WINNIPEG, Man. — A 26-year-old Winnipeg woman has been sentenced to two years less a day in custody for acting as an accessory after the fact to the murder of Diego Moscoza, a killing court heard she had no advance knowledge of and participated in only under a credible threat of death.
Devlin Langlois pleaded guilty in the Court of King’s Bench of Manitoba to helping dispose of the victim’s remains after Moscoza was stabbed at least 16 times by Taylor Linklater and Noreen Thomas in a Selkirk Avenue home on March 17, 2025.
Justice Grammond, in his Oct. 23 decision, describes how Langlois — then 24 and a daily user of hard drugs including fentanyl — was given drugs and told to stay in her bedroom before the killing. She awoke to the sound of the victim moaning in the basement but, fearing Linklater and Thomas, did not call emergency services. After the victim died, the two killers returned and directed Langlois to fetch a shopping cart, then threatened to kill her if she did not move the cart containing the body, which she left in a nearby back lane.
The court found the threat credible: Langlois had previously been stabbed in the back by Linklater, and Linklater was a member of the same street gang as her boyfriend, Melvin Traverse.
Crown prosecutors had sought three years followed by two years of probation, while the defence argued for time served. Justice Grammond found the offence fell at the lower end of the 18-month-to-five-year range established in Canadian case law, but ruled that time served alone would not sufficiently denounce conduct that “strikes at the administration of justice.”
Aggravating factors included Langlois’s failure to seek help while the victim was still alive, the indignity of moving his body, and lying to police before ultimately telling the truth about six months after the murder. Mitigating factors included her guilty plea, lack of criminal record, youth, remorse, progress in custody, and Gladue factors related to her Indigenous heritage and severe trauma, including childhood sexual abuse and intimate partner violence.
With credit for 467 days of pre-sentence custody at enhanced rates, Langlois has approximately eight and a half months remaining, to be followed by two years of supervised probation with conditions including drug and alcohol abstinence, counselling, and a prohibition on contacting Linklater or Thomas. A DNA order and weapons prohibition were also imposed.
The victim, a father of a five-month-old child, was remembered in a victim impact statement from his domestic partner describing the significant emotional toll of his loss on his family in the United States.
