N.L. man had told graphic details of wife's death to undercover officer, murder trial hears

< warm>Warning: This story contains expressed linguistic communication and a verbal description of computer graphic violence.

On Nov. 30, 2023, Dean Penney told an undercover RCMP officer about how he pushed his wife down a set of stairs.

A week later, during a second recorded interview on Dec. 8, Penney spoke of the need to finish the job.

"I did hit her a couple times to make sure that she wouldn't be waking up or anything like that. I didn't want that kind of shit happening to me," Penney said in a video recording that was played in Supreme Court in Corner Brook on Tuesday.

"I did hit her with a f--king, just one of those little mallet hammers that was sitting there on the floor."

Penney made the confession to an undercover officer he believed was the head of a criminal organization set to hire him as the captain of a yacht. 

The officer playing the crime boss can only be referred to by a pseudonym, Rudy.

Penney has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of his estranged wife, Jennifer Hillier-Penney, and has pleaded not guilty. She was last seen Nov. 30, 2016. Her body has never been recovered.  

In opening statements earlier this month, Penney’s lawyer said the pressures Penney was under made his confession unreliable.

“Is what Mr. Penney said to the crime boss, the fictitious crime boss, true? Our position will be at the end that it was not," defence lawyer Mark Gruchy said.

Last week, the jury saw the first interview between Penney and the crime boss. Penney told Rudy that a fight had broken out between the estranged couple. In that video, played in court Friday, Penney said that Hillier-Penney was going "nuts," and that Penney pushed Hillier-Penney down a set of stairs into their garage. 

Hillier-Penney was bleeding from her head and ears and didn't have a pulse when he went into the garage, he recounts on the video. 

But on Tuesday, the court heard more details, including how Penney and Rudy reenacted the incident, where Rudy played Hillier-Penney lying on the ground.

"The smack was here on her head, and she had a smack here from where, I guess, she came down the steps. And I just took the mallet hammer and hit her a couple times like that to make sure," Penney said.

"Maybe two, three times … Hard enough that I knew. Because the third time, there was like a big splatter."

That declaration led to audible sobbing in the courtroom from members of Hillier-Penney's family, who have been present every day of the trial. On Tuesday, some of Hillier-Penney's cousins attended for the first time.

In the video shown in court on Tuesday, Penney said he placed Hillier-Penney’s body, which was wrapped in plastic, into garbage bags. He closed the bags with duct tape, then rolled Hillier-Penney into a canvas Seadoo cover before placing her into his green duck decoy bag.

After the garage was cleaned, and Penney had a conversation with his daughter, Deana, Penney said he pulled his vehicle up to the garage, took Hillier-Penney's body, and later drove to his cabin around 45 minutes away.

He then gave Rudy new details about how he hid Hillier-Penney's body in the ocean.

Penney had originally said that he had left the wharf by his cabin, sailed into the Hare Bay Islands area and threw all of the evidence overboard.

In the second interview, Penney said he drove in the dark and told Rudy that while people were in the area, he wasn't seen.

In the same video, Penney spoke of how boards installed on the boat to hold duck decoys doubled as a ramp. 

"All I had to do was just roll her out," he said. "Pushed everything in at the same time … I got lucky."

Penney said he placed additional weight at several points around the bag, including around Hillier-Penney's ankles and feet, to ensure her body sank.

Penney later showed Rudy the general area of where he said he dumped Hillier-Penney's body using mapping software on Rudy's computer. Rudy also pulled a weather report from the night, showing Penney faced wind gusts of over 35 km/h during his ride.

It was Penney's two decades of experience on the water that formed a key part of the Mr. Big operation set up around the St. Anthony, N.L., man.

The first recorded interview served as a job interview for Penney to become the next captain of Rudy's yacht. But before he could do that, Rudy said, they needed to talk about how they could "fix" the problem Penney was facing.

Penney got the opportunity to interview for the captain's position because the previous captain, who was actually another undercover officer who was referred to as Ryan, had fallen ill. It was a staged scenario in the operation.

Rudy told Penney the plan was for Ryan to be the one to ultimately take the fall for Hillier-Penney's death, but gaps in the story from the first interview required a second one. Rudy said Penney's story had to become Ryan's.

Penney and Rudy then met for the interview on Dec. 8, 2023, in Edmonton to finalize the details of Penney's captain contract and fill in the gaps.

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