Fatal Friendship: The Murder of Nancy Eaton EP 2

On a cold winter night in January 1985, a worried mother discovered the body of her twenty-three-year-old daughter. Nancy Eaton, an heiress to the Eaton family fortune had been stabbed to death in her own home and sexually assaulted. And the distraught mother knew exactly who was responsible. Seventeen-year-old Andrew Leyshon- Hughes was a troubled teenager, but Nancy was his friend and had treated him like a little brother. It wouldn’t take long for Andrew to confess to the horrible crime but was he ultimately responsible for what he had done? His esteemed lawyer Clayton Ruby would argue that his client wasn’t guilty of anything. What would a jury decide?

Fatal Friendship: The Murder of Nancy Eaton

She was the great, great granddaughter of Timothy Eaton, founder of Canada’s largest department store chain and he was from a wealthy, well-respected family. She was a beautiful twenty-three-year-old woman with a new career and an exciting social life, while he was a deeply disturbed seventeen-year-old who had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals half his life. An unlikely pair, but they had bonded over a carefree summer in Muskoka at their neighbouring family cottages.

Life back in the city would put a strain on their friendship, but she would always make time for him and let him sleep on her couch when he nowhere else to go. So nothing seemed out of the ordinary when he showed up on her doorstep on a snowy January night in 1985. But by the next morning everything would be very different. She would be dead before she woke, and he would be holding the bloody knife.

They were the closest of friends, so why did he kill her? Was he simply bad or completely mad? That would be the ultimate debate in determining his fate.