Young couple found Renée Sweeney on floor of video store, saw man running away
CBC
The young couple went into Adults Only Video on Paris Street in Sudbury that cold morning in January 1998 to see if they had a copy of the Pamela Anderson sex tape.
What they found was a woman lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
A 45-year-old man, whose name is protected by a court-ordered publication ban, testified at the Renée Sweeney murder trial in Sudbury Friday morning over Zoom.
Next to the woman on the floor, he said he saw a male squatting down, shoving something into a bag.
"He didn't make eye contact, didn't say anything to me and just ran past me," the man told the court, where 43-year-old Steven Wright is on trial for second-degree murder.
"I didn't know what was going on. I felt faint."
He told the woman on the floor that he was going to get help. He remembers her head moving, but didn't hear a response.
The defence asked a series of questions about the bag the witness saw, pointing out that he told police detectives 25 years ago that it could have been the jacket found not far from the crime scene.
The couple, both studying at Laurentian University at the time, were engaged back in 1998 and are still married today. The woman, whose name is also covered by a court-ordered publication ban, took the witness stand in the afternoon, over Zoom.
She remembered seeing what she thought was vomit on the floor and her fiancé storming out of the store, telling her that a woman was bleeding inside and sent her to a nearby bagel shop to call for help.
She said she and her husband have been shown pictures of possible suspects over the years by police to see if they match the person they saw ran out of the store that day, but none of them did.
On Thursday, the court heard from Paulette Taillefer who from about 25 feet away saw a "boy" running quickly through the parking lot toward Paris Street that morning.
She said he wasn't wearing a coat on a cold day, was carrying a bag under his arm and looked "straight at" her with eyes "like saucers."
Taillefer's account was the basis for the first sketch of the suspect Sudbury police released in the weeks following the murder in the winter of 1998.
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