A man who was sentenced to a life term for the 1984 murder of a Prince George taxi driver has been sentenced to a further 25 years for the slaying of a former cult leader inside a New Brunswick prison.
RCMP say Matthew Gerard MacDonald was sentenced Monday in Moncton provincial court after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Roch "Moses" Theriault.
Theriault died on Feb. 26, 2011, after a fight with MacDonald at the Dorchester Institution, a medium-security prison southeast of Moncton.
MacDonald was already in prison for the second-degree murder of Danny Bryce, who was stabbed to death on Oct. 14, 1984 in Prince George, and for the 1994 manslaughter of another inmate at the William Head Institute on Vancouver Island.
Part-way through his February 1985 trial, MacDonald admitted he killed Bryce in a moment of rage, because he thought Bryce was running up the cab fare. MacDonald had pleaded not guity to first degree murder but changed his plea to a reduced charge of second-degree murder.
The judge explained to the jury that first-degree murder requires planning and deliberation and that the Bryce murder was a "spur of the moment thing."
Bryce was stabbed 19 times and his throat was slashed with a 20-centimetre hunting knife. One cut was so forceful it severed Bryce's spinal cord. His body was found in his cab in a bush area in South Fort George.
The funeral procession for Bryce, who was 31 years old at the time of his death and married with a daughter, included more than 50 city taxis with black flags flying and the service drew about 200 people including about 90 cab drivers and their families.
MacDonald, who was sentenced to at least 18 years in prison without parole, told the court a ball of frustration and anger had been building up inside him in the three months since his release on mandatory supervision from the Prince George Regional Correctional Centre, where he had been transferred from federal prison.
MacDonald had a history of violent assaults and was frequently sentenced by warden's courts to indefinite solitary confinement because of continual fights he had within prison.
He told the court he fell 20 metres down a Newfoundland cliff onto solid rock when he was nine years old and has had a short and violent temper ever since.
Theriault, who investigators say was found dead near his cell at a penitentiary in Dorchester, N.B., founded and led a notorious sect in the 1980s. It was first established in two Quebec towns, Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce and Saint-Jogues, then finally in Burnt River, Ont.
Theriault, who wanted to be called Moses, was sentenced to life in prison in 1993 for the gruesome murder of his wife Solange Boilard, whom he disembowelled with a kitchen knife as part of a cult ritual.
Theriault was engaged in physical and sexual abuse of members of the cult, including the amputation of the hand of one woman, Gabrielle Lavallee. Lavallee wrote a book about her experience.
The cult leader had 22 children with women he held under his sway.
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