Accused killer tried to recruit girlfriend as spy, court hears

Dellen Millard wanted roommate to change his testimony in Bosma case, secret letters reveal

Secret letters sent to his girlfriend from jail show Tim Bosma’s accused killer was desperate to convince a friend to change his story.

In his flowery and flattering letters to Christina Noudga after his arrest in May 2013, Dellen Millard tries to recruit his “princess” to be his “secret agent” in a mission to get his roommate to backpedal on his statement to police.

“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,” Millard writes on Oct. 1, 2013.

“His testimony, not forensic science, is going to get me convicted.”

Millard, 30, and his friend Mark Smich, 28, are on trial together for the first-degree murder of Tim Bosma.

The Ancaster father disappeared May 6, 2013, after taking two men for a test drive of the Dodge Ram pickup truck he was selling online.

The Crown says Bosma was shot in his truck and then burned in an incinerator outside Millard’s air hangar at the Waterloo Region airport.

Michalski, 26, has already told the jury that on May 4, 2013 — two days before Tim Bosma disappeared — Millard showed him a photo of a black pickup truck in a Kijiji listing and asked him whether he should steal a truck from “the nice guy or the asshole.”

Michalski says he told him to “f--- off” — Millard was wealthy and didn’t need to steal.

In his letter to Noudga, Millard states clearly: “Andrew needs to say I showed him a picture of a truck and said who’s (sic) I should BUY.”

Noudga, 24, is the Crown’s key and final witness. She is also charged with being an accessory after the fact to the murder. Her trial will take place later this year.

The jailhouse letters were seized from the nightstand in her bedroom after her arrest in April 2014.

“I don’t know, it’s just something I did . . . looking back, (it was) very stupid, very idiotic of me, but I can’t change anything at this point,” she said when assistant Crown attorney Tony Leitch asked why she kept them and did not go to police.

She was in love with him, she said, and he was in jail. The letters to her were “sentimental.” The jury heard she sent Millard sexy photos of herself, Noudga told the jury she would deliver and receive notes through his mother, Madeleine Burns.

“He was obviously asking me to tamper with evidence and testimo- ny, in order to protect him,” Noudga said with a sigh Thursday, as the letters were one by one displayed on the courtroom screens.

In one letter to her, Millard warned his girlfriend — who testified she’d always wanted to be a spy — to “be careful my love. . . . If you’re going to undertake contacting Andrew, it has to be done with ‘Mission Impossible’ super spy perfection.”

She insisted she did not fulfil his requests.

The jury heard Thursday that on the night of Millard’s arrest Noudga got a call from Smich who told her “we’re in deep s---.” Later, in the early hours of May 11, after meeting with Burns, Noudga testified, she wiped down a large trailer in Burns’s driveway — the one she and Millard had dropped off a day earlier — to get rid of fingerprints.

She said it was only that night, drinking wine in a hotel and “brainstorming” with Millard’s mother, they had realized it was possible the Bosma truck was in the trailer at her Kleinburg home. So back they went — in the night — to wipe it clean.