Recording was ruse to punish wife: accused
Pair not serious about alleged murder plot, suspect tells undercover officer
PRINCE ALBERT Speaking to a cellmate shortly after his arrest, Curtis Vey said he told his alleged co-conspirator that his wife was recording him and asked her to make it look like they were having an affair because he was “sick and tired” of his wife’s suspicions that he was being unfaithful.
Vey didn’t know the cellmate was an undercover police officer.
The audio recording of their conversation was played in court Tuesday during the conspiracy to commit murder trial of Vey and Angela Nicholson in Prince Albert Court of Queen’s Bench. They are accused of planning to kill their spouses, Brigitte Vey and Jim Taylor, after Vey’s wife recorded their alleged murder plot on July 1, 2013.
Five days later, after Vey was arrested at his farm near Wakaw, an undercover officer posing as someone who was just charged with assault was placed in a cell with Vey. About half an hour after they met, Vey started to detail his marriage troubles and how his wife would record his conversations with an iPod device.
Vey said when Nicholson, a former client of his, had stopped by to ask for an old financial statement, he asked her to go along with his plan to make it look like they were having an affair. He said it was to teach his wife and kids a lesson for not trusting him and jumping to conclusions.
“I said, ‘You know what, we’re gonna give them something to talk about,’ ” he told the cellmate.
Vey said Nicholson mentioned her husband going missing, and that he also mentioned that Taylor could go missing because of his drug connections. They were trying to make it look real, he said.
“And it ended up f---g backfiring on me, big time. I can’t kill af—g deer, never mind killing anybody else,” he told the undercover officer. “I’m just not that way.”
Police would need more hard evidence against him besides what was on the iPod recording, he said. If not, it would be two people against whatever is on the recording, Vey noted, referring to Nicholson.
He said he never mentioned his wife’s name, but that Nicholson did say Taylor’s name. When his wife left the house after listening to the recording, Vey said he phoned Nicholson to tell her “we’ve gotta come clean” because his children thought there was something going on between them.
“I guess we shouldn’t have said a f----ng word, but you know, sometimes you do things before really thinking about the consequences. Lots of it was just f----ng idle chitchat,” Vey told the undercover officer.
The conversation happened hours before Vey’s two police interviews. After his first interview on July 6, he returned to his cell and said he’d told the officer a bit of the story, but not the “crucial part.”
“I got nothing to hide,” he said about the fact that police would be searching his home.
A different police officer interviewed Vey the next day. After that, in his cell, Vey said he found out that Nicholson “caved” and said some damaging things during her interview.
She made it seem like what they talked about was iron clad rather than just a discussion, and made it sound like they had talked about it before, he said.
Vey told the undercover officer they had never discussed those things before.
In his second police interview, which the jury heard last week, Vey said he had discussed killing their spouses twice. He also admitted having a three-year affair with Nicholson, and said that although he discussed drugging their spouses and lighting his house on fire once his wife fell asleep, he had no intention of actually doing it.