Police bugged murder suspect’s homes, car and cellphone during investigation

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This article was published 16/05/2018 (2866 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The man accused of killing Simone Sanderson was under police surveillance for months before he was charged in connection with the 2012 homicide.

Details of the Winnipeg Police Service’s investigation into Kyllan Ellis were revealed for the first time Wednesday, as the jury for the second-degree murder trial learned about covert wiretaps police set up in both of Ellis’s homes, in his car and on his cellphone.

Police then tried to get Ellis to react as the investigation progressed. They planned various events, which police referred to as “stimulations,” including a traffic stop involving the same officer who had previously questioned Ellis about Sanderson’s death, and a news conference held two weeks before Ellis’s arrest.

During the April 13, 2016, news conference, homicide unit Sgt. Wes Rommel renewed pleas for the public’s help to solve the case. He told reporters police had obtained male DNA from the vacant Winnipeg lot where Sanderson’s body was found in 2012 and police believed the man who killed her had returned to the scene afterward.

At the time that information was publicly reported and broadcast, investigators had long since zeroed in on Ellis and were watching to see how he would react, Rommel testified Wednesday.

The jury previously heard police did find male DNA in the vacant Main Street lot where Sanderson’s body was found, but they couldn’t link it to Ellis. There is no DNA link between Sanderson and her accused killer.

Ellis, 30, first came to the homicide unit’s attention via a Crime Stoppers tip nearly two years after Sanderson’s death.

Rommel said he was acting on separate information from a source when he got a court order to access hospital records for Ellis’s mother, and subsequently applied for court authorization to set up the wiretaps in two residences in which Ellis lived. Probes were set up in his car and police tapped both his and his parents’ cellphones.

The jury was set to hear some of those wiretap recordings Wednesday, after they watched video surveillance footage showing Ellis walking toward Main Street around 1 a.m. on Aug. 27, 2012.

WPS Det. Terry Bambrick testified he reviewed more than 100 hours of video to find Ellis, and also to spot a brief flash of headlights that was suggested is evidence Ellis’s car was in the lot where Sanderson’s body was found behind 1052 Main Street. The footage doesn’t show Ellis in the lot, and Sanderson didn’t appear in any of the video surveillance footage, Bambrick testified.

Sanderson, 23, was last seen in the North End on the evening of Aug. 26, 2012. Her body was found a few days later, after the Labour Day long weekend, partially covered with a piece of cardboard.

Court has heard she had been communicating with men on online dating sites before she died, and police believed that’s how she came into contact with her accused killer.

Gail Oakley, a resident in the apartment complex that faced the lot where Sanderson was found dead, testified she looked out her bedroom window late one night during the last week of August 2012, to see a man standing in the lot, looking at the ground.

“He looked like he was looking for something,” Oakley, 62, told the jury Wednesday. “I assumed that he had stopped for a pee break and was looking for (his) keys.”

She spoke to police about what she’d seen a few days later, after she saw a large police presence at the lot and learned a body had been found there. She’d described the man as “native,” with long dark hair and a pock-marked face, wearing a tracksuit.

She agreed during cross-examination Wednesday that Ellis does not appear to be Indigenous nor have dark hair nor a pock-marked face.

Ellis, who is Caucasian, sat in the prisoner’s box, his long blond hair tied in a ponytail behind his thin frame.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay