A man charged with second-degree murder in the 2007 killing of an “extremely vulnerable” Métis woman in Winnipeg has pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.

Kevin Queau was charged in 2024 in the death of 24-year-old Crystal Saunders, after advancements in DNA technology allowed police to identify him as a suspect in the cold case. 

That breakthrough led to an elaborate RCMP investigation involving what’s known as a “Mr. Big” sting — an investigation during which Queau confessed to undercover officers that he “dropped a body” in 2007, Crown attorney Michael Desautels read from an agreed statement of facts in a Winnipeg courtroom last week.

Lawyers are expected to jointly recommend a 12-year sentence, minus enhanced credit for time served, the agreed facts said.

They’re also asking Court of King’s Bench Justice Sadie Bond to recommend Queau serve that sentence in British Columbia — an action Bond confirmed Queau knew would not amount to directing corrections officials where to place him.

“You understand that?” she asked him in court last Friday.

“My family’s there,” Queau said. “As long as I have a recommendation.”

Queau is expected to be sentenced on Thursday, when Desautels told court he plans to provide more details about why prosecutors agreed to the plea deal.

A number of details Queau provided about the killing “had never been disclosed by police and were proven independently from the confession,” Desautels said.

The agreed statement of facts said the details Queau shared included that he choked Saunders to death, that he disposed of her body near St. Ambroise, Man., that she was naked and that she was involved in the sex trade.

Queau also owned a red Chevrolet Blazer at the time of Saunders’s death, the agreed facts said, which matched the description of the red vehicle police saw her getting into the last time they saw her on April 18, 2007.

He also admitted to hiring Saunders for a sex act, but killing her before that happened — which the agreed facts said is consistent with his DNA being found on her neck and under her fingernails, but not in other areas.

‘Difficult to investigate’

Saunders’s remains were discovered on April 19, 2007, when an RCMP constable was checking his trapline in the area of St. Ambroise and found her naked body in a water-filled ditch. She had suffered a number of injuries, and an autopsy determined she was strangled, the agreed facts said.

“She had struggled with addictions and homelessness, making her extremely vulnerable” and making it “difficult to investigate her disappearance,” Desautels read from the agreed facts.

“Despite significant efforts, police were unable to identify who she had been with the night she went missing.”

The Winnipeg police officers who had seen her get into a red vehicle the night before her body was found worked in her neighbourhood regularly, and knew her by name and appearance.

They tried to follow and stop the vehicle, but lost track of it in Winnipeg’s North End, the agreed facts said.

Without a suspect, the case eventually fell under the jurisdiction of Project Devote, which reviews unsolved homicides of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

The investigation got a new lead after Queau was convicted of sexual assault, overcoming resistance by attempting to choke and aggravated assault in British Columbia in 2015, which led to his DNA being entered into the national databank. His matched unknown male DNA found on Saunders’s body, the agreed statement of facts said.

“With this information, the investigation turned to Queau as the main suspect,” Desautels read from the agreed facts.

Undercover sting

Because police had “exhausted traditional investigative techniques” in the case, the facts said, RCMP then started the Mr. Big sting operation. The controversial technique involves undercover officers befriending a suspect.

That operation involved 52 scenarios from February 2023 to January 2024, with officers posing as “members of a small but organized group of criminals who engaged in money laundering and the transport of unspecified illicit goods on a boat they operated in and around Vancouver,” the agreed facts said.

In the sting’s final scenario, undercover officers asked Queau about a 2007 killing in Manitoba and staged a situation where police were looking for him, with one of the undercover officers suggesting they could help him, “but only if he were completely forthright with them.” Queau then “promptly advised that he had killed a sex trade worker in Manitoba.”

One of the officers told Queau he could deal with the situation on his own, or the group could help “work through it” with him, the agreed facts said.

In response, Queau disclosed that in 2007, he “dropped a body.” He provided a detailed version of events, which he said began when he picked Saunders up “for a sexual exchange” and drove to an alley. He said the two began to “fool around” in the vehicle,” when Saunders produced a knife and tried to rob him.

Queau said he choked Saunders for two to three minutes with both hands, that she was bleeding from her mouth as he strangled her and that he had been drinking before it happened.

Queau also said he immediately drove about two hours away to a campground in St. Ambroise, northwest of Winnipeg, stopping on a highway near Portage la Prairie to strip Saunders of her clothing.

He then took a road leading into the St. Ambroise campground, which he described as “marshland,” where he took Saunders’s body from his trunk and “dumped her body in a ditch,” Desautels said.

He then returned to his fraternity house in Winnipeg with Saunders’s clothing and purse, which he burned in a backyard fire pit, Desautels said.

Queau drove his red Blazer back to Edmonton the next day, where he washed the vehicle down with bleach, the statement of facts said.