Accused killer’s mother testifies about night of the murder

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This article was published 23/05/2018 (2859 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The phone rang in the middle of the night.

Carol Ellis answered, half-asleep, agreeing to pick up her adult son, who told her only he’d lost his keys.

Kyllan Ellis stepped out of the dark along Winnipeg’s Main Street, a couple of blocks from the spot where his mother would, days later, see a makeshift memorial shrine for a young woman.

He got in Carol’s car and they drove to his father’s home in Lorette, so Kyllan could get his second set of car keys. He stayed quiet and wouldn’t tell his mother what was going on. She recognized his “wooden-faced” expression, the blankness in his eyes – the “nobody’s home” look, she’d come to associate with someone experiencing psychosis.

On the drive to his car, Kyllan started talking. It was around 2 a.m., Aug. 27, 2012, just hours after 23-year-old Simone Sanderson was last seen alive.

Four years later, mother and son were both arrested by Winnipeg police.

The jury that will have to decide whether 30-year-old Kyllan Ellis is guilty of killing Sanderson heard his mother’s version of events Wednesday – one of the last pieces of evidence presented to court before Crown prosecutors closed their case against him.

“He ended up choking her, he said,” Carol Ellis testified.

He said he’d picked up a girl – “She identified herself as a prostitute,” Carol testified – and she told him to drive to a place she knew. The woman stole his car keys and threw them. A man “came out of nowhere,” and jumped on Kyllan’s back, Carol recalled her son saying. There was a fight, and he choked or strangled her, and she fell to the ground.

Carol Ellis testified she thought she recalled Kyllan saying he’d covered the woman’s body with leaves.

“Everything is a mess in my brain right now,” she said on the witness stand.

Parts of Carol Ellis’s testimony, specifically whether her son ever used the words “choked” or “strangled” were challenged by defence lawyers, who suggested those words could have been “inserted into your brain” when she talked about that night with other people. She subsequently agreed those words may not have been uttered by her son.

But that night, and as time went on, “I really began to question the whole thing,” she said of her son’s story. She said she dropped him off somewhere along Main Street, and never saw a body, any blood on her son’s clothes or any sign he was hurt.

Kyllan Ellis, who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia years earlier, was known to talk about things he believed happened, things that weren’t true, his mother said. She said she had subsequent conversations with him about that night. When questioned by Crown prosecutor Brent Davidson, she said she thought they’d talked about it five times.

“It finally got to the point where he’d tell me he didn’t know what I was talking about and (that) I had memory problems,” she said.

A police wiretap hidden in Carol Ellis’s living room recorded such a conversation between mother and son in April 2016. In it, Carol told Kyllan she knew he “took a life” – which he repeatedly denied – and they argued about his subsequent accusations that she had dementia. She also asked him if he’d left his DNA at the murder scene.

Jurors heard the recordings last week.

In response to cross-examination questions from Cook, Carol Ellis agreed she has a bad memory – due in part to traumatic events and alcoholism – and said it’s “fair to say” she doesn’t necessarily trust her own memories from that night. She said she didn’t believe what her son told her was true.

Carol Ellis was arrested and accused of being an accessory to murder April 25, 2016 – the same day Kyllan Ellis was arrested for second-degree murder. He’d first come to Winnipeg homicide detectives’ attention via a March 2014 Crime Stoppers tip (from someone police later learned was Carol’s boyfriend).

She testified she had talked to her boyfriend, as well as another friend and medical professionals, about what her son had told her.

A bloody fillet knife was found Sept. 2, 2012, in the vacant Main Street lot near Sanderson’s body, which was partially decomposed and covered by cardboard.

When police searched Carol Ellis’s home, they found a similar fillet knife inside her bedside table drawer. She testified she may have had others in the house at some point, but didn’t know where they were.

WPS Sgt. Jennifer McKinnon testified Wednesday it was “unusual” to see a fillet knife at the scene of a stabbing, adding she’d never before seen that type of flexible, thin knife at any of the other stabbing cases she’d investigated.

(Homicide unit Sgt. Wes Rommel said the same thing when he testified last week.)

Kyllan Ellis’s defence team is not presenting any of its own evidence during the trial, and lawyers are expected to deliver closing arguments to the jury next week.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay