Crown is '95 per cent' sure all evidence and witnesses called in the case against accused killer Greg Fertuck

The Greg Fertuck murder trial is set to shift gears to the phase where lawyers will argue what Justice Richard Danyliuk should admit as evidence in the case against the 68-year-old accused killer.

Prosecutor Carla Dewar said Wednesday that she's 95 per cent certain that she and fellow Crown Cory Bliss will be calling no more witnesses in the eight-week old murder trial underway at Court of Queen's Bench in Saskatoon.

Defence lawyers Mike Nolin and Morris Bodnar said they plan on calling one witness on Thursday.

All the evidence and testimony so far has taken place in a voir dire, or trial within a trial.

Should things go as planned, the next step is for both sides to submit their arguments to Justice Danyliuk. Danyliuk will then rule on what will be admitted.

The judge-alone trial began on Sept. 7. Greg Fertuck is charged with first-degree murder and offering an indignity to a body. His estranged wife Sheree disappeared Dec. 7, 2015, after heading to work at a gravel pit east of Kenaston, Sask. Her body has never been found.

Greg Fertuck admitted to police after his arrest in 2017 that he had been at the pit that day. Investigators also found a speck of Sheree's blood in the back of his truck. Although he had been arrested, he denied having anything to do with her disappearance and was released.

Police then ran an elaborate undercover operation, called a Mr. Big sting, where they posed as criminals and tricked Fertuck into disclosing that he had shot and killed Sheree and then dumped her body in a bluff of trees northeast of the pit.

Fertuck later said he had made up that story.

A denim sleeve

On Wednesday, RCMP Const. Robert Head testified how, in Aug. 2019, police spoke with a father and son from the town of Beechy, Sask., about 140 kilometres southwest of Kenaston.

The men recovered a strip of denim cloth from a gravel crusher that they had used in the pit near Kenaston where Greg Fertuck had told undercover officers that he shot Sheree.

"They kept the material, it was a sleeve off a shirt," Head said.

"We had no information that Sheree wore it."

Under cross-examination by Mike Nolin, the officer said police had no description of Sheree wearing denim the day she went missing. Head testified that he was aware there were conflicting descriptions of what she wore, and that he did not talk to Sheree's three adult children or her niece.

Head said he was not aware of a stain on the fabric.

"I remember it was old and tattered," he testified.

"There was no effort to test it [for biological evidence]."

Shell casing comparison

The Crown also submitted a report on a comparison between two .22 calibre shell casings discovered in the gravel pit near where police found Sheree Fertuck's semi-truck the day after she went missing.

The two casings were discovered during an intensive foot search of the pit by police the following spring after the weather broke.

The casings were compared to a third shell casing. Under questioning by Nolin, RCMP Cpl. Ron Degooijer could only say that the third casing came from the home of Fertuck's common-law partner, Doris Larocque.

Larocque testified earlier this week.

The casing analysis was done at the RCMP forensic laboratory in Surrey, B.C. It concluded that the two casings recovered from the gravel pit had been fired from a single firearm.

The third casing, from Larocque's house, "was neither identified nor eliminated as having been fired in the same firearm which fired the [other] expended cartridges," wrote forensic specialist Kenneth Chan.