A Saskatoon jury has found Tyler William Robert Hurd guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Cynthia Crampton.
When the jury returned with its verdict Friday evening after more than seven hours of deliberation, some of Crampton’s family members began to sob in the packed courtroom.
Following the verdict, Justice Neil Gabrielson handed down the mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
In order to find Hurd guilty of first-degree murder, the jury had to agree that an unlawful act was committed which caused the death of the victim, Crampton, that Hurd had the intention required for murder and that the murder was planned and deliberate.
Cynthia Crampton. Court exhibit photo.
If the jury had agreed that all elements of the offence — except planning and deliberation — were present, it would have had to find Hurd guilty of second-degree murder instead.
The jury heard that Hurd confessed to killing Crampton in her bathroom on June 1, 2016, meticulously detailing the half-hour ordeal to several police officers.
Crampton, a mother of two, died in her Stonebridge basement suite on Galloway Road. Two days after her death, one of her daughters found her body face-down and covered in towels on her bathroom floor.
Hurd had met Crampton through his girlfriend, Tammy Poffley. Crampton let the couple stay with her when they were homeless. After her death, Hurd told police he murdered her because she got Poffley hooked on painkillers and tried manipulating him into having sex with her.
‘I am sickened by your presence’
In a victim impact statement delivered Friday after the verdict, Crampton’s daughter Kara Leftley said she always looked up to her hard-working, accepting mom.
She spoke passionately about how shocked she was to find out her mother used drugs to self-medicate her manic depression and that her mother, sadly, never had a chance to get better.
“Your deranged personality demonized her,” Kara Leftley told Hurd. “I am sickened by your presence.”
She expressed her dismay that this “disgusting event” had to go to trial and accused Hurd of forcing the jurors to listen to every gruesome detail for his own sick reasons.
Crampton’s other daughter, Shanda Leftley, told Hurd his reason for killing her mom — Hurd said Crampton was a bad person — was “deranged.”
“You are the true tragedy that happened to Tammy,” Shanda Leftley said, referring to Poffley, who is in jail for being an accessory to murder.
After the judge announced the life sentence, Hurd looked directly at Crampton’s family and called himself a “psychopath” who is paying for his crime.
“It is a sick, disgusting thing I did, but try to let go of the hate,” Hurd said.
Jury instructions
Earlier in the day, jurors sat in rapt attention as they received their final instructions from Justice Neil Gabrielson.
Some jurors took down notes as Justice Gabrielson explained the requirements to be met for all the possible verdicts. Hurd was charged with first-degree murder, although his lawyer had argued that the murder was not planned and deliberate, and therefore second-degree murder.
Planning and deliberation is not the same as intention, Gabrielson explained, noting that a murder can be intentional without being planned. The plan does not need to be complicated, but requires some forethought into the crime rather than a decision made in the moment, he told the jury.
To be considered deliberate, the crime must be carefully thought out, not hasty, rash or impulsive, Gabrielson said. It means the accused would think about the consequences before the murder, weighing the advantages and disadvantages.
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