Babcock Murder Trial - Weekend Discussion #5

[Stumper]

I keep trying to put myself in the shoes of a hypothetical MS who was not involved in this plan...

... so here’s this guy who I love “like a brother” and live with but is always coming up with harebrained schemes, many of which involve illegal activities but nothing to this point that makes me think he’ll murder anyone. Okay fine. And friend tells me he’s getting an incinerator. And that it’s for garbage. Oh no wait, I’m texting him about bones and testing it out on dogs, so if you’re still giving me the benefit of doubt maybe I’m just a creep that hurts animals but as far as I know, no murder involved! And I help this guy get in touch with a guy who sells guns who I know from elementary school. But if you’re still giving me the benefit of the doubt, maybe he needs it to kill said dog or those pesky deer (handgun? Interesting choice. But I don’t question it in this hypothetical) on his property...

Then at some point this friend tells me he killed a girl. And none of my texts after that point reveal any surprise, discomfort or worry. Oh you rolled your first spliff, friend who I had no idea was going to murder anyone? Cool. How is the spliff? No it’s okay, my gf can just wait in the car while we’re talking to that girl, if you know what I mean. And then I’ll make a rap for this.

He helped test the incinerator, he hooked him up with a “gun guy”, and at no point when his buddy murdered someone did he express any surprise, it was just casually talked about like it was just one more mission.

Very well put IMO

 

[canadiangirl]

That almost reads like MS could have written it! There's one interesting text that makes me think there had been a lot of conversation between DM & MS not captured via text messages. That's the one on July 3rd that where DM tells MS not to be out front when he gets back. If MS was playing a benign role, why didn't DM want him visible when he arrived back to Maple Gate with LB?

I would explain that as DM is bringing home a chick to bang that isn't Christina. Moo

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[canadiangirl]

If that is the story he's going with, he'd be smart to not testify because it is isn't going to get him a non guilty verdict as it's unbelievable even before he gets cross examined.

He'd be better off claiming ignorance of the crime until much later so he can just say I don't remember that night instead of some wildly detailed story that he made no attempt to have corroborated when MM was on the stand.

And he still has to explain why the one kid said he told him he killed a girl.

IMO that kid was not a reliable witness. He was strung out by his own admission

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[NoodlesMcgee]

IMO that kid was not a reliable witness. He was strung out by his own admission

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As opposed to MS?

Kid has nothing to gain with a lie.

 

[Stumper]

Here's how I'd spin a hypothetical MS who was not involved in this plan:

...so here's this guy that I love like a brother and he feels like my ticket to the good life without the kind of work I would have to do in the real world. He's got big dreams and bad schemes and if we're going to go to next level stuff I can contribute by hooking him up with Ish. And is he hot to hook up with Ish! He hits me up four times between January 27 and January 31, and by the 31st he's really frustrated - "I'm under pressure , ****'s gotta start happening. wtf's up with Isho? tell that guy to text me already." All good. He had the first of the guns we'd score in his hand by Feb. 10. Good times are coming. Next level ****. Life rolls on for few months and we meet at titty bars makin' big plans and doing stuff, mission here and mission there. There's a lot of drugs. Come late May he makes a big move cause we're going places where we might need to disappear people, maybe for money, maybe for an inheritance, maybe maybe maybe. July 3rd rolls around and I roll out of bed in the middle of the afternoon like most days, and start my daily scrounge for food, for beer for dope. My hooks me up with some Heini and a couple of subs by 6:30 and I'm chillin with Marlena and Dell's out on a mission of some kind. I'm out for a smoke by the pool and I see he's got a chick over so I lay low and waste the night away in the basement with Marlena, drinking beer and having sex and listening to Pocket Full of Stones on repeat and then later I hit the vapes - that knocked me on my *advertiser censored* for a while but I came to my senses and texted my to see if he was around so we could run wars or hang out or something, but he's down for the night. I read his last text from a few hours ago around 9 am and hit him back with an "aight" before I head off to bed. That brought him downstairs and he told me the craziest **** had gone down. Un-f-ing-believable. That chick I saw last night is gone. Crazy. Dell's gonna deal though, and I'm so tired and I just need to crash. Whatever ever he needs me to do to help I'm down. He's my . Well, eventually we dispose of her in Dell's new incinerator. Took a while to get it going, but we hung in with the wait 'cause Dell's got this body to deal with now and it's the perfect chance to test it. I didn't really know what to expect, but it was intense. I wrote a rap about it right away, how I saw her that night, how she ended up. Intense.

That scenario is a definite possibility, but no more so then Dell went over to christina’s To rap on her window while mark and Laura did coke..

Neither one explains the advance preparation of an incinerator capable of disposing completely of human remains and many other of the one in a million unfortunate coincidences that would still have to be accounted for.

“ Whoa you killed her bro??? Good thing we happened to buy that huge garbage.. er.. I mean pet incinerator.. No worries we’ll just have a bbq and pretend like it never happened. Think I could have her suitcase and maybe her iPad so I could write a cool rap about this?

 

[Grey-St]

I was reading the letters that were released during the TB trial and noticed that DM mentions that he watched video statements from AM and others. Videos from other high profile cases are available on YouTube, such as the Colonel Williams interrogation. DM's trial for the murder of his father will probably hold things up, but when that trial is over, could we expect these items to be released to the public?

This is really interesting. I didn't realize this happened in Canada, releasing such things to the public.

I hope so. I would really like to see DM's interrogation.

I feel like there would have to be a pertinent public interest, and justifiable circumstances for releasing any interrogations or video statements. Seems like pretty private stuff.

 

[canadiangirl]

As opposed to MS?

The difference IMO is you would likely know if you killed someone strung out or not.
What the exact detail of someone "said" happened while you're strung out is different..
People don't even get it right sober.
Did he say they killed her? He killed her? He knew about it? They planned it?
What exactly was said? Context matters.

The rap lyrics indicate to me that MS was involved after the fact otherwise I believe he would have written about "poppin a girl with a. 32. And if you don't be careful it could be YOU. I'm say10, he's Dman. Together we are f'n the hoes, cause we're bros, and if you go swimming you can find her phone"

The gun talk, the incinerator, still doesn't mean to me he planned or knew of a murder.
I feel the evidence so far isn't enough. We'll see.
JMO

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[Inspector_North]

https://www.thespec.com/news-story/...20-more-things-the-bosma-jury-was-never-told/

Point 12 in this article in the Spectator seemed to say that the letters were primarily relayed through MB.

Thanks for that article. I never saw the make/model of the third gun before. The article states that Smich said, "[FONT=&amp]"There's multiple firearms of different calibres".

[/FONT]
We know that TB was shot with a .380 from the shell casing found, and were shown pictures of a Walther PPK which is chambered for .380 ACP ammo. The gun confiscated on November 2012 was a .32 S&W Long which uses different ammo. The third gun according to that article is a BODYGUARD 380, which is also chambered for .380 ACP ammo.

I thought I would put together a picture of all three guns side by side. Since there is no actual photo of the BODYGUARD 380, I pulled one off the net.

 

[JuneBug67]

Sorry Andreww and JuneBug67, I can see where you are both coming from but I can’t concede that a not guilty verdict for MS is based on logic and Guilty is based on emotion/intuition.

I think that it is a matter of micro logic’s vs macro logic.

You two are focused on the micro logic. That SM can not be proven to have known LB was the particular victim, and that it can’t be proven he was hands on involved in her actual death. (neither can be proven for DM either btw.. although there is slightly more circumstantial evidence against him)

The Macro logic looks at his involvement and behaviour before, during and after the murder and (without rehashing all the details for the hundredth time) the evidence logically show a man planning a murder, being present while a murder was committed, cheerfully cleaning up from a murder then proudly bragging in detail about that same murder. I see no other logical interpretation for the sum of his actions over the months before and after July 3/4 of that year.

As with the TB murder it does not matter legally which of them actually made the kill or who the victim ended up being if the murder and incineration of a undetermined person was a planned event by both.

I intended the term logic in a sort of formal way, and not at all to imply that logic is kind of 'hard' thinking and intuitive thinking is 'soft' or emotion-based. Both are important ways to understand the world, and I agree with you that relying too much on one at the expense of the other (what you called micro vs. macro logic) can lead to chasing your own tail or missing the big picture. Where I disagree is, as mentioned, more on the 'formal' side. I see people rely too heavily on what are essentially syllogisms that just aren't accurate. For example: "Some people who dispose of a body are murderers. Mark Smich disposed of a body - that cannot lead to "therefore Mark Smich is a murderer". To me, nobody should be counting what he did on the 23rd as counting as any kind of proof of what he did on the 3rd/4th. That is not logical, in that formal logic way that I mean. Circumstantial evidence is of course cumulative, but the strands that make up your circumstantial rope have to say what you purport them to say in the first place to even be strands. What I see in the macro is lines being drawn through things that we can't even say for sure even belong together. The almost complete absence of Smich's presence in the evidence on July 3/4 has to be considered as something that might logically interrupt the line you want to draw between Smich's actions before and after that date. The fact that DM doesn't really give a **** about CN and the fact that he moves his focus to a commercial incinerator after he dumps her has to be considered as something that might logically interrupt the line people want to draw between his dark insinuations with CN and the incinerator as part of a plan to murder Laura. I understand how compelling your argument is on the intuitive level, and why it is completely logical in the more informal way we use that term - logic meaning a sort of common sense reasoning - but I think people are ignoring how arbitrary some of the connections that are being made between events may be. There are things that explain Smich's text history and actions on the 3rd/4th at least as well as and realistically probably much better than being a wingman on a murder. DM on the other hand is damned at just about every turn in that 24 hour period. To me, that stuff has to matter when reasonable doubt is the bar and life in prison is what is at stake.

 

[JuneBug67]

If that is the story he's going with, he'd be smart to not testify because it is isn't going to get him a non guilty verdict as it's unbelievable even before he gets cross examined.

He'd be better off claiming ignorance of the crime until much later so he can just say I don't remember that night instead of some wildly detailed story that he made no attempt to have corroborated when MM was on the stand.

And he still has to explain why the one kid said he told him he killed a girl.

MM isn't even in a position to corroborate anything in my hypothetical MS. She wasn't told, MS was.

And no, the Crown has to explain why one kid said he didn't say that. That's our system of justice.

 

[Stumper]

I intended the term logic in a sort of formal way, and not at all to imply that logic is kind of 'hard' thinking and intuitive thinking is 'soft' or emotion-based. Both are important ways to understand the world, and I agree with you that relying too much on one at the expense of the other (what you called micro vs. macro logic) can lead to chasing your own tail or missing the big picture. Where I disagree is, as mentioned, more on the 'formal' side. I see people rely too heavily on what are essentially syllogisms that just aren't accurate. For example: "Some people who dispose of a body are murderers. Mark Smich disposed of a body - that cannot lead to "therefore Mark Smich is a murderer". To me, nobody should be counting what he did on the 23rd as counting as any kind of proof of what he did on the 3rd/4th. That is not logical, in that formal logic way that I mean. Circumstantial evidence is of course cumulative, but the strands that make up your circumstantial rope have to say what you purport them to say in the first place to even be strands. What I see in the macro is lines being drawn through things that we can't even say for sure even belong together. The almost complete absence of Smich's presence in the evidence on July 3 has to be considered as something that might logically interrupt the line you want to draw between Smich's actions before and after that date. The fact that DM doesn't really give a **** about CN and the fact that he moves his focus to a commercial incinerator after he dumps her has to be considered as something that might logically interrupt the line people want to draw between his dark insinuations with CN and the incinerator as part of a plan to murder Laura. I understand how compelling your argument is on the intuitive level, and why it is completely logical in the more informal way we use that term - logic meaning a sort of common sense reasoning - but I think people are ignoring how arbitrary some of the connections that are being made between events may be. There are things that explain Smich's text history and actions on the 3rd/4th at least as well as and realistically probably much better than being a wingman on a murder. DM on the other hand is damned at just about every turn in that 24 hour period. To me, that stuff has to matter when reasonable doubt is the bar and life in prison is what is at stake.

Fair enough. But, it’s just as important to remember that public safety and other innocent lives are at stake in these determinations as well. To fine a line can be drawn either way imo.

If we can’t meet the bar in a case with as much evidence as this we risk making thrill murders a very low risk activity to those so inclined. Not many killers chronicle their crimes with a trail of texts, pics, videos, raps, confessions and physical evidence as these two have

 

[Stratocaster]

Some of the texts that are really disturbing to me are the ones MS tells DM that 'people know too much already, etc...time to have one of our chats at the titty bar again'

Absolutely, all the phone texting evidence is incriminating foresure, but to be a fly on the wall at the titty bar for those in-depth conversations would reveal the darkest of dark of two criminal minds.

 

[Typhoo1961]

This is really interesting. I didn't realize this happened in Canada, releasing such things to the public.


I feel like there would have to be a pertinent public interest, and justifiable circumstances for releasing any interrogations or video statements. Seems like pretty private stuff.

Paul Bernardo's interrogation is on Youtube. So are several others from known Canadian criminals. You just have to look for them.

 

[Grey-St]

Paul Bernardo's interrogation is on Youtube. So are several others from known Canadian criminals. You just have to look for them.

Wow, I stand corrected. :dunno:

 

[Grey-St]

Regarding jail visits, DM's visits would have been what is considered "closed" visits which means from behind glass. He would have been considered in remand custody, since he had not yet been charged and sentenced and these visits were closed.
Lawyers would have access to open visits - direct contact.

Thank you for this information! I went and did some more research, and yes I agree that DM was in remand custody, so would have only had closed visits. I can't however find enough information on Lawyer visits... Are you, or anyone else for that matter, able to post a link to a reliable source? It's likely the case that they would have open visits (for signing paper work possibly?) but I just want to be sure.

 

[Spartygirl]

Well, WOW !! Just WOW !! I was complaining a few days ago about being disappointed with the court proceedings this week and then, BOOM !!

I finally caught up on yesterday's court thread and can hardly wait until next week to see what transpires !!

JusticeforLaura

 

[Typhoo1961]

Wow, I stand corrected. :dunno:

That is why I am hoping that DM's tapes as well as any from everyone else get put up on YT.

 

[gremlingrrl]

From what I read, the media fought the Judge's decision to keep the public out of the courtroom on day 1 during the pre-trial motions of the TB case. They won, were able to read the transcripts from day 1, and were able to sit in on the remainder of the pre-trial motions. The publication ban has remained in effect, so journalists know what went on, but could not/can not report on it. I don't know the answer to your question regarding the publication ban. It could be lifted after all three trials are complete and the media can then report, or it could remain in effect. It's hard to speculate.

Ah, ok. Gotcha. I missed that the media was ultimately allowed, but the public (only) was denied entry on that hearing. Thanks for clarifying.

 

[XFP]

Here's how I'd spin a hypothetical MS who was not involved in this plan:

...so here's this guy that I love like a brother and he feels like my ticket to the good life without the kind of work I would have to do in the real world. He's got big dreams and bad schemes and if we're going to go to next level stuff I can contribute by hooking him up with Ish. And is he hot to hook up with Ish! He hits me up four times between January 27 and January 31, and by the 31st he's really frustrated - "I'm under pressure , ****'s gotta start happening. wtf's up with Isho? tell that guy to text me already." All good. He had the first of the guns we'd score in his hand by Feb. 10. Good times are coming. Next level ****. Life rolls on for few months and we meet at titty bars makin' big plans and doing stuff, mission here and mission there. There's a lot of drugs. Come late May he makes a big move cause we're going places where we might need to disappear people, maybe for money, maybe for an inheritance, maybe maybe maybe. July 3rd rolls around and I roll out of bed in the middle of the afternoon like most days, and start my daily scrounge for food, for beer for dope. My hooks me up with some Heini and a couple of subs by 6:30 and I'm chillin with Marlena and Dell's out on a mission of some kind. I'm out for a smoke by the pool and I see he's got a chick over so I lay low and waste the night away in the basement with Marlena, drinking beer and having sex and listening to Pocket Full of Stones on repeat and then later I hit the vapes - that knocked me on my *advertiser censored* for a while but I came to my senses and texted my to see if he was around so we could run wars or hang out or something, but he's down for the night. I read his last text from a few hours ago around 9 am and hit him back with an "aight" before I head off to bed. That brought him downstairs and he told me the craziest **** had gone down. Un-f-ing-believable. That chick I saw last night is gone. Crazy. Dell's gonna deal though, and I'm so tired and I just need to crash. Whatever ever he needs me to do to help I'm down. He's my . Well, eventually we dispose of her in Dell's new incinerator. Took a while to get it going, but we hung in with the wait 'cause Dell's got this body to deal with now and it's the perfect chance to test it. I didn't really know what to expect, but it was intense. I wrote a rap about it right away, how I saw her that night, how she ended up. Intense.

I really wish I could follow this post and the responses, but it's just too much text without any paragraphs! My eyes can't take it. Keep on everyone, I'll pick it up another time!

 

[Oreck]

Sorry Andreww and JuneBug67, I can see where you are both coming from but I can’t concede that a not guilty verdict for MS is based on logic and Guilty is based on emotion/intuition.

I think that it is a matter of micro logic’s vs macro logic.



You two are focused on the micro logic. That SM can not be proven to have known LB was the particular victim, and that it can’t be proven he was hands on involved in her actual death. (neither can be proven for DM either btw.. although there is slightly more circumstantial evidence against him)

The Macro logic looks at his involvement and behaviour before, during and after the murder and (without rehashing all the details for the hundredth time) the evidence logically show a man planning a murder, being present while a murder was committed, cheerfully cleaning up from a murder then proudly bragging in detail about that same murder. I see no other logical interpretation for the sum of his actions over the months before and after July 3/4 of that year.

As with the TB murder it does not matter legally which of them actually made the kill or who the victim ended up being if the murder and incineration of a undetermined person was a planned event by both.

Yes, Stumper, I have to agree, You have hit it bang on. MS helped size and order the Eliminator and set DM up with a gun, That's Premeditation.

This spell -punctuation checker WS uses is a curse. Always moving the curser somewhere else except where i want it.
Can it be turned off till I'm finished with each post? And then just turned on to check before sending?