NEW WESTMINSTER - Two-time Surrey murderer Thomas Robert Elton will serve at least 25 years in prison, without being allowed to apply for parole for strangling and stabbing his wife to death during what he claimed was a suicide pact being carried out.
Both Elton, 58, and his wife Brenda Turcan - also known as Brenda Blondell - were murderers on parole, in unrelated cases, when he killed her in their apartment at Greenwood Gardens in Guildford on June 22, 2009.Elton claimed he was trying to help Turcan, 59, commit suicide. When Justice John Truscott found him guilty of second-degree murder in 2012, at B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster, the judge noted Turcan had been suffering from a "constellation of progressive medical illnesses" when she died.The couple shared the ignominious distinction of having murdered someone before they met. Elton had been on parole for the 1975 murder of a fellow prisoner he stabbed in Matsqui prison and Turcan was also on parole for a murder she committed in 1987.Tom Zytaruk