Inquest called into starvation death of Jeffrey Baldwin

An inquest will be held into the death of a five-year-old boy who died of starvation in his grandparents’ Toronto home.

Published on Fri Mar 25 2011

An inquest will be held into the death of a five-year-old boy who died of starvation in his grandparents’ Toronto home.

Ontario Chief Coroner Dr. Andrew McCallum says an inquest can be held now that all court proceedings in Jeffrey Baldwin’s death have been completed.

McCallum says the inquest jury will hear evidence regarding the circumstances of the boy’s death on Nov. 30, 2002.

McCallum says the date, location and presiding coroner will be announced at a later date.

Jeffrey weighed only 21 pounds and was covered in sores when he died from complications due to chronic starvation.

Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman were convicted of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and their appeal was rejected earlier this month.

Bottineau and Kidman were convicted in 2006 and sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 22 and 20 years, respectively.

Kidman and Bottineau were designated as legal guardians for Jeffrey and his sister, who had suffered abuse at the hands of their birth parents.

Bottineau and Kidman used the children as a source of income, collecting government support cheques in their names while they confined them to a dark, unheated room that reeked of urine and feces.

Bottineau’s lawyer James Stribopoulos had argued his client’s conviction should be overturned because the trial judge “swept away evidence of Bottineau’s highly incapacitated mental state.”

Justice David Doherty, one of the three judges who heard the appeal, said the trial judge had taken Bottineau’s IQ of 69 — borderline mental retardation — into account when sentencing her to life in prison.

“He finds that she’s of limited intellect, but she’s also a lying, manipulative person,” Doherty said in rejecting the appeal.

The judges also dismissed arguments that Kidman played no part in Jeffrey’s abuse.

“He’s there every day, his room is next to the dungeon that these kids were being tortured in,” Doherty said. “There’s all kinds of evidence that he knocked this kid around.”

Although Jeffrey and his sister lived in squalor, the rest of the house was normal, including the living quarters of other children in the home.

Richard Litkowski, the lawyer for Kidman, had asked court to quash Kidman’s murder conviction and instead send him to prison for manslaughter.