Millard’s ex key, final witness in trial
Christina Noudga testifies about accompanying the man co-accused in Tim Bosma’s murder
Christina Noudga did not question her boyfriend.
Dellen Millard was often dismissive or ambiguous when she asked him about his life — so she just flat-out stopped asking.
When he picked her up for a “tiny mission” on May 9, 2013, Noudga says she didn’t ask what it was — instead, she recalled on the witness stand Wednesday, they smoked weed and she gave him “sexual favours” while he drove.
She “wasn’t curious” about what was inside the giant trailer they were towing to his mother Madeleine Burns’s home in Kleinburg that night — a drop-off Burns had clearly not been expecting.
And when they headed next to Millard’s air hangar at the Waterloo Region airport late that same night, and from there to his Ayr farm, she again had no questions.
He needed to move his incinerator out of the barn, he told her. He was worried about the creaking floorboards breaking beneath it and wanted it out.
So she slipped on black nitrile gloves and assisted him in towing the massive “Eliminator” out of the barn, back into a wooded laneway in the dead of night.
Noudga is the Crown’s key and final witness in the first-degree murder trial of Millard, 30, and his friend Mark Smich, 28.
The pair is co-accused in the death of Ancaster, Ont., dad Tim Bosma, who disappeared on May 6, 2013, after taking two men for a test drive in the pickup truck he was trying to sell online.
The Crown says Bosma was shot in his truck and then burned in an incinerator outside Millard’s air hangar.
Noudga, now 24, is charged with being an accessory after the fact to the murder. Her own trial is set for November. She slipped into the courthouse Wednesday surrounded by reporters, her face fully wrapped in a scarf. She had her mother, similarly covered, and lawyer Paul Mergler by her side.
Noudga smiled and occasionally giggled on the stand during her first day of testimony.
The jury has heard that after her arrest, letters — sent to her from Millard, behind bars — were seized from her bedroom by police. They also found a DVR (digital video recorder) with surveillance footage from Millard’s hangar in her closet. He had given her the DVR when he picked her up for that “tiny mission” on May 9, 2013, she remembered — the night before he was arrested. She said she thought it was a stereo and never took it out or looked at it — even after Millard was charged in the murder of Tim Bosma — because it “didn’t spark (her) curiosity.”
She also testified she didn’t take it to police because it never dawned on her that it could be relevant.
She and Millard had been together about three years when he was arrested in 2013. They’d met when she was still in high school and started dating when she was 18. She was in love with him and thought they were in an exclusive relationship — though the jury has heard that Millard had multiple women on the go.
Millard had pet names for her, the jury heard: Rubik, because of her ability to solve the Rubik’s Cube, and Kinks (as she was named in his cellphone contact list) for “other reasons.”
She said she and Millard spent “most of” their time together.
But when assistant Crown attorney Tony Leitch showed her old text messages between the two of them, Noudga said she could not recall most of the conversations — offering information only when encouraged to refresh her memory from her police statement.
She also said she did not remember seeing a photo of a gun sent to her from Millard’s phone back in 2012.
She said she had only been prepped by her lawyer to discuss events that occurred after May 6, 2013.
When Millard texted her that night that he was on an “all-nighter” of a “mission,” she said she took that to mean he was working late.
She insisted that “mission” was a word he used innocently and ambiguously to describe things like errands or shopping — that the most illicit context she’d heard it used in was in reference to buying weed.
She said Millard had discussed plans to buy a truck, but had never mentioned stealing one. But again, she didn’t ask questions.
“I was like ‘cool.’ End of conversation,” she said.
Noudga’s testimony continues today.