Accused killer claims victim threatened to stab him

Detective’s delicate touch with Ferguson elicits emotionally charged recollection

On Sept. 14, 2014, Scott Ferguson returned the company truck to his boss, told him that he was quitting his roofing job and that he had just killed his girlfriend, Susan Elko.

Then, he drove to a convenience store and called Calgary police from a pay phone, saying he had killed his girlfriend and wanted them come and arrest him.

By that evening, the 23-yearold was asking a homicide detective what evidence they had that he committed murder.

“Are you familiar with forensic evidence and how all that works?” asks Det. Matt Demarino. “Do you know what DNA is?”

It’s difficult to imagine anyone other than a child not knowing of such things, thanks to the glut of TV shows such as CSI and Forensic Files. So it’s not surprising that in the hours after Elko’s death, Demarino would speak to the man now on trial for second-degree murder as though addressing a small child.

Still, the task of interrogating a murder suspect is a fine art, one requiring moments of tenderness and toughness, meeting the other on their terms and being subtly but effectively persuasive in an emotionally charged, volatile situation.

On the third day of Ferguson’s trial for second-degree murder, the jury spends much of it watching the video of his more than nine hours in a police interview room, edited down to four hours.

What they see and hear is a jarring glimpse of the accused’s torturous hours after the death of the 39-year-old Elko, who was stabbed 10 times in the neck. For much of those hours, he has jags of crying, moaning and whimpering, sounding at times like a wounded animal while he rocks back and forth on the floor and curls up into a fetal position.

Knowing the perils of leaving a suspect alone for too long, Demarino dotes on him in those early hours. He brings coffee, he offers cigarettes; he even gets someone to go on a fast-food run for Ferguson. He tells the accused that he, too, was once a roofer, using a short spray of four-letter words, familiar ones on job sites, for emphasis.

In time, Demarino gets Ferguson to open, learning that the native of Peterborough, Ont., has a police officer brother and that he came out west for work in 2011, like so many other easterners drawn to the city’s prosperity, and that his girlfriend of a year and a half had moved here from Kelowna, B.C.

Watching the early moments of the interview video, the accused man begins to cry, as do his family members sitting in the front row. At one point, his tears prompt defence lawyer Balfour Der to get up from his seat and hand his client a tissue.

It would be a moving moment if not for the fact the previous day, images of the beautiful Elko very much alive, then photographs of her very much dead, elicited no such outpouring of emotion from the handsome young man in the defendant’s box.

A few hours in, Ferguson finally tells Demarino that he and Elko had had a fight earlier that morning; that “she was always mad at me,” physically abused him regularly and threatened to kick him out, but that he didn’t know “how it happened” earlier that day.

He did remember that Elko “kicked me in the nuts” when they returned from fishing, and that she kept hitting, punching and slapping him. “She was going to stab me,” he tells Demarino, saying Elko opened up the pocket knife she had bought him for his birthday and waved it at him.

Then, he does remember how it happened. She was starting to open the knife, says Ferguson, so he grabbed it and cut her — “there was just blood everywhere.”

Moments later, the two were “rolled in a ball and I’m on top of her and she was bleeding underneath me. She . . . she died in my hands.”

I’m on top of her and she was bleeding underneath me. She . . . she died in my hands.