Montreal jury finds man, woman guilty of first-degree murder in killing of man’s ex-wife

Odna Daudier was killed in May 2022. (FILE)

A Montreal jury has found a man and a woman each guilty of first-degree murder in the death of the man’s ex-wife.

On Monday, jurors found that Jacques Adonai Charpentier and his new love, Melissa Estimé, worked together to kill Charpentier’s former spouse, Odna Daudier, in 2022.

Crown prosecutor Philippe Vallières-Roland had argued during the trial that Charpentier tried more than once to kill Daudier before finally using an “undetectable poison” transported to Montreal in a Coca-Cola bottle.

At the outset of trial, the Crown said that one of the challenges in prosecuting the case was the fact that Daudier’s cause of death had not been established. The prosecution relied on text messages exchanged between the two co-accused as evidence in the trial.

“Because of cameras and also the contents of the cellphones, we were able to prove that case. Without that, I don’t think we could have managed,” Vallières-Roland told reporters outside the courtroom on Monday.

According to the Crown, Charpentier had trouble accepting the separation from his former wife and later became “literally obsessed” with her and decided “he wanted to kill her.” He tried once but a woman intervened, and she later ended up being a witness at the trial.

The prosecutor said Charpentier asked Estimé to get poison from the Dominican Republic and then on May 28 they carried out their plan.

“They had the GPS on her car and they waited for her to ambush her and they actually attacked her in her driveway and they brought her in Riviere-des-Prairies to leave her there dead,” Vallières-Roland said in a brief summary of the case after the verdict was reached.

With files from CTV Montreal’s Stéphane Giroux and Noovo Info