Lynn Kalmring
Image Credit: Contributed/justiceforlynn.webs.com
May 30, 2013 - 7:45 PM
911 CALL FROM WIENS: "CAN YOU HEAR ME? I JUST SHOT MY WIFE."
Shelley Pertelson was asleep in her bed when she got a phone call from her sister who would be fatally shot no more than an hour later.
Pertelson was one of the first witnesses to be examined today in the trial of Keith Gregory Wiens, charged with second degree murder in the 2011 shooting death of Lynn Kalmring.
Pertelson said the call display read 11:46 p.m. when she received the call, an unusual time to hear from her sister.
“I heard her sobbing, like I am right now,” she told the court.
Kalmring was calling from her home in a gated residence in Penticton where she lived with Wiens.
“I asked her what was wrong,” Pertelson said, at first suspecting something had happened to their elderly mother.
Kalmring told her she had been fighting with her husband and had thrown her rings and $2,000 U.S. dollars at him. She said Wiens told her to get a job before he went to bed that night.
“She told me, 'it's obvious money is more important than love to him,'” Pertelson said. She tried to calm her sister by suggesting things would be better in the morning. She also suggested her sister could stay a couple days at her home, but Kalmring declined, telling her she didn't want to leave and that she loved Wiens.
Crown prosecutor Colin Forsyth asked Pertelson how her sister sounded on the phone that night.
“It wasn't an angry voice, her heart was hurting,” she said. “She said she loved me and I told her I loved her and would call her in the morning.”
But when Pertelson did call she got the answering machine.
At 12:21 a.m. Penticton RCMP received a 911 call from Wiens. The recording was played in court for the jury.
“Can you hear me?... I just shot my wife,” he said.
The call-taker kept Wiens on the phone until police arrived at the residence. During the call Wiens is heard saying, “I am not a criminal.”
He also said he was as an-ex police officer and was unarmed.
“I am not going to threaten the police in any way, shape or form,” he said.
Up to 25 witnesses are expected to testify in the trial at Kelowna Supreme Court. It reconvenes tomorrow morning.
To contact the reporter for this story, email Julie Whittet at jwhittet@infotelnews.ca or call (250)718-0428.
News from © iNFOnews, 2013