Tess Richey’s mom still struggling to cope as her killer loses appeal

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Tess Richey’s killer lost an appeal of his murder conviction — and in wonderfully quick fashion.

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It took judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal just a few minutes of deliberation before coming back with their decision to dismiss Kalen Schlatter’s application without even having to hear the Crown’s argument.

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So the sick sex killer will continue serving his life sentence — while his victim’s mother struggles to cope with her own.

“Six years. Six years since I lost Tess,” wept 67-year-old Christine Hermeston when reached Tuesday in North Bay shortly after the panel’s abrupt decision. “I know it’s a victory, but there’s no such thing as a victory without Tess. But at least we don’t have to go through it all over again because I couldn’t have done it. It’s not possible. I just don’t have the strength.”

On Nov. 24, 2017, Richey was 22, an aspiring flight attendant who’d gone through a recent breakup and was meeting an old high school friend to drown her sorrows at Crews and Tangos on Church St. After a night of dancing and too much drinking, Richey and her girlfriend Ryley Simard were asked to leave.

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Schlatter, who’d also left the club, quickly latched on to the two intoxicated women. After wandering around the area for the next couple of hours, Simard left them on Dundonald St. at about 4 a.m. to go home. Richey then ordered an Uber to leave as well.

Hermeston woke up to an Uber notification that her youngest daughter never made her ride.

Instead, Schlatter was captured on security video leading Richey down a dark driveway of a vacant Church. St house under renovation.

“Your sexual appetite,” said the trial judge, “led you literally to take an innocent young woman by the hand down a path to her death.”

Richey had been choked to death; Schlatter’s semen was found on her pant leg and his saliva on her bra. Forty-four minutes after they were both seen on video entering the laneway, Schlatter reappeared alone

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For four days, Richey’s body lay at the bottom of the stairwell. Despite a cursory police search, she was finally discovered by her mother on Nov. 29, just 40 metres from where she was last seen.

At his appeal, Schlatter’s lawyers argued Justice Michael Dambrot wasn’t even-handed and made it difficult to argue their theory that someone else was responsible. Their alternate suspect, a man who can only be identified as J.G., was subpoenaed by the defence and admitted he’d been following Richey that night because he thought she wanted to talk to him.

But he denied ever meeting her — let alone climbing a fence to access the alley where Schlatter insisted he’d left Richey alive.

No motion-activated cameras in the area captured another person entering the property, the Crown countered in its factum, nor was J.G.’s DNA found anywhere near the crime scene.

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The defence also argued the trial judge hadn’t given the jury a strong enough warning about the dangers of believing a jailhouse informant — the killer’s cellmate at the Toronto South Detention Centre testified Schlatter had confessed to being high on MDMA and booze when he choked Richey and masturbated on her after she turned him down for sex.

If anything, Dambrot was overly protective to Schlatter’s defence: The Crown wasn’t permitted to call one of his former sexual partners who said he had a choking fetish and had choked her during sex. He also told her he had issues with restraint and “wouldn’t be able to control himself.”

Prosecutors were also not allowed to tell the jury about porn found on Schlatter’s phone including a recent video depicting a woman entering an alleyway where she’s struck with a shovel and raped and her attacker then masturbates over her corpse.

There was still more than enough to convict him — and to dismiss his appeal with their reasons to follow.

The court’s decision comes as a momentary relief for Richey’s mom. And then her life of pain resumes.

“My life is a void because of this monster,” sighed Hermeston. “It just gets worse. It never gets better.”

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