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 Man found guilty of stabbing girl 173 times 15 years ago Canadian Press Feb. 16, 2004 MONTREAL - A man was found guilty of first-degree murder Monday in the 1987 death of a teenage girl who had been stabbed 173 times. Guy Croteau, 47, will receive an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years in the murder of Sophie Landry, 16. Judge Martin O'Hare said that due to the severity of the crime there was no alternative to sentencing. "If he had showed restraint and not stabbed his victim so many times the sentence may have been lesser," he said referring to a vague Canadian law that says when a victim is beaten, stabbed, shot or otherwise physically harmed in an "overzealous fashion" the sentence given by judge or jury should be a mandatory life. "In this instance," said the government's prosecutor David Johannsen, "the judge and I deemed that, given the circumstances, a rational person would believe 50 strokes of a knife to be sufficient to cause the appropriate physical harm to the victim," and anything more than that amount was considered "over zealous," and thus the life sentence was applied. 
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