Jury in Nellie Angutiguluk murder trial hears of police search for evidence

A homicide investigator with Montreal police has detailed how she searched for a wire or cord in the apartment of Kwasi Benjamin that corresponded to the mark found on his dead girlfriend's neck.

Benjamin, 32, is on trial for the second-degree murder of Nellie Angutiguluk, 29, an Inuk mother of three who had moved to Montreal from Puvirnituq, in the Nunavik region of northern Quebec. Angutiguluk died sometime on the Victoria Day weekend in May 2015.

Testifying Thursday before Quebec Superior Court Justice Michael Stober and a jury in the Montreal courthouse, Lt.-Det. Elisa Craighero described attending the autopsy of Angutiguluk, two days after the woman's body was found.

Craighero said the pathologist, Dr. Caroline Tanguay, found a furrow on Angutiguluk's neck, starting at the centre of the neck and extending to the left side. She said a technician measured the width of the mark to be 0.9 centimetres.

After the autopsy, the investigator says the pathologist asked her to investigate further at the couple's apartment.

"She asked us to do more crime scene investigation, to find a comparable object, either a wire or a cord, with a width between 0.5 centimetre to one centimetre, to compare with the furrow mark on the neck," said Craighero.

The investigator obtained a warrant and then went to the apartment in the city's Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood.

She told the jury she toured the apartment to understand its layout and then went to the bedroom, where she found an alarm clock hanging by a wire from the pole in the closet.

Craighero says she also found a cable plugged in to the television and a bag containing some garbage in the kitchen. She said she noticed a cord attached to a piece of clothing in that bag.

A forensics technician later arrived at the apartment to collect the items and submit them to the pathologist for comparison.

Earlier in the day, a Montreal police constable described how he guarded the apartment door where the couple lived until the body transport workers arrived to remove Angitiguluk's body.

The officer testified he then turned off the lights in the apartment, put two locks on the door, and then posted large orange stickers on the door notifying neighbours that the apartment was a protected crime scene.

The pathologist who performed the autopsy on Angutiguluk is expected to testify for the Crown later in the trial.