At Berbice Assizes
HARLON Dey, who murdered his girlfriend, Samantha Gordon on March 5, 1998, but was allowed to plead guilty to the less serious offence of manslaughter earlier this week, will be sentenced on July 16.

Justice Winston Patterson, presiding at the Berbice Assizes, deferred sentencing the convict, on an application by Defence Counsel Michael Baird, to await a probation report on the prisoner’s background.

Dey was originally indicted for the capital offence of murder.

State Prosecutor Fabayo Azore said the witness, Adolphus Alder nicknamed ‘Mason’ knew Dey for eight years and the victim was his niece-in-law.

Alder, in his deposition, said, on fateful day, he went to work at Lot 52 Princetown, Corriverton, Corentyne, in the same yard where Dey and Gordon lived,

He said Dey was looking through a window of their house when his reputed wife, Gordon asked the witness for soap powder to wash clothes.

Alder said, after he complied with the request, the woman was found dead in the same tub in which she was washing, with cutlass marks on her neck and blood on her head and shoulders.

The Prosecutor said Police searches failed to locate the killer but yielded the murder weapon in the kitchen of the house that the couple occupied and it was tendered in evidence at the preliminary inquiry (PI) .

Azore said, in a caution statement he gave on September 12, 2005, Dey confessed to fatally chopping Gordon and consuming the insecticide ‘Shelltox’, in an apparent suicide bid.

However, he survived after being treated at New Amsterdam Hospital and went into the interior, where he got married and fathered a child prior to his arrest.

The Prosecutor said a post mortem report revealed that the woman died from secondary haemorrhage due to a severed artery and a vein, in addition to a fractured cervical spine.