Candace Derksen
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In November 1984, 13-year-old Candace Durkin went missing on her way home from school. Her sudden disappearance sparked one of Winnipeg's most extensive searches for a missing person, lasting six and a half weeks. Twenty-two years later, a man was finally arrested for her murder. However, justice is still far from being served after concerns arose over the integrity of the forensic evidence.

This is Forensic Tales, episode number 251, The Murder of Candace Dirksen. ♪

The girl at the heart of this week's story is Candace Dirksen, a

a girl whose life was cut short just by walking home from school one day. She was born on July 6, 1971, to parents Wilma and Cliff. When Candace was 11, her family moved to Winnipeg and settled into the community of Elmwood with her younger brother and sister. She was described as a social butterfly who loved making new friends. She also loved horseback riding and swimming.

On November 30th, 1984, 13-year-old Candace was on her way home from school when she went missing. At around 4.15 p.m., she stopped into a local grocery store and used the payphone to call her mom, Wilma. She asked her mom if she could get a ride home from school, but her mom said she wasn't able to come get her, so she would have to walk the rest of the way home. Now, it wasn't a very long walk, and she had done it plenty of times before, but at first, she was a little bit upset.

But Wilma, her mother, promised that they could go shopping together later that evening, and that seemed to make up for it. Except that shopping trip between mother and daughter never happened, because Candace Dirksen never made it home. Candace's parents started looking for her right away, and they quickly got the police and the community involved.

Pretty early on, about 500 students from the school all came together to help look for her. Her parents knew that she wasn't the type of kid to just run off or anything like that. Plus, her mom just spoke with her on the phone, and nothing really seemed wrong except maybe Candace was a little bit upset that she wouldn't give her a ride home and she had to walk instead. But her parents didn't think that simply that would have caused her to run off.

Most of the search was centered between Candace's house and the school because that's where she was last seen. They also looked at certain landmarks in the area, including nearby rivers and railroad tracks, but nothing really turned up.

Something to also keep in mind here, they're searching in some pretty cold winter weather. So on top of a basic missing person search, it's also starting to get really cold and really chilly and will eventually snow at some point, which is only going to make things that much harder. About 48 hours into the search, the police got their first big tip.

A couple reported seeing Candace being dragged away from the Watt Street bus stop by two teenagers around 4 o'clock p.m. on the afternoon she went missing. So that's great, right? Finally, someone saw something and everything seems to line up. Watt Street would have been on her way home, and this was right around the same time that she called her mom. Well, not so much for the Winnipeg Police Department.

According to this couple who called in the tip, they were told by one of the police officers that Candace had run away before and they weren't really taking this case too seriously.

So basically they said, hey, thanks for calling this one in, but we don't really consider this a missing person case just yet. Now, to be crystal clear, the Winnipeg Police Department did say later on that they don't know which officer made that statement and they weren't aware that she had ever gone missing before.

And according to Candace's mother, Wilma, that's simply not true. Her daughter had never run away before and had never been reported missing to the police. So it's unclear why these rumors about her being a possible runaway started spreading in the first place, or why the police department didn't really follow up on this initial tip. But whatever the reason may be, this was certainly a missed opportunity. Now fast forward two weeks.

Candice was still missing, so she was registered with the Child Find Canada organization, which is basically a database for missing young people. This is a missing child case, right? So the more eyes and the more ears they can get, the better. It just takes one person to see this young girl somewhere, and this whole thing could be over. And here's the sad reality with missing child cases.

The longer they're missing, the less likely there's going to be a positive outcome here. But despite this great organization's best efforts, nothing essentially happened with the search. By late December, Candace's parents went back in the media, basically begging anyone with information to please come forward. I think they still had hope that their daughter was still alive, but they didn't.

But at this point, reality was probably starting to set in that maybe she wasn't going to be found alive anymore. And this was more of a search for remains or search for answers type of plea to the public.

They also used this press conference to once again say that Candace wasn't a runaway. Despite any rumors and despite any false statements about that, they simply didn't think that she would do something like that. So at this press conference, they stood in front of everyone and just pleaded for anyone who would listen to them to keep looking for her and to not give up on this case. Because at this point, it had been well over a month since she went missing.

Another four weeks went by, bringing us to January 17th, 1985. At around 9.30 in the morning, a call came in from an employee at the Alcott Brick Tile and Lumber Company. He said he found a young woman who appeared to be Candace in a vacant shed on the company's property. Now, to give you an idea of where she was found, this was essentially an industrial lumber yard right around the corner from Candace's house.

but the company hadn't used it in several years. So this was the first time that anyone had gone there in a really, really long time. This employee said that he went out to the shed because he was looking for a piece of equipment, and that's when he happened to stumble upon her body. He said he opened the door and right away saw what he thought was the body of a young girl. So he said he closed the shed right away and went to go call the police.

He said he didn't even go inside of the shed and he certainly didn't touch anything because he had no idea what he was walking into. He just said that he knew what he saw. He thought it was the body of a young girl and he basically ran out.

Now, when law enforcement got to this shed, they did confirm that it was in fact Candace Dirksen. And just to put this whole thing into perspective for you, this spot is only about 500 meters away from her house. So this entire time that they spent looking for her, turning over every rock, looking everywhere, she was right under their noses this entire time.

Now, the awful, awful details. She was found lying on the floor of the shed, hogtied with a piece of twine, something that we're going to be talking a lot about. All of her clothes were on except for one missing shoe, so it wasn't immediately clear if she had been sexually assaulted or not.

And based on the condition of her body, the police theorized that she was killed within hours of going missing. And her likely cause of death was hypothermia. Let's not forget, this was during the middle of Canada's winter. The temperature inside that abandoned shed could have been as low as negative 25 degrees Celsius. So it was very, very cold. And Candace had likely been exposed to the cold this entire time.

And without going into too much detail about this, this meant that she was likely tied up, hogtied, and basically just left for dead inside this vacant shed in the middle of winter. It doesn't get more disgusting than that. We're talking about a little girl here. Now, you might be wondering, why didn't they find her sooner since the shed was so close to her parents' house?

It should have been one of the first places that they looked during their investigation. It really shouldn't have been that hard. Well, I guess the best explanation is that this was a completely unused, abandoned shed. None of the company's employees ever really went out there. So it was simply overlooked by virtually everyone during the entire six and a half week search for her.

And this particular employee of this company just so happened to stumble upon her while he was looking for this piece of equipment. If he didn't decide to go out there when he did, then we might have never have found her. Or it could have been weeks or even months later.

At first, the Winnipeg Police Department were very hesitant to release any details about the case. They wouldn't even publicly say that she died from hypothermia or that her case was being treated as a homicide. That didn't come until several weeks later when they finally said, yes, Candace likely died from exposure to the cold, and yes, they think that she was murdered. Now, I'm not sure why that is. It's possible.

possible that they just weren't sure it was hypothermia or not, because sometimes that's hard to determine during an autopsy. And I'm also not sure why they wouldn't come right out and say that this was a homicide, because to me, it seems pretty obvious. Candace didn't hogtie herself in there, so obviously someone else is responsible for this.

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This certainly wasn't the outcome that anyone had hoped for, but now that they had finally found her, they could move on to the next step of the investigation, identify her killer.

Two months later, the Winnipeg Sun released an article saying that she might have been the victim of a quote, teenage prank gone wrong. This particular newspaper had basically put together the different pieces of information they had and came up with this theory all on their own.

They knew about the tip that came in from the couple, who said that they saw two teenagers dragging Candace away somewhere. And now she ended up frozen to death inside this abandoned shed. So they started to wonder if this could have been simply a teenage prank gone wrong. Maybe it started as something innocent, but then eventually turned deadly by accident. Now the question about sexual assault.

After the autopsy, the Winnipeg police announced that they had no reason to suspect that she had been raped. They also said she hadn't been drugged or poisoned either, giving even more credibility, in my opinion, to this prank-gone-wrong theory. Some teens picked her up as she was walking home from school that day, tied her up, and threw her in that shed. But she ended up dying. But it wasn't the only working theory.

Not long after this, Candace's father agreed to go down to the police station to take a polygraph test. He wasn't ever really considered a suspect, but I think he just wanted to officially clear his name in all of this. And taking a polygraph examination was the family's way of just crossing their T's and dotting their I's. Now, the outcome of the polygraph examination wasn't too surprising. Cliff, the father, passed it with flying colors.

So everyone could move on from this theory and really focus on finding the actual suspect. However, the police seem to be still stuck on this prank gone wrong idea until September 1985 happened.

In September 1985, the year after Candace was killed, a woman walking her dog found a 12-year-old girl who was tied up to a boxcar alongside the railroad tracks. And when the police came out to look at the twine that was used, they realized that the same kind was also used to tie Candace up, the twine. So this got everyone thinking that maybe these two cases are somehow connected.

You've got the same type of victims, two teenage girls. Both of them were tied up in almost identical ways. The same style of knots and the same style of twine was used. The only difference here was that Candace was killed and this girl thankfully wasn't. So at this point, the police are even wondering, could there be a serial predator out there?

Candace's death might not be some teenage prank after all if the same exact thing happened to someone else in the same area.

When the police sat down and questioned the girl, she told them that a man had abducted her around 3.30 p.m. and forced her into his car. She said he was a white male, probably in his 20s, with dark brown curly hair, who wore a blue plaid jacket, blue pants, and was driving a small two-door car with a dark colored interior. But beyond that, this poor girl wasn't able to recall very much.

And that description could match half the 20-something-year-old guys living in the area. So eventually, that case went cold. They never found the guy. But this won't be the end of the story when it comes to this case. We'll talk about it a lot more later on, and you'll see why we're talking about it when we're talking about Candace's murder.

So after that, many more years went by. Now it's 2001, which means DNA testing is finally available. So the RCMP tested the twine used to bind Candace and several strands of hair found at the crime scene for DNA. The hope was they were going to get a hit in the national database. But unfortunately, they didn't. All the DNA testing at this point came back inconclusive.

Now the case is about 20 years old, and the family started having their doubts about whether they would ever find out what happened to her. And I think they're right for thinking this. I don't blame them. 20 years is a really long time to just sit around and wait for answers. There's even a good chance that their suspect, the person responsible for all of this, they could be dead at this point.

So now fast forward again to 2007. The Winnipeg police reopened Candace's case, calling it Project Angel. And one of the first things they did was send the twine and the hair samples to a private lab called Molecular World in Thunder Bay, Ontario to be retested.

It had already been tested once back in 2001, but as we already know, those results came back as inconclusive. But now, this is finally where investigators got somewhere. According to the police reports, three pubic hairs were found on or near Candace's body, even though the police said she was never sexually assaulted.

So right away, they knew it had to mean something. How does someone's pubic hair get on a teenage girl? They also found four scalp hairs that had been bleached blonde, but they weren't hers. Now, obviously, these hair samples weren't tested back in 1985 because there just wasn't good enough DNA testing back then. But now, by 2007, there was.

And not only were they able to test the hairs for DNA, but this private lab, Molecular World, was even able to get a match. Then three weeks later came the first arrest. On May 16, 2007, 43-year-old Mark Edward Grant was arrested and charged with Candace's murder.

According to the Winnipeg police, it was his DNA found at the crime scene, the hair and the DNA that they found on the twine. He also just so happened to have bleached blonde his hair right around the same time the murder took place. Now, before we go on with the rest of this story, here's a little bit about Mark Edward Grant, because I think it's important to know exactly who this character is.

He's pretty much spent his entire life behind bars for one thing or another, beginning as just a teenager. And in my opinion, he's pretty much the textbook definition of a serial predator. His first sexual assault happened when he was only 14. In that particular case, he was charged with sexually assaulting a female of an undisclosed age and was sent to a youth detention center.

After that, he was slapped with charges of breaking and entering, fraud, forgery, breach of parole, escaping custody, and being unlawfully at large. Now, he's an adult. And in 1988, he was charged with his first sexual assault over the age of 18. In that case, he was accused of sexually assaulting, uttering threats to, and unlawfully confining a young female.

He was ultimately found guilty of all three of these charges at trial, and for that case, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The following year, he was back at it yet again. He was once again accused and later convicted of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl and sentenced to four and a half years in prison, later reduced to four.

And I'm still not done. Less than two weeks after being released, he was accused of a third sexual assault in 1994. Now aged 32, he was convicted of choking and sexually assaulting another young female of an undisclosed age. In that case, he was sentenced to the maximum penalty of 10 years minus time served.

During that prison sentence, Mark Grant was up for parole several times. But the Parole Board of Canada kept denying it, saying that he was likely to re-offend. Which, based on his criminal record, everything that we've already talked about, that seems pretty likely.

In one of the parole hearings, the board said, quote, he had shown little progress with internalizing sex offender relapse prevention concepts and because he took his psychiatric medications on and off, end quote.

According to an article by CBC, Mark Grant was diagnosed with schizophrenia and in the early 2000s, he was prescribed medication to control his symptoms, which included his, quote, sexual urges. But apparently the medication wasn't working or he just wasn't taking it like he should have been because he kept reoffending and kept reoffending.

I want to mention here that Mark Grant definitely had a target and an MO when it came to his victims. Almost every single one of them was a young female girl. And although many of the victims had their ages redacted from the police reports, almost every single one of them fits this description.

So for Mark Grant to now be arrested in connection with Candace's case, everything made sense with his M.O. and what we know about him. She would have been the perfect target for him. The only thing that doesn't fit is the sexual assault. Candace wasn't assaulted like the others, unless she actually was and the police were wrong about that. Let's also call out the fact that Mark Grant should have probably spent the rest of his life in prison.

It's very clear, based on his criminal record, that he's going to re-offend time and time again. So why do we keep letting this guy out? Just so he can sexually assault someone else? Now going back to Candace's case, according to the Winnipeg police, the hair found at the scene matched Mark Grant's and he was arrested. His DNA was also allegedly on the twine.

He would have been 21 years old at the time and he wasn't in prison. He had already been released, so everything right now seems to line up.

Even more interesting, the police arrested Mark Grant on December 7th, 1984 on unrelated charges and even questioned him about her disappearance. Now it's unclear why he was initially eliminated as a suspect, but unfortunately he was. If the Winnipeg police knew anything about his criminal record, then it should have been a no-brainer. But unfortunately, that wasn't what happened.

So on May 16, 2007, Mark Edward Grant was officially charged with murder. His DNA was in the system because after his release in 2005, he was required to submit a sample, and that's how he was linked back to this case. And a side note, when he was released from prison back in 2005,

the city of Winnipeg put out basically a community notice warning to all women and to all children about the risk of sexual violence just because of this guy. So there's no question here that he was a real threat to the community.

Now, how exactly was his DNA matched to Candace's crime scene? Well, when the case eventually goes to trial, there will be a lot of issues with the DNA. But before we get to that point, let's talk about what this private lab did back in 2007. Molecular World used his mitochondrial DNA to match it to the hairs at the crime scene. This is DNA from his mother.

They also found his DNA on the twine. To make sure they had the right guy, the police followed him around for a few weeks until he spit on the sidewalk and they could get a second sample. And if that still wasn't good enough, the police even went as far as to get a DNA sample from one of his siblings. And all of that came back as a match, according to this private lab. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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So you're probably thinking this was a slam dunk case. Case closed, DNA matches. What more is there to talk about? Well, not so fast because the credibility of the DNA evidence is about to come under major scrutiny.

Mark Grant's trial finally began on January 17, 2011, after several years of delays and 26 years to the day after Candace's body was found. The Crown had hoped that they would be able to talk about all of his previous convictions for sexual assaults of other young girls.

But unfortunately, the judge in this case said that they weren't allowed to. So the jury never heard about how many times he was arrested and how many times he was convicted of this very thing. Now, I think that's a massive loss here because telling the jury about his past sexual assaults of young girls would have definitely helped to paint a picture of who this guy really was and talk a lot about his M.O.,

But still, there was the DNA evidence. But even that, as we're about to talk about, had a lot of issues of its own. The Crown also had to deal with the issue of time. We're talking about a crime that happened almost three decades earlier. So there's the potential that a lot of the witnesses in the case might not remember much or have even passed away at this point.

Retired RCMP forensic scientist Donald Oglevy was the guy in charge of the hair and fiber unit in 1985, and his testimony was pretty problematic from the get-go. He said he was the one who examined the hairs found at the crime scene. However, since DNA testing wasn't available back in 1985, he said he only examined the hair underneath a microscope. He also said he examined the twine.

But here's the problem. The pieces of twine were sent to him in two separate plastic bags that were labeled twine from hand and twine from feet. However, when the twine was originally collected from the crime scene, so from the shed, it was placed in a box. So sometime after being in a box, it was then transferred to two separate plastic baggies.

Well, on cross-examination, the defense said, hold up a minute. If you found DNA on the twine years later, isn't it possible that the DNA could have been contaminated during this move from the box to the plastic baggies? Well, this is what he said, quote, this is the expert, the scientist, quote,

I have no knowledge of how clean the box is or how sterile or how well it was sealed. I never examined it, end quote. And it gets worse. He said he didn't remember if he wore a hairnet or not while examining the twine or the hair samples. He said he only remembered wearing gloves. He also couldn't say if his exam table was completely clean or sterile or not.

So let's pause there because I can already hear you sighing. This already sounds like an absolute dream for Mark Grant's defense attorneys.

Here's one of the Crown's star forensic experts who is basically saying the DNA evidence might be contaminated or, at the very least, compromised in some way. And this guy wasn't even the one who tested the twine or hair for DNA. We already know that hair analysis underneath a microscope alone isn't exactly reliable. So let's get to that part right now.

Scientists from the private lab testified to the DNA testing that was done in 2007. And just for context, this private lab is the first accredited lab in Canada to do mitochondrial DNA testing. So that's pretty groundbreaking. Well, their scientists said that it was for sure Grant's DNA on the hair and on the twine.

They basically said there was a 1 in 500 million chance that it could belong to someone other than him. So 1 in 5 million chance. Those are pretty good odds, right?

Yes, the original detective who handled the hair probably didn't handle it in the right way, but now this company who tested it in 2007 is saying no. It's still a good sample and the DNA still matches Grant with a really high probability. Again, 1 in 500 million.

Now the defense only called one witness to talk about the DNA, and it was a retired genetics professor who said that the DNA analysis in this case was just bad science in his expert opinion. He testified that the lab in 2007 excluded data that might have led to false conclusions about the DNA.

So you have the state's experts saying that the hair matches Grant, and the defense is saying it might have been contaminated, and that the hair analysis that was done in this case is just bad science. You also have the defense saying that Mark Grant was physically and sexually abused as a child, and he hadn't been arrested for 18 months prior to Candace's murder. So which side would the jury believe?

Yes, the DNA evidence is certainly compelling, but what if it might have been tampered with or what if it might have been contaminated? The original DNA tester himself even said that he couldn't be sure whether he examined the hair on a clean table or not. That's kind of a problem if you ask me.

Well, on February 18th, 2011, after three days of deliberation, the jury found Mark Grant guilty of second degree murder. And three months later, in May of 2011, he was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison. Despite being a career criminal, this was by far his longest sentence.

The judge who handed down the sentence even said Grant, "...showed unspeakable cruelty when he left Candace to die in that shed." So finally, the Dirksen family might get justice here.

However, almost as soon as the sentence was handed down, Grant filed an appeal citing a total of 18 errors made by the trial court judge. His defense also alleged that the police ignored important evidence pointing away from Grant and how the crime scene was grossly mishandled and some of the evidence was contaminated.

The idea is that since the hair and the twine evidence might have been mishandled back in 1985, there's no way to guarantee that the testing they did in 2007 is even accurate. So just because the Crown's experts say that there's a 1 in 50 million chance of it belonging to anyone else doesn't exactly mean anything if they aren't good samples.

So the appeal was heard two years later, April 2013. Then on October 30th, 2013, the Court of Appeal issued its decision. They were overturning Grant's conviction. Not only did they have a problem with the integrity of the DNA evidence, but they also said that the trial court judge made a mistake in not allowing the defense to present evidence that pointed to another possible killer.

So, who exactly is that? Well, remember that 12-year-old girl who was found tied up at the railroad tracks, the one who was tied up with the same type of twine used in Candace's murder? Well, Mark Grant's defense alleged that whoever killed that girl also killed Candace.

But here's the thing. It couldn't have been Grant because he was in prison at the time the other girl was attacked. Now, obviously, this decision was absolutely devastating to Candace's family. They waited so many years just to see an arrest in this case. And now the person that they believed was responsible had their conviction overturned.

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So the Crown appealed the appellate court's decision and a Supreme Court hearing was scheduled for November of 2014. But in March of 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld ruling, which meant the Crown had no choice but to announce that they would seek a new trial against Grant. They would have to start all over again. And that's exactly what happened two years later in 2017.

On January 16, 2007, Mark Grant's second trial began, one day shy of the 32nd anniversary of Candace's body being found. This time, the defense opted for a bench trial.

They didn't want to argue their case in front of a jury, probably because a jury had already convicted him. So they probably thought that they would have a better chance if only a judge was going to decide. Just like the first trial, the key piece of evidence for both sides was the DNA.

The Crown continued to say that only Grant's DNA was found at the crime scene, the hair and on the twine, and the defense continued to argue that it wasn't preserved properly and therefore couldn't be trusted. Time and time again, experts for the Crown said that they couldn't remember if they wore gloves or not, and the hair samples and twine were stored in paper baggies, not exactly the best thing.

They didn't even have a record of how many people had touched it over the years. One expert from the RCMP testified that the twine was placed in seven different tubes. Seven. But admittedly, at least one of these tubes was in fact contaminated. So I think you get the point here.

Now, to be completely fair, there weren't any standardized DNA protocols back in 1985. So everything the police did in this case was basically accepted back then. There just weren't any DNA protocols. And a lot of these procedures didn't change until many years later. But of course, now all of this is going to be a problem.

Now, the defense also got the opportunity to talk about that other attack. And here's what they had to say about it. They said both cases were extremely similar. The same type of victim and the same type of twine and knots were used, basically suggesting that both of these crimes were committed by the same person.

And we already know that the defense alleged that it couldn't be their client, Grant, because he was in prison at the time that this second girl was attacked. He was only released from prison when Candace was killed.

But again, the reason why the defense suspected that some other person or the same person was involved is because the exact same twine in the exact same style of knots were used in both crimes. So whoever the perpetrator is for the other crime had to be the same perpetrator in Candace's case. They basically said that it would have been too much of a coincidence, for lack of a better word or a better term, that

for these crimes to have been committed by different people. There were just too many similarities. Plus, a Wrigley's blue gum wrapper was found at both crime scenes.

And the only fingerprints found at the boxcar crime scene belonged to the victim. So there was nothing at that other crime scene that investigators found that was later then linked back to Grant. The only fingerprints, again, were the victim. And there's this bubblegum wrapper that was found at both crime scenes that they weren't necessarily able to connect to Grant or to anyone else.

Grant's defense questioned one of the scientists from the private lab who did the testing back in 2007, and this particular scientist did confirm that anyone with the same maternal line shares the same mitochondrial DNA.

So I think what the defense was doing here was trying to plant a seed in the judge's mind that it doesn't necessarily mean the DNA belongs only to Grant. If he had siblings who have the same mother, the DNA might belong to someone else. And again, just hammering home the integrity of the DNA evidence. It's also worth mentioning here that none of the DNA is even left.

So the defense wasn't able to go out and do any of their own independent testing on it.

Also, a genetic expert for the defense said that obviously this independent lab was biased because there was a DNA marker on the piece of twine that didn't come back for either Candace or Grant. It didn't match either one of them. So what they're saying is that there's essentially a quote DNA marker on evidence from the crime scene. The twine doesn't belong to the victim, doesn't belong to Grant, and

basically suggesting that there might be this third suspect out there or this third individual. The Crown seemed to have another problem, memory. At the first trial, the police said at least one officer entered the shed where Candace's body was found.

But during the second trial, they said that was a mistake and no officer entered the shed. So which one is it? And what are we supposed to believe? The original report from 1985 or their memories now?

This now brings us to closing arguments. The defense obviously said that none of the forensic evidence was reliable for all the reasons that we've already talked about. And the Crown said, yes, it is. 99%, even greater than 99% of the population could be excluded, but not Mark Grant. He also fit the profile. He had done this dozens of times to other young girls. So he had the means and he had the motive.

So at this point, it was all in the judge's hand. There was no jury, so it was all up to one single person. And on October 18, 2017, the judge found Mark Grant not guilty of second-degree murder, basically accepting the defense's argument that the forensic evidence was tainted.

Once again, Cliff and Wilma Dirksen were devastated. It had been such a roller coaster of emotions, and now this was the outcome? The man they believed killed their daughter gets to basically walk free. And since this was a retrial, he isn't allowed to be tried for her murder again. This was their only shot. This was their last shot.

Now, in 2019, Mark Grant filed a lawsuit naming 12 defendants, including the government, seeking $8.5 million in damages. He also alleged that the police conducted a poor and negligent investigation. Today, the lawsuit is still pending in the court system. It's been almost four decades since 13-year-old Candace Dirksen was found dead inside that abandoned shed, frozen to death and hogtied.

Was this some teenage prank gone wrong? Or was the person arrested and put on trial twice for her murder actually the one responsible? And what do you think about the forensic evidence? Can it be trusted? To share your thoughts on this week's episode, follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales.

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