'Catastrophically violent'

A man facing the possibility of an indefinite prison sentence for killing and dismembering his friend nine years ago has shown “an utter inability” to control his “catastrophically violent” behaviour.

That’s what a B.C. Supreme Court judge was told Wednesday as closing arguments got underway in the dangerous offender hearing of Nathaniel Jessup, a 36-year-old man convicted in 2022 of manslaughter and offering an indignity to human remains in a case referred to by the trial judge as “macabre” and “beyond the pale.”

Jessup was homeless in the summer of 2015 when he attacked Katherine McAdam, his friend. He killed her on Aug. 15, 2015, inside the basement suite she rented on Cedar Street in Creston.

McAdam’s dismembered remains were found 12 days later by police on an acreage outside Creston. Jessup had cut her body into seven pieces and then left them to decompose in a bike trailer he tried to hide.

Following his conviction, prosecutors applied to have Jessup deemed a dangerous offender — a label saved for Canada’s most intractable and violent criminals. Dangerous offenders are locked up indefinitely unless a judge is satisfied a lesser sentence would adequately protect the public.

Jessup's dangerous offender hearing started last week at the Kamloops Law Courts.

'Repetitive violent behaviour'

“Mr. Jessup has a pattern of repetitive violent behaviour that shows spontaneous, impulsive and reactive violent offences and a pattern of persistent aggressive behaviour in which he’s shown a total indifference to the effect on other people,” Crown prosecutor Laura Drake said during her closing argument.

Drake asked B.C. Supreme Court Justice Dennis Hori to consider the fact that Jessup twice told police he “snapped” after committing violent offences. She said that shows he is incapable of controlling his behaviour.

“Committing catastrophically violent assaults as a result of snapping is the very definition of a failure to restrain behaviour,” she said. “Mr. Jessup’s offending history easily evidences an utter inability on his part to restrain his behaviour.”

Drake said Jessup's past shows a troubling pattern.

“Mr. Jessup’s documented history of spontaneous assaultive behaviour has caused catastrophic consequences,” she said.

“The pattern clearly shows the likelihood of death, injury or severe psychological damage, because all three of those things have been caused by Mr. Jessup in the past.”

Decision in November

Drake laid out all of Jessup’s other violent offences, starting with a serious stabbing in 2010. He has five convictions for assaulting corrections officers in prison and one for aggravated assault stemming from a 2015 incident in which he choked a five-year-old boy — nearly killing him.

In that case, Jessup walked into the backyard of a home of a family he did not know and asphyxiated a five-year-old boy into unconsciousness. A doctor later testified that the boy could have died.

Jessup was also acquitted following a previous murder trial in Kamloops in 2019. He was charged with second-degree murder in the 2014 death of Dylan Levi Judd, Jessup’s former cellmate at Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre.

In that case, a judge ruled there was not enough evidence to prove Judd did not take his own life — as police initially believed.

Defence lawyer John Gustafson will deliver his closing submissions on Thursday. He is asking for six to 12 years of new time for Jessup.

Hori will first have to decide whether Jessup should be labelled a dangerous offender, then determine the appropriate sentence. A decision is expected sometime early in November.

Jessup remains in custody.