Elderly Passions Earn Life Sentence

"The grief and sadness I feel of her loss has been truly compounded by the knowledge that my father, her beloved husband of 32 years, committed this incomprehensible act."
Nicholas Edgar

"This was a senseless, unnecessary and rather unexplained act that will resonate with the victims who survived."
Judge Robert Pelletier

"I felt shock and broke down in tears."
"I cried. I cried my heart out."
"How can I continue living happily when I couldn't protect her, didn't warn her? Why didn't I share my fear?"
Tereza Sernets

Robert Edgar arrives at the courthouse in L'Orignal, Monday, Feb. 2, 2015. Edgar, pictured being helped out of an OPP paddy-wagon, is charged with murdering his wife Zdenka (Radja) Sekora at their home in Lefaivre.      Mike Carroccetto

The murderer is 79, and the woman he killed was 83. They had been married for 32 years, and lived in eastern Ontario, in the village of Lefaivre, in Alfred-Plantagenet Township, where they had lived for the past three decades. Now, a judge in a courtroom in L'Orignal has delivered a life sentence for murder. Mr. Edgar is a retired engineer who worked for Air Canada.

When he met Zdenka Sekora in the 1980s in Montreal, he promised the woman he travelled to Europe to convince that she should marry him, a house of her own, a car of her own and Air Canada employee privileges. Robert Edgar pursued Zdenka Sekora mere days after the death of his first wife. And according to Robert Miller, a lawyer who represented Mr. Edgar, the couple had lived a "peaceful existence".

Tereza Sernets recalls at age 19 meeting her stepfather and feeling frightened of him. She recounted that he often taunted her and chased her. Now all those years later, she feels profound regret in not having shared her unease about the man with her mother. And now her mother is dead, and the man who killed her has pleaded guilty so that a trial was avoided where family members would be dragged through the public airing of painful details.

Which hasn't meant that they weren't given the opportunity to produce victim impact statements. Robert Edgar's own son Nicholas, spoke to the court of his gratitude that the family was spared the agony of having to testify in a trial. He also stated that his stepmother had been a true mother to him, a vibrant, energetic woman, warm and nurturing.

Robert Edgar had dialled 911 on January 25 of 2015 to report an "accidental death". He informed police when they arrived that his wife had been carrying a large box of books and fell down the house stairs, dying from her injuries. Police noticed bruising on the man's arm and hand and fresh scratches on his cheek, under his nose and on his neck.

Caused, he explained to suspicious police, when he had attempted to turn his wife over on her back, from the prone position she had assumed in the fall. His wife, he said, had been semi-conscious at the time and flailed out reflexively at him. An autopsy performed on January 26 revealed that the elderly woman had been smothered to death; no evidence existed that she had fallen down stairs.

Five days after the death of Zdenka Sekora her husband Robert Edgar was arrested and charged with her murder. The death and the arrest played utter havoc with the emotions of the extended family. Unanswered is the question: what would motivate an elderly man to murder his elderly wife with whom he had lived ostensibly peacefully, without any incidents of violence having taken place previously.

At age 79 Robert Edgar has been convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to ten years in prison. For him that will indeed be a lifetime.