Murder trial: Text messages led police to suspect Halifax med student was killer

William Sandeson, left, arrives for his preliminary hearing at provincial court in Halifax. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese)

HALIFAX — This 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 Aug. 18, 2015, officers reviewing photos of text messages on his cellphone realized that this soft-spoken witness was now a suspect -- and that the missing physics student could have come to harm.

A video recording of the interview was shown Wednesday at Sandeson's murder trial. He stands 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 jury trial started Monday.

At the time of the interview, Sandeson was not a suspect, but police believed he was the last person to speak with Samson via cellphone late on Aug. 15, 2015 -- the night the 22-year-old disappeared.

In the video, Sandeson appears relaxed as the lanky track athlete tells RCMP Sgt. Charla Keddy that he had met Samson three weeks earlier to talk about buying marijuana.

Keddy told Sandeson he wouldn't get in trouble for 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."

The Mountie, who is now a staff sergeant, told the court that Sandeson was "polite, co-operative and in good spirits."

At one point, Sandeson told Keddy that before he was accepted to attend Dalhousie's medical school, he had studied medicine in the Caribbean. He said he wouldn't receive any credit at Dalhousie for those studies, but he said the money spent on tuition there "counts towards my debt."

During the interview, Sandeson confirmed Samson had recently offered to sell him nine kilograms of marijuana, but he said the offer was rejected because a sample he had recently examined was of poor quality.

Instead, Sandeson said he agreed to buy a small amount for personal use, and he 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 waited around," he said in the interview. "He didn't come .... I went out and there was no one there." 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 had happened to Samson, he said: "I don't really know. I assume he's hiding."

The investigator asked Sandeson to show her the text messages he had exchanged with his new supplier, but Sandeson said he had deleted his text-messaging app a few days earlier because he was worried Samson's disappearance would prompt police to seek out his drug dealing connections.

"I got nervous about buying marijuana," he told the officer.

Keddy asked Sandeson to reinstall the app, which almost immediately reproduced their previous conversations. At first glance, the messages between the two seemed innocuous, Keddy told the court, adding that the interview quickly drew to a close because she had promised to drive Sandeson home before the deadline passed for an appointment he had made.

Before he left the police station in downtown Halifax, another officer took photos of all of the relevant text messages.

In her opening address to the jury on Tuesday, Crown attorney Carla Ball said Sandeson became a murder suspect when police determined that the texts were at odds with his version of events.

Ball said the texts indicate that Sandeson had invited Samson to his Henry Street apartment to buy nine kilograms of marijuana.

Immediately after police realized that a large drug deal had been in the works, Sandeson was placed under surveillance and the search for Samson intensified, the court heard.

A search of Sandeson's apartment turned up video images from a surveillance system showing the two men entering the apartment on Aug. 15, 2015, at around 10:30 p.m. The images show Samson carrying a large duffel bag.

That was the last time Samson was seen alive. His remains have yet to be found.

The court proceeding marks the second time Sandeson has been put on trial for killing Samson. A verdict from a trial in 2017 was overturned on appeal and a second trial was ordered in 2020.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 11, 2023.