Warning: This column contains graphic content.

Hours and minutes, days and nights.

Spoonfuls of time that can make all the difference between life and death.

Happenstance and randomness — wrong place, wrong paths crossed.

At 4:02 a.m. on Nov. 25, 2017, Tess Richey called for an Uber to pick her up near the corner of Dundonald and Church Sts. It had been a long evening of drinking with a female friend at a Gay Village bar, Crews and Tangos, as Richey numbed the hurt over a breakup with her boyfriend, a Toronto courtroom heard on Thursday.

The driver told her to “meet Marlon,” who would be there to pick her up by 4:14 a.m.

But Richey wasn’t there. Twice he sent messages to her cellphone, without response, before finally writing her off as a “no show.”

Sometime after ordering that Uber — between 4:14 a.m., when a woman and a man were captured on surveillance video disappearing from view in an exterior stairwell between two buildings, and 45 minutes later, when the man emerged alone — Richey was murdered, court was told.

Four days later, after frantic calls from the vanished Richey’s family to police, after that same area had been searched by cops — improperly and inefficiently, it would later be alleged — after Richey’s mother made the four hour drive from North Bay to search for herself, plastering the neighbourhood with posters, knocking on doors, the mother found her daughter’s lifeless body at the bottom of that stairwell.

Just imagine.

An autopsy would determine that Richey had been strangled, Crown attorney Beverley Richards told the jury. The youngest of five sisters, she would have turned 23 that week.

Kalen Schlatter has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.

In her opening address, Richards provided an outline of what the prosecution believes happened, details that will be fleshed out in the weeks to come by witnesses, surveillance videos, photographs, diagrams, pathologists, forensic evidence and jailhouse conversations the defendant had with two undercover officers following his arrest on Feb. 4, 2018.

“You will hear that Kalen Schlatter, in the hours after his arrest on the charge of murder, told the officers that he loves brunettes,” said Richards. “That he has slept with over 40 girls even though he is only 21 years old. Kalen Schlatter told the officers that he sleeps with random girls in threesomes and foursomes. The girls beg him to sleep with them because they think he’s cute. The girls that Kalen Schlatter meets are all college girls. They like his charm and looks.

“You will hear that Kalen Schlatter told the officers that he usually hangs out with gay men because they always have women around them. Mr. Schlatter goes to gay bars with his gay friend because there are so many straight girls in the bar and he always picks them up and takes them home.

“You will hear that Kalen Schlatter told the undercover officers it’s so easy to pick up girls. ‘You just have to be confident that you have something they want.’ Mr. Schlatter also told police that he likes a challenge and sometimes you have to push the boundaries with women to see where it goes.”

Schlatter, the jury heard, was the blond man on that surveillance video, leading Richey out of sight. DNA evidence retrieved from the victim’s brassiere and other bits of her clothing, as well as semen from a stain in the upper thigh area of Richey’s trousers, have been linked to Schlatter “to a statistical certainty.”

The night had begun harmlessly enough for Richey and Ryley Simard, an old high school chum from North Bay. They hadn’t seen each other in years, ever since Richey had moved to Toronto with dreams of becoming a flight attendant and travelling the world; she had already completed the course at Seneca College.

After spending the day with one of her older sisters, picking apart the failure of her romantic relationship, Richey wanted to go out, get some drinks in her and forget the “pain and humiliation” of the breakup, said Richards.

She met Simard at the club around midnight, texting her sister that she’d safely arrived. Schlatter had entered the bar at 11:45 p.m., according to cameras at the front entrance. Surveillance video, said Richards, will show that Richey and Schlatter had no interaction inside the two-storey club. There was only a brief exchange outside the bar as the women were leaving at about 2:15 a.m., when Simard needed a light for her cigarette.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Simard and Richey begin walking northward on Church St. with Schlatter following behind, court was told.

The trio stop at a hot dog stand, then outside a house on Dundonald where the owner had stepped out for a smoke. Richey apologized if they’d been making too much noise on the street and struck up a conversation with the homeowner, spilling about her breakup, “crappy life” and that sometimes it hardly seemed worth all the heartache.

At no time was there any physical contact between Richey and the blond male who the prosecution says was Schlatter, although Simard would give him a quick kiss before parting company with a friend, walking westbound towards the streetcar and leaving Richey with the man who’d glommed onto them, the court heard.

Seven cameras had been installed around 582 Church St., a large property under renovation, enclosed by a boarded fence. Those cameras belonged to the construction company. It wasn’t until Nov. 29 — after Richey’s body was discovered — that the property’s owner and the construction manager viewed the video from Nov. 25, which was immediately turned over to police.

The forensic pathologist who conducted Richey’s autopsy is expected to testify that cause of death was “neck compression” — strangulation — which may have been caused by a soft ligature, although a choke hold could not be excluded. Richey had bruising on her lower arms, the back of her right hand and the back of her left wrist, along with a scrape over the crease on her ring finger and a fresh injury on the left forehead, with scalp hemorrhaging in the same area. The injuries, said Richards, suggest a struggle. “In other words, they were defensive injuries.”

Richey was also just starting or at the end of her menstrual period.

“Mr. Schlatter wanted privacy with Tess so that they could hook up,” Richards asserted. “He told the officers (in the jail cell conversation) that he saw an alleyway next to a big house which was under renovation.” Schlatter, said Richards, took Richey into the alley, where they began “making out.” He ejaculated onto Richey’s pants, said Richards.

According to the preview of evidence, Schlatter told the undercover officers that Richey said she wanted to have sex with him but couldn’t because she was on her period. When Schlatter allegedly tried to insert his finger into her vagina, she stopped him.

“Kalen Schlatter told the undercover officers he was upset because he wanted to have sex with Tess Richey. Kalen Schlatter was upset because Tess Richey told him no.”

And that’s where the prosecution’s trial road map stopped, before a crime scene forensic officer was called to enter a barrage of photographs into evidence.

Richey’s mother, Christine Hermeston, was not in the courtroom on Thursday. She’ll likely be called as a witness in the murder of her youngest child.

The two 51 Division officers who were charged with professional misconduct under the Police Services Act for their alleged mishandling of what was then a missing person case — Richey’s crumbled body so shatteringly found by her mother just 40 metres from the address to which those constables had been sent — have had their disciplinary hearing deferred until the conclusion of this criminal trial.