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Neighbour: Mother partied after killing daughter

BEVERLEY WARE South Shore Bureau
Fri. Jan 30 - 10:33 AM

BRIDGEWATER — Scott Saunders lit candles in the windows of his third-floor apartment every night Karissa Boudreau was missing.

Inside, he felt sick because he knew what most people didn't. He knew Karissa wasn't coming back.

Day and night, he listened to a drunken Penny Boudreau in the apartment next to his, fighting with her boyfriend. Bodies banged against the thin walls, he heard yelling and screaming.

Then one day, he heard Vernon Macumber yell, “I can't believe you did that to her. I can't believe you killed your own f...ing daughter!”

“It was all in my gut,” Mr. Saunders said, and the weight of what he was hearing was too much. He called the police, and what he had to tell them helped build the case against Penny Boudreau.

In an exclusive interview with The Chronicle Herald, Mr. Saunders said he was to be a prime witness in the case against Ms. Boudreau. He has given video and audio taped statements to major crime investigators, but with her guilty plea today, his evidence is no longer needed.

Mr. Saunders said he listened to the fights and relayed to the police what he was hearing as it was being said. Because of that, police were able to get a wiretap on Ms. Boudreau's phone which added to the evidence they were gathering.

“From the very minute Karissa went missing, I had no doubt, absolutely no doubt in my mind, that this woman would be held responsible for this.”

Mr. Saunders said that's because Ms. Boudreau's behaviour completely changed once Karissa disappeared. Up until then, she wouldn't acknowledge him in the hallway. She just kept her head down when he said hello.

Their apartment was always quiet.

But on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008, the day she told police her only child had disappeared, Ms. Boudreau started partying. And she didn't stop for days.

“Her child was missing and she was carting alcohol into the house, partying, there was noise, banging, screaming, hollering, partying. There was definitely a change in her personality there. . .They were partying up until two days after the body was found. It was a 24/7 party.”

She brought in lobster and carried up blue bags filled with alcohol. Mr. Saunders said he could hear “large amounts of sexual activity” going on in the apartment, and there were times the pot smoke was so strong, he put a towel across the bottom of his door.

The slamming against his walls was so bad, his wall vibrated and cracked, Mr. Saunders said.

He said Bridgewater police were called to their apartment “numerous times.”

The phone in Ms. Boudreau's apartment was on the other side of Mr. Saunders' bedroom wall, and he could hear their conversations. One night, he heard Mr. Macumber crying on the phone to a male relative.

“They're blaming me for the whole thing, I don't know what I'm going to do,” he wept. “They're going to blame me, I don't know why she won't just tell them.”

Mr. Saunders said he could plainly hear what was being said as the couple fought, so he called the police. “As I was hearing them, I repeated word for word to the major crime unit what they were saying. I'd say, 'He just said this,' then I'd say, 'He just said that.'”

Mr. Macumber now lives with relatives in New Ross and still drives the red Neon that once held Karissa's dead body.

Mr. Saunders, who spent two years working with child drug addicts in Africa, said this was the most traumatic experience of his life. “Every night that kid was missing, I lay in bed saying, 'God help me. God help me.' There has to be justice.”

He only ever met Karissa once. It was about a week before she went missing and she was looking for a missing cat. There were posters all over town.

“She was desperately looking for this cat to return. She said, 'Please, if you see this cat I don't want the $500 reward. I just want to find the cat and return him to his owner.'”

She was worried about the cat being out in the cold. “We're going to find this cat before he dies in the winter,” she said.

Three weeks later, her frozen remains were found on the bank of the LaHave River just a couple of kilometres from her home.

Mr. Saunders credits police with doing an “awesome job” proving who killed Karissa. “These were dedicated people out to get to the bottom of this and they were not giving up; not giving up.”