“You don’t like me, do you?”It probably would not have required being under oath for Shawn Lerner to give an honest answer.“No.”Lawyers don’t give a fig whether witnesses under cross-examination like them or not. It’s an adversarial process.But Dellen Millard, who is representing himself in court, is one of the two defendants on trial for first-degree murder in the death of Laura Babcock, whose remains have never been found.Read more: Laura Babcock murder trial hears of her struggles with drugs, mental healthDreadful details come fast and furious on Day 1 of trial into Laura Babcock`s murder: DiMannoLaura Babcock killed for being odd woman out in love triangle, court hearsThe prosecution says Millard and Mark Smich killed her five years ago, then disposed of the young woman’s body in an incinerator.“You find me sketchy.”More a declaration than a question but Lerner responded. Yes, he does.When Babcock went missing in early July, 2012, it was Lerner, her former boyfriend, who raised the alarm.Just as it had been Lerner, still fond of his ex in a close friend way, who put Babcock up in a west end Toronto motel for a couple of nights, just before her vanishing, because she had nowhere to stay, had been couch-surfing and quarrelling with her parents. And, as Lerner discovered when they met for dinner at a food court — the last time he saw the 23-year-old alive, their final texts exchanged on July 1 — had been working for an escort service.It was Lerner, too, who loaned Babcock an iPad that night — the same device on which investigators would later find rap lyrics which appear to allude to her murder. “The bitch started off all skin and bone, now the bitch lay on some ashy stone . . . ” In a brief video segment shown to the jury earlier this week, Smich is seen singing that repugnant ditty.Both Smich and Millard have pleaded not guilty.The last eight phone calls Babcock made on ...
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