A cold-blooded killer who hid out at a Fort Langley home in January 2008, was sentenced to 50 years to life this week for the first degree murder and dismemberment of his landlord and boss in Sacramento, Calif. back in 2007.
Arthur Carnes, 40, was found guilty last month but was spared the possibility of the death penalty because of a cross-border extradition deal with Canada that made the U.S. promise to spare his life from lethal injection.
Carnes was the live-in caretaker at Seybert's home, when he murdered the man, decapitating and de-limbing him and documenting it on a digital camera before throwing his body into a waterway. Carnes stole the victim's car and emptied his bank account. His whereabouts was tracked to Fort Langley because he used the victim's debit card here. Working Langley RCMP, Carnes was arrested in Fort Langley, in a backyard.
Normally, such a conviction would carry the death penalty in California but because Carnes was arrested in Fort Langley and claimed refugee status here, Canada would only release him back to the U.S. on a promise he wouldn't be executed.
After committing the murder, Carnes, a self-professed survivalist, drove the victim's car as far as Washington State where he abandoned it and crossed into Canada on foot illegally.
In that time, he befriended a Fort Langley man on a "survivalist" website that both the local man and Carnes frequented, the courts heard.The man took in Carnes without knowing he was wanted for murder in the States.
The jury heard that Carnes posted a 400-page manifesto of "natural born killers" like himself, detailing ways to kill someone including the options he chose to kill Seybert.