Bail Granted

Andrew Bagby was twenty-eight, a family medicine resident in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and popular with his patients. He had been seeing Shirley Turner, a doctor about twelve years older whom he met at medical school in Newfoundland, and he ended the relationship on November 3, 2001. The next afternoon she set out from Iowa, where she was working, and drove roughly 950 miles to confront him.

His body was found the next morning in a parking lot at Keystone State Park, shot five times with a .22. Turner flew to Canada a week later and settled in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She was arrested there on December 12, 2001, and a judge granted her bail the following month. While fighting extradition she gave birth to Andrew’s son, Zachary, on July 18, 2002. In January 2003 a court released her on bail a second time, and she kept the baby.

On August 18, 2003, with extradition closing in, Turner put lorazepam in Zachary’s formula, strapped him to her chest, and walked off a wharf at Foxtrap Marina into Conception Bay. Both drowned. A provincial review in 2006 called Zachary’s death preventable and issued 29 recommendations. In December 2010 Parliament passed Zachary’s Bill, letting judges weigh the risk to an accused person’s children when setting bail.