WINNIPEG -- A judge presiding over the Phoenix Sinclair murder trial released several hours of police interview tapes to the media as a jury continued to determine the fate of a couple accused of first-degree murder in her death.

Judge Karen Simonsen released 13 hours of taped interviews police did with Samantha Kematch and Karl Wesley McKay to local media outlets yesterday.

The videos were requested by media outlets shortly after they were viewed in their entirety last month by the jury, but Simonsen put off releasing them until the jury had been sequestered.

Two videos show separate police interviews with McKay and Kematch.

A third video, though, shows McKay leading three Mounties to a location deep in the bushes near a dump on the Fisher River First Nation on March 17, 2006, where he believed he may have buried the five-year-old. The spot was close to where the five-year-old was found.

"I wrapped her in plastic with a yellow rain jacket," McKay told Mounties, who had asked how the body was left. "Her head had been covered with (a piece of) bark."

Jurors began deliberating the case for an hour on Monday night before retiring to a hotel for the evening. They did the same yesterday after spending all day trying to reach a consensus on the case.

Phoenix was a ward of Child and Family Services for much of her short life until Kematch regained custody of the girl just months before her death in July 2005.

During those months, the jury heard Phoenix was routinely beaten by the couple with their fists, feet or a metal bar, forced to eat her own vomit and confined to a cold barren basement.

Kematch and McKay both admitted they were guilty of manslaughter but pointed the finger at each other as having inflicted the fatal injuries.

The jury is expected to resume deliberations this morning.