Mark Grant’s lawyers build defence with evidence potentially pointing to another suspect

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This article was published 18/01/2017 (2652 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Defence lawyers for the man accused of killing 13-year-old Candace Derksen are trying to introduce more evidence they argue could point to a different suspect.

As the second-degree murder trial for Mark Edward Grant continued Thursday before Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Karen Simonsen, court heard about letters that were mailed to CJOB radio station in late 1987, two years after Candace went missing and was later found frozen to death in a shed. The contents of the letters, in which the writer “connects themselves to the Derksen matter,” defence lawyer Saul Simmonds said, are part of a voir dire process — a hearing within the trial. It will be up to the judge to decide whether this evidence — along with all other information the defence says could potentially point to an unknown suspect, someone other than Grant — will be admissable, meaning whether she’ll consider it before reaching a verdict.

Simmonds brought up the two letters during his cross-examination of a retired Winnipeg Police Service sergeant and current civilian member of the WPS. John Burchill was working on analysis for the major crimes unit when a directive came down from the police service in 1995 asking for a review of the unsolved Candace Derksen case. Derksen was found frozen and bound at the hands and feet inside a construction company shed in Elmwood on Jan. 17, 1985. Burchill told court he hoped to find a DNA profile in the case that would prompt homicide investigators to revive it.

Burchill asked for several exhibits from that case — including twine, hair samples, the teen’s jacket and jeans, a swab of her lips and chewed gum seized from the scene where her body was found — to be retested using the latest DNA analysis technology, court heard.

One of the three pieces of chewed gum found inside the shed had Candace’s DNA on it. Tests from 1996 could only reveal that the two other pieces had traces of male DNA. When the extracted male DNA was analyzed again using more powerful technology in 2011, two separate male DNA profiles were identified, court heard.

Simmonds asked Burchill whether police were concerned about the “suspect bias,” and whether he informed DNA analysts about suspects he hoped would result in a match.

“In this particular case, I didn’t have a suspect at all,” he said.

Burchill confirmed the letters sent to radio host Peter Warren at CJOB were tested for fingerprints because the writer had linked themselves to Candace’s death. The investigative significance of the letters at the time was not explored in court Thursday.

Police investigating Candace’s homicide hadn’t told the public that the girl hadn’t been sexually assaulted, yet the letter writer, who wrote about “the little girl who froze to death in the shed” seemed to be aware of that fact. “I almost made love to her but I lost my desire,” the letter said. Its writer also expressed struggling with internal anger and mental illness.

“The fact that there had been no sexual contact… was not common knowledge,” Simmonds suggested to Burchill on the stand.

“That was my understanding; it wasn’t common knowledge,” Burchill replied, saying it’s common for police to “hold back” information from the public as an investigative technique. He also testified that the police didn’t publicly release the fact they found Wrigley’s Extra gum inside the shed where Candace’s body was found.

Earlier in the trial, Grant’s defence team raised questions about another, similar abduction that was reported to police while Grant was in custody. That, as well as the contents of the letters and any other evidence relating to a “third-party suspect,” is subject to the voir dire process. At the scene of the reported abduction, the same brand of gum was found.

Grant was convicted of second-degree murder in Derksen’s death after a trial in 2011, but that conviction was overturned because the first trial judge had not allowed the jury to hear evidence about a potential third-party suspect.

Grant was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in 2007, after DNA tests linked him to the crime scene.

So far in Grant’s retrial, which is scheduled to last into next month, Crown and defence lawyers have spent time detailing how police and DNA specialists handled the twine that bound Candace’s ankles and wrists.

Knot specialist Robert Chisnall, who examined the twine, testified it was about 14 feet long and was wrapped around her 10 times: six times around her ankles and four times around her wrists. There were no DNA protocols in place at the time, he said. He examined the twine in his home for about four hours with his bare hands, without gloves or a mask.

RCMP DNA specialist Tod Christianson, who worked at the lab in Winnipeg, testified he received the twine from Burchill in February 2001. He said it was an unusual sample in the sense that he had no indication of where to focus his analysis — he didn’t know which parts of the twine were more likely to yield DNA evidence because he didn’t know where they had touched Candace’s body and that of a potential suspect, for example.

Ultimately, he decided to “randomly chop” the twine into seven pieces and place them in separate, sterile vials for analysis, he said. Christianson called Burchill at the police service before doing so, he said.

“I wanted to make sure he knew I was going to be basically destroying this exhibit to see if there was any DNA present,” Christianson testified.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay

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