Witness: Wlasiuk Told Me How He'd Commit Murder
Published: September 15th, 2008
By: Tyler Murphy

NORWICH – A woman who claims she heard Peter M. Wlasiuk bragging about how to murder someone by drowning them in Guilford Lake a year prior to the death of his wife, Patricia, testified in his murder trial Friday.

“Sometime in the first part of 2001, did you have a conversation with Mr. Wlasiuk that sticks in your mind?” District Attorney Joseph McBride asked witness Brenda Golden. She confirmed she did while sitting at Wlasiuk’s bar, The Angel Inn (formerly The Pillars) in Guilford.

Golden told the court that Wlasiuk said it “would be easy” to make “problems” go away.

“He said, for instance, it would be easy to kill someone and make it look like a drowning accident. He said, ‘But you have to be smart, you can’t just drown them and say, throw them in the lake because they could test the water in their lungs and tell whether or not it came from the lake.’ He said, ‘Say I wanted to put someone in Guilford Lake ... the thing to do would be to get a bucket or a container of water from the lake and drown them in that, then throw the body in the lake.’”

Wlasiuk, 39, is charged with second degree murder in the death of his wife Patricia, 35, whose body was found in Guilford Lake after what he claimed to be a truck accident that took place at about 12:30 a.m. April 3, 2002.

Investigators claim Wlasiuk killed his wife at their Oxford home, and staged the Guilford Lake accident to cover it up. A jury convicted Wlasiuk of murder in January 2003, but that decision was overturned on appeal in August 2006.

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Golden said she drove to the scene of the accident May 4, 2002 after hearing about Patricia’s death. After visiting the site, she said she concluded that a murder had taken place and needed to tell “someone” about what she heard. Golden said she was not drinking the night of the alleged remarks and also told the court she overheard Wlasiuk say he wanted to get rid of the drug problem in Guilford.

One of the first on the scene the night of Patricia Wlasiuk’s death was tow truck driver Kenneth Constable, who helped to perform CPR on Mrs. Wlasiuk after she had been pulled from the lake.