Jury hears more from interrogation
Christopher Garnier told a police interrogator he heard Catherine Campbell’s final breaths, and he was haunted by “seeing her, hearing her” gasp for air as he struggled to remember details of the night she died.
“I could hear her take her last breaths,” Garnier told RCMP Cpl. Jody Allison on Sept. 16, 2015, hours after the police officer’s body was found face down in thick brush near Halifax’s Macdonald Bridge.
“I don’t know how this happened... I’ve been trying to remember what happened.”
The jury continued to watch the 9.5-hour-long taped interview Wednesday at Garnier’s murder trial in Nova Scotia Supreme Court. ere’s still about an hour and 15 minutes left to watch, and the trial continues today.
Garnier allegedly killed the o - duty Truro police o cer in a McCully Street apartment in the early hours of Sept. 11, 2015, and used a wheeled compost bin to dispose of her body.
For the rst roughly ve and a half hours of the interrogation, Garnier sat in a grey-clad room sobbing in a computer chair amidst photos of Campbell spread out on a table, telling Allison he wasn’t “supposed to say anything.”
At one point, Det. Const. Michelle Dooks-fahie enters the room and takes over the interview, speaking to Garnier in a soft voice.
He repeatedly tells her “I can’t” when she asks him to tell her about what happened inside the apartment and “take responsibility.”
“This is your time to show it was a mistake, that it happened so fast,” said Dooks-fahie, sitting close to Garnier in a chair, sometimes placing her hand on his shoulder.
Allison re- enters the room.
He tells Garnier he was speaking with investigators and knows what Garnier had in the car when he was arrested.
e jury has heard a tarp, work gloves and rope were among the items found in the car, which was spotted driving by the area where Campbell’s body was discovered in the early hours of Sept. 16, 2015. Garnier was arrested minutes later.
Allison says: “Don’t tell me she was still alive when you put her in the compost bin.”
“No,” Garnier replies.
He breaks down and sobs into his hands as he tells the two investigators, “I’m trying to remember.”
“She wasn’t moving,” Garnier said when asked by Allison how he knew Campbell was dead when she was put into the bin. “She wasn’t breathing.”
Garnier said he remembered being with her in the Halifax Alehouse, where the two had met, but didn’t remember who approached who, or going back with her to the Mccully apartment.
He told Allison he remembers seeing Campbell bleeding from the nose.
“It’s all I can think about. It’s why I haven’t got any sleep,” said Garnier, wearing a T-shirt and pants and sitting with his hands clasped together, the two o cers sitting in front of him.
“I remember watching it on the news; I was trying to gure out why the (expletive) I would do something like that. I would never do something like that.”
Garnier repeatedly told Allison that he could not remember how Campbell’s face became bloody, but eventually said he may have hit her.
“I feel like at this point I’m telling you what you want to hear,” said Garnier. “If I knew, I’d tell you. I have no reason to hold anything else back at this point.”
He recalled being in the yard of the Mccully Street apartment after she stopped breathing, but didn’t remember putting her body in the green bin, or walking with it through the city’s north end towards the Macdonald Bridge.
But Garnier said he remembered roughly where the body was left.
“When I drove back down there I didn’t know exactly where she was,” he said, referring to the night of his arrest.