A hearing scheduled to begin next week at the Kamloops Law Courts to determine whether a killer who cut his victim into seven pieces should be labelled a dangerous offender will again be delayed.
Nathaniel David Jessup, 36, was convicted in 2022 of manslaughter and offering an indignity to human remains in a case referred to by the judge as “macabre” and “beyond the pale.”
Jessup was 28 in the summer of 2015, when Katherine McAdam vanished from her home in Creston. The 59-year-old’s body was located 12 days later.
Jessup, who was homeless at the time, had a friendly relationship with McAdam.
He killed her on Aug. 15, 2015, inside the basement suite she rented on Cedar Street in Creston. Her dismembered remains were later located by police inside a bike trailer on an acreage in Erickson, an unincorporated community just outside Creston.
Following his conviction, prosecutors applied to have Jessup deemed a dangerous offender — a label saved for Canada’s most serious and violent criminals.
Dangerous offenders are locked up indefinitely unless a judge is convinced a lesser sentence would adequately protect the public.
Jessup’s three-week hearing was supposed to have started in October, but it was pushed back to January due to the availability of a forensic psychiatrist.
On Tuesday, the day Jessup was slated to appear in court for a hearing to determine whether he could appear next week by video, he fired his defence lawyer.
A hearing has been set for Thursday morning to determine the next steps.
Jessup was acquitted following a previous murder trial in 2019. He was charged with second-degree murder in the 2014 death of Dylan Levi Judd, his 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.
Jessup was arrested in the Lower Mainland weeks after McAdam’s death and he has been in custody since. During that time, he has served a 3.5-year sentence following a series of choking incidents involving children.
