Ex-girlfriend blames Millard for this ‘mess’
Tense cross-examination at trial for Tim Bosma’s death
Christina Noudga swears she is not looking to protect her ex-lover — and blames him for dragging her into his “mess.”
“He put me in a situation I didn’t belong in,” she said Tuesday of accused killer Dellen Millard, and of the charge of accessory after the fact to murder which she faces as his girlfriend. “He also cheated on me.” But during a tense first bit of crossexamination, Thomas Dungey suggested the 24-year-old’s “selective memory” is convenient for them both — that she has her own trial coming up later this year and needs Millard “on side.”
Millard, 30, and Mark Smich, 28, are co-accused of the first-degree murder of Tim Bosma. The Ancaster dad left his home on May 6, 2013 to take two men for a test drive in the pickup truck he was selling online. The Crown alleges he was shot in his truck and then burned in an incinerator outside Millard’s hangar at the Waterloo airport.
Noudga is charged with allegedly helping Millard move key pieces of evidence (including the trailer containing Bosma’s truck, which he drove up to his mother’s house in Kleinburg) on May 9, 2013, the night before his arrest.
Noudga has consistently claimed she had no knowledge and asked no questions about the “tiny mission” they were on that night.
“If you didn’t know anything, that’s to your assistance, right?” suggested Dungey, who is representing Smich.
“Well I didn’t know anything, so that is to my assistance,” she replied. “It’s also to the truth.”
Dungey referenced a series of writ- ings found in Noudga’s bedroom after her arrest in April 2014.
The jury has seen dozens of letters Millard sent Noudga from jail, asking her to tamper with witnesses. During his cross-examination, Millard’s lawyer Ravin Pillay suggested it was crushing loneliness that propelled Millard to write to her, and that he was “confused” and “lost” in jail.
Noudga said she was surprised that the letters were brought up at trial.
Her own writings were drafts of sorts — notes and ideas she wrote down but never sent (though she did send letters, she admitted, they just weren’t recovered). She claims she was trying to piece together whether Millard was innocent or guilty — using information she gleaned from the media and the Internet.
In them, she lists notes and questions to herself:
“Could they trace phones to areas for times?”
“Do they know we moved stuff at Waterloo? Gloves. Do they know we put trailer at mum’s?”
In another note, she references “immunity” and talking to police.
The night of Millard’s arrest, the jury has heard, Noudga and Millard’s mother Madeleine Burns got together in a hotel and, over wine, “theorized” that Bosma’s truck could possibly be inside the trailer back in Burns’s Kleinburg driveway.
Concerned that they had touched it during the drop-off, they drove back and wiped off their fingerprints.