Millard’s ex-girlfriend in plea talks
Ex of Bosma killer charged with obstructing justice, wilfully destroying evidence
Aformer girlfriend of one of two men convicted in the murder of Tim Bosmais in talks for a plea deal regarding a charge laid against her in the case.
A trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday for Christina Noudga, 24, who is charged with being an accessory after the fact.
Sources close to the case have revealed that a resolution is in the works and that Noudga is expected to plead Tuesday to the lesser charges of obstructing justice and wilfully destroying evidence.
However, until the words are uttered in court, it is not official. If she does take the deal, one source says, it’s unlikely she’ll spend any more time behind bars.
Reached Sunday night, Noudga’s lawyer said that it would be “premature” to draw conclusions. “I can say that there are ongoing discussions with respect to the matter,” Brian Greenspan said.
Assistant Crown attorney Brett Moodie — who, along with fellow Crown Craig Fraser, is prosecuting the case — declined to comment, although he said he “doesn’t deny” Greenspan’s statement. A member of the Bosma family confirmed that they had been consulted by the Crown about a potential resolution.
Bosma, 32, was killed in 2013 after he took Dellen Millard and Mark Smich out for a test drive of a pickup truck he was trying to sell.
Millard, 31, and Smich, 28, were convicted of first-degree murder in June and sentenced to life in prison. Both are appealing the verdict.
Noudga testified at Millard’s trial this spring, but none of what she said there can be used against her in her own trial due to protections under the Canada Evidence Act.
A university graduate and medical school hopeful, Noudga moved to Canada from Ukraine with her family when she was a toddler. The family lives in a bungalow in Etobicoke.
She spent four months in jail following her April 2014 arrest before being granted bail. When she returned to Hamilton’s John Sopinka Courthouse this spring for her boyfriend’s trial, the tall brunette and her mother donned dramatic disguises, with scarves covering their faces as they rushed past reporters.
Noudga had been dating Millard for about three years when he picked her up late on May 9, 2013. She was one of several women he had on the go at the time. He’d texted her earlier that day, looking for her help on a “tiny mission.” “Sure,” she’d texted back. Close to 10 p.m., he pulled up in front of her parents’ bungalow in his red pickup truck, towing a massive black car trailer behind him.
When she hopped into the truck next to him, he handed her a digital video recorder and asked her to hang onto it. She testified at his trial that she thought it was some sort of speaker and ran inside to put it in the back of her closet.
Back in the truck, they headed to his mother’s house in Kleinburg, where they dropped the trailer off in her driveway.
From there, they made three more stops:
First, at Millard’s air hangar, where they swapped the red pickup truck for his dark blue GMC Yukon.
Then, at Millard’s North Dumfries area farm, where — in the pitch dark, wearing black gloves — the pair hauled a 10-foot-tall animal cremator out of an abandoned barn and into the woods.
And finally, at Millard’s friend Matt Hagerman’s house, where Millard handed him a locked black-and-yellow tool box around 4 a.m.
Noudga insisted at Millard’s trial that she didn’t ask a single question of Millard as they drove that night.
She “wasn’t curious” about what they were up to — or the seemingly strange mission they were on — she said.
She was too busy smoking weed and performing “sexual favours” on her boyfriend to chat, she testified.
When Millard was arrested the next day, Nougda said she went back to his mother’s house, where the trailer was still in the driveway. The two women went to a hotel, where they drank “copious amounts of wine” and fretted over Millard’s arrest.
It was there — in the early hours of May 11 — that they “theorized” that Bosma’s truck could possibly be in- side the trailer in the driveway. Concerned they had touched it during the previous night’s drop-off, she explained, they drove back and wiped off their fingerprints.
They weren’t tampering with evidence, Noudga insisted — they just wanted to “remove (their) involvement.”
Five days later, Millard’s charges were upgraded to first-degree murder. On May 22, Smich was also charged in Bosma’s death. It was close to a year before Noudga was arrested.
When police searched her house following her arrest in April 2014, they found the DVR in her messy bedroom closet.
In her bedside table, they discovered secret jailhouse letters sent to her by Millard. In them, he pleaded with her to be his “secret agent” and to tell friends to change their stories to police.
Millard repeatedly ordered his “princess” to destroy the letters. But she hung onto them because she said they were “sentimental.”
She “contemplated” helping him, she admitted, but said she weighed the pros and cons and decided against it.
In another note, she references “immunity” and making a statement to police. She never did that either. Although Tuesday’s trial was not expected to draw crowds as large as Millard’s, it’s a case the community has still long awaited.
Bosma’s widow, who attended every day of the first trial, said she would not attend Noudga’s trial.
“I have decided with the completion of the primary trial that it is time for my daughter and I to begin to rebuild our lives,” Sharlene Bosma said. “Spending more time in the courthouse is not what’s best for our little family.”
She says she kept herself in the spotlight until the verdict in the primary trial to keep her husband’s memory alive and the focus on him.
“But that job is done now. My fight was for Tim and for Tim to be remembered. But now that it’s over, it’s time for me to step out of things and rebuild.”