'What a fine day to die': Suicide notes offer glimpse into troubled mind of double murderer Traigo Andretti
Dan Zakreski | CBC News | Posted: October 31, 2018 4:02 PM | Last Updated: October 31, 2018
Traigo Andretti left behind five notes in cell at Regional Psychiatric Centre before death
The notes are revealing, cryptic and unsettling.
They show the turmoil in the mind of convicted double murderer Traigo Andretti as he prepared to take his own life in his cell at the Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon. They were read into the record Tuesday at the coroner's inquest into his death.
Andretti bled to death from a deep gash in his left arm. His death was ruled suicide, although no weapon was ever found in his cell. He had been locked in the cell alone. Surveillance footage showed no one entered or left his room the night he died.
In one of the notes, Andretti asked that his remains be cremated and the ashes given to his mother to scatter in salt water, preferably between Vancouver Island and the mainland.
"I ain't my ashes, I'm dead," he wrote.
In another, he thanked the nurses and social workers at the prison hospital for their care.
One said, "What a fine day to die," followed by, "One cut I'll try, see what light is at the end of the tunnel and come back."
Other notes make no apparent sense.
"If I get another life, I'm going to be a lesbian. A super sexy one, being a man is too easy," he wrote.
"Avril Lavigne plays cool. I vote yes for another planet for humans."
Police who were called to the centre that morning noted there was a cross drawn on the wall next to his bed with the letters "R.I.P." inscribed on it. There was also a one metre by half-a-metre makeshift basin under his bed where the blood from his fatal wound flowed.
Neither the cross on the wall or the bloody basin were visible from the door, jurors heard.
Andretti was convicted of first-degree murder in 2014 for the death of his wife, Jennifer McPherson.
Her remains were found scattered on a remote island off the east coast of Vancouver Island.
Andretti was subsequently charged with second-degree murder in the 2006 slaying of Myrna Letandre in Manitoba, for which he later pleaded guilty.
Some of Letandre's dismembered remains were found in 2013 in a Winnipeg rooming house where Andretti had been living.
Andretti had been at the Saskatoon psychiatric centre since April before he died. Jurors heard how he had talked about killing himself, which is why he had been moved from a prison in Manitoba to the prison hospital and then Churchill unit.
The inquest continues Wednesday.