Montreal —
A Quebec court judge acquitted former probation officer Marlene Chalfoun on Thursday of conspiring with two convicted rapists to have three of her relatives sexually assaulted.
Judge Micheline Corbeil-Laramee accepted Ms. Chalfoun's defence that she was engaging in harmless fantasy when she referred to Jack the Ripper, notorious schoolgirl killer Paul Bernardo and a violent attack on her relatives in correspondence with dangerous sex offender Nick Paccione.
A series of 32 letters, exchanged between Ms. Chalfoun and Mr. Paccione, and between Mr. Paccione and a paroled rapist who can't be identified because he faces a trial on other charges, were the crux of the Crown's case.
The Crown alleged Mr. Paccione, who is currently in a prison in northeastern Quebec, was a go-between who put Ms. Chalfoun in touch with the other paroled rapist so he could carry out the attacks last fall. The attacks did not take place.
Prosecutor Louis Miville-Deschenes called the alleged plot "violent, heinous and macabre."
In his closing arguments last month, Mr. Miville-Deschenes challenged the defence claim that the letters were pure fiction. He cited several passages in which Ms. Chalfoun described how the assaults would be carried out.
In a letter dated June 29, 2002, Ms. Chalfoun asked Mr. Paccione about the other rapist and suggested he should "do something constructive with his deviant potential."
She said an attack on three of her relatives would be easy because the rapist is Italian, just like the spouse of one of the relatives, and he could get into the house while the spouse was out by passing himself off as a cousin visiting from Italy.
"Then he could be really mean and violent," wrote Ms. Chalfoun. "One thing I insist on is that when he's beating her, he say: 'This is for all the bad things you've done to others ... you're nothing but a whore... . Then he could do the Jack the Ripper thing."
Earlier in the trial, the defence entered into evidence another 17 letters Ms. Chalfoun wrote to Mr. Paccione to try to support the claim that the parts of her letters that referred to an attack on her relatives were just one of several make-believe scenarios she exchanged with Mr. Paccione in the seven years they corresponded.
Ms. Chalfoun testified she was only trying to give Mr. Paccione, a self-described sex addict since he was 12 years old, a harmless outlet for his violent urges.
She repeatedly said she never gave Mr. Paccione or the paroled rapist any identifying information about her family members that would lead them to believe she actually wanted to hurt them.
Louis Morissette, a psychiatrist who testified as an expert witness for the defence, said Ms. Chalfoun showed a lack of judgment by writing to a sexual delinquent in prison. But he said he found no evidence that she made serious attempts to have her fantasies carried out.
Ms. Chalfoun has been held in protective custody in Tanguay women's jail since her arrest Oct. 3.
She was fired last November from her job as a court liaison officer. Before taking that position in 1999, Ms. Chalfoun had been a temporary probation officer for seven years.
