Man found guilty of second-degree murder in 2012 killing

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This article was published 29/05/2018 (2843 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nearly six years after a Winnipeg woman was found dead in a vacant lot, a jury found her accused killer guilty of second-degree murder.

The seven-man, five-woman jury deliberated for about seven hours on Tuesday before deciding 30-year-old Kyllan Ellis is guilty of killing 23-year-old Simone Sanderson. They were sequestered since early afternoon, after receiving legal instructions from Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Chris Martin. He told them they would have no “magic formula” to decide what to believe, but they were to use their common sense to reach a verdict. “Let your common sense and life experiences guide you,” Martin told jurors.

The judge asked the jury to be careful about jumping to conclusions about the lack of DNA evidence tying the accused killer to the crime.

There was no DNA linking Ellis to Sanderson’s body, which was found in a vacant lot on Winnipeg’s Main Street about a week after she was last seen alive. A fillet knife covered in her blood was found a few feet away.

Both of Ellis’s parents testified during his trial, recounting separate conversations they had with their son about his belief he “may have killed someone.” His mother, Carol Ellis, and his father, John Ellis, testified they didn’t believe their son, who has schizophrenia.

It was up to the jury to decide whether Ellis was having delusions during these conversations.

Kyllan Ellis was seen on surveillance video footage walking along Main Street in the early hours of Aug. 27, 2012, not far from the lot where Sanderson was later found dead. Jurors heard she was likely killed in the wee hours, after being last seen alive the evening of Aug. 26.

Around 2 a.m., Aug. 27, Ellis called his mother and asked her to pick him up along Main Street, saying he’d lost his keys. She drove him to his father’s home in Lorette to get a second set of keys, and then back to the North End to pick up his car.

On the drive back, before she dropped him off along Main Street again, she testified, he told her he’d picked up a sex worker who told him to drive to a place she knew and then stole his keys. The woman had a small knife, Carol Ellis remembered her son saying.

A man “came out of nowhere,” and jumped on Kyllan’s back, she testified. There was a fight, and he choked or strangled the woman, and she fell to the ground.

John Ellis testified his son told him about the incident in 2014, and said he chased the woman after she stole his car keys. John Ellis said he “literally had my fingers in my ears” to avoid hearing gory details.

“He ended up choking her, he said,” Carol Ellis testified. She said she thought she recalled Kyllan saying he’d covered the woman’s body with leaves. Those two details — that Sanderson was strangled and her body concealed with leaves — were considered “holdback” information that police didn’t publicly release.

Ellis’s defence lawyers argued his mother was mistaken about those details, that they could have been “inserted” in her mind when she talked to her boyfriend about what her son had told her. The judge asked jurors to consider how the boyfriend could have known those details.

On police wiretap recordings, Carol can be heard telling Kyllan she knows he “took a life” and she is trying to protect him. Kyllan Ellis is heard repeatedly denying his mother’s suggestion. The jury had to decide how important those wiretaps were, Martin told them on Tuesday.

“Mr. Ellis can only be held responsible for what he actually says, not what Carol Ellis says,” Martin said.

The jury was also asked to decide whether Ellis killed Sanderson in self-defence. His lawyers argued he may have been defending himself, based on what he told his mother about being attacked by an unknown man and seeing a woman armed with a knife. But if jurors agreed with that argument, they would have reached a different verdict.

An autopsy revealed Sanderson died of blunt and sharp force trauma and had knife wounds to her hands from trying to protect herself. Her jaw was broken in two places — a sign “extreme” force was used against her, a pathologist testified — a bone in her neck was broken, and she likely had open wounds to her head and shoulder.

Ellis wasn’t charged in her killing until four years after her body was found. The jury didn’t hear evidence about how Ellis and Sanderson met, other than what he told his mother, but investigators believed they had been communicating on an online dating site.

katie.may@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @thatkatiemay