Judge tells Pechaluk jury to keep deliberating

A courthouse sketch of Ashleigh Pechaluk at her first-degree murder trial on Tuesday, April 14, 2009.

The jury tasked with deciding the fate of a woman accused of killing her female lover's long-term boyfriend told a judge it cannot reach a unanimous verdict in Ashleigh Pechaluk's first-degree murder case.

Early Wednesday afternoon, the jury informed Madam Justice Mary Lou Benotto that it could not reach a unanimous verdict, but the judge told jury members to keep trying and sent them back into deliberations.

The Crown alleges that the 24-year-old Pechaluk and her lover, Nicola Puddicombe, 34, hatched a plan to kill Dennis Hoy three years ago.

Hoy was found dead in his girlfriend's apartment on Queensway Avenue on Oct. 27, 2006.

The 36-year-old GO Transit officer had been bludgeoned to death with an axe, and police soon arrested Pechaluk and charged her with first-degree murder.

Puddicombe was arrested more than six months later, in May 2007. She faces a separate first-degree murder trial once Pechaluk's own trial is over.

Wednesday marked the third day of deliberations in Pechaluk's trial, which began in April.

Pechaluk has admitted she helped plot the murder of Hoy, though she claims she did not kill him because she could not go through with it.

Instead, Pechaluk said she slept through the murder.

Puddicombe, the Crown has said in court, was the sole beneficiary of the insurance payout from her long-term boyfriend's death.