The trial of Vitali Stefanski resumed Thursday with testimony from a pair of police officers who were involved in the search for his ex-wife, slain Lumby mother Tatjana Stefanski, and from a witness who had found it strange to see Vitali’s sports car parked far down a rough and remote logging road near Lumby on the day she went missing.
Vitali is accused of second-degree murder in 44-year-old Tatjana’s death, and after previous hearings this week saw Vitali and Tatjana’s son and daughter take the stand. Day 4 of the trial in B.C. Supreme Court in Kamloops on May 28 has revealed the RCMP’s initial findings and actions in their investigations of the alleged abduction and killing two years ago.
Karen Derry has been a resident of Lumby for 41 years. She testified that she was camping with family at a campsite along Mabel Lake Road on April 13, 2024, near where Vitali’s black Audi vehicle was found.
Derry said she and her husband drove to the Cottonwood Beach campground that morning and didn’t see anything on the way up the forest service road.
When they returned home that afternoon, they noticed a black Audi parked around the 25-kilometre marker of the road.
“It seemed peculiar to me that somebody would drive 25 kilometers down a not-well-maintained bush road in an Audi in April,” she told the court. “It seemed like a bit of a strange thing, but at the time we didn’t know anything about anything.”
Derry said she and her husband glanced at the vehicle to see if someone had broken down, but seeing no one in it they continued on their way.
They arrived home around 5 p.m. and began to become aware of a situation unfolding in their community.
They saw a Facebook post asking the public for help locating the black Audi they had seen. Derry said she reported to the poster that they had seen the vehicle and exchanged a few words through messages. The person she was messaging was Jason Gaudreault, Tatjana’s partner.
The Crown next called Const. Clay Fixsin to take the stand. An RCMP member for 15 years, Fixsin had been posted in Lumby in April 2024.
It was shortly after 8 a.m. April 13 when Fixsin received a call for service and was informed that a girl had called police after her mom had left with her ex and hadn’t been seen since.
Fixsin was heading to Lumby from Vernon at the time and pulled over in Lavington in order to call the girl who had made the 911 call. At that moment, he said a vehicle came racing towards him and came to a screeching halt beside his marked police vehicle. It was Jason Gaudreault.
“He was frantic,” Fixsin said, adding Gaudreault was wanting him to search for Tatjana.
Fixsin went to the home where Gaudreault, Tatjana and her two kids lived on Highway 6 just outside Lumby. The daughter, who had called police, was still at her boyfriend’s house, and so Fixsin went to further the investigation.
Video surveillance from a nearby business failed to download, said Fixsin, so he went to a nearby storage facility at the behest of Gaudreault. The court previously heard that Vitali had given his son keys to a storage unit inside a suitcase that morning.
“Jason was adamant that we check in the storage unit to make sure that Tatjana wasn’t inside,” Fixsin said.
No one was inside the storage unit, but inside the tidy locker was a mattress propped up against a wall, and at the time “there was some confusion of whether Vitali was living in the storage locker,” Fixsin said, recounting what Gaudreault had told him he suspected.
Fixsin requested a police helicopter search the area but that effort came up empty.
Then, around 5 p.m. and with no prior signs as to Tatjana’s whereabouts, police received a tip from Derry.
Fixsin followed the tip down Mabel Lake Road for over an hour until he found Vitali’s Audi.
He said he grabbed a semi-automatic rifle as he was alone, exposed and without cellular service (he called for backup via radio communication). He noted grabbing the gun was a precaution he would take in any such case.
He said he approached the car and saw no one was inside. Then he noticed dried blood in the car’s interior.
The front passenger seat had been lowered and was covered with blood. There was also blood on the driver’s seat headrest and blood smears in the back seat, he said.
Around 12:30 a.m. April 14, with Tatjana still not located, Const. Fixsin ended his shift and additional resources took over.
During a brief cross-examination, the defence asked if nothing unusual stood out to Fixsin in the storage locker.
Fixsin said the only thing that would lead him to think someone was living in the locker was the mattress and clothes found inside.
The Crown then called Cpl. David Hoekstra to the stand. Hoekstra is in charge of the Vernon RCMP detachment’s Serious Crimes Unit.
He was on call on April 13 and stepped in to help with the investigation.
It was Hoekstra who successfully accessed the surveillance footage that Fixsin had had trouble with.
The court viewed the video for more than 20 minutes, and Hoekstra described that at 7:55 a.m. in the video, a black car parks at the top of Tatjana’s driveway.
Day 4 of the trial will resume at 2 p.m.