungary and was killed in a Hungarian prison 6 months later, a claim that has never been independently confirmed. The man who actually delivered the blows that killed Christine Demeter has never been identified with certainty, by anyone, to this day.

The defence offered the jury two further alternatives on top of that. The first was a convicted boxer named Joseph Dinardo, serving 7.5 years for arson, theft, and passing counterfeit money, who testified that an escaped prisoner named Laszlo Eper had introduced him to a woman in a shopping plaza parking lot who'd offered him $10,000 to break her husband's hands or legs. Shown a photograph of Christine Demeter afterward, Dinardo hedged, saying she looked like the woman but he couldn't swear to it since she'd been wearing sunglasses. A few nights later, Dinardo claimed, Eper showed up at his apartment with blood soaked through his pants and shoes. Within a month, Eper was dead, shot in a gun battle with Metro police during an unrelated crime. Inside his apartment, officers found a slip of paper with two names on it: Peter Demeter's, and the name of the police superintendent running the murder investigation. The Crown pushed back hard, calling a detective who testified Eper's record showed nothing but theft and burglary, with no history of the kind of violence that killed Christine.

The second alternative had nothing to do with Eper at all. A 24-year-old Mississauga man named Henry Robert Williams was, at that exact moment, facing his own charges for the murders of 2 teenage girls and the attempted murder of a third, all committed within about 3 months of Christine's death and just a few miles from the Demeter home. The defence raised the obvious question: could the same man have killed Christine too? In an almost unheard of move, the Crown called Williams himself to the stand, mid trial, to testify he'd been at work the night Christine died. He denied any involvement under oath, and the theory went nowhere.

Peter Demeter never testified at his own trial. After 3 days of defence witnesses, Pomerant simply announced, "the defence rests," and sat down. The jury never heard from the one man at the center of it all, not in his own voice.

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Verdict

The jury began its deliberations on Tuesday, December 3rd, 1974. They came back into the courtroom the following day with questions, asking Justice Grant to reread the testimony of several witnesses, including Ferenc Stark's account of Christine's alleged rifle scheme and Szilagyi's account of the "incident on Dawes Road." Grant spent hours reading portions of the trial transcript aloud, his own steady voice carrying nearly 20,000 words of wiretapped conversation and testimony back into the record one final time. Before the jury retired for the last time, at 12:30 pm on December 5th, Grant dismissed more than a dozen defence motions for mistrial that Pomerant and Greenspan had filed over the course of the trial, several of them concerning press coverage.

The jury reached its decision and announced the verdict.

Guilty.

Peter Demeter turned in his seat, nodded, and smiled at Marina Hundt, sitting in the gallery. About 60 spectators and 20 reporters crowded into the courtroom to hear what came next. Mr. Justice Campbell Grant sentenced Demeter, that same day, to life in prison, with no eligibility for parole for 10 years. He appealed the conviction twice, first to the Ontario Court of Appeal, and then to the Supreme Court of Canada. He lost both times. Both decisions are on the public record today, if you want to read the court's own reasoning for upholding it.

CHAPTER NINE: The Case Against Him

I want to slow down here, because a lot of people hear "circumstantial case" and think that means a weak one. It doesn't. Peter Demeter's case was won on exactly the kind of evidence that makes circumstantial cases strong: dozens of small, independently verified facts that all point the same direction, none of them a smoking gun on its own, but taken together leaving almost no other reasonable explanation.

Let me walk you through what the jury actually had in front of them.  There were many more facts the jury considered, here are some:

First, the wire. Csaba Szilagyi's testimony about 5 years of murder plots wasn't just one man's word. It was corroborated by police tape recordings made after the murder, in which Peter's own voice, in his own words, was captured discussing the killing with the man he'd once tried to recruit for it.

Second, the timing. That call about a deal for "one, not two girls," 2 days before Christine died, put a live, active arrangement in motion in the exact window before the murder. It wasn't just an old pattern. It was still happening.

Third, the fabricated threat. Three days after the murder, on a phone he didn't know was tapped, Peter invented a kidnapping threat against his own daughter, apparently to justify pulling back the reward he'd offered for his wife's own killer. Police proved, on tape, that the call never happened.

Fourth, the money and the motive. Peter had insured Christine for roughly $1 million, with a bonus payout if her death was ruled an accident. That detail matters enormously, because "she must have fallen" was the exact story Peter offered police within minutes of finding her body.

Fifth, the affair, on both sides. Marina Hundt's letters, her testimony, and the trip they'd taken together under a false name just 5 weeks before the murder gave the jury a second, more emotional motive layered on top of the financial one. And Christine's own discovery of that affair, just weeks before she died, gave the jury a reason Peter might have felt the clock was running out.

Sixth, opportunity. Peter had two separate windows alone that night: several minutes taking his dog back to the car, and several more at the back of a jewelry store, ostensibly shopping for a gift for the woman he was, at that very moment, on the phone with.  This may be considered as an opportunity for Peter to confirm his diabolical plans with Christine’s killer.

Seventh, the staged scene. The garage told its own story. There was no forced entry. A bench blocked the driver's side of the car. The car's dead battery meant Christine couldn't have honked the horn or rolled up the power windows to protect herself. The key to the interior door connecting house to garage was missing, and Greenwood told the jury to remember that a second garage door was broken as well, meaning the only way in that night was through one specific rear entrance, a door someone would have needed to know about in advance. And in the corner of that garage sat a stack of boxes, 6 feet high, tall enough to hide a person waiting.

Eighth, the wounds themselves. The pathology suggested Christine wasn't struck once in a panic. The first blow knocked her into a sitting position. Then came 6 more blows to the back of her skull, delivered in a line, methodical rather than frantic. Nothing was taken. Her clothing was undisturbed. This wasn't a robbery gone wrong.

None of these facts alone proves a murder for hire. A missing key could be an accident. A dead car battery could be a coincidence. Boxes in a garage corner are just boxes. But stack them together, and ask yourself what innocent explanation accounts for all 8 of them at once, and you start to see why an 11 week trial ended the way it did. Csaba Szilagyi gave the jury the why. The scene gave them the how. And Peter Demeter's own recorded voice, 3 days after his wife's body was found, inventing a threat that never happened, gave them a man whose story never quite matched the moment he was living in.

EPILOGUE

By every normal measure, this is where the story should end. A conviction after 11 weeks of testimony. Two failed appeals. A life sentence, and a man locked away with no eligibility for parole until the fall of 1984.

Christine Demeter was buried in a granite grave that her family covered, front and back, with the kind of loving detail people reserve for someone the headlines never managed to capture properly: a fashion model with a complicated life, a young daughter, and a marriage that had quietly stopped working on both sides long before it turned fatal on one of them. She'd found the proof of her husband's betrayal herself, weeks before she died, and had already gone looking for a lawyer. Her killer, whoever actually swung that weapon in the dark of that garage, was never caught. In a strange way, that's almost the least surprising part of this whole case. Peter Demeter didn't need to be there. He just needed someone else to be.

I'll be honest with you. When I started researching this case, I assumed the story ended with that December verdict. It doesn't. Not even close. Because a decade later, the same man who spent 11 weeks insisting he was innocent of murder walked out of a medium security prison on day parole, rebuilt a quiet, respectable little life for himself in Peterborough, Ontario, and then, within a matter of months, did something so audacious that Peel Regional Police gave the investigation a code name of its own. And it involved, of all people, the family that had taken in his own daughter the week he was arrested.

That's next time. I promise you, it gets stranger.

This episode was written, researched, and produced by me, Ryan Dell. If you liked what you heard, please take a moment to give the show a 5-star review. These episodes are ad free, and leaving a review takes less time than listening to the ads other podcasts make you sit through. It helps the podcast grow, and it helps other people find these stories.

I love hearing from you. If there's a case you think I should cover, send me an email. My address is: canadiancrimecast@gmail.com.

I'm Ryan Dell, and this is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime. Part 2 of the Demeter story is up next.

True crime pulls back the curtain on some of the worst things people do to each other, but it also shows us the people who run toward that darkness on purpose, every single day, so the rest of us stay safe. This week, take a moment to thank an officer in your community. They deserve to hear they are appreciated, it makes a huge difference in their lives.