What the jury in William Sandeson's second murder trial never heard

WARNING: This story contains graphic details.

It is a cramped, little room. The walls are lined with white acoustic tiles and the floor is an intense green. Two chairs are positioned facing each other, close enough together that anyone sitting in them would almost be touching knees.

William Sandesonspent nearly24 hours in thisroom at police headquarters, beginning on Aug. 18, 2015.

Investigators peppered him with questions about what had happened in his apartment three nights before,when Taylor Samson, a 22-year-old physics student at Dalhousie University, was shot and killed.

As part of the police interrogation,they reminded Sandeson, who was 23 at the time,ofpart of the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm." Doctors take that oath, and Sandeson was days away from starting medical school when he was arrested.

Jurors in his first murder trial in 2017 listened to most of that interrogation, as the video was played in court. But it's one of the pieces of evidence the jury at his current murder trial largely did not see.

Lawyers for both sides made their closing arguments on Wednesday. Sandeson'slawyer argued that he killed Samson in self-defence over a drug deal that went bad. The Crown claimed Sandeson was deep in debt and wanted to avoid paying for the nine kilograms of marijuana Samsonhad brought to the apartment.

With the jurorsnow cut off from outside contact as they deliberate whether Sandeson is guilty of first-degree murder, what they did not hearcan now be reported.

6 different stories

In thepolice interrogation video, Sandeson recountssix different stories about what happened in his apartment the night of Saturday, Aug. 15, 2015. None of those stories had Sandeson pulling the trigger. Instead, he talked about gang members climbing through hisapartment window to kill Samson and spirit away his body.

When Sandeson was arrested, police suspected him of kidnapping Samson and cautioned him about his rights relating to that charge. But as the interrogation continued and investigators extracted more evidence from his phone and his apartment, they shifted their focus and it became a murder investigation.

In the seven years since he was arrested and interrogated, Sandeson'slawyers have argued that heshould have been given a second warning by police to reflect the murder charge. He wasn't.

In pretrial motions leading up to the currenttrial, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice James Chipman agreed that Sandeson's rights had been breached. Chipmanruled that thecurrent jury would not see any of the later police interrogations, only the initial one in which Sandesonwas questioned as a witness andnot as a suspect.

That left Sandeson free to outlinea seventh version of events to the current jury, in which he admitted to the shooting, but claimed he acted out of self-defence.

Very different trials

The judge and lawyers in thecurrent trial went to great lengths to shield the jury from information about the 2017trial. But as many of the same witnesses were called to testify, it became necessary to refer to transcripts of what they said at the 2017 trial,in order to jogtheir memoriesabout what they had seen in August 2015.

The judge finally gave a mid-trial instruction, acknowledging the 2017trial but admonishing jurors not to think about it.

This current trial has gone more smoothlythan did the one in 2017, which saw many interruptions in whichthe jury was sent out of the courtroom while the lawyers argued. One of those arguments was over whether a mistrial should be declared because a private detective hired by the defence had passed information to police.

The original judge denied the mistrial request. But it became the basis of a successful appeal, which ledto thecurrent trial.

Sandeson's lawyer made another bid for a mistrial in the months leading up to the currenttrial, once again focusingon the actions of the private detective. ButChipman rejected that argument.

Dramatic testimony

The information the private detective passed on relates to the most dramatic moments in both murder trials: the testimony of Justin Blades and Pookiel McCabe. The two men said that moments after they heard a gunshot, they saw a large man slumped over in Sandeson's apartment, bleeding to death.

There are other things that neither jury saw, including a text message allegedly sent by Sandeson four orfive weeks before Samson was killed. In the text, Sandeson threatened to dismember his girlfriend if he found out she had been unfaithful to him.

Thetext message led to speculation that Sandeson had dismembered Samson's body and perhaps dissolved it using chemicals, as he hadthreatened to do to his girlfriend. But during thecurrent trial, Sandesonclaimed he putSamson's body in a duffel bag,droveit from Halifax to Truro, N.S., and dumped it in a stream leading to the Bay of Fundy.

While the jury in the 2017trial saw most of the police interrogation video, they didn't see a section in which an officer called Sandeson a "piece of shit" in the course of trying to elicit an answer from him. The judge in the 2017 trial accepted that the exchange was highly prejudicial to Sandeson, so it was edited out of the version that was shown to thatjury.

It remains to be seen whether withholding all of thisinformation will impact the current jury as it deliberates.