Murder or manslaughter? Jury to decide fate of man who admitted to killing Windsor woman

Jury members must now decide if Jitesh Bhogal is guilty of murder or manslaughter in the death of 31-year-old Autumn Taggart.

Both the defence and Crown presented their closing arguments Monday, summarizing the theories they believe best explain what happened in the early morning hours of June 10, 2018. Since he's already admitted to "accidentally killing" Taggart, Bhogal is at least guilty of manslaughter.

The Crown's theory is that the "sexual assault and murder was motivated by drugs and anger."

Prior to entering Taggart's apartment, a female drug dealer took his cash and a large quantity of cocaine he had purchased. The Crown said he was searching for that woman when he entered the victim's apartment.

"He intentionally killed her thinking she was" the female drug dealer or Bhogal realized he was assaulting "a completely uninvolved woman" … and wanted to "cover up his crime," Crown Attorney Kim Bertholet said during closing statements.

During testimony from the female drug dealer, Michelle Altiman, she told Bhogal the cocaine was placed in her "snatch" — a slang term for vagina — until he drove her back to a drug house.

The Crown points to Bhogal's DNA on a vaginal swab from the victim's body that was presented at trial and said that suggests he sexually assaulted Taggart. But the defence said there could have been cross contamination when Taggart's body was moved or how the scene was handled by police and the coroner.

"He searched for the cocaine in the anogenital area believing she was Ms Altiman," said Bertholet. "There can be no dispute he was upset and determined to get that cocaine back."

Bhogal testified he didn't remember a lot of what happened inside Taggart's bedroom, how exactly he entered the third-floor unit or how he left.

These are a "series of self-serving fabrications and convenient gaps in memory" on important issues, Bertholet said. 

Taggart was "a woman completely uninvolved in the events of the night."

She argues Bhogal had made "purposeful and intentional acts" before and after Taggart's death. The Crown believes Bhogal "fabricated paranoia" to make jury feel he was more affected by the cocaine than he actually was.

"Its simply unimaginable that Mr Bhogal could manually strangle or suffocate for the length of time to cause her death without foreseeing that it would cause her death," Bertholet said.

An autopsy determined Taggart's cause of death to be strangulation and neck compressions. There were also injuries related to a sexual assault.