‘Prove it,’ teen’s accused killer tells Winnipeg police after his arrest

WINNIPEG – Nearly a quarter century after young Candace Derksen was left to freeze to death in a brickyard shed, her accused killer sat down with police and challenged them to prove his guilt.

It was May 2007. Mark Edward Grant had just been arrested and was sitting in interview room No. 5. He wanted a lawyer and he wanted proof.

"If you guys have a case, then prove it to me because I don’t believe you do," he tells officers, his statement captured on a videotape that was played at his first-degree murder trial on Wednesday.

Derksen was 13 when she disappeared in November 1984. Her bound body was found six weeks later after a massive search. It was a case that haunted the city for years as it went unsolved.

The jury has already heard how Grant was arrested after advances in DNA science gave the Crown new evidence it says links him to the crime.

The tape containing Grant’s statement to officers lasts move than 3 1/2 hours, but he was in the interview room much longer than that.

In the video, Grant leans back in a chair, his heavily tattooed arms folded in front of his chest. At other points he puts his head on the table. At times he seems to have fallen asleep.

He eats at least twice, drinks coffee, smokes a couple of cigarettes and has a couple of conversations with his lawyer Peter Eddgett, who does not remain for the entire interview. Eddgett reminds police more than once that Grant does not have anything to say about Derksen.

An insulin-dependant diabetic, Grant leaves the interview room after about seven or eight hours to go to hospital and receive an injection.

The officers who arrested him, Sgt. Allan Bradbury, the head of the cold-case unit for the Winnipeg Police Service in 2007, and his partner Sgt. Jon Lutz, take turns questioning him.

Grant insists early on that he didn’t know Derksen and doesn’t know anything about the case.

Lutz starts by telling Grant about the Derksen family and how her disappearance and death hurt her parents.

"I can’t imagine what they would have gone through. Her brother and sister were affected … They’re still in a lot of pain," the officer says.

They are looking for answers, Lutz says, but Grant has none to offer.

Lutz promises they will tell Grant why he was arrested.

"I will tell you at the end of the day why you’re our guy … The truth is the truth. It doesn’t change," he says as he tries again to get Grant to open up.

"I have no comment," was Grant’s only response.

The jury has already heard that Grant was linked to Derksen through a degraded, partial DNA sample found on the twine binding her body and hair at the crime scene.

It was Bradbury who decided to try and get more evidence from the twine, which had been tested by the RCMP years earlier for DNA but provided inconclusive results.

"I was trying to get the best evidence I could in this case," he said of his decision in March 2007 to send the remains of the twine tested by RCMP to the Molecular World DNA lab in Thunder Bay, Ont.

Grant’s defence lawyer has attacked the DNA evidence as having not been handled properly in the years before it was tested. He has also said the new tests were interpreted in a way that unfairly implicated Grant.

The video statement is the final element of the Crown’s case.