Laura Babcock murder trial day 1

Dellen Millard and Mark Smich are on trial for first degree murder. Today a Toronto jury heard part of a Mark Smich rap song as the evidence in the Laura Babcock murder trial.

The video hasn’t been made an exhibit yet so it hasn’t been released, but the crown implied that that the song was about the murder of Laura Babcock and she began her opening statement with text messages Dellen Millard sent his girlfriend Christina Noudga:
“First I am going to hurt her. Then I’ll make her leave. I will remove her from our lives.”

We heard Babcock told Noudga she was still sleeping with Millard and that Noudga was upset about that.

Laura Babcock was 23 years old when she disappeared in July of 2012. Her father, Clayton Babcock, was the first to testify in her murder trial. He told court Laura had acted erratically in the months after finishing her degree, before she disappeared. She didn’t want to live at home, because she didn’t like the rules, he said so she was moving from one friend’s house to another. Her dad last heard from her on June 30, when she called to say she was stopping at home to drop off her dog and eat before going on a trip.

Then Dellen Millard, who is representing himself at trial, got up for the cross examination.

“I noticed you shaking up there,” Millard said. “Is this more difficult for you because I am the accused?” Babcock agreed it was. He remembered meeting Millard once, at the door, before Millard took Laura out for the night.

“I didn’t have glasses then, did I?” Millard asked. Babcock just remembered Millard was the guy who flew planes and was going to take Laura on a trip.

Shawn Lerner was next on the stand. He was Babcock’s boyfriend for a couple of years and they stayed friends afterwards. In late June 2012, he got her a hotel room for a couple nights and loaned her an iPad so she could look for a place to live. He never saw her again. Within weeks he had reported her missing and organized her Facebook friends to help look. He saw that the last eight calls Babcock made were to Dellen Millard and contacted him. Millard told him Babcock was into drugs and the wrong people.

The crown says after Babcock went missing, the iPad Lerner loaned her was connected to a computer at Millard’s house and re-named Mark’s iPad.

The crown says Millard and Smich received a livestock incinerator called the Eliminator shortly after Babcock’s disappearance. They were doing smell checks at a barn on a farm Millard owns before it was operational and afterwards, there are photos of Smich with the incinerator at Millard’s airplane hangar in Waterloo, and then Smich composes a rap song on the iPad about a woman who “started off all skin and bone and now lay on some ashy stone.”

The trial resumes Today.