Officer describes autopsy, scene where Derksen’s body found

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This article was published 18/01/2017 (3218 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A retired police officer’s sudden discrepancy in testimony has prompted defence lawyers for Candace Derksen’s accused killer to raise more questions about how DNA evidence was gathered in the 32-year-old case.

Thirteen-year-old Candace Derksen went missing on her way home from school in November 1984 and was found dead — frozen and bound with twine at the wrists and ankles — inside a shed in Elmwood nearly two months later.

As the second-degree murder retrial of Mark Edward Grant continued Wednesday, retired Winnipeg Police Service officer Robert Parker testified he remembered a new detail in the investigation.

Parker attended to the shed were Candace’s body was found on Jan. 17, 1985, and three days later photographed the autopsy. It was his job to take photos for the police service and collect items as they were removed during the autopsy so they could be later examined as evidence.

Parker said testimony he’d given during Grant’s previous trial in 2011 was “incorrect” — testimony that concerned how he packaged the twine that had been used to tie up the girl. DNA extracted from the twine was later linked to Grant, leading to the second-degree murder charge.

“About two weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night” and realized the twine that was removed from around Candace’s hands and feet during the autopsy was put into a paper box, rather than a plastic or paper bag, Parker said.

He said he had recently reviewed his previous transcripts and that detail “was bothering me,” until he remembered he had placed the twine in a paper box initially used for photo film, which was common practise for police at the time, he said.

“Why I recall that, I have no explanation for that,” Parker said.

The discrepancy became more apparent when another witness testified he received the twine from the Winnipeg Police Service inside two separate plastic baggies contained in an outer paper bag.

Donald Ogilvie, a retired civilian member of the RCMP, was in charge of the Mounties’ hair and fibre investigation section in Winnipeg in 1985. He testified Wednesday that he didn’t receive the twine in a box, even when viewing a photo of the box provided to him in court.

“It would be somewhat unusual to receive an item of that nature in a box like this,” he said.

Pieces of twine came to him in separate plastic bags that were labelled “twine from hand” and “twine from feet,” he said.

During cross-examination, defence lawyer Saul Simmonds asked Ogilvie about the potential for DNA transfer if the twine had been moved from a box to the plastic bags.

“I have no knowledge of how clean the box is, or how sterile, or how well it was sealed,” he said. “I never examined it.”

The allegation that the twine was mishandled was one of the arguments Grant’s defence team used during the appeal of his conviction the first time this case went to trial. Grant was convicted of second-degree murder in Candace’s death in 2011, but the conviction was later overturned by the Court of Appeal based on errors made by the first trial judge. The Supreme Court upheld the appeal court’s decision in 2015, and the Crown decided to proceed with a new second-degree murder trial.

During his testimony, Parker described seeing Candace’s body frozen and her face frostbitten. Some of her clothes and parts of her face appeared to be covered in dust, and her jeans were soiled, he said. In response to a question from Crown attorney Brent Davidson about whether it appeared Derksen had been sexually assaulted, Parker said it didn’t appear as though the fastener on her jeans had been interfered with.

As the condition of her daughter’s body and clothing were described in court, Wilma Derksen sat in the gallery taking notes.

The retrial, which began Monday, is scheduled to last until mid to late February. On Thursday, four witnesses are scheduled to take the stand, including two DNA analysts, a police officer who made decisions about what should be subject to forensic DNA analysis in the case and a knot specialist who examined the twine found on Candace’s body.

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