WINNIPEG – A crime that gripped Winnipeg 26 years ago will finally be in the hands of a jury this week in the first-degree murder trial of a man charged with killing a 13-year-old girl.
Mark Edward Grant, 47, is accused of grabbing Candace Derksen off of the street as she walked home from school Nov. 30, 1984, then leaving her bound in a brickyard shed where she froze to death.
The defence announced Monday it would call no further evidence in a case that has focused largely on DNA, with conflicting views on how the science should be interpreted.
Defence lawyer Saul Simmonds and Crown counsel Brian Bell are expected to make their closing arguments Tuesday. The judge plans to charge the jury Wednesday afternoon before deliberations begin.
Derksen was a lively student at Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute when she disappeared. The last day she was seen alive she had a brief exchange with a boy she’d met at a summer bible camp, made a couple of phone calls home to see if she could get a ride from her mother, then started walking on her own.
She never arrived, leaving frantic parents Wilma and Cliff Derksen to search the neighbourhood and make desperate phone calls trying to locate her.
The case made headlines as police got involved and the search continued. Investigators interviewed David Wiebe, the boy Derksen talked with before leaving school, suggesting to him that he was a suspect.
They also interviewed Grant, after his then 14-year-old girlfriend, Audrey Manulak, made what she later said was a false claim to have seen Derksen after Nov. 30. Police ruled Grant out as a suspect at the time.
Derksen’s frozen body was finally found Jan. 17, 1985, in a shed on the property of Alsip Brick and Tile. She had been left bound hands to feet and had frozen to death, likely within a day of being abducted.
"The body was frozen solidly," Dr. Peter Markestyn, Manitoba’s chief medical examiner at the time, testified at Grant’s trial.
There were no signs of sexual assault or serious injury. Police gathered bits of hair and fibre evidence from the shed and from Derksen’s body, but all leads proved to be dead ends.
Ten years ago, with DNA science being used more and more in criminal cases, investigators sent some of the evidence they had collected to the RCMP for testing, but the results were inconclusive.
Early in 2007, they tried again, sending some of the same evidence to a lab called Molecular World in Thunder Bay, Ont. This time they got a report that led them back to Grant and they arrested him in May of that year.
Grant professed his innocence to police, even after being kept in an interview room for almost an entire day. He challenged them to prove they had a case.
"You’re barking up the wrong tree," he insisted.
Amarjit Chahal of Molecular World testified for the Crown that when taken together, the results of the DNA profile they obtained in 2007 pointed to Grant. There was, he suggested, a one-in-50-million chance that someone other than Grant left the DNA that was found.
But Chahal admitted the DNA that was analyzed was degraded and said they excluded some data to come to that conclusion.
Simmonds called his own expert, Dr. John Waye, a professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University, who said it was questionable science to not look at the data, since it would have excluded Grant as a suspect.
"You can’t ignore data because it doesn’t fit your expectations," he said.
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