Nabbing a suspect
How Chris Garnier became a suspect in the killing of an off-duty police officer
When Const. Catherine Campbell didn’t show up for work on Monday, Sept. 14, 2015, officers went to her Dartmouth apartment to look for her.
They found a tidy apartment with the TV on and an alarm clock sounding - but the petite blonde officer was not there.
What followed was the kind of police procedural work wellknown to anyone who watches TV’s Law and Order: a series of clues that led them to her body, in thick brush near the Macdonald Bridge in central Halifax, roughly 40 hours later.
By then, they had already zeroed in on Christopher Garnier as a person of interest, according to evidence presented in the ongoing trial’s first two weeks.
Police witnesses have revealed to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court jury how Garnier came to their attention - and of the moment when investigators scrambled to hide as he drove towards the crime scene shortly after Campbell’s body was discovered on a steep embankment.
The Crown has alleged Garnier punched and strangled Campbell inside an apartment on McCully Street, a few blocks away from the bridge, and used a green compost bin to dump her body.
Garnier is facing charges of second-degree murder and interfering with a dead body. The trial resumes Monday.
The jury has heard Campbell, 36, was a Truro police officer, but lived an hour away in Dartmouth, across the harbour from Halifax. So when she did not show up for work, the force asked Halifax Regional Police to check on her.
When they didn’t find Campbell, officers checked video surveillance cameras from her apartment building, and found footage of her leaving home in the early hours of Friday, Sept. 11.
She never returned. RCMP Const. Kyle Doane said they learned she took a cab to the Halifax Alehouse, a woodpanelled pub just below Citadel Hill and favoured by a slightly older crowd than the university students who pack other bars in the port city.
Because Campbell lived alone, no one had noticed her missing until the following Monday.
And so it was around 1 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 15, that Doane arrived at the bar to review surveillance video.
There on the black and white footage was Campbell, seen kissing and dancing with a brawny man on the previous Friday, before leaving the bar with him around 3:30 a.m.
“At one point they became quite passionate,” Doane told the jury on Nov. 22. “The thing that stuck out the most was the point where her legs were wrapped around Mr. Garnier.”
Bar staff identified the man as a former Alehouse employee - Garnier.
The trial has heard that Garnier, who turned 30 on Thursday, had broken up with his girlfriend the previous day, and was starting a new job in the sales department at K & D Pratt Group Inc., an equipment distribution company.