‘Truly callous’: Sask. women sentenced in 2019 killing of substitute teacher

WATCH: Telsa McKenzie, facing a murder charge in the death of Sheena Billette, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter.

Two La Ronge women were sentenced to lengthy prison terms last month for their role in the kidnapping and death of local teacher Sheena Billette in December of 2019.

Deborah McKenzie and Sharise Sutherland-Kayseas will serve prison sentences of just over five-and-a-half and nine years, respectively, for kidnapping and manslaughter.

In a sentencing decision released this month, Justice Krista Zerr said the two women showed “truly callous disregard for Sheena Billette’s humanity.”

Someone murdered Billette, says Zerr, but she fell short of concluding the two women were guilty of murder.

“I must be careful not to sentence either offender as if she knew, when she aided or abetted the kidnapping, that Sheena was going to be stabbed an unfathomable number of times and left to die on the side of the road.”

In her decision, Zerr describes Billette as a “daughter, sister, niece, spouse, community member and friend.”

“Most importantly, she was the mother of four children, now ages 15, 11, seven and six.”

For those children — her father Willi Billette wrote in his victim impact statement — Christmas will never be the same. “Now, on special occasions, we go to the graveyard, pray, and make an offering for Sheena.”

Details regarding the events of Dec. 23, 2019 are limited but Billette received a severe group beating at 936A Quandt Crescent in La Ronge. Around 4 a.m., she was carried to the back seat of McKenzie’s Chevy Impala alongside Sutherland-Kayseas and Julien Potvin, with Charlie Charles sitting front passenger and Telsa McKenzie driving.

By 5:30 a.m. that morning, a driver found Billette dead on the side of Highway 2.

Janika Slinn, Billette’s sister-in-law, told CTV News in January 2020 that she didn’t recognize any of the suspects.

“I think she was at the wrong place, wrong time. I don’t think she was friends with the wrong people,” Slinn said.

But during the preliminary inquiry prior to trial, court heard evidence Billette was a meth user who sold drugs to support her habit, and that she was in debt to suppliers.

Witness Linda Halkett testified she was at 936A Quandt Crescent the night of Billette’s killing.

Halkett told court that when she asked the group why they were giving Billette such a serious beating, Deborah McKenzie told her “Sharise beat her up for me.”

The judge weighed a number of factors to reach her conclusion about the sentences for McKenzie and Sutherland-Kayseas, including Gladue reports describing their circumstances as Indigenous women, their moral culpability, and other aggravating or mitigating factors — including a heartbreaking written apology from Sutherland-Kayseas that Zerr accepted as genuine.

Their Gladue reports outlined a litany of horrific childhood experiences, marked by instability, upheaval and physical and sexual abuse. Sutherland-Kayseas had little contact with the school system throughout her childhood, suffered fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and was raised to idealize the gang lifestyle, Zerr writes.

Factors like the past criminal records of the women and the sheer brutality shown towards Billette would have earned them sentences at the upper limit of the four to 12-year range for kidnapping and manslaughter, Zerr writes.

“However, as I have already found, there are significant Gladue factors that modestly attenuate each offender’s moral culpability. Accordingly, Ms. Sutherland-Kayseas’ sentence falls at the upper limit end of the range, with Ms. McKenzie’s slightly below.”

The sentences of just over five and a half years for McKenzie and just over nine years for Sutherland-Kayseas are what remains after accounting for the significant time both have already spent on remand under the charges.

Read the full text of Zerr’s decision on CanLii