EDMONTON – A teenager on trial for the 2009 killings of Susan Trudel and Barry Boenke confessed to the murders to an undercover RCMP officer in a recording played at his trial Monday.
The youth, who cannot be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, was unknowingly recorded when he spoke about the killings to the officer as they drove in a vehicle on March 30, 2012.
The teen tells the officer that he fled the Bosco Homes youth facility on May 31, 2009, and reached the piece of Boenke’s property where Trudel lived in a trailer, roughly 10 kilometres from Bosco Homes, near Ardrossan. He told the officer he had stolen a handgun from a stored vehicle nearby and shot Trudel and Boenke outside the trailer.
“I shot the guy in the middle of the head,” the teen said. “And then I dragged her, drug her inside and hit her in the back of the head with an axe.”
Boenke survived being shot in the head, the teen said. “He was still alive, so I beat him with a two-by-four.”
Throughout the confession, the teen mentioned how he specifically tampered with evidence to confuse investigators. He covered his shoes in plastic during the crime, bleached and burned his clothes, used rifle shells in the handgun, fired randomly outside the trailer to create further bullet holes, and then spread Trudel’s blood across her kitchen ceiling to make odd patterns for investigators to find.
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“It was to throw them off,” he told the undercover officer as loud rap music played in the background. “They wouldn’t know how it got there.”
He dragged Trudel into her trailer “because the cops would assume a 14-year-old couldn’t,” he said.
The teen was 14 when Trudel and Boenke were killed. He was 16 when the recording was made. Now 17, he faces two charges of second-degree murder.
The teen was recorded after murder charges against him had been dropped. At the time, he had sat through his preliminary hearing, where he saw and heard all the evidence gathered after the killings.
Court has heard the teen’s charges were brought back after he was the target of a “Mr. Big” operation. In such circumstances, an undercover officer elicits information from a suspect under the pretence that they are being recruited into a criminal organization and need to admit crimes to gain trust.
The officer in the recording commended the teen after his story is complete. “I wasn’t 100 per cent sure you were one of us, but you’re solid. Taking care of business. Doing what you have to do.”
Some of the teen’s admission has already been disproven in court. The teen said he targeted Trudel’s trailer because it was known to have a large amount of crack-cocaine in a freezer, which an investigator testified was not there. He said that Trudel and Boenke were “smoking crack” outside the trailer when he arrived. Toxicology tests showed neither had the drug in their system.
The teen claimed he had beaten Trudel with an axe, then bleached the weapon before he left it beside her body. RCMP Staff Sgt. Dean Funnell, a bloodstain pattern analyst, has already testified that there was no evidence the axe was cleaned and there was blood on it.
“The bloodstains are not consistent with the axe being used,” Funnell told court.
Also, the teen said he had twice shot Trudel and Boenke but the medical examiner found at least three bullet wounds in both of them.
Other parts of the confession fit the evidence already heard in court. The blood trail that Trudel left shows that she was injured outside and then attacked again in her kitchen, where she died, which fits the teen’s account of her death.
The teen said he took apart the handgun he used, bleached the parts, then threw them in a nearby ditch. The gun has never been found.
The teen also told the undercover officer that a second teenager who fled Bosco Homes with him was “scared” and remained in a vehicle while the killings occurred.
“I want him gone,” he said of the second teen. “He knows exactly everything.”
The second teen and the undercover RCMP officers have yet to testify in the trial.
The recording has been presented as evidence in the trial by Crown prosecutors, but not yet accepted by the judge.
The trial continues.
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