Court to weigh validity of ‘boxcar girl’s’ testimony

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/05/2017 (3063 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the mid-1980s, two young girls around the same age, from the same area of the city, were both found tied up and alone.

The first, 13-year-old Candace Derksen, was found hog-tied and frozen to death in a lumber-yard storage shed in Elmwood in January 1985. About 14 feet of twine was wrapped six times around her ankles, four times around her wrists, knotted six times, making her escape impossible.

The second, a 12-year-old girl who can’t be named under a publication ban, was found nine months later in an empty train boxcar on the CP Rail tracks near Chalmers Avenue, screaming for help and crying for her mother from beneath the plastic shopping bag that covered her head. She was propped up against the back wall of the boxcar, her hands and feet sticking out in front of her, bound with rubber tubing.

Three decades later, her account of what happened to her on Sept. 6, 1985 became the reason the Supreme Court decided the man accused of killing Candace would get a new trial. Now, after 53-year-old Mark Grant’s second-degree murder retrial has concluded, it’s an account Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Karen Simonsen will have to decide if she believes.

The jury that convicted Grant of second-degree murder in 2011 never got to hear from the boxcar girl, whose reported abduction happened while Grant was already in jail. If jurors had heard her testimony back then, they would’ve heard her recant it on the stand, agreeing with a Crown prosecutor’s suggestion that the whole thing never happened. After the woman’s admissions, Justice Glenn Joyal, who presided over the jury trial, decided the incident didn’t happen, despite a statement the 12-year-old had given to police shortly after she was found by a passerby. In the statement, she described in detail being forced into a strange man’s car after school on a Friday — the same weekday Candace went missing — driven to the boxcar, pushed in, tied up and left there. A 23-year-old woman walking her dog in the area heard her cries for help and rescued her around 4:30 p.m.

The “striking similiarities” between the two cases prompted Grant’s defence team to fight to introduce evidence that defence lawyer Saul Simmonds argued could point to a murder suspect other than Grant. The now-44-year-old woman returned to court to testify for the defence in February, saying she has since received several harassing phone calls — and even a brick thrown through her window, mob-style — that threatened her to tell the truth or she would be killed in her sleep.

On the witness stand a second time, the woman said she was lying during the first trial when she agreed the incident didn’t happen, submitting to what she described as police pressure to say she was never abducted. This time, she said she knew the incident happened, “to my recollection,” but she said she could not remember any details of what took place. She said she didn’t know if she had lost her memory over the 32 years that had passed, or whether the details of what she knew had come from her own nightmares.

“They tried to convince me that it didn’t happen. That I might have made it up or that I was crazy,” she said of police and the former Crown attorney on the case.

“I had a lot of nightmares growing up and I don’t know if details were memories or dreams, and that’s basically when they said if you don’t remember then maybe it didn’t happen,” she testified in February.

The Crown’s theory is that the girl found the tubing in a garbage bin in a maintenance closet at her middle school, snagged it and staged the abduction in the month’s after Candace’s high-profile disappearance. The woman denied the suggestion in court. The Crown said the clothes she provided to police for their investigation of the incident were not the same clothes she was wearing when a passerby found her in the boxcar.

Simmonds has repeatedly argued the two cases have a “strong nexus” the courts can’t ignore.

“Two young girls under these exact circumstances are found in exactly the same sort of situation,” he said. “Did the person who committed the offence with Candace Derksen learn from their event? Did they perhaps not anticipate that there was going to be a death? I have no idea.”

Despite inconsistencies in the woman’s story and her memory troubles, “if we were on the other side of the podium and this was a sexual assault case,” her testimony would have been treated differently by the Crown, Simmonds suggested.

“Stay of proceedings. That’s what we would say,” Crown prosecutor Brent Davidson said during his closing arguments last week. He said the woman made no mention of being held at gunpoint until she spoke to police five days before her first testimony in 2011, and from then on said she couldn’t remember any details.

“That’s when the memory loss started — as soon as someone confronts her on her story,” Davidson said, adding “the best-case scenario for (the 44-year-old woman) is she’s a perjurer.”

Justice Simonsen is set to deliver a verdict on the six-week retrial at a later date.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay