Dellen Millard and Mark Smich Found Guilty of Murdering Laura Babcock
The jury did not know the two men were already serving life for the murder of Tim Bosma, burned in the same animal incinerator.
Published
Laura Babcock was 23 when she stopped answering her phone in July 2012. More than five years later, on Saturday, December 16, 2017, a jury in a downtown Toronto courtroom found Dellen Millard, 32, of Toronto, and Mark Smich, 30, of Oakville, guilty of her first-degree murder. Her body has never been found. Tears and quiet cheers broke out in the gallery as the verdicts were read. Millard, who had acted as his own lawyer, swivelled in his chair, stared at Babcock's mother and shook his head. Linda Babcock smiled.
The Crown's case was that the two men planned the killing for months. Babcock had been sleeping with Millard at the same time as his girlfriend, Christina Noudga, and by the spring of 2012 the two women were feuding. In mid-April Millard texted Noudga: "First I'm going to hurt her. Then I'll make her leave." Babcock's own life was coming apart that year. Her friends testified she was using cocaine and struggling with her mental health; she fell out with her family, drifted from place to place with her small dog, and in June began working as an escort. On July 3 her phone and Millard's met near a subway station at about 6:30 p.m. and moved together to his house, where Smich's phone also pinged a nearby tower. Her last outgoing call, to voicemail, was at 7:03 p.m. The next day Millard sent Smich a photograph of a large object wrapped in a blue tarp. The Crown said it was her body. On July 5 an animal incinerator Millard had bought arrived at his hangar at the Region of Waterloo International Airport, and on July 23 he wrote to Smich that it was ready. Photographs from that night showed Smich smiling in front of it.
Both men were automatically sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. All twelve jurors recommended that Millard's parole ineligibility run consecutively to the term he was already serving; five recommended the same for Smich. What the jury had not been told was that the pair were already serving life for the 2013 murder of Tim Bosma, a 32-year-old Hamilton man who disappeared while trying to sell his pickup truck and whose body was burned in the same incinerator, or that Millard faced a separate first-degree murder charge in the 2012 death of his father, Wayne Millard, first ruled a suicide.
"We've sat through a six-week funeral for our daughter Laura," her father, Clayton Babcock, said outside court, his wife holding on to him. "Today's verdict really brings us little joy. The loss of Laura is no easier today than when it was realized five years ago." The Crown prosecutor, Jill Cameron, said simply: "Today was about justice for Laura and justice was served."
What this story covers. It draws on The Canadian Press report carried by Global News on December 16, 2017, and on CBC News's report of the same day for the jury's recommendations on parole. The case was circumstantial: no remains were recovered, and the account of the killing and the incinerator is the Crown's, which the jury accepted. Justice Michael Code heard sentencing submissions in February 2018. Millard was convicted of his father's murder that September.
Sources
- Dellen Millard, Mark Smich found guilty of first-degree murder in death of Laura Babcock, Global News (The Canadian Press)
- Jury finds Millard and Smich guilty of 1st-degree murder in death of Laura Babcock, CBC News