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CALGARY -- Calgarian Wendy Hewko was a giving soul who didn't deserve to be killed and then gruesomely dismembered by her tenant, her sister said yesterday.
Marlene Halverson said Hewko was always ready to assist someone less fortunate than her.
"She always extended a helping hand to anyone in need, the same hand that was cut off and thrown on the river bank like a piece of trash," Halverson told her sister's killer's sentencing hearing.
Halverson said not a day goes by where she doesn't think of the grisly circumstances surrounding her sibling's demise.
"The gruesome visions and thoughts of her horrible death always return," she said.
Dean Victor Gosse pleaded guilty to charges of manslaughter and causing indignities to a body in the July 14, 2007, death of Hewko.
Gosse, 38, admitted causing Hewko's death when he shoved her in his basement suite after she came looking for rent money.
Gosse told Det. Len Minello he grabbed Hewko by the hair and threw her when she yelled at him inside their Castlebrook Dr. N.E. residence for owing rent money to her common law husband.
Hewko's body was dismembered by Gosse, who scattered the remains near a bicycle path close to Max Bell Arena.
Gosse told Hewko's spouse, Brian Harrison, she had gone out for cigarettes and didn't return. Harrison, who had been at work assumed Hewko, 48, had gone "partying" for an extended period as the crack cocaine user had done in the past.
More than two weeks after Hewko disappeared several of her body parts, including her severed head, were found in the vicinity of the bike path near the river.
A month later her torso was discovered by a civilian in the same general area.
Because of decomposition the medical examiner was unable to determine a cause of death.
Gosse wasn't arrested until last Feb. 26 at his mother's residence in Gander, Nfld.
Both Crown prosecutor Susan Kennedy and defence counsel Alain Hepner said Gosse should be handed the equivalent of a 10-year prison term, minus credit for the time he has spent on remand.
That will leave him eight years and one month to serve, they told Justice Suzanne Bensler.
Bensler said she will decide this afternoon whether to accept the joint submission.