WINNIPEG – A former deputy Winnipeg police chief didn’t view Mark Edward Grant as a suspect when he interviewed him in 1984 while investigating the disappearance of 13-year-old Candace Derksen.
Grant, 47, is now on trial for first-degree murder in Candace’s death. She disappeared Nov. 30, 1984, and her bound and frozen body was found in a brickyard shed Jan. 17, 1985.
Menno Zacharias, a detective sergeant in the youth division in 1984, said when he talked to Grant, it was to check out claims by Grant’s girlfriend that she had seen Candace after she disappeared.
The case had been making headlines for more than a week when he went to the Remand Centre to speak with Grant on Dec. 10. Grant had been taken into custody for being unlawfully at large.
"The prime case I was working on, along with the rest of the youth division, was the disappearance of … Derksen," said the retired deputy chief. "He wasn’t a suspect in the case and he was co-operative."
Audrey Fontaine, who was Audrey Manulak in 1984, a troubled 14-year-old runaway, has already testified about her relationship with Grant, who was in his early 20s.
Since Grant wasn’t a suspect, Zacharias said he didn’t take a formal statement. All the officer has now are his notes of the interview, which he read to the court.
"Has not seen Candace. Didn’t know Audrey knew her," he read.
Police also had questions about girl’s clothing found in a concrete dugout in the CPR railyards. It was a hideout Grant used after he initially escaped custody and Manulak shared it with him for a night or two. The court heard earlier that "I love you Mark" was scrawled in chalk on one of the bunker’s cement walls.
But when questioned, Grant told police that "only he and Audrey stayed there," Zacharias read to the court.
Earlier Monday, the jury heard more about how the case continued to be investigated years after Candace’s death.
Tod Christianson, an RCMP forensic scientist, received articles of clothing and other items from Winnipeg police for DNA testing in February 2001.
He prepared them and sent them to the RCMP lab in Ottawa and also wrote a report on the results the tests produced.
DNA from two males was found on pieces of gum found in the shed where Candace’s frozen body, her feet and hands bound, was discovered.
It was run through the RCMP databank at the time and did not produce any matches. But at the time, he said they did only nuclear DNA testing. There are two other methods.
The last witnesses to testify Monday brought the case to 2007, the year Grant was arrested. Sgt. Brian Chrupalo of the cold-case unit asked Sgt. Robert Russell of the identification division to take a blood sample from a pair of jeans taken from Grant, who was a complainant in another case.
The samples were then sent to Molecular World Inc. in Thunder Bay, Ont., the first accredited lab in Canada to do mitochondrial DNA testing.
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