TORONTO — The family of Laura Babcock said they have learned to hate since finding out that their daughter was brutally killed and her body was burned in an animal incinerator.
Babcock’s parents and her brother expressed their hatred and heartbreak in a victim impact statement read out Monday at a sentencing hearing for Dellen Millard and Mark Smich, who were found guilty in December of first-degree murder.
“We hate you for taking Laura’s life away from her,” the family wrote. ”She should be laughing, dancing and enjoying life.”
At one point, Crown lawyer Jill Cameron, who was reading the statement, choked up.
“We now say that we have only one child so that we don’t have to answer people’s polite inquiries about our family,” the Babcocks wrote.
Babcock’s family said the woman’s death has taken a heavy toll.
“We always taught our children not to use the word hate. It is too horrible and destructive, but you men have made us hate,” said the Babcocks’ victim impact statement. “We’ve learned to hate.”
Millard, 32, of Toronto, and Smich, 30, of Oakville, Ont., were previously found guilty of first-degree murder in the 2013 death of Hamilton man Tim Bosma, whose remains were burned in the same animal incinerator — called The Eliminator — they had used to get rid of Babcock’s body.
Bosma’s family and friends also attended Monday’s sentencing hearing, which was taking place in a packed Toronto courtroom.
The jury in the Babcock case agreed with the Crown that the pair murdered the 23-year-old Toronto woman because she had become the odd woman out in a love triangle with Millard and his girlfriend at the time, Christina Noudga.
The trial heard Babcock struggled with her mental health and drug use in the months leading up to her disappearance in the summer of 2012. And she had become infatuated with Millard.