Millard told girlfriend ‘to get stories straight’: witness

TORONTO • Dellen Millard advised his girlfriend in letters later seized by police on what to say if she was ever called to testify about a young Toronto woman who disappeared five years ago, court heard Thursday.

Retired Hamilton police officer Richard Floriani told the first-degree murder trial of Millard and Mark Smich that he seized dozens of letters on April 10, 2014, at Christina Noudga’s house written by her boyfriend, Millard.

Millard and Smich are accused of killing Laura Babcock, 23, and burning her remains in a massive animal incinerator in the summer of 2012. The Crown alleges that Babcock was killed because she became the odd woman out in a love triangle with Millard and Noudga.

“Whatever it is you believe it needs to be put aside, this is what happened,” Millard wrote in one of the letters shown in court.

“I told you Laura was over doing coke with Mark in the basement. We went to say hi to them. You saw her alive with Mark. There was coke on the bar.”

Floriani told court Millard and Smich hadn’t been yet charged with Babcock’s murder at the time the letters were seized.

“Later when she was reported missing, you asked me if I knew anything,” Millard wrote. “I told you that Mark had told me that she had OD’d, probably from mixing her prescriptions with Mark’s coke.”

In another letter, Millard appeared to reverse course.

“That stuff I wrote before about seeing Mark and someone partying in the basement, that was just brainstorming, forget it,” he wrote.

“Destroy this letter — to protect me.”

In another letter Millard wanted Noudga to become his “secret agent.”

“To get out of this bind I need help. I won’t ask you to give testimony that can be disproved. We need to get our stories straight, I need to know what you’re willing to do. You said you wanted to be a secret agent, be mine?”

Millard and Smich have pleaded not guilty in Babcock’s murder. Her body has not been found.

With the submission of the letters, the Crown finished its case against the pair.