Sangret's lawyer, Linton Thorp, rejected the prosecution's contention that the knife alleged to have been the murder weapon had belonged to Sangret in his opening speech for the defence; emphasising his client's insistence that he had never owned such a knife and adding that the knife in question was of British Army issue as opposed to Canadian. Furthermore, Thorp added that a knife found some 23 paces from the murder scene had been discarded by a policeman who had initially attached no importance to the find, and that repeated searches to relocate this knife had been unsuccessful.