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A woman who was a witness as her boyfriend was killed inside a home in Lachine nearly three years ago sent him messages after he died for two very different reasons.
The woman testified Wednesday at the Montreal courthouse in the trial of Véronique Manceaux, a 38-year-old woman charged with the second-degree murder of Jimmy Méthot. The victim was killed inside Manceaux’s home during Labour Day weekend in 2021. Manceaux is also charged with causing an indignity to Méthot’s body.
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The 31-year-old witness, whose name is under a publication ban, had been Méthot’s girlfriend for about two years before he was killed. She was Manceaux’s friend for much longer.
After describing on Tuesday that she went into “shock” while Méthot was assaulted by Manceaux and a person who was a minor at the time — and that his body was a bloody mess because he had been stabbed — she answered questions posed by prosecutor Marie-Claude Bourassa about text messages she sent to the deceased.
“After he was killed, Veronica asked me to send messages because his friends would be wondering where he was. I unsent them after,” the woman said as she wiped away tears with a tissue.
She said she was not willing to erase messages she sent to Méthot telling him that she loved him.
“I just said that I loved him and that I was sad,” the woman said, adding she didn’t want to erase those messages “because that was all that was left of him.”
She said that at one point after the attack, she lifted something that was covering Méthot’s body and kissed him on the forehead.
She described her relationships with Méthot and Manceaux as complicated. Shortly before the homicide, she had resumed seeing Méthot after he was released from jail, but she suspected he was dating another woman. This was no big deal to her, she said, because she was seeing someone else.
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She said Manceaux was someone who “would become very upset when she didn’t have crack.”
“She was in some kind of f–king psychosis world (after Méthot was killed),” the woman said. “We all thought it was f–ked.”
The woman was explaining what was behind bizarre text messages Manceaux sent to her after Méthot was killed. She said Manceaux was frustrated because no one was helping her to clean up the blood in her home. The witness said Manceaux expected her, the minor and a man named Everette Roger Clayton, another person present during the attack, to resume the long work ahead of them.
The Crown’s theory is that Méthot was killed sometime between Sept. 6 and 7, 2021.
While the witness was on the stand, the jury was shown an eight-second video she recorded on her phone during the afternoon of Sept. 8, 2021. In the video, Manceaux is seen vacuuming a doormat outside her front door. She is heard laughing as she lifts the vacuum and continues to vacuum the entrance to her home.
While he was being attacked, Méthot managed to make it to the front entrance and tried to escape, but the minor grabbed him and returned him to Manceaux’s living room, where he died. In the video, Manceaux is seen blowing a kiss to her friend while the woman is heard joking: “This is my wife. She vacuums outdoors and indoors.”
Earlier in her testimony, the woman said she and Manceaux sometimes referred to each other as “wife” or “wifey” when they joked around.
“Like I said earlier (in her testimony), anything I was told to do in that house, I just went along with it,” the woman said when Bourassa asked why she would record the video while Méthot’s body was still inside the house.
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