On Thursday, December 18, 2025, Tim Rees’s charge of second-degree murder in the 1989 murder of 10-year-old Darla Thurrott was withdrawn in the Superior Court of Justice in Toronto.
Darla was strangled in her bed at her home in Etobicoke on March 16, 1989. She was found by her mother in the morning. Tim Rees, then 25 years old, who had visited Darla’s parents the evening before and stayed overnight, was convicted of the murder on September 15, 1990, and sentenced to life imprisonment. His appeal to the Court of Appeal was dismissed on June 16, 1994, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear his case. After 23 years in prison, he was released on parole in October 2012.
Innocence Canada adopted Mr. Rees’s case in 2009 and in 2018 filed an application with the then Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould alleging that he had been wrongly convicted. The compelling feature of his application was an undisclosed tape-recorded statement of the landlord who lived in the same home and slept in the room immediately across the hall from Darla. The landlord, since deceased, had given a highly incriminating statement to the police hours after the murder but the defence knew nothing of it. The landlord was able to testify with impunity and falsely that he had never had a relationship with Darla and had not been in her bedroom on the night she was murdered.
If the missing tape recording had been disclosed in 1989, it is questionable whether Mr. Rees would ever have been charged, let alone convicted of Darla’s murder. In a remarkable twist, in 1989 it was one or more members of the Toronto Service who never revealed the existence of the missing tape-recording, and in 2012 it was members of the Toronto Police Homicide Cold Squad who found the missing tape-recording after they had been assigned to respond to Innocence Canada’s request for access to the original investigative files.
Tim Rees, who is now 62 years old, said:
“For the first time in 37 years, I do not carry the burden of the charge of murdering Darla. I did not murder her, and today the charge was withdrawn. I should never have been charged in the first place. I’m 62 and only now can I start my life anew. Darla never got justice either because the real killer was never charged.”
Innocence Canada counsel James Lockyer, who is one of Mr. Rees’s lawyers, said today:
“Tim Rees was a victim of extraordinary non-disclosure. He has always claimed his innocence and testified to his innocence at his trial in 1990 and before the Court of Appeal in 2024. Fortunately, his parole officer believed he was wrongly convicted because, without that, he would likely not have been given parole in 2012 and would still be in prison today.”
Jerome Kennedy, also one of the lawyers who argued the appeal, said today:
“At long last, Tim Rees’s nightmare is over. We at Innocence Canada are proud to have helped him through this ordeal of his wrongful conviction.”
For further information, contact:
James Lockyer at 416-518-7983 or jlockyer@lzzdefence.ca
Jerome Kennedy at 709-725-2966 or jkennedy@makethecall.ca