My sweet serial killer.

Those were the words Christina Noudga wrote in the jottings police seized from her bedroom on the day she was arrested in April 2014. Her notes, or whatever they were, were taken along with the letters Millard wrote to her from jail.

Police were gobsmacked. They couldn’t believe what they had found.

“Everything happens for a reason,” said one officer who worked on the case. It took a year to arrest her, he explained, but what a trove of evidence Noudga stashed over that period.

Millard’s letters and Noudga’s notes first came to light at Noudga’s bail hearing in the summer of 2014, after she had spent just over three months in jail charged as an accessory after the fact in the murder of Tim Bosma. Parts of what she wrote were revealed at the Bosma murder trial, but other parts have remained under wraps due to standard publication bans that prevent the early release of evidence discussed at bail hearings, pre-trial motions, and, in the case of jury trials, sessions where the jury is not in the room.

It was not clear whether Noudga’s musings were rough drafts of letters to Millard or actual letters that he had returned to her or simply notes she wrote for herself.

Her lawyer at the time, Paul Mergler, told the court that “Sweet Serial Killer” was a line from a Lana Del Rey song, which it is indeed.

In her notes, Noudga also made a list of what she believed to be the potentially damning evidence against her boyfriend. One of the more gruesome and still inexplicable things she wrote was “limbs cut off without hesitation.”

When that ugly phrase was read out in court at the bail hearing, a pregnant friend of the Bosmas fled the room in tears.

Yet despite this and other evidence that suggested Noudga knew she was helping Millard get away with murder, the judge at her bail hearing appeared quite sympathetic to her. He opined on how she was a smart young woman who could get back to her studies if released. While the terms of her original bail were strict, they were gradually relaxed. By the time she testified at the Bosma trial, she no longer had to wear her ankle monitor.

Many questions have been raised about why Noudga was never called to testify at the Babcock trial. Online rumours abound that she had cut some kind of secret deal.

Nothing could be further from the truth, which was that no one wanted to put her in the witness box. The Crown felt able to make its case without her and who knows what she would have said if called to testify.

Millard wanted the opportunity to cross examine his former lover, but he wasn’t prepared to call her as a witness himself, which would have left him having to play by the strict rules of direct examination while the Crown got to do an aggressive cross

The deal Noudga made just over a year ago to plead guilty to obstruction of justice is not well understood. Her original lawyer was smart to arrange a judge-alone trial. Middle-aged male judges often go soft on pretty young women. A reporter friend of mine calls this well documented phenomenon “the chick discount.” The more vulgar lawyer term is a “pussy pass.”

At Noudga’s conviction and sentencing, I was taken aback when the judge (not the same one from the bail hearing) announced there wouldn’t have been enough evidence to convict her. Assistant Crown Attorney Craig Fraser had just finished saying it was a strong circumstantial case, the judge had not heard the evidence, and, yet, there, he was comfortably asserting it wouldn’t have been enough to convict and telling Noudga to make nicer friends.

It made the Crown look very smart for making the deal it did. After all who would want to go through weeks of what Fraser called “soul destroying” evidence and testimony for the same result? The Bosma family didn’t.

While Noudga likes to use social media to show herself having a great time, the truth is a little more complex. She cares enough to monitor what people are saying and mock it on her Instagram. There is no indication she feels an ounce of remorse.

She aspires to be a doctor and was admitted to a Polish medical school. At some point, she will probably get married and jump at the chance to change her unusual and distinctive name. Google will not make the connection. She will likely disappear.