Police interviews presented as evidence at Barrie murder trial

Warning: Readers may find some details in this article graphic and disturbing.

On Thursday, jurors watched video evidence of a police interview from 30 years ago that shed light on Katherine Janeiro's final days before she was found dead in her Barrie apartment.

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The case remained cold for 26 years before police arrested Janeiro's former boyfriend, Bruce Ellis, also known as Robert MacQueen, in 2021 and charged him with second-degree murder.

In the video, Wanda Sherwood told police she was friends with Janeiro and had spoken with her on the phone the day she died.

Sherwood told police she had dated Woody Theakston, the biker Janeiro was said to have sold drugs for out of her apartment.

During the police interview, Sherwood said Theakston and Paul Daigle, who testified earlier this week, discovered Janeiro's body on Oct. 10, 1994, while at her apartment looking for cough syrup.

Sherwood explained that she hadn't been feeling well, and Theakston had a key to Janeiro's apartment and knew she had medicine.

She told the police Theakston thought 20-year-old Janeiro had taken her life by slitting her wrists based on the amount of blood the two men discovered.

A neighbour who frequently let herself into the Dunlop Street apartment to use Janeiro's phone testified seeing two men rifling through cupboards and drawers in the kitchen on the night of her death.

The court had previously heard that just weeks before she was found on her bedroom floor with multiple stab wounds, Janeiro told Ellis' ex-wife he had gotten her pregnant. Janeiro had also allegedly been spreading rumours that Ellis had contracted AIDS from an exotic dancer. His ex-wife testified that those rumours had made him very angry.

On Thursday, the court also heard from a man who found Janeiro's missing phone in a Barrie creek roughly five months later.

As part of an Agreed Statement of Facts, it was revealed that an engineer from Northern Telecom examined the phone and discovered it could store phone numbers, display and record incoming caller ID and keep memory of the last outbound call. The phone, police said, had been ripped from the wall in Janeiro's living room.

Another police interview video was played for the jury, in which a woman who considered Theakston a friend told investigators he did not kill Janeiro.

"He can't collect off dead people," she told the officers. "Woody is a lot of things, but he's not going to kill a 20-year-old girl with a child."

Theakston has since passed away.

Ellis denies any involvement in Janeiro's death.