After a string of delays, the trial for Richard Mantha got underway in a Calgary courtroom on Wednesday.
Mantha is accused of kidnapping, drugging and sexually assaulting seven women between September 2020 and March of 2023 — most of them sex trade workers.
He was arrested in 2023 and has pleaded not guilty.
Mantha was initially supposed to go to trial in January of 2024, but the trial was delayed after Mantha fired his lawyer, then suffered a stoke several months later.
During a hearing last fall, a forensic psychiatrist testified while the stroke may have affected Mantha’s cognitive capacity and reduced his verbal skills, he was still fit to stand trial.
On Wednesday, the court heard testimony from a woman named Kathleen Budzey, who told the court she was driving toward Highway 22X in early April of 2022 when she spotted a woman walking who appeared to be staggering and appeared out of place.
After stopping to ask the woman if she was OK, Budzey testified the woman told her she didn’t know where she was. Budzey continued telling the court she told the woman there was a nearby Tim Hortons, and called police to check on her.
The next person to take the stand was Christopher Vermeersch, a former digital forensic investigator with the RCMP, who was tasked with looking at all the files inside Mantha’s cellphone.
The Crown prosecutor alleges that images, conversations and videos containing sexually explicit materials show it was Mantha who was committing the acts — with the Crown saying the evidence is based off his voice and other visible features.
However, when Mantha’s attorney asked if the forensic investigator could verify the images and video were originally taken by the same device they were pulled from, the investigator could not.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Crown played the police video interview of one of the complainants who was brought in for interview in March of 2023. The woman starts by telling police she thought, “Nobody cared about her.”
During the interview she recalled being at a bus stop in the Calgary community of Forest Lawn in early April of 2022, waiting for a bus when a man in a truck stopped, asking her if she needed a ride home. After accepting a Sprite to drink, the woman says she passed out — waking up naked in an RV and Mantha holding a vibrator.
The complainant told police she pulled a knife on Mantha, demanding to be taken back to Calgary, but on the drive, she was pushed out of the vehicle landing on her stomach and rolling into the ditch.
The woman finished by saying she was eventually picked up by members of Alberta RCMP who told her she was the second woman they had picked up under similar circumstances that week, eventually dropping her off at a CTrain station and did not follow up.
More testimony is expected to continue in the coming days, with arguments expected to wrap up in the judge-only trial by the end of May.
