Sandwiched between the testimonies of Marlena Meneses and Christina Noudga—the final witness for the Crown—there was one other witness to take the stand briefly at the Tim Bosma murder trial: Sergeant Kerry Duench of the Hamilton Police. Duench helped execute the search warrant at Noudga’s house after her arrest. She is there to testify that in the top drawer of Noudga’s bedside table, she found a series of letters that appeared to be written from jail by Dellen Millard. During Noudga’s testimony, those fifty letters are introduced as evidence. In a signed admission statement prepared by Millard’s lawyers, the accused has agreed that he wrote the letters.
The letters are extremely valuable, because they show Millard’s attempts to fabricate alibis, tamper with witnesses, and suborn perjury. They also provide a glimpse inside his mind.
Key details about the letters’ transmission are not presented in evidence; the jury hears only that they were delivered to Noudga by Madeleine Burns at meetings that took place once or twice a month, often at a Canyon Creek steakhouse near Noudga’s home. Over lunch or dinner, Noudga would collect her mail and give Burns letters to take to Millard. While Millard’s letters defied a court order barring him from communicating with his girlfriend, Noudga, until her arrest, was free to write to him. As the facilitator of this exchange, Burns violated a court order. She was never called to testify, however, nor has she been charged in relation to this case.
Throughout the trial, many observers tweeted at journalists asking why Burns, who came to be known online by her nickname, Rabbit, was not facing charges and did not come to court to support her son. The reporters were not allowed to answer even though they knew that Burns was under subpoena and excluded from the courtroom, first as a possible Crown witness and later as a potential defence witness. If they did so, they would have risked being found in contempt of court for publishing critical information that the jury had not heard. Jurors did not know that Burns might testify. Nor did they know that her subpoena had been served by Detective Matt Kavanagh on January 4, 2016, at the Toronto West Court on the first day of Millard’s preliminary hearing to decide if he should stand trial for the murder of his father, Wayne. Two months later in March, when Justice Diane Oleskiw ruled that Millard would be committed for trial, no news media reported her decision.
According to Noudga, Burns started delivering Millard’s letters in late May or June 2013, though at first she would just show them to Christina and not allow her to keep them. As far as Noudga remembers, they mostly described Millard’s life in jail, interspersed with declarations of his love for her. The letters stopped, for reasons unknown, in January 2014. Some sections of the letters in evidence have been redacted and are not shown to the jury or made public. The earliest letter found in Noudga’s bedside table was dated July 25, 2013, and titled “A Letter To an Arabian Princess.” The spelling mistakes are Millard’s.
I have a new prized possession. It’s a little scrap of paper with a muddy paw print on it. It’s fabulous! Thank you—you really do know me better than anyone else. It’s the perfect gift in this place. When I was first brought in they treated me as though I were Hannibal Lecter. Paraded down the halls in chains and surrounded on all sides by a team of guards. I suppose the attention should have been flattering. For the first two weeks I was kept naked in a bare video recorded cell, and given only bread and jam to eat. In conversation the presiding psychiatric, [name redacted], actually admitted he was trying to see if he could make me suicidal as part of his pet project to figure me out. He called me an “enigma.” He never did get a chance to finish his experiment. I managed to slip out of his clutches and into prison orange clothing. The good doctor does not realize the service he actually did me. He applied such great pressure in his quest to crack my spirit—what he accomplished was hardenning me, like loose carbon turned to diamond. Once I almost broke down. I had taken a Styrofoam cup and broken it into little granuels. I was pushing them about on the floor into different geometric designs. Almost immediately there was a bang at the door. “What are you playing with?” I replied that it was Styrofoam, that I wasn’t aloud to read, or draw, and so that was all I had available. The guard confiscated the Styrofoam granuels, and I was back to absolute deprevation. I sat, hugging my knees, and began to cry. I wiped away the first tears with a forearm and the words tattooed there immediately jumped out. Here was text the doctor could not confiscate. “I am heaven sent, don’t you dare forget.” I had forgotten, and thanks to that tattoo, at the moment I needed reminding, I got it. I stopped crying and smiled. If the doctor had not been so cruel, I do not think I would be fairing so well now. I’ve been in “the hole” for two months. This is where other prisoners are sent for misconducts, such as fights: They come, they stay for a couple of weeks as punishment, and they go back to their respective ranges. They think this is punishment? Ha! I have clothing, pencil, paper and books. As my great grand mother would have said “tis luxury.” The challenge is no longer enduring the day to day realities of prison life, it is bearring the loneliness. Being separated from you is terrible. All the pleasures of modern society; cars, movies, restaurants, itunes, I can do without. My favorite activities; sailing and flying, I could do without. What I long for most is to wake up next to you. I miss you so much—gonna cry.
Your letter has uplifted my spirits like an infusion of helium! I love you like I’ve never loved any other woman. I’m coming for you.
After lead prosecutor Tony Leitch reads this aloud in court he asks Noudga what she had written to Millard. (Her letters to him have never been found.)
“Um…hmm,” she says. “Probably, you know, generic: ‘I love you, I long for you…don’t worry, you’ll get through this.’ ”
Leitch reads the second part of Millard’s July 25 letter, in which he segues abruptly from his fantastical account of life in jail and declarations of love for Noudga into not so subtle instructions for her.
Some day sooner or later X may be forced to give a statement, or be sepinaed to take the stand. People often make small lies, and are caught lying by the details. X NEEDS to know, what the police already know, so that X doesn’t say anything contrary. X must have this information! Police know Mark gave Dell a locked toolbox. They know Mark told Dell it contained drugs; and that Mark wanted Dell to hide it. They do not know if Dell was told the combination. (Dell will say he did not know the combination.) Police know that Dell used Christina’s cell phone to text Matt and ask him to hold the toolbox. Police do not know if Christina was in the Yukon, only that Dell had access to her phone at the time. Matt stated he could not see into the Yukon. (Dell will say the toolbox remained locked the entire time. Christina may have seen it in the car, but it was closed, never openned. Dell will say he borrowed Christina’s phone to send some texts. The only reason he gave was that Mark had made a terrible mistake and Dell was trying to contain it. Dell will say he left Christina and Pedo at Maple Gate, taking her phone with him, saying he had to meet someone briefly, and would be back soon. Dell will say he returned to Maple Gate without the toolbox, and returned Christina’s phone to her, with the text history cleared.) Police know that after Dell’s arrest Matt returned the toolbox of drugs to Mark. After Mark’s arrest police found the toolbox EMPTY in Mark’s basement.
“Any idea who X is?” asks Leitch.
Noudga says implausibly that she doesn’t. She does, however, concede that the letter was odd. “I didn’t see any reason for him to hide the fact that I was in the car,” she says. “I probably responded with a vague ‘Okay, that’s interesting,’ and then moved on with talking about my day. I never agreed or disagreed.”
“Did you realize what he was asking of you in this letter?”
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking at it now, he’s obviously asking me to tamper with evidence and testimony.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“No.”
“Why did you choose not to go to the police?”
“I didn’t want to be involved,” she says. “Not so much [due to] the love I had for him. It was more so I had plans to go abroad, get on with my life.”
The fact that Millard was charged with first-degree murder was apparently inconsequential to Noudga. “I didn’t want to make a statement,” she tells the court. According to her account, it never occurred to her that the police might be interested in the letters. “I just left them there and they collected dust,” she says.
“Were you prepared to lie for him?” asks Leitch.
“No.”
Along with Millard’s letters, police also seized various notes, diary-like musings, and draft letters from Noudga’s room. Leitch shows her some of her writings.
“This is your own handwriting?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Do you see what you wrote?” Leitch asks. Then he puts his earlier question to Noudga again. “Were you prepared to lie for him?”
“I wrote that with thoughts of maybe helping him out,” she says of her notes, which are not shown in court. “I thought about it, but I wasn’t prepared to do it.”
“Put it in writing but thought better of it? That’s your position?”
“Yes.”
Leitch shows a second letter to the court, this one from August 2013. It follows the same pattern as the first. Millard alludes to Smich getting him in trouble, saying he should have paid more attention to a piece of advice he heard on Breaking Bad: “Never trust a drug addict.” He professes his undying love for Noudga. “I adore the effect your spirit has on me,” he writes. “It’s like sunshine to a meadow.” And then he tells her that to get around the damning cell phone evidence, he may claim to have lent out his phone.
Millard gives the impression of having way more confidence than someone in his situation should have. “The entire case is circumstantial and full of holes,” he declares. He asks his girlfriend to check Smich’s Facebook page for pictures of Mark working at the hangar and, if she finds the photos, to send them to him.
Noudga tells the court she couldn’t have done that even if she’d wanted to, as she deleted her Facebook account shortly after her boyfriend’s arrest, and it would have raised suspicions if she’d used someone else’s account. Throughout her testimony, she insists she didn’t oblige Millard in any of his requests, other than to send along some sexy pictures of herself. His letters seem to support her claims, as he becomes increasingly anxious about her willingness to help him.
UNTIL HE LANDED IN JAIL charged with first-degree murder, Millard exerted a lot of control over Noudga, whose goal was to have him love her as much as she loved him. Although she denies it in court, her text messages about all-nighters and mission digestion can be interpreted to mean she was not only aware of Millard’s murder plan but also approved of it. Judging from their texts and letters, it appeared that Noudga regarded Millard as a kind of superman unbound by society’s rules, the perfect mate for the brilliant, sexy woman she imagined herself to be. To Millard, Noudga—with her lack of empathy or moral core—was a suitable candidate for number one girlfriend. But he was not prepared to be exclusive: on the side, he also continued to see the realtor Lisa Whidden, and Jenn Spafford, the glamorous ex-fiancée who was still enjoying the use of his car and one of his condos. Once he was behind bars, however, Millard realized that he was going to have to offer Noudga more if he wanted to keep her loyal. In September, he wrote promising her children and a life together.
Pedo is my child in name and spirit, but the most basic life goal is to have children of my own flesh. My one true fear is to die before being a father.
I usually keep my hopes and plans to myself. Did you know my plan for us and the sailboat? I know I told you I was buying one soon. It was supposed to be this summer. What I didn’t tell you was that as early, next spring, as weather would have allowed, I planned on Michalski bringing it, with me, to Toronto. By then you’d be done with your school year. I wanted us to set sail, just you, me and Pedo, and we’d head for the Atlantic. From Halifax we could go where ever the wind blew us. The winds would probably favor Norway, with a stop in Iceland. Then south to Scottland and England. I figured we’d explore each by harbouring and renting a car. After that the summer would be ending and you’d have to decide if you wanted to fly back for school in Canada or keep on going. I don’t think it would be hard to convince you to keep on going….
…I planned to sail the world with you. I hoped to time our ship’s return to Canada with you pregnant. So we could each benefit from the advice of, and share in the joy with, our mothers.
It chews me up on the inside knowing what I’m missing; worrying what I may never have. If I beat the charges, this dream could still be realized….
…I knew before I was arrested that I wanted you to be the mother of my children. I was waiting for you to finish school. I was waiting for my business to stabilize. I was waiting for us to explore the entire globe. Maybe I was waiting for me to be just a little more mature; to be better emotionally settled. But I’ve known for some time that I had finally found the girl I have spent my entire life waiting for. And now I’m in jail. Fuck!
What if I don’t beat the charges? What if I’m given a life sentence? I’m sure you would book overnight trailer visits. But for how long? I’m certain that if I win the trial we’ll have children. But would you have children with a man in prison for life? It may not be a fair question, but these aren’t fair times. It’s on my mind and will be every day.
P.S. Even as a prisoner I could make a better husband and father than most free men.
As Tony Leitch reads this letter aloud in the courtroom, it causes extreme discomfort. The Bosma family is visibly shaken. Members of the normally stoic jury look horrified. And when the gallery of spectators files out for the afternoon break, they are pretty much speechless.
In keeping with his habit of following declarations of love and devotion with requests for favours, Millard’s next letter to Noudga tries to enlist her help as a “secret agent,” a career, she tells Leitch, she had long fantasized about.
I’ve always been able to achieve extraordinary goals. Winning back my liberty…Wow, maybe it’s beyond me, on my own. Maybe all the things I’ve achieved have been. I’ve always gotten help in one form or another. To get out of this bind I need help. I won’t ask you to give testimony that could be disproved. What I’ve written to you is a “rough draft.” I wanted your feedback. I WONT have you made a witness if you don’t want to be. I can’t promise the prosecussion won’t subpoena you and force you to testify though. We need to get our stories straight. I need to know what you’re willing to do? And of course nothing will go without being checked against phone and internet records. You said you wanted to be a secret agent. Be mine? Life has a funny way of giving us exactly what we wish for.
Here’s your chance to be a covert operative. I wished for two years off work. I wished for a challenge worth devoting myself to. Seems I got it. You know what I wish for now? My liberty. Yours and Pedo’s company. Freedom and exploration. To get these things I need to win at trial. To win at trial, I need help. Help could be testimony. Help could be other things too…like secretly delivering a message…just staying quiet has been an immense help already. If Mark and Andrew had done the same this would be a lot easier. Poor Andrew, shit his pants and spilled his guts. And treacherous Mark; got himself charged by trying to put it on me. These are the most lethal pieces currently played against me.
By October 1, when he wrote the following letter, Millard regarded himself as a jailhouse lawyer, proposing concrete action plans for Noudga. While some of his legal points are correct, others are not. His allegations about the Hamilton Police are unfounded. And he continues to be obsessed with Michalski and his evidence.
None of the science included in the disclosure is hugely relevant. I’m assuming they have Grissom from CSI Las Vegas working the case, and will discover and prove everything that science can. If they miss something, then bonus. If they fake something, then it’s a chance to catch them faking. The science shows a body was disposed of. It does not, in this case, show how someone died.
If someone dies accidently, and then the body is disposed of, that’s not murder. If someone dies accidently during a robbery, that’s murder. Because the robbery is intentional, even an accidental death can become a murder conviction. Most of the evidence points to me going to buy a pickup. This results in an acquittal, and I’m a free man. But there’s a problem, and it’s the testimony of Andrew Michalski. Cops tricked him into thinking a) that he was charged with murder, which he was not, and b) that they already had the evidence, he was just confirming a tiny meaningless piece for them. Andrew told police that on May 5th I showed him a picture of a black dodge pickup truck, printed from the internet, and told him there were two trucks to choose from, and that I asked “who’s should I STEAL, the nice guy’s or the asshole’s?” It took five hours of interrogation and Andrew contradicted himself many times, but that’s what he gave them.
Fucking panzy, scared into giving up a true friend. He doesn’t understand the law. He doesn’t know what the words mean. He’s the only piece of evidence that puts me in the category of intentional robbery. His testimony, not forensic science, is going to get me convicted. He is the most important, single piece of the case against me….
…His interrogation seems guided. As if the detective were hinting at what Andrew should say: When Andrew said “no Dell didn’t tell me anything about anything” the detective gets angry. When Andrew says “there was a picture of a truck” the detective is all warm and cudly. We are going to argue that Andrew was given the message that he wasn’t going home until he said what police wanted to hear. That he was untruthful, so that police would let him leave. The interrogation really does look that way too….
Andrew’s a bit gullible when it comes to authority. He is probably mad at me, blaming me for his frightenning interrogation, so that he doesn’t have to admit to himself how completely he has thrown me under the bus. All he had to do was say nothing, but instead he tried to talk his way out.
Andrew needs to say I showed him a picture of a truck and asked “who’s I should BUY.” That he changed it to steal because, before the interrogation began, cops told him they wanted to hear about the planning of a truck robbery, and he wasn’t going home until he told them what they wanted to hear….
…Someone needs to shake him up. I protected him by telling him nothing. He should never have moved things after I was arrested. That was Mark who brought heat to him, not me….
…It was Mark who fucked up a truck robbery, not me. And just because I helped clean up Mark’s mess, does not mean I should also pay for it. Especially not because of a technicality in the law. Especially not because Andrew didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. I need him to undo the damage he has done me!
I love him and I know he loves me. He has a loyal heart. If he knew that his words were going to get me a life sentence, he would want to change them. Show him how he can, and he will change them.
Millard regularly warns Noudga to get rid of the evidence. “If ever there were letters to destroy, these are they. Reread them,” he writes. “Destroy them now.” Millard is also paranoid about those close to him being watched. “My mum’s house is under very elusive surveillance,” he tells Noudga. He suggests that Noudga’s and Michalski’s phones are obvious targets for bugging. He asks, “So are you my secret agent? Careful what you wish for.” He gives her the name of a lawyer, Christopher Tarach, to pass on to Andrew once she makes contact. “Chris already knows my case. He will probably take Andrew for free,” Millard says. “If need be Moose [another friend] could donate 1000.00 (warn him not to use his bugged phone).”
Millard tells Noudga that her most important role will be on the witness stand at his trial.
Protecting your credibility and preparing to give testimony is how you can help me most. Do not allow that to be sacrificed by trying to solve less important issues.
The second most important role, is getting Andrew on board to help. He’s got to say he never heard anything about any thefts or plans to steal anything, especially nothing about stealing a truck. He heard I wanted to buy a truck. Lots of people heard buy, he was just being pressured, coached even, by police….
…Bringing Andrew back to my side, brings me back from losing, and puts me at a tie. Your testimony, though, will be what wins it….If Andrew wants to be helpful, maybe he can contact Matt. Andrew’s good hearted, but a tad bit slow. If he does want to help, impress upon him how important it is to keep any contact with you a secret. If he goes to talk to Matt, he must not say where he got his information. He needs a cover story completely thought out in advance.
Help me ObiwonRubikinks, you’re my only hope.
The letter includes a large sketch by Millard of Noudga dressed in a Star Wars–style helmet and goggles. He is a gifted sketch artist.
As Leitch reads the letters one by one into the record at court, he stops regularly with questions for Noudga.
“Did you ever think holding on to [the letters] could protect you in some way?” he asks.
Noudga looks blank.
He rephrases the question. “Did you have any concerns about anything Mr. Millard might do?”
She says she didn’t. A few minutes earlier, she had insisted she kept the letters only because “I always wanted him to love me back the way I loved him.” Now, she says, looking back, she sees “it was very stupid, very idiotic, of me.”
IN OCTOBER 2013, MILLARD STARTED teaching himself Ukrainian in jail and writing passages of his letters to Noudga in her parents’ native tongue. In a letter that was also a language-learning exercise, Millard wrote several phrases in Ukrainian, including “Dellen loves Christina,” “Never a lender nor a borrower be,” and “First learn the alphabet.”
“Prior to incarceration,” asks Leitch, “had he shown any interest in the Ukrainian language?”
“It wasn’t on the top of his language list,” says Noudga, who, despite her infatuation with Millard, seems to have sensed on some level that learning Ukrainian might be a ploy to ingratiate himself with her. Although he was also learning Spanish and was interested in a lot of languages, Millard had never before tried to talk to her in Ukrainian. Yet after a few months in jail, he was signing his letters to her with the Ukrainian phrase meaning “your man” or “your husband.”
Millard was also obsessed with surveillance. In a letter sent in October, he tells Noudga that a recent visitor to his mother’s house, who stopped by when Madeleine Burns wasn’t home, was pulled over by police fifteen minutes later on Highway 27 “by an unmarked cruizer (the kind that look like cop cars, but the word police is obscured). It seems like a routine traffic stop, until he’s ordered out of his car, and the car is searched. Nothing was found. Then to top it off, he was asked what he was doing at my mum’s.”
Millard says these cops are “real undercover,” who can’t be detected. He was sure they knew that his mother and Christina were meeting. “I hope you read these letters in an enclosed place where none of the public can see you,” he says. “I hope you take this warning very seriously.”
Despite the perceived danger, Millard still wanted Noudga to contact Michalski with what he called “Mission Impossible, James Bond, super spy perfection.” He was okay if she played the romance card. “I don’t mind you being publicly flirtatious if it’s in my favor,” he writes. “Just so long as all of him stays on the outside of you.”
A few days later, Millard told Christina he needed her phone records for May 5, 6, 7, and 8. He wanted incoming and outgoing calls and texts, with times and locations. “Send me a copy AND keep a copy for yourself,” he says. “So that I can write you about them, and we can cross reference.”
Leitch asks Noudga if she obliged.
“No,” she says. “I thought it was, like, a waste of time.”
“Was that your response?”
“I don’t know if I used those exact words….I was probably like, ‘I don’t think you need the phone records, because I know what I was doing the entire week.’ ”
As frustrated as Millard may have been with Noudga’s lack of response to his requests, he kept on cozying up to her. “I was going to wait to hear from you before writing this letter, but I don’t want that much time to go to waste,” he writes on October 27. “So until I do hear from you, I am going to continue writing as if your response is a resounding Yes! That you will be my secret agent; effectively my savior.
“Only the craftiest of coyotes will be able to avoid charges like witness tampering or perjury,” he continues. “Of paramount importance is that you keep our contact secret.”
Noudga maintains that she didn’t know at first that a court order forbade Millard from communicating with her. She says a few of her friends and both her parents were aware she was in contact with him.
By mid-November 2013, six months after his arrest, Millard was still discussing phone location data, although he admits to Noudga, “Because there is still so much disclosure to come, it is not certain what defense I will use.” He wanted her to testify that he had a habit of lending his phone to Smich and to help him find any possible supporting evidence. “This can be done in the positive, ie: someone called my phone [and] instead of me answering, Mark would answer and say that I wasn’t there. Or, this could be done in the negative, ie: someone saw me, but I did not have my phone on me.” He asks Noudga if Snoff and Kodiak, the code names he has assigned to Hagerman and Michalski, “will help create the precedent. Careful what you tell them. Be sure they will help before giving them any information.”
“Did you reach out to them about this phone issue?” asks Leitch.
“No,” says Noudga.
“In your time with Mr. Millard, did you ever see him loan his phone to Mr. Smich?”
“I’ve seen him not have it, but I’ve never seen him lend his phone.”
Somewhat ironically, Noudga appears—according to her testimony on this point—to have been almost as unhelpful to her jailed boyfriend as she was to the police and prosecutors. She maintains that in the same way she ignored his requests for her phone records, she didn’t engage with him about what defence strategies he might use at trial.
Millard also worried about his mother’s role as intermediary. In one of his letters, he describes an incident where Burns called him from a pay phone and put Noudga on the line.
It was wonderful to think you could hear me on the phone. I could almost feel your presence. Even now days later, it puts the hint of a smile on my face.
But, it was also reckless of my mum to do that. Your credibility as a witness is the ace up my sleeve. If either you or her are under surviellence, what are you gonna say when the prosecution pulls out a snapshot of you in the phone booth, with phone records, and jail records, to say I was on the other end of the line?
…A phone call you can’t talk back on is not worth the risk. There were a hundred officers assigned to this case. It doesn’t take that many to listen to the jail phone, and fetch coffee. These aren’t traffic cops. They’re like the KGB. You, and my mum, are the only people who haven’t given any statement at all. Your names are probably on a board in some detective’s office with big question marks beside them. I don’t think my mum appreciates that police focus could be on her, and you. I need you to appreciate it. I need you to play the role of the illusive spy. Illusive, cunning and catious; if you can be these things, I can get out of here and be yours again.
According to Noudga’s account of this phone call, she did not say a word, just listened as Millard sang the Oasis song “Wonderwall” to her. The lyrics, especially the chorus about being the one to save him, likely struck him as relevant.
Leitch is skeptical. “He has the opportunity to speak to you in person and all he does is sing ‘Wonderwall’?”
“Correct.”
“How does he know you’re there?”
“His mother mentions it to him.”
“Did you ever do this again?”
They never had any further voice contact, she says.
As 2013 drew to a close, Millard’s letters suggest he was becoming increasingly worried that his hold on Noudga was weakening. He asked one of his visitors in jail to reach out to her. And in an interview with the Toronto Star, weeks in the making, he laments not being able to speak to Noudga due to the no-contact order. “We were in love,” he declares for the world to read.
Before the Toronto Star article appeared, on December 30, Millard had informed Noudga that he was speaking to a reporter, who had also expressed interest in talking to her. “I shrugged my shoulders, and said I did not mind. But when he contacts you, I think, you should not talk to him,” Millard writes. “Don’t say anything to him, not about me, not about you, not about the weather. I don’t know yet if what he is going to write, is going to help me, or hurt me.”
For her part, Noudga let Millard know that she’d “withheld” a lawyer, to which he responds, “Oh how I miss your diction! Its ‘retained,’ my love.” The two of them regularly corrected each other’s language mistakes. He called her his “english professor,” probably because she gave him grief over his atrocious spelling, while he took aim at her vocabulary mix-ups and malapropisms. (In court, for example, she confused recant with recount several times.)
Millard also encouraged Noudga to keep active on his behalf. “Surely your super spy self can get in touch with Kodiak. How about going to Yuri’s and getting him to call in a plumbing emergency. Or, going to the same New Year’s party,” he writes in early December.
“We can’t know what to say until disclosure is fully in. That’s still months down the road,” he says. “More disclosure could change everything and require a different approach with what will be best for you to say. What Kodiak needs to say is already clear, that won’t change.”
“So this is a reference to you testifying,” says Leitch.
“Uh, yes.”
“How do you respond?”
“I don’t mention it, really. I had other plans for New Year’s and Christmas anyways, and that’s what I talked about.” She says Yuri was a friend of hers, Millard’s, and Michalski’s.
When Leitch reads the translation of a date written in Ukrainian in the next letter, Noudga corrects him, as she has done on a few previous occasions. “You need a new translator,” she says.
“You could be right,” Leitch says. “Maybe we should have hired you, Ms. Noudga.” Then he asks if she was still in love in December.
“Unfortunately so,” she says, but adds that her feelings were contradictory. When she expressed this to Millard, he responded, “What do you mean by—the more you love me, the more you hate me? Or was it—the more I open up with my emotions, the more you hate me? Please elaborate.”
“Why the hate?” Leitch asks.
“Just…I always had, like, feelings that he was seeing other women, but he rejected them and was aloof about that, and I was madly in love with him, but I wasn’t sure how he felt back at me. I kind of felt like I was being played, and I wasn’t sure what was going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it’s just because he was in jail he was getting really passionate and emotional,” she says. He had expressed loving and lustful sentiments before, but he had never come on quite so strong.
So, Leitch asks, it was the “declarations of love interspersed with requests to reach out to Crown witnesses. Is that what you mean by getting played?”
Noudga says it is.
Leitch comes to an undated letter with AGENT COYOTE written in the top right-hand corner. In it, Millard refers to Michalski as Kodiak again and to Mark Smich as Itchy. Along the top of the paper are instructions for Noudga: “reread this page, commit to memory, then *destroy this letter*.”
What Kodiak has the power to say, about what Itchy said to him, could change everything. Maybe Itchy told Kodiak that “I wasn’t there” and “not involved with what went down.” That Itchy had gone with two of his “boyz” and “something bad happened.” That when I found out, Itchy’s boyz threatened violence against Itchy’s family, and my family, if either of us spoke a word about them. Itchy begged me to help him hide what had happened, and I tried to. When police arrested me, I could not help them in their investigation, because to do so would have endangered my mother, my property and Itchy’s family. This is also why I have not answered questions about the case for the media. And why my mother is selling my property and her house, so that there is nothing vulnerable. And why I have not attempted bail or house arrest. I would be a sitting duck for the killers who would want to ensure I never talk. Maybe Itchy told this to Kodiak. Maybe Kodiak will tell the court. I need this kind of help to win this. Have you made contact with Kodiak? Will he help?
What it is that I found out is still uncertain. And as for what happened with Itchy and his “boyz” to result in a dead guy and a stolen truck, that is uncertain too.
Maybe Itchy’s boyz were somehow involved with the dead guy, or his wife.
Maybe some fluke accident occurred.
Maybe Itchy knew I was shopping for a truck, and knew that I was tiring of supporting him, so he hatched a plan to steal a truck, and sell it to me for a reduced price thereby engraciating himself with me, at the same time as scoring some cash for himself. A perfect plan in Itchy’s books. He enlisted two of his boyz, who had experience with car theft and armed robbery. Itchy thought he was setting up a pleasent surprise for me, that was going to pay off for him. But something went wrong.
Maybe we’ll never be certain, but what is certain is that Itchy told Kodiak that I wasn’t there. Right?
*destroy this letter*
Also of some importance is that Dell does NOT own a gun. Itchy has Boyz who are said to own guns. Their street names are Lyle and A-pock. Maybe it’s the same “boyz.” Itchy’s street name is Say10. Dell does not have a street name
This actually does more to help Itchy than I feel he deserves.
“Who’s Agent Coyote?” asks Leitch.
“I don’t know,” says Noudga. “Well, maybe he was referring to me, but it was never specified.”
“You knew this was an attempt at fabrication when you read this?”
“At the time I read it, I honestly believed in his innocence…. He was always gentle and kind.” Noudga says she never knew Millard to be aggressive. “I was in denial for a very long time.”
Leitch puts one of the last of the letters from Millard on the courtroom screens and suggests to Noudga that it’s essentially a script for her to follow in answering questions about Millard and Mark Smich and their strange relationship. While she claims she didn’t interpret the letter that way at the time, Noudga now concedes Leitch has a point. The overall theme of the letter is that Smich was starting to get on Millard’s nerves in a big way.
“Dell was complaining more and more about Mark,” Millard tells Noudga, feeding her his storyline. “He said that Mark was always smoking pot, and that Mark wasn’t helping at all, and that Dell felt like his time was being wasted….Dell told you he was going to cut Mark off soon. The first week of May, Dell told you he had the cash together, and that he was buying a diesel truck that week.”
Unfortunately for Millard, if there ever were a moment when Noudga was prepared to learn and recite her lines, it has passed. She tells the court she never heard any mention from Millard of cutting Smich off or raising cash for a truck. She also denies that Smich had access to Millard’s passwords, as Millard wanted her to say. In his letter, Millard writes, “When at Maple Gate, Mark would ask to buy songs on Dell’s itunes, or even ask to use Dell’s eBay account. Dell would yell over that it was okay. Apparently Mark had Dell’s passwords. You heard and saw this while chilling at Maple Gate. Mark had access to everything in Dell’s life.”
Millard was no doubt worried about his eBay account because he had used it to buy concealment holsters, including for a Walther PPK. As for Millard’s iTunes account, Smich having access would explain how an iPad, obtained around the time Laura Babcock disappeared, had come to be synced to Millard’s computer.
“Dell’s goal was to make Mark self sufficient,” his letter to Noudga continues. “Dell talked of the plan to produce a rap album with Mark. Dell would supply the equipment, and network with others to bring in musical talent. It was Mark’s dream. Dell thought it would be the way to finally make Mark self sufficient.” The problem, according to Millard’s script for Noudga, was that Smich had started drinking too much and taking oxycodone. And as a result, Millard was no longer prepared to further Smich’s rap ambitions.
In his letter to Noudga, Millard writes, “In March Mark told you that he didn’t think Dell was ever going to get around to making the rap album. That he thought Dell was too busy with his grandfather’s company. Mark told you that his sister had a place in Calgary, and that he was gonna move out there with Marlena, as soon as he could get enough money together to go.”
According to the script, Noudga was to say she had witnessed a conversation in which Smich admitted to Millard he was torn about the Calgary plan, and that Millard told him if he wanted to stay and make the rap album, Smich would have to get off oxycodone and work hard. Noudga was to recount that she later asked Millard why he continued to support Smich. “I told you some people gave food to food banks, some people donated money to the homeless, and some people spent months in africa building homes,” he writes. “Mark was all three rolled into one for me.”
AS THE LAST OF the letters are read into the court record on her third day of testimony, Noudga remains as unpleasant and unforthcoming as ever. When Leitch asks her a few final questions, she is still making faces and being rude. She does, however, seem to relish the chance to deliver a line straight out of the movies when asked if she sees Dellen Millard in the courtroom. “Right over there,” she says as she points across the room. Then, at Leitch’s request, she does the same for Mark Smich—all with a big smile.
Out of necessity, Millard’s lead lawyer, Ravin Pillay, is relatively kind in his cross-examination of Christina Noudga, who can still inflict more damage on his client, should she choose to do so.
“You are facing very serious charges,” he begins.
“Alas, I am.”
“Your world has been torn apart?”
“Yes.”
“Life as you’ve known it has ceased to exist. Fair?”
“Yes.”
“All your plans for the future have been put aside?”
“Yes.”
“You live under constant scrutiny of the media?”
“Yes.”
“You and your family have experienced significant hardship?”
“Yes.”
“You appear to be very composed.”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re scared, aren’t you?”
“Terrified.”
“Your primary focus is on your case?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not here to help Mr. Millard?”
“No.”
Pillay suggests that Noudga knew from Millard’s letters that he was in a steady emotional decline. “You could tell the isolation was getting to him. He was losing hope. He was desperate, depressed?”
“He didn’t come off as depressed, but, yeah, being in jail, you get depressed,” says Noudga, who does not have fond memories of her four months behind bars before she made bail in August 2014.
Pillay says she knew the things Millard was asking her to do were “stupid, foolish, wrong,” which was why she never acted on them.
“No, I just filled him with more love and support,” Noudga replies. She says she told Millard, “You’re not, like, alone in here. Don’t worry about it. Everything will be fine.”
Pillay suggests that she didn’t answer when Millard asked if he could rely on her testimony, she didn’t go on Facebook to look for pictures of Smich, and she never had any contact with Michalski.
Noudga agrees.
Pillay says she kept the letters for their sentimental value and didn’t destroy them because she never intended to act on what they proposed.
“Yeah,” she agrees.
“You never thought they would be introduced at trial.”
“I’m a little surprised they are, actually.”
Pillay gets as tough as he’s going to get with Noudga when he asks her how someone who fancies herself a science geek, as he puts it, could have accepted Millard’s explanation that the Eliminator would be used to burn metal.
“I used the term burning improperly,” she says, and clarifies that she meant melting. It’s possible, she agrees with Pillay, that she doesn’t remember very well at all the conversation she had with Millard about why he acquired an incinerator.
ONE OF THE FIRST questions Thomas Dungey asks Noudga is when she stopped loving Millard.
“When he got me arrested,” she says. She describes her current feelings toward her ex-boyfriend as “contempt and a bit of loathing.”
“I’ve been humiliated in public and by the courts for two years, so I don’t necessarily like him,” she says.
“Of course, your trial’s coming up,” says Dungey, referring to her November 2016 court date. “If Mr. Millard was to testify he told you everything, if he said you knew there was a truck in the trailer, that would hurt you?”
Yes, she says, but then he would be lying under oath.
Dungey wonders about what he calls Noudga’s selective memory, and she explains that it’s not that she forgets things, more that she just didn’t ask questions she knew Millard wouldn’t answer.
“He didn’t tell you about what criminal activity he had done?”
“No, he never told me.”
“Did he tell you he stole a Bobcat?”
“No.”
“Did he ever tell you he was on an illegal mission with Andrew Michalski?”
“No.”
Nor, according to Noudga, did Millard mention theft missions with Hagerman or Smich.
“You would have parties at Maple Gate. You’d be there with Michalski, Marlena, Hagerman,” says Dungey. “And never did it ever come up about illegal missions?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“If it did, I wasn’t there,” Noudga says. “I would have been like, What the fuck?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, Why would you do that when you can just buy it?”
“So, nowhere along the lines did he ever tell you he was going to steal a truck?”
“No.”
“Did Andrew mention it?”
“Andrew and I were not that close.”
“So he kept you completely isolated from that aspect of his personality?”
“I’m kind of glad he did.”
“It’s kind of like we’re dealing with a whole other personality.”
“I’d say more secrets,” says Noudga. “If he was in criminal activity, he did this to protect me.”
“That’s your defence in your case: it’s that he didn’t tell you anything?”
“Well, I didn’t know anything.”
Dungey asks Noudga to read some notes she made to herself under the heading “Brilliant Ideas.” She had written that if she ever dated another criminal, she should blackmail him.
It was “because I had dated Dellen, who had a criminal life,” she explains, adding that she has a bad and inappropriate sense of humour. She tells Dungey that those notes have nothing to do with the case. “You’re misreading it. This was written in a way for me to profit off men’s criminal activity for blackmail.” It was simply planning for the future.
Dungey asks why she played along with Millard and his letters for so many months.
“I maintained this idea he was innocent. Maybe he had some role to play in it, but I didn’t believe in him being a murderer.”
“He’s charged with murder and telling you he wants you to tamper with Crown witnesses.”
Noudga tells Dungey what she told Leitch: that she avoided answering Millard’s questions. “I didn’t want to make him feel like I wasn’t supporting him. That’s how I did it,” she says.
“At this point, do you not say, How can this guy be innocent?”
“Sometimes people can’t get out of certain situations, and I thought he was trying to get out of the situation….I thought, Maybe no one’s going to believe the truth, so he has to come up with a story.”
“It gets worse as it goes along,” says Dungey about the letters.
“I think he was just getting more anxious because I had not responded.”
Noudga traces many of her current problems to legal advice she claims she was given after Millard’s arrest. “I got advice, and I’m sorry that I followed it,” she says.
Justice Goodman tells her that it was her “constitutional right” and she doesn’t have to be sorry she spoke with a lawyer. The details cannot be revealed due to solicitor–client privilege.
Noudga says her friends and family were unfairly harassed by police and media because she was advised not to make a statement.
Dungey points out that talking to people is how the police conduct investigations and that it doesn’t constitute harassment. He finds her whole attitude puzzling, he says, including the fact that when Tim Bosma was missing and Millard’s trailer was in Madeleine Burns’s driveway, neither Noudga nor Burns called the police.
Noudga makes a face as if to suggest Dungey is as crazy as Leitch.
“You wouldn’t assume there might be evidence?” he asks.
“It was a possibility we didn’t explore,” she says. “We didn’t explore where the person might be.” As always, Noudga fails to say Tim Bosma’s name. “I don’t know why we didn’t call the police then. We waited for legal counsel…and then called it in.”
When Dungey asks why she wiped down the locks on the trailer, Noudga replies, “I wasn’t tampering with possible evidence. I was just removing my involvement.” Lawyer and witness go round in circles about whether fingerprints constitute evidence, provoking laughter in the courtroom and consternation from the judge.
As his cross-examination ends, a somewhat exasperated Dungey displays one final letter from Millard on the screen. It was written in January 2014. “You are a truly special woman,” Millard signs off. “I believe we deserve each other. I deserve you, and you deserve me.”
“The last line in the letter,” says Dungey. “ ‘I deserve you and you deserve me.’ That’s what he wrote to you?”
“Yes,” says Noudga.
“Thank you,” he says. “No further questions.”
It takes a while for it to register with Noudga what’s just happened. While Dungey didn’t succeed in rattling Noudga as he did Shane Schlatman and Matt Hagerman, his last question was what CBC News later referred to “a mic drop moment.”