A woman accused of murdering her twin sister has been found not guilty by reason of mental illness. The partial remains of 36-year-old Ivy Chen were found in Coquitlam, BC’s Minnekhada Park in March 2020. RCMP officers were called to reports of a suspicious fire around 6 a.m. on March 10. Her sister, Tracy Chen, was charged with first-degree murder and indecency with a dead body. The court heard on Thursday that Tracey suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and heard voices in her head, telling her to kill her sister. 0:52 Woman arrested after small fire sparks suspicious death investigation at Coquitlam park “In this tragic incident, Tracy Chen killed her sister Ivy and then cut her body up and tried to burn it,” Crown counsel Jay Fogel told Global News. Current trend
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Story continues below ad “And so the court went into the murder trial today, and found that the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Tracy Chen had killed her sister in a premeditated murder, indeed guilty of first degree murder and the human remains.” He added that two psychiatrists found that Tracy was suffering from schizophrenia and other mental disorders at the time and was therefore found not criminally responsible on grounds of mental disorder. Evidence suggests Tracy stabbed her sister to death in the flat they shared and then tried to dissolve her remains in acid. When that didn’t work, he put them in pots and took them to the park and set them on fire. Fogel said it appears Tracy believed her sister Ivy wasn’t really her sister and that her sister and the Canadian government were going to kill her. “So she thought the only way to save her life was to kill her sister in the direction of the voices she was hearing at the time,” he said.
Read more: Suspicious death charge in Coquitlam
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A charge has been filed in connection with a suspicious death in Coquitlam
Chris Johnson, Tracy’s counsel, said this was a very tragic case with some shocking events. “It is clear in both reports from both very experienced psychiatrists that at the time of this murder, my client was so mentally ill that she could not appreciate that what she was doing was mentally wrong,” he said. Story continues below ad Johnson added that from the evaluations that were done, it appeared that Tracy had been suffering from some form of mental illness for several years and that this seemed to increase over time. “Ultimately, as she believed, she had very different thoughts, that some entity had taken over her sister and it wasn’t her sister and that entity was trying to kill her,” he said. Tracy will remain in a psychiatric facility and her condition will be reviewed on a regular basis, according to court documents. © 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
