Mark Edward Grant, who was convicted and later acquitted in the 1984 Winnipeg teenage murder case, was sentenced on Monday to 10 years in prison for sexually assaulting and forcibly confining a woman in her 60s in Vancouver. After deducting 215 days of pretrial detention, the 62-year-old Grant has 9 years and 42 days remaining in his sentence.
Vancouver police previously reported that on January 8, a woman was sexually assaulted in a residential building near East Hastings Street and Columbia Street in the Downtown Eastside, and Grant was subsequently arrested. Prosecutors charged Grant with unlawful imprisonment, armed sexual assault, and making threats, with the threats charge being deferred. In addition to imprisonment, the court imposed a lifetime ban on firearms and weapons, required him to submit a DNA sample, and added him to the national sex offenders database under the Sex Offenders Information Registry Act.
Grant was tried in connection with the 1984 murder of Candace Derksen, who disappeared on her way home from school in East Kildonan, Winnipeg. Her body was found on January 17, 1985, in an industrial storage shed not far from her home, her hands and feet bound with rope; the cause of death was hypothermia. More than two decades after the crime, on May 16, 2007, police confirmed that Grant’s DNA matched the DNA found on the rope, and charged him with first-degree murder. This case is one of the most high-profile murder cases in Manitoba, and the trial began in 2011, exactly 26 years after Dexter’s body was found.
A month after the trial began, a jury found Grant guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. Two years later, the Manitoba Court of Appeal overturned the conviction, finding that the trial judge had erred in failing to allow the defence to submit evidence pointing to another possible perpetrator. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the decision. In October of the same year, the judge acquitted Grant on the grounds that the DNA evidence was “fundamentally flawed.” In 2019, Grant sued the Winnipeg police and prosecutors for wrongful conviction. The civil lawsuit is still pending, and the Dexton case remains unresolved.