CITY police have slammed the national RCMP lab for outdated technology and restrictive policies, saying they contributed to an almost six-year delay in identifying the alleged killer of Candace Derksen.
Police said Thursday they could have cracked the decades-old cold case more than five years ago if Ottawa's National DNA Data Bank had been better equipped.
The evidence that was re-examined by a private lab in Thunder Bay, Ont., and led to the arrest of convicted sex offender Mark Edward Grant had been sent to the RCMP's facility in 2001, said Winnipeg city police Insp. Tom Legge.
"The exhibits were returned to us. There was either an inability or an incapability to proceed further in examining the exhibits," he said Thursday.
"From a policeman's point of view we need that lab to do up-to-date work for us," Legge said, calling on politicians to make sure the lab gets the funding it needs to bring it up to speed with dozens of privately run labs in Canada and the United States.
"It's a tool we use more often than the public realizes," Legge said of DNA analysis to solve crimes.
Legge's comments echoed those made earlier this month by federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser in her scathing review of the National DNA Data Bank.
Fraser said the RCMP-run lab is beset by backlogs and "significant weaknesses" in how it deals with quality issues, particularly with an automated process for testing DNA.
Legge's comments also come a day after police charged Grant, 43, with first-degree murder in Derksen's disappearance and death. Grant, a long-term sex offender, was arrested by officers at about 8:30 a.m. as he walked near Main Street and Logan Avenue, not far from Siloam Mission where he was in a job-training program.
His arrest capped a police investigation that spanned more than 22 years and ended years of speculation by Derksen's parents Cliff and Wilma and their family and friends.
Grant is presumed innocent unless convicted in court.
Derksen had disappeared Nov. 30, 1984 as she walked home from school. After weeks of a frantic search, her frozen body was found Jan. 17, 1985 in a small industrial shed at Alsip's Industrial Products Ltd. at 1 Cole Ave. not more than 500 metres away from her family's duplex on Herbert Avenue. Her hands and feet were tied behind her back with thick rope, and there was evidence the person who did it may have stayed with her for a period of time. Candace was not sexually or physically assaulted.
Police had a pool of suspects and wanted the RCMP lab in Ottawa to analyze forensic evidence recovered in the shed to see if it came from the same person. If so, that DNA profile could be tested against known offenders who have been ordered by the courts to supply a blood sample for DNA purposes.
But, Legge said, the federal lab did not have adequate technology.
He said officers eventually learned of Molecular World Inc. in Thunder Bay, and that it could do the specific testing to develop a DNA profile.
Legge would not comment on what police found inside the shed, but it's believed strands of bleached hair formed part of the evidence tested in Thunder Bay.
The material was sent to Molecular World last fall. Testing found the material, including the hair, all belonged to the same person. That left police to put a name to it.
Legge said investigators had already narrowed down their list of suspects by comparing notes in different cases.
He said the Winnipeg Police Service could not send the Thunder Bay DNA profile of the suspect to the national DNA lab for comparison, nor could it ask the national lab to borrow a known offender's blood DNA sample, as the federal lab has policies of not sharing material with private labs.
He said that meant police had to obtain new DNA samples from a suspect and have the Thunder Bay lab compare them to what was recovered in the shed in 1985.
Police launched a special surveillance project called Project Angel to secretly seize the needed exhibits from the suspect. The Thunder Bay lab recently matched those new exhibits to what police have had on file for almost 23 years.
Dr. John Bowen, director of biology services with the RCMP, denied the Mountie labs frustrated the Derksen investigation.
Bowen said the RCMP had been working on the case since 1984 when it did an analysis of hair and fibres from the crime scene. There was also DNA work done in 1993 and 1996 as well as 2001 with the latest technology, which provided a profile put into the national data bank, he said.
bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca
-- With files from Paul Samyn and CP
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