National Post

Babcock obsessed with death, court hears

- LIAM CASEY

TORONTO• It took an Ontario prosecutor 10 minutes to read through a lifetime of pain for Laura Babcock.

Jill Cameron walked the jury in the young woman’s murder trial through her mental-health records, which detailed more than a dozen visits to specialist­s in the year leading up to her disappeara­nce in the summer of 2012.

“She feels no one loves or cares about her,” reads a note from a psychiatri­st at Toronto’s St. Joseph’s Health Centre on April 29, 2012.

She banged her head against the wall to relieve her “extreme anxiety,” and she had lived with an overwhelmi­ng f ear of death since childhood, read another.

Babcock’s mother, Linda, closed her eyes and bowed her head as she sat in the packed courtroom on Wednesday. Her father, Clayton, rubbed his temple sand clenched his jaw.

The Crown contends Dellen Millard, 32, of Toronto, and Mark Smich, 30 of Oakville, Ont., killed Babcock and burned her body in a large incinerato­r because she was the odd woman out in a love triangle with Millard and his girlfriend.

T hey believe she was killed on July 3 or 4, 2012. Her body has not been found. Both Millard and Smich have pleaded not guilty.

Millard, who is representi­ng himself, has said he didn’t care much about his girlfriend at the time or about her feud with Babcock. Court has heard there was bad blood between the two women.

Babcock’s mental- health records came as an admission in court agreed upon by the prosecutio­n and both accused, Justice Michael Code told the jury.

They boiled her records down to eight pages that detail only the time from August 2011 to April 2012.

Babcock lived through extreme anxiety, depression and borderline personalit­y disorder, the records state. She purged herself. She cried all the time, and she obsessed over death.

“Her major concern is death and what would happen after she dies,” reads a note from a nurse at William Osler Health Centre in Etobicoke, Ont., on Aug. 18, 2011.

The next day, Babcock told a social worker at the same hospital she has had negative thoughts since she was five years old.

She would blame her parents for not understand­ing her. Then she’d take it back.

She told a nurse on March 14, 2012, that she sometimes wished to die, but on several other occasions she told hospital staff she did not contemplat­e suicide.

Babcock told one psychiatri­st she felt misunderst­ood. She accused her parents of not believing her most recent diagnosis of borderline personalit­y disorder.

“She would sometimes state that it’s not until she’s dead that people would realize she had an illness,” said a note from a psychiatri­st on April 29, 2012.

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