HALIFAX –
The first time police interviewed William Sandeson about the disappearance of a fellow Dalhousie University student, they didn’t learn much.
But soon after the medical student left the police station on August 18, 2015, officers, reviewing photos of text messages on his cell phone, realized that this soft-spoken witness was already a suspect — and that the missing physics student may have been harmed .
A videotape of the interview was shown Wednesday at Sandeson’s murder trial. He is accused of fatally shooting Taylor Samson during a drug deal and later disposing of his body.
Earlier this week, the 30-year-old accused pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in Nova Scotia Supreme Court. His trial began on Monday.
Sandeson was not a suspect at the time of the interview, but police believed he was the last person to have spoken to Samson on a cellphone late on August 15, 2015, the night the 22-year-old disappeared.
In the video, Sandeson appears calm as the lanky racer tells RCMP Sgt. Charla Keddy that he met with Samson three weeks earlier to talk about buying marijuana.
Caddy told Sandeson that he wasn’t going to get himself in trouble by talking about illegal drugs because the priority was finding Samson, who needed medication to deal with a serious liver condition.
“That’s not what we’re investigating,” Keddy said during the interview. “You’re not in trouble for that.”
Mountie, who is now a staff sergeant, told the court that Sandeson was “polite, cooperative and in good spirits”.
At one point, Sandeson told Cady that before he was accepted to attend Dalhousie’s medical school, he had studied medicine in the Caribbean. He said he won’t get any credit at Dalhousie for those studies, but said the money spent studying there “counts toward my debt.”
During the interview, Sandeson confirmed that Samson had recently offered to sell him nine kilograms of marijuana, but said the offer was rejected because a sample he had recently tested was of poor quality.
Instead, Sandeson said he agreed to buy a small amount for personal use and invited Samson to deliver the goods to his Halifax apartment sometime after 10 p.m. on Aug. 15, 2015. But Samson never showed up, he said.
“I’ve been waiting around,” he said in the interview. “He did not come …. I went out and there was no one.” Later that night, around 1:30 a.m., Sandeson said he texted Samson to say they could meet later in the day.
When Keddy asked him if he had any idea what happened to Samson, he said, “I really don’t know. I guess he’s hiding.’
The investigator asked Sandeson to show her the text messages he had exchanged with his new provider, but Sandeson said he had deleted his texting app a few days earlier because he was worried that Samson’s disappearance would lead police to search for his connections with drug trafficking.
“I got nervous about buying marijuana,” he told the officer.
Caddy asked Sandeson to reinstall the app, which almost immediately replayed their previous conversations. At first glance, the messages between the two appeared harmless, Keddie told the court, adding that the interview quickly ended as she promised to drive Sandeson home before the deadline for an appointment he had made.
Before leaving the downtown Halifax police station, another officer took pictures of all relevant text messages.
In her opening address to the jury Tuesday, Crown attorney Carla Ball said Sandeson became a suspect in the murder when police found the texts contradicted his version of events.
Ball said the texts show Sandeson invited Samson to his Henry Street apartment to buy nine kilograms of marijuana.
As soon as police realized a major drug deal was brewing, Sandeson was placed under surveillance and the manhunt for Samson intensified, the court was told.
A search of Sandeson’s apartment turned up surveillance video footage showing the two men entering the apartment on August 15, 2015, around 10:30 p.m. The footage showed Samson carrying a large bag.
This was the last time Samson was seen alive. His remains have not yet been found.
The trial marks the second time Sandeson has gone on trial for Samson’s murder. A conviction from a 2017 trial was overturned on appeal and a second trial was ordered in 2020.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on January 11, 2023.
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