The murder trial for three people accused of killing Ryan Lane continued Friday as a courtroom heard how one of the accused was trying to sell his pickup truck the day after police allege the vehicle was used in the kidnapping and killing of Ryan Lane.
Testimony on Friday revelaed that when Will Rempel took his red GMC truck to an Airdrie scrap yard on Feb. 8 2012, it immediately caught the attention of one of the workers.
Court heard most vehicles taken to the salvage business were not driveable but this was a clean, shiny, good-looking truck.
“I thought I might buy it, it looked like a good truck,” Andrew Knox, a worker at Rainbow Salvage, testified in a courtroom Friday. “He (Will) told me he wanted to scrap the truck.”
Will Rempel, his brother Tim Rempel and Tim’s wife Sheena Cuthill, are accused of the first-degree murder of Ryan Lane.
Knox told the jury he offered Will Rempel $500, nearly four times the amount he would get if he sold it for scrap.
But Rempel declined, insisting on selling it for scrap and getting just $128 for the truck.
It’s alleged the trio plotted to kill Lane over custody of the child he shared with Cuthill.
Cuthill had applied for sole guardianship of the little girl and when Lane was notified in late 2011, he requested visits.
A family court mediator testified Lane seemed depressed when they met.
“Ryan was very sad,” Joanne McKay, a family court mediator, said. “He expressed many times how much he missed the child, he just wanted regular access to his child.”
WATCH: Global News continuing in depth coverage of the Ryan Lane murder case.
Watch below: Exclusive interview with Will Rempel.
Court also heard Lane hadn’t paid child support in nearly two years.
Maintenance enforcement had suspended his driver’s licence when he failed to pay the $288 per month he owed to Cuthill.
At the mediation session, Cuthill agreed to waive the money Lane owed and to allow Lane see the little girl.
Lane took her to a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant on Feb. 6, 2012, just hours before he disappeared.
The Crown’s theory is Lane was lured to meet the Rempels, kidnapped in the red truck and then killed before his body was burned in a barrel at a gravel pit near Beiseker.
The trial continues next week and is scheduled to continue for another five weeks.
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