The father of a NHL player and his mistress talked about staging a disappearance and a house fire in what the Crown alleges was a plot to murder their respective spouses.
The bottom line: they needed to cover their tracks, a jury heard Wednesday.
Brigitte Vey took the witness stand at the trial of her husband, Curtis Vey, and his mistress, Angela Nicholson, who each face two charges of conspiracy to commit murder.
Brigitte testified she thought things were fine in their 28-year marriage. The couple, who lived on a farm near Wakaw, Sask., were planning for retirement together until October 2012, when she caught her husband texting in the bathtub and became suspicious that he was cheating on her.
So Brigitte hid her iPod under the kitchen table at the farmhouse on July 1, 2013 and went to work.
What it captured over the course of the next several hours shocked her.
Nicholson shows up and kibitzes with Curtis about her birthday, her pending divorce and the farm.
Then Curtis wonders aloud if anyone would notice if Nicholson's husband were to disappear.
"It could be a number of days before anybody's suspicious he's gone," Curtis is heard saying on the scratchy recording that was played for the jury. "Is there going to be really anybody who really is worried about him?"
Nicholson wonders if she should ransack her house.
"If I go in there, if I turn over, say the coffee table, and I open the cupboards, and I'd go upstairs and I'd pull dresser drawers out and make it look like they're rummaging through for something. That's going to make them suspicious, is it not?" she wonders.
"Just make sure you got gloves on," Vey responds.
Vey wonders about a fire.
"The bottom line is that's how, you know, it's set up to be an accident, right?" he says. "Do you know what I mean? Like, the house burns down."
Nicholson suggests lighting the curtains ablaze.
"I thought if I could just pre-start the curtains, they're not going to be able to tell how it start," she says.
"OK. I know what you mean," Vey responds.
Crown lawyer Lori O'Connor has told the jury she intends to prove the lovers settled on a plan to kill Brigitte Vey in a house fire and Nicholson's husband by overdose.
Both Curtis Vey, who is the father of Vancouver Canucks forward Linden Vey, and Nicholson have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Earlier this week, RCMP Cpl. Dereck Wierzbicki testified that searches were done of both the farmhouse and Nicholson's home in Melfort but no plans were found.
The trial is expected to last two weeks in Court of Queen's Bench in Prince Albert, Sask.
--- Jules Knox was live from court: