Thirteen years behind bars for slashing sister's throat – Winnipeg Free Press

A Manitoba woman who slit her sister's throat in a drug-fueled rage and grief and left her seriously injured brother stumbling half a kilometer away for help has been sentenced to 13 years in prison.

Kathleen Flatfoot, 50, pleaded guilty to attempted murder for the March 13, 2023, attack in suburban Dauphin.

Provincial Court Judge Jeff Bailey said in a written ruling on May 13 that Flatfoot's crime was “extremely violent and his subsequent behavior was cold, calculated and designed to avoid arrest.”

Two weeks before the attack, Flatfoot's daughter accidentally froze to death in Lake Winnipegose, sending Flatfoot into a drug and alcohol addiction, the court heard at a previous sentencing hearing.

On March 12, Flatfoot and her son asked the victim and her husband if they could take them to Dauphin to collect the money the community had raised for their daughter's funeral and then perform the funeral. The victim agreed, but said he needed $200 for gas.

“(Flatfoot) was upset that the community only raised $60 to help bury her daughter,” Bailey said.

During the visit to Dauphin, Flatfoot drank and consumed cocaine. He got angry and started talking about “murder”.

Once in Dauphin, the group decided to stay separate until the funeral home opened the next morning, with Flatfoot and her son staying at a relative's home and the victim and her husband at a nearby home.

As the night wore on, Flatfoot continued to drink and angrily complained to his family, especially his sister, “I could lick him.”

At 4 o'clock in the morning, Flatfoot, along with his son and another man, went in search of his sister.

They found the victim at a house two doors away and told him they had been kicked out and needed a ride. The victim and her husband agreed, and after two stops to get money and more drugs, they were taken to a cemetery on the outskirts of town and waited for the funeral home to open.

“Let's kill these guys and get the truck,” Flatfoot said to his son as they stood by the cemetery. Flatfoot pulled out his hunting knife and reached into the front seat, grabbing his sister's forehead with one hand and slitting her throat with the other.

“It extended to her sister's neck, cutting exposed skin and muscle, lacerating her trachea, severing exposed jugular veins and causing significant blood loss,” Bailey said.

Everyone got out of the truck, Flatfoot ordered his son and another man to hold the victim's husband, so beaten he could not help his wife.

Flatfoot, her son and another man fled in the truck, abandoning it in a park and driving to a nearby apartment building, where security cameras caught them laughing together. After letting them in, another security camera captured Flatfoot throwing away his jacket.

When the victim rang the doorbell for help, he bled from the neck and stumbled into the funeral home. When no one showed up, he went to a Tim Hortons restaurant half a mile away. The woman, who could not speak due to her injuries, wrote a letter to the staff and warned her husband who was injured.

The woman was rushed to a local hospital and then transferred to a Winnipeg hospital where she stayed for seven days.

The woman “gathered incredible strength because of her will to live,” Bailey said. “He's clearly scarred and no doubt has a daily reminder of his sister trying to kill him.”

According to a presentence report prepared for the court, Flatfoot was raised by his mother and stepfather, and their four children, including the victim, were treated more cruelly by the stepfather than his biological children. Flatfoot's parents were abusive to each other and drug addiction was common, he said.

According to Flatfoot, her parents often had drinking parties where her stepfather would take all the children, except when he was at another house. Flatfoot said she was sexually assaulted by party guests on at least two occasions.

Flatfoot said that his stepfather sometimes deprived him of food and made him sleep in the barn because he “wasn't his.”

At age 13, Flatfoot was caught by Child and Family Services and placed in a home where he was sexually abused. Flatfoot's mother and stepfather had to complete a six-month substance abuse program to regain custody of him.

After Flatfoot returned home, he was at the dinner table when his stepfather forced him to eat the program certificate, Flatfoot told the reporter.

Flatfoot described “numerous other acts of neglect and torture suffered at the hands of both of his parents; “There is no reason to doubt any of them in court,” Bailey said.

Flatfoot's attack on his sister came amid “a lifetime of family neglect and abuse, substance abuse and intergenerational trauma,” Bailey said.

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Dean Pritchard
Court reporter

He once said that a journalist is a well-dressed reporter. Dean Pritchard doesn't have a good suit. But he knows a good case law.

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