Editor’s note: The following story contains graphic descriptions heard in court that may not be suitable for some readers.
The man who discovered Katherine Janeiro’s missing telephone, which Barrie police had been searching for in the months following the young mother's 1994 murder, testified on Thursday.
Video testimonies to homicide investigators by a now-deceased female witnesses were also heard in a Barrie courtroom yesterday, which marked the ninth day in the ongoing murder trial.
Janeiro, 20, was found stabbed to death in her Dunlop Street West home on Oct. 10, 1994.
Robert MacQueen, who is now 61 and is also known as Bruce Ellis, is on trial for second-degree murder in her death. None of the allegations against him have been proven in court.
The first witness of the day was Sudbury resident Wayne Restoule, 76, a retiree who used to live and work in Barrie.
Restoule discovered the missing telephone, which had gone missing from Janeiro's apartment, on March 16, 1995 at around 7:30 a.m. as he stopped to feed some ducks in Bunker’s Creek, near Bradford and Vespra streets, a few blocks from the murder scene.
He had been on his way to work as part of his usual daily routine when he spotted the phone's coiled cord in shallow water close to the shore.
Restoule testified it had caught his eye because police at the time had made a public appeal for information, leading to the recovery of the missing telephone. The phone was sitting upside down at the bottom of the creek.
He said he picked up the phone by its cord, placed it into a plastic bag and then resumed his bike ride to work. Upon finishing his shift, he called police to report the find. Police met with Restoule and he showed them the exact spot where he had discovered the phone.
Evidence presented in court included police photos of the phone as well as the numbers which were programmed into it, which were still recoverable at the time, more than five months later.
The court was also shown police interview videos of Wanda Sherwood, nicknamed "Stevie," who was a girlfriend of William “Woody” Theakston, an outlaw biker who was a friend of Janeiro’s and was one of the first three people to discover her body. Like Theakston, Sherwood has since died.
In the video, Sherwood describes Janeiro as someone who “had a lot going for her … She was getting her little girl back for good.”
Sherwood also said Janeiro “cared about others more than herself. She was always taking in kids and feeding them.”
As this video clip played for the court, Janeiro’s daughter, Dawn, sat in the front row of the gallery, watching intently.
In Sherwood's second police interview, which happened a week later, she opened up about her increasingly fraught relationship with Janeiro, as they had been arguing for a while at the time.
She told police that Janeiro was “cut off” from her supply of cocaine “until she paid her bills … because I said so.”
Sherwood had previously supplied Janeiro with eight grams of cocaine, which she was to sell for around $100 per gram. She believed Janeiro sold it all and owed her about $550.
Sherwood testified that Janeiro had recently "dumped" several pills into the toilet at a local bar, Tom Doolys.
Police interviews from 1994 and 1995 were also shown of another deceased witness, Sherry Neilson, who was a friend of Theakston’s.
Neilson testified Theakston was at her home the night of the murder. He had eaten dinner and was drinking, then went to bed as he spent the night there.
“There was no possible way he could get to the place where this happened,” she blurted out near the beginning of the interview, despite not being asked.
Later in the 1994 interview, Neilson said “there’s no way he could have gotten out of the house without me knowing,” because she owned a dog.
Neilson was told by Theakston in the morning that Janeiro had left five voicemail messages on his cellphone, which had been turned off before he went to sleep.
She then drove him to the area of Janeiro's apartment and dropped him off at a nearby coffee shop.
In the second interview, which occurred in May 1995, Nielsen stated Theakston “can’t collect money from a dead person ... He would never kill a 20-year-old girl.”
The court also heard 17 voicemail messages left on Janeiro’s landline phone in the hours before she was killed. Callers included her boyfriend, Douglas Callow, Theakston and others trying to contact Janeiro. The last message before her death was left at 4:30 a.m.
The trial, which is expected to last seven weeks, resumes Monday.
Court has heard the last time Janeiro had contact with anyone was around 4 a.m. on Oct. 10, 1994. Her body was discovered by a friend around 7 p.m. that night.
At the time of Janeiro's death, police said she had suffered multiple stab wounds. Her two-year-old daughter had been visiting family members at the time of the homicide.
Court previously heard from the Crown that MacQueen had been in a relationship with Janeiro while he was married and living nearby on Dunlop Street.
On Tuesday, MacQueen's ex-wife testified that Janeiro had told her she was pregnant, and the father was believed to be MacQueen or possibly another man.
During opening statements, the Crown said Janeiro had a "therapeutic abortion" on Sept. 16, 1994, less than a month before she was killed.
According to news reports published by the former Barrie Examiner, Janeiro’s body was found lying on the floor, covered in blood with scratches on her face. She’d been at a pair of downtown bars most of Sunday night and early Monday morning prior to her body being found.
