Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  Noudga has declined to meet with Tony Leitch for witness preparation. Her brief period of cooperation with police and prosecutors ended with the two interviews given shortly after her arrest. Leitch makes it clear that there’s no deal between Noudga and the Crown with respect to the evidence she is about to give. Her lawyer, Paul Mergler, sits in the public gallery with her mother.

  As is customary, Leitch’s first questions touch on personal history: how Noudga came to meet Millard in 2010, when she was eighteen and he was still with his fiancée, and how by 2013 she had become his girlfriend, staying over at his house five to seven nights a week. Noudga’s original connection to Millard was through Andrew Michalski, who knew her ex-boyfriend, though she and Michalski were never especially friendly and haven’t seen each other since May 2013. She explains that in the year before the murder of Tim Bosma, Mark Smich replaced Michalski as Millard’s best friend. “It kind of just crossed over,” she says. As a result, Noudga was regularly in Smich’s company as he and Millard smoked dope, played video games, and “focussed on Mark’s rap career.”

  “Was there any person [Millard] spent more time with than Mark?” asks Leitch.

  “I think me and Dellen spent more time together than Mark and Dellen,” says Noudga. While she admits to being extremely jealous of other women, Noudga does not appear to have been perturbed by her boyfriend’s peculiar relationship with Smich. Nor did she mind spending the occasional evening hanging out with Matthew Ward-Jackson, the alleged gun dealer, if it made Millard happy. Anything, it seems, was better than worrying that Millard was in the company of other women.

  Leitch asks about the term mission, and Noudga says it was how she and Millard referred to a variety of activities: everything from buying weed to grocery shopping to touring Millard’s properties. She says the word had no criminal connotations apart from purchasing marijuana. When Leitch shows her a photo of the Walther PPK that Millard texted her in September 2012, Noudga denies having any memory of it. As for the Eliminator, she says her boyfriend told her that it had been purchased to burn scrap metals from his aviation business.

  —

  LEITCH ASKS NOUDGA ABOUT a text message sent to her on Saturday, May 4, 2013, two days before the murder. “I’ve got some mission prep to do, reaching Waterloo soon, you’re welcome to tag along,” Millard wrote.

  There’s a long silence while Noudga looks at the message, which is displayed on the courtroom screens, before answering that she doesn’t recall what happened that day. “Nothing stands out to me,” she says, adding that when she and her lawyer were preparing for her testimony, they went back only as far as May 6.

  Noudga also has no memory of stopping with Millard at his Riverside Drive property in the west end of Toronto later that Saturday evening to pick up Millard’s Yukon from Javier Villada and give him the white van. Nor does she know what Millard meant when he sent her a text message after his Sunday test drive with Igor Tumanenko.

  “No go today,” he wrote. “I will be around later if you want to chill.”

  “Did you ever talk to him about that test drive?” asks Leitch.

  “No,” says Noudga. She repeats that she can’t recall anything that happened before May 6.

  “Okay,” says Leitch, “let’s talk about Monday, May 6, 2013. Did you see [Millard] that day?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Do you want to see the texts that were sent between you?”

  “I think they’d be helpful.”

  Leitch puts them up on the screens. There’s a message to Noudga about Millard’s lunch with his mother, Madeleine Burns, whom he refers to as Rabbit. He’d complained the week before that he was having “a bit of constipation with that ass rabbit” because she wasn’t helping him out fast enough with his condo financing woes. But that Monday, Burns had come through by taking funds from a line of credit on her house. “Finally pulled that rabbit out of my ass, went downtown, paid for the condo, and showed it to my mum,” he wrote to Noudga at 7:38 P.M. on the night of Tim Bosma’s murder.

  Two minutes later, he told her, “I’m on my way to a mission now. If it’s a flop i’ll be done in 2 hrs. If it goes…it’ll be an all nighter.”

  At 10:47 P.M. Noudga asked Millard if he was finished.

  “Gonna be an all nighter,” he replied at 11:34 P.M.

  Leitch asks Noudga what Millard meant here by a “mission.”

  “I have no idea what he was referring to.”

  “Did you ever ask him later?”

  “Never got the chance to,” she says. “He was going to be working late in the evening, so by the time he was going to see me I would probably be asleep.”

  “No prior discussion about what he was doing that day?”

  “I knew he was inquiring into purchasing a vehicle.”

  Noudga says Millard had mentioned buying a truck the month before. “I was like, ‘Cool.’ End of conversation.”

  “Do you recall any specifics?”

  Noudga says she can’t.

  Leitch puts up more texts from Millard.

  “Yo,” he wrote at 6:40 the following morning from the hangar.

  “Early morning,” Noudga replied.

  “Need a break, I’ve got a moment to relax,” he texted just before 8 A.M.

  Noudga asks her boyfriend if he’s still working.

  “Stage 1 complete, taking a respite,” he says.

  He’s back home at Maple Gate and there’s some talk of them getting together, but they can’t coordinate a time.

  “K then later,” says Millard. “I’m gonna take a nap.”

  “Good choice :)” says Noudga.

  Leitch asks her why she told Millard it was a good choice.

  “Because I was still in bed and I didn’t want to get out,” she says. She had no desire to run over to Millard’s to be with him during his break, she tells Leitch. And, no, she had no idea what he was taking a break from or what “Stage 1” meant. She assumed it related to whatever he had been working on through the night.

  Noudga says Millard “was always very ambiguous” about what he did all day while she was at university and at the part-time job she had as a lifeguard.

  “Did that bother you?” asks Leitch.

  “Originally, but then after a time I just stopped asking questions,” she says. The only thing she admits to persistently inquiring about is the affairs she suspected Millard of having with other women.

  Just before 6:30 that Tuesday evening, Millard texted Noudga again. “Had a nice 5 hour nap & bath, refreshed and ready for the next stage of mission digestion,” he wrote.

  “Lol mission digestion,” said Noudga.

  “(:” came the reply.

  Noudga explains that she found mission digestion a funny term. She even laughs in court about it. “Yeah, I thought it was just a weird way to name one of his missions.”

  “Right,” says Leitch. He asks her about the smiley-face emoji.

  “I think it’s funny when you say ‘emoji,’ ” says Noudga, laughing again as she tucks her hair behind her ears. It’s unclear if she’s forgotten why she’s here in court or just doesn’t care.

  In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Millard texted Noudga to tell her he was about to take another nap. When she woke up and read the text, she responded by asking him how the mission went.

  “1.5 hr nap & still going,” he replied.

  “Nap-texting too.”

  “Still going on mission.”

  “Quite the long mission.”

  “Very, want to come help?”

  “What do you need help with?”

  “Nvm,” he said, meaning never mind. “I’m letting my craving for your company get the best of me. Still in Waterloo, I don’t have time yet.”

  “Oh boo, you’ve gotten me all excited.”

  In court, Noudga claims to have no memory of what they were talking about or why she asked how the mission was going. “He’s been referring to the mission in the past c
ouple of days,” she says. “I wasn’t sure what it was, so I used his words back at him.”

  Leitch asks if she had any idea why the date fell through.

  “He never told me why. I was expecting to see him throughout the entire week, but he kept blowing me off,” Noudga says. “It was kind of annoying, you know?”

  When she finally did get the chance to see her boyfriend, she jumped at it.

  “Tiny mission tonight, could use your help,” he wrote on Thursday afternoon.

  “Sure. Pick me up at 8:30,” she texted back.

  “Are you home?” asked the habitually late Millard at 9:37 P.M.

  “Yes,” said Noudga. “But I don’t enjoy waiting around for you.”

  “Do you actually love me?” wrote Millard.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Roll a joint. I’ll pick you up in 10 mins.”

  Noudga lived with her family in a much less affluent part of Etobicoke than the one her boyfriend lived in. When Millard showed up at their bungalow in his red Dodge pickup, he was towing the trailer that contained Tim Bosma’s truck.

  Before Noudga got into Millard’s truck, he gave her the digital video recorder he had brought from the hangar, the one with the brief clip of Millard, Smich, and Pedo from early on Tuesday morning. She took it to her bedroom while he waited outside. When she returned, they headed north to his mother’s house in Kleinburg, smoking weed along the way. She thought Millard seemed tired and sad.

  “What did you think you were going to help him with?” asks Leitch.

  “I didn’t have the faintest idea.”

  “So you get in the car. What’s the discussion?”

  “I’m not sure what the discussion was. He gave me what I thought at the time was a stereo.” Noudga didn’t ask for any explanation because, she says, Millard was always “ambiguous.”

  “Did you ask him what he was doing for a week?”

  “I didn’t specifically ask him what, but I asked how it went,” she says. “If I asked specific questions, he’d answer ambiguously, so I just stopped asking questions.”

  As her testimony progresses, it becomes clear that this is the Noudga narrative, her explanation for her participation in the events of May 9 and 10. She never asked questions, so she couldn’t have known what had happened that week. After Millard’s arrest, she simply moved the DVR farther back into her closet. Police photos taken when officers searched her bedroom show clothes and underwear all over the floor, used coffee cups, an unmade bed. In the closet, with junk piled on top of it, is the DVR, which the police will take away as evidence.

  “Did you not think it might be relevant?” asks Leitch.

  “I didn’t think of it at all.”

  “Your boyfriend is arrested. At some point it must have dawned on you that this could possibly be evidence.”

  “This specifically? Never dawned on me.”

  Noudga’s answers are frequently accompanied by eye-rolling, laughing, and sighing to show how stupid it is to imply she should be curious about the DVR in her closet or the contents of the trailer she and Millard pulled to Kleinburg.

  “Should I have asked every time he showed up at my doorstep pulling a trailer?” she says. “It was like a normal evening.”

  Leitch asks Noudga to refresh her memory by reviewing the statement she gave to police after her arrest.

  “Um, okay,” she says, making it clear that she thinks this is another bad idea.

  “What did you think was in the trailer?” he asks again after she has a moment to read.

  “A Mother’s Day present for his mother,” says Noudga. “This was later an idea I came up with, like, when I was talking with his mother about what was in the trailer. The word Tesla was thrown around, because she wanted an electric car.”

  When Noudga and Millard reached Madeleine Burns’s house, Millard backed the trailer right up against the garage door, smashing a light on the exterior wall. Noudga says she thought that positioning the trailer in such a way was just another one of the weird things he regularly did.

  “Did you see Madeleine Burns?” asks Leitch.

  “She came out and was like, ‘What is this? Why are you putting it here?’ And he was like, ‘Don’t worry.’ ”

  When Burns asked her son why he was being so evasive, he didn’t answer, says Noudga.

  “At this point, we were both extremely stoned,” Noudga recalls, laughing. “Then we both said bye to her and left for Waterloo.”

  “How long is that drive?”

  “Forty-five minutes to an hour.” She makes a scornful face, adding that she and Millard didn’t talk much along the way. “It was more of a sexual expedition,” she says. “Well, he was driving, and I was performing sexual favours for him, so there was no discussion to be made.”

  Noudga is smiling. She appears pleased with herself. Earlier, when asked how she got her nickname Rubikinks, she said the “Rubi” part came from her ability to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Leitch said he didn’t need to know about the “kinks” part. (The jury had already heard from other witnesses that Kinks was the name assigned to Noudga in Millard’s phone contacts.)

  Leitch asks Noudga how long the sexual act in the truck continued. He is trying to show that it can’t account for a complete lack of conversation on the drive.

  Noudga claims to have serviced Millard for half an hour once they hit the highway, leaving just fifteen or twenty minutes to talk. Their subsequent conversation revolved around the fellatio, she says, tossing her hair.

  When they arrived at the hangar, they exchanged the red truck for the Yukon. She tells Leitch she believes she was there for just ten minutes.

  Although Noudga said in her post-arrest statement that she and Millard had moved boxes at the hangar and that she wore gloves, she has since changed her mind. She says she is convinced that the box-moving happened on a different evening and that she wore gloves only to move the incinerator at the farm.

  “We leave and were about to get on the highway when Dell interjects and says, ‘Oh, one more quick stop.’ ” He wanted to go to the farm and move the incinerator from the barn.

  “What did Dellen say when you were in the barn?” asks Leitch.

  “He said, ‘Oh, the floorboards are creaking under its weight. I don’t want it to break.’ ” She and Millard gloved up, hitched the four-thousand-pound Eliminator to the Yukon, and towed it to a treed laneway, where Chaz Main would find and photograph it later that day.

  “Is it that he wanted to have it a little bit concealed?”

  He didn’t want “a random contraption standing in the middle of the field,” says Noudga. She maintains that the purpose of concealing the machine was to hide it from prospective thieves, and not in anticipation of a police search. She estimates the whole operation lasted no more than fifteen minutes. She took off her gloves and either gave them to Millard or put them on the floor of the Yukon.

  Noudga’s first day of testimony wraps up with her account of heading back to Toronto with Millard to drop off the toolbox.

  —

  THE PUBLIC REACTION TO Noudga’s performance on the witness stand was unequivocal: she was reviled and mocked in both mainstream and social media. The Toronto Sun featured her picture on its front page with a tabloid-style headline about her sexcapades. In The Hamilton Spectator, Noudga was excoriated by court columnist Susan Clairmont, who wrote that “of all the unsavoury witnesses the jury has heard from at the Tim Bosma murder trial, she is the least likable of the lot.” On Twitter, a photo circulated of Thomas Dungey’s head grafted onto the leather-clad body of a machine-gun-toting Terminator renamed the Dungenator. “I’ll be back for the truth, Christina,” the caption read. Inside the courtroom and out, expectations were running high that Dungey’s cross-examination would both call Noudga to account and yield some answers.

  For one brief moment as her second day of testimony begins, Noudga appears slightly chastened by the negative reaction she has provoked. But she quickly reverts
to Mean Girl mode when Leitch points out to her that her timeline of events doesn’t add up and shows her slides displaying the cell tower pings. Noudga looks at him as if he were incompetent. “Oookaaay,” she says condescendingly.

  The phone records show that Noudga was at the farm later and for a longer period than she has claimed. They also show that on the earlier “sexual expedition” to the Waterloo hangar, four calls were made from Noudga’s phone.

  “Um…hmm,” says Noudga as she examines the screen, at a loss to explain. She says that she didn’t make any calls. “On the drive back from [the farm], I know I gave him my phone,” she adds.

  “Did you lend him your phone more than once that night?”

  “I may have.”

  Leitch tells her that nine calls in total were made to Matt Hagerman on her phone. “You were in a position to hear those nine phone calls,” he says, “and you have no recollection of what was said?”

  “Not the exact words and phrasing….I know I lent him my phone to get in contact.”

  “I’m asking you what Mr. Millard said to Mr. Hagerman in those nine phone calls.”

  “I don’t recall,” says Noudga, now looking vaguely worried.

  While she originally said they left the farm at 12:30 A.M., she shifts the time to 3 A.M.

  Leitch asks what time she thinks they arrived at the farm from the hangar.

  “Like one or two.”

  “So you were there two hours?”

  “No.”

  “So how long were you there for?”

  “Maybe an hour at most.”

  The implication is clear: if Millard and Noudga spent about an hour at the farm, then they were also at the hangar for longer than she has acknowledged. That, in turn, casts doubt on her claim that she was mistaken in her police statement about moving boxes at the hangar. The missing hour or two has to have been spent somewhere, because the phone data shows conclusively when Noudga and Millard travelled from the farm to Hagerman’s.

  Noudga says she was exhausted and falling asleep when they pulled up at his house. She may have waved at Hagerman, who she remembers laughing with Millard. Then she and her boyfriend returned to Maple Gate at about 4:30 A.M., had sex, and went to sleep. When Millard woke up an hour or two later for an early morning meeting at the hangar, they had more sex. Then he left.