A man previously convicted, then acquitted, of killing a Winnipeg teenager has been sentenced in British Columbia for sexually assaulting a woman in her 60s.
Mark Edward Grant, 62, was sentenced by a judge on Monday for sexual assault and forcible confinement. He was handed a sentenced of 10 years, reduced to nine years and 42 days after taking into account 215 days of pre-sentence custody.
Grant was arrested in the city’s Downtown Eastside on Jan. 8 after a woman was sexually assaulted by a man inside a residential building near East Hastings Street and Columbia Street, Vancouver police previously said.
He was charged with unlawful confinement, sexual assault with a weapon and uttering threats. The Crown directed a stay of proceedings in relation to the latter charge.
The court also imposed a lifetime firearms/weapons ban, an order for a DNA sample, and for Grant to be listed in the national police database under the Sex Offender Information Registration Act.
Grant was previously convicted in the 1984 killing of Winnipeg teen Candace Derksen.
Grant was charged with first-degree murder on May 16, 2007, more than two decades after Derksen disappeared in Winnipeg’s East Kildonan neighbourhood on her way home from school.
Her body was later found, her hands and feet bound with twine, in an industrial storage shed not far from her house on Jan. 17, 1985. She had died of exposure.
Grant was charged after his DNA was determined to be a match to DNA found on the twine.
His trial, one of Manitoba’s most high-profile murder cases, began in 2011, exactly 26 years to the day after Derksen’s body was found.
A jury found Grant guilty of second-degree murder a month later and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
The conviction was overturned two years later by the Manitoba Court of Appeal, which decided the trial judge erred by not allowing the defence to present evidence that pointed to another possible killer. That appeal decision was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2015.
The Crown brought a new trial, before a judge alone, on January 2017 — one day shy of the 32nd anniversary of Derksen’s body being found.
In October that year, the judge found Grant not guilty, accepting the defence argument that DNA evidence was “fundamentally flawed.”
Grant sued Winnipeg police and the Crown for wrongful conviction in 2019.
That matter is still before the courts. The Derksen case remains unsolved.