A violent family saga came to an end Wednesday night when a Winnipeg jury convicted Jerome Labossiere of three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his elderly parents and 44-year-old brother.
The jury deliberated for nine hours before they returned the verdict.
However, about a dozen members of the Labossiere family who were in court for the ruling were visibly shocked, one of them breaking down in tears, when the jury acquitted co-accused Michel Hince on the same charges.
Jerome Labossiere will serve the mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years for a crime that Justice Brenda Keyser called "monstrous."
She said it was hard to believe someone would arrange such murders in his own family for greed and profit.
The prosecution had argued that Jerome hired two men to kill his 78-year-old father Fernand, his 72-year-old mother Rita and his brother Remi in 2005 at their farmhouse near St. Leon, Man.
One of those men, Jeremie Toupin, 26, agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder and received a sentence of life with no parole for 10 years in exchange for testifying against the others.
He described how the trio were shot execution-style and then the farmhouse was burned to the ground in an attempt to hide the evidence.
Court was told Jerome was angry at his brother because he believed Remi was gambling away the family fortune.
However, it turned out that Remi had left that fortune of more than $1-million to his nieces and nephews.
Relatives took the stand to explain how after the deaths, Jerome came forward with a different will that he claimed Remi had written, leaving the fortune to Jerome's son.
He also offered his nieces and nephews $25,000 each to renounce their claim to the money – an offer they all refused.
Jerome's sister, Paulette Desrochers, testified that he told her the victims all "had to go down" after Remi cut him out of the will.
She also said he described them as "casualties of war."
It was the second high-profile trial involving the Labossiere family in recent months.
Late last year, Kelly Clarke was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the execution-style deaths of Joel Labossiere and his pregnant wife Magdalena in 2008.
Joel Labossiere was one of Remi and Jerome's nephews.
Testimony during that trial indicated that Mr. Clarke knew Jerome when the pair were in jail together, but Jerome was never charged in the deaths.