ST. THOMAS — Chad Reu-Waters had a penchant for saying things to make him look smart, tough, or dangerous.
ST. THOMAS — Chad Reu-Waters had a penchant for saying things to make him look smart, tough, or dangerous.
“He started lying to me from Day 1,” his ex-wife, Catherine Reu, said during cross-examination by defense lawyer Andy Rady at her former husband’s first-degree murder trial on Friday.
A lot of loose lips, boasting and fibbing would spill out after he’d been drinking, like when he told her he was a lawyer and had a university science degree. Or that he had two businesses in Guelph. And he’d go on, she said, about how much money he had and kept a binder full of pictures of all the cars he stole.
He bragged of ties to the Mafia and Hells Angels, but that wasn’t clear, she said. “I believed he worked for people.”
When he told her in 2003 that he’d killed his business partner, Ashley Pereira, 33, of Mississauga, by strangling him at a Guelph storage unit and stuffing his body in a freezer, it “shook me up,” Reu said, but she wasn’t sure if it was true.
Over the next decade, Reu-Waters told her several times he killed Pereira, she said. She never saw the freezer, but he said it was kept in Guelph, then moved to Mount Forest. After that, she didn’t know where it had gone.
Then, in 2014, Reu-Waters, who took his wife’s name because he wanted “a fresh start,” threatened to implicate her in Pereira’s death during the couple’s messy separation and fight for custody of their three children.
And that’s when she went to the police for the first time, Reu said.
The second full day of evidence at Reu-Waters’ trial revealed what the 48-year-old Jarvis man said about Pereira over the 17 years Pereira was missing – before a hiker found his body in a locked chest freezer dumped over a cliff on the Lake Erie shore east of Port Burwell on May 6, 2019.
Reu-Waters has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and indecently offering an indignity to human remains by concealing them in a freezer. The jury has heard he was in jail when his son, Sam Waters, and two buddies moved the freezer from a Simcoe hobby shop and pushed it off the bluff in the night.
Under questioning by assistant Crown attorney Andrew Paul, Reu, in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, talked about her rocky marriage to Reu-Waters that begin in October 2000.
He founded South Coast Hobbies and Rides in Simcoe, originally called Waters Family Quads, and also had a part of a multi-level marketing company that sold books and CDs, she said.
His partnership with Pereira began after the two spent time on the same unit in a Milton jail. Reu said they started some kind of computer business involving $100,000 in equipment.
She met Pereira only once, in early 2002, when she was pregnant with her daughter, at a business meeting with her husband at a diner near Toronto airport.
“He said Ashley is a good name,” perfect for a boy or girl, Pereira told her in suggesting what to call the baby, she said.
The marriage deteriorated. In 2003, after his mother died, Reu-Waters was staying home “a lot,” which caused a lot of arguments, she said. When Reu told him she was “done,” Reu-waters “said he would kill me,” she testified. “(He) said he had done it before and mentioned Ashley.”
Reu-Waters mentioned Pereira other times, usually when he was drunk. That escalated when the couple separated in 2013 and 2014.
She said Reu-Waters threatened in text messages to implicate her in Pereira’s death to stop her reporting him to child welfare authorities and get her to agree to custody terms.
She told her lawyer before Reu-Waters backtracked, but he renewed the threat two weeks later, writing that if she didn’t talk to him he was “going to let police know exactly what I had done,” she said.
He told Reu he’d include details like that she’d put a hat on Pereira’s head and panties in his pocket. He also said he had receipts from when she paid a Guelph storage company while he was in jail and “he had a spot saved just my size beside Ashley,” she said.
Reu shows the police the texts. The police spoke to Reu-Waters about Pereira, but the inquiries went no further.
Reu described finding Reu-Waters on their front porch, “wondering who called the cops about Ashley,” unaware it was her. “I’d never heard my heart beat in my ears before. My blood pressure was that high,” she said.
Reu said she moved back into their Jarvis home a year after they separated because she didn’t want to leave Reu-Waters – “a bad influence” – alone with the children.
The relationship ended in 2018 when Reu-Waters threw her and the kids out of the house without their belongings, she said. The pair then communicated “as little as humanly possible.”
In terse email exchanges, Reu-Waters again threatened to implicate her in Pereira’s death. He said he’d spilled all the details to his new girlfriend.
Reu took the emails to police in 2019. The divorce was finalized in 2000.
The jury also heard from three police officers. OPP Sgt. Timothy Mason described finding keys to Master brand locks in a safe in Reu-Waters’ bedroom closet. Identification Const. Kaitlin Rodak demonstrated how two of the keys opened the lock on the freezer.
She also said no DNA or fingerprint evidence was found on the freezer and other seized items.
Former police officer Sherri Hill testified that she had a conversation with Reu-Waters in 2005 about a collision involving a minivan registered to SMJ Marketing, a business owned by Reu-Waters and Pereira.
Reu-Waters told Hill the van belonged to Pereira, who “had gone to Mexico” but “checks in every few weeks.”
The trial continues Monday.