The Tribune

By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

AFTER being acquitted of the murder of her husband after a more than five-year long court battle, Donna Vasyli plans to spend time with her family before deciding what she wants to do with her life, according to one of her attorneys.

Mrs Vasyli was acquitted Thursday night after a nine-member jury found her not guilty in a retrial for the stabbing death of her millionaire podiatrist husband, Philip Vasyli, in 2015.

The ruling marked an end to an eight-year-long court fight that initially resulted in her being convicted of murder in 2015. That conviction and 20-year sentence was quashed two years later and then a retrial was ordered by the Court of Appeal.

When contacted by The Tribune on Friday, Owen Wells, one of her attorneys, described the entire ordeal as a stressful one for Mrs Vasyli, saying her focus now was to reconnect with family.

“The whole trial was an ordeal,” he said. “It was very stressful for her knowing that she was innocent and knowing that there was really nothing to connect her and she had to go through the whole process.

“It was an eight-year process beginning in 2015 with the initial trial and the Court of Appeal and then the Privy Council and now a retrial so she really hasn’t considered her option as for what’s next.

“What’s most important now is spending time with her family, including her grandchildren and both her parents who she hasn’t seen in eight years. They reside in Australia. They were too elderly to travel and, of course, she could not visit them due to her passport (being held) and being on bail.”

Mrs Vasyli’s retrial before Senior Justice Bernard Evans lasted for about six months, with a gag order put in place preventing reporting of the proceedings.

According to Mr Wells, some 27 witnesses were called by the Crown prosecution in the trial, which he described as “tedious.”

“It’s been six long months,” the attorney added. “The jury was empaneled in October so the trial was nonstop since then with us breaking for Christmas so you could imagine the work we had to put in everyday and every night after court, we met until the wee hours of the morning sometimes until two or 3am in the morning just working on the trial.

“What would be the strategy for the next witness, how we would approach the witness. It was a tedious trial to say the least. The prosecution called 27 witnesses and we called one defence witness so you could imagine the work and the effort that went into it.”

Mr Vasyli, who was married to Mrs Vasyli for 34 years, was found stabbed to death on March 24 2015, at the couple’s Old Fort Bay home.

Mrs Vasyli was convicted of killing her husband months after he died. She was sentenced to 20 years at the Bahamas Department of Correctional Services.

But in July 2017, the Court of Appeal quashed her guilty verdict and consequently ordered a retrial.

She appealed the matter before the country’s highest court, however in March 2020, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London ruled that she had a case to answer.

The Bahamas’ Court of Appeal was allowed to decide if a retrial would take place.

“The case was built off circumstantial evidence,” Mr Wells said of the retrial. “There was no direct evidence … and we approached the case from a totally different aspect than the previous lawyers in 2015 did.”

He said the legal team presented different “theories” as to what may have happened to Mr Vasyli, having felt that police did not dig enough into those theories and just decided that their client was guilty.

“They never made any investigation of whether it was suicide, whether it could’ve been someone else who was present there that day. They made no investigations of these things,” he said.

Mrs Vasyli’s legal team included Mr Wells, K D Knight, KC, Damian Gomez, KC, and Bianca Samuels.