Precious Charbonneau died after she was stabbed repeatedly by her husband, 43-year-old Robert Giblin, and was then thrown from their high-rise apartment, police said.Mark Blinch/The Globe and Mail
A pregnant Toronto woman who died in a murder-suicide in December was found near her fetus, but it's unclear how the two were separated, police say.
Precious Charbonneau, 33, died on Dec. 20 after she was stabbed repeatedly by her husband, 43-year-old Robert Giblin, and was then thrown from their high-rise apartment, police said. Mr. Giblin also fell from the apartment.
Three days later, police responded to a 911 call from someone who had found a fetus on the ground outside the building. Officers said at the time that the fetus wasn't related to the murder-suicide, but after receiving the results of forensic testing on Monday, they said the fetus was indeed Ms. Charbonneau's.
She was believed to have been nine weeks pregnant when she died. As for what happened in her final hours – whether she lost the fetus through miscarriage or some other way – "that's a big question mark that everybody's still working on," Toronto police Constable Craig Brister said.
Because of the stab wounds and her fall, Ms. Charbonneau's autopsy hadn't yielded all of the answers to what happened, he said.
"They were able to determine that she was pregnant, but a lot of the results were inconclusive due to the amount of damage," Constable Brister said.
He said he wasn't sure how far apart the bodies were found from the fetus. After the discovery of the fetus, police treated it as a separate investigation, he said, and they quickly told the public the fetus was unrelated before receiving forensic results.
That announcement "was potentially premature," the officer said. "We hadn't 100 per cent eliminated it" as a possibility.
"It's one of those things that, at the time when they initially looked at it, they couldn't definitively say they were connected, so that's why they started a separate investigation," he said. "How it got there is still being investigated."
Mr. Giblin's family said the war veteran, who served in Afghanistan, battled post-traumatic stress disorder. He married Ms. Charbonneau in November.
"He was proud of his service for our country, both in the Navy and the Air Force. Sadly, Rob suffered from PTSD," an obituary published last month stated. "He sought and underwent treatment and put the pieces of his life together.
"When he was well, he was overjoyed to have met and [married] his love Precious Charbonneau."
One former military friend, who didn't want to be identified for fear of upsetting both families, told The Canadian Press that Mr. Giblin handled his two tours in Afghanistan with aplomb and never appeared to suffer any ill effects from the wars. The friend said Mr. Giblin was in good spirits when they last spoke, shortly after his wedding, and he seemed ecstatic to have found love as a 43-year-old.
"He found what was his perfection, he was going to have a baby and he said his life was complete," the friend said in an interview from the Ottawa area. "He was happy last time I spoke with him," the friend said in an interview from the Ottawa area, "but I guess we didn't know everything about him."