Early guilty plea helps net 2-year sentence for B.C. man who hid ex’s mom after killing her

A man who killed his ex-girlfriend’s bipolar mother and hid her body in the woods to be ravaged by wild animals before her remains could be found will spend two years in prison, a B.C. judge ruled earlier this month.

Sign In or Create an Account

In October 2023, Coquitlam RCMP arrested and charged Carson Saul MacKay, 33, with the second-degree murder of 57-year-old Jodine Millar almost a year earlier in November 2022.

The Winnipeg native, who was apprehended in Calgary, pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges this January and was sentenced by Justice David M. Layton in a New Westminster courtroom on Sept. 15, after accepting a joint submission from Crown and defence counsel.

Get a dash of perspective along with the trending news of the day in a very readable format.

By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

Layton said the sentence “reflects a properly functioning justice system, as opposed to one that has broken down, and accounts for the hard decisions Crown and defence counsel must legitimately make in difficult cases.”

According to an agreed statement of facts in his recently published decision, MacKay and Millar’s daughter, Sara, had been in a relationship since 2017. In July 2021, it was agreed that Millar would come to live with them in Kelowna and the trio moved to a home in Coquitlam the following year, where the couple resided on the main floor and she in the basement, with shared common spaces.

“Millar had experienced mental health difficulties, including bipolar disorder, and Sara wanted to look after her,” the judge wrote, noting that the older woman “sometimes failed to take her medication as prescribed.”

By August, the couple had split up and while Sara moved out, Millar stayed in the basement. The decision does not explain why.

On Nov. 26, Millar “was in a manic state, and was acting in a paranoid and erratic manner,” resulting in her overfeeding her dog and the animal vomiting on the stairs outside her bedroom door.

As MacKay was cleaning up the mess, a “paranoid and angry” Millar emerged from her room yelling at him while holding the steak knife she used to cut her pills. The two “got into a physical altercation,” during which MacKay pushed her hard, causing her to fall on her bedroom floor.

He went back upstairs and left Millar “space to calm down.” When he returned some 10 minutes later, he found her in a pool of blood from a wound caused by the knife that had become “lodged in her body” when she fell.

Fearing someone would think he’d intentionally murdered Millar, MacKay wrapped her “body in blankets and bound it with tape, rope and a dog collar” and drove it in her car to “an empty lot on Burke Mountain where he buried it in a clandestine grave in a forested area.” He reported her missing to police the following day.

According to Coquitlam RCMP, her vehicle was involved in a single-vehicle collision along Highway 1 at No. 3 Road in Abbotsford shortly after 9 p.m. on Nov. 28. The vehicle was empty when police arrived.

When discovered under undisclosed circumstances in May 2023, her decomposed remains showed damage “consistent with large animal scavenging.”

In her victim impact statement, read aloud in court, Sara didn’t address Millar’s mental struggles but called her a hard-working and supportive mother who “put herself through trade school to become a journeyman electrician.”

“Not knowing what had happened to her for so many months was traumatic, as was the later knowledge about how her remains had been disrespected and discarded,” the judge summarized.

Layton said he had to consider many aggravating and mitigating factors in determining whether to accept the joint sentencing submission.

“Particularly aggravating,” he said, was MacKay “taking actions that desecrated” Millar’s body by hiding it and not reporting it to authorities. Also working against him was that she was killed in her own home, “which should have been a place of safety,” and the impact on the family by burying Millar “in a surreptitious grave” and depriving her family the chance to mourn and bury her appropriately.

Layton also said MacKay’s youth and his size advantage over Millar — six-foot-three and 160 pounds to her five-foot-five and 125 pounds — was another aggravating factor. In pushing her down, the judge said MacKay was “not protecting himself, but rather was acting out of frustration.”

On the mitigating side were the brevity of the altercation, the single push, the “significant element of chance” in Millar’s death, that it was out of character for MacKay and the strong community support for him.

MacKay also pleaded guilty before even pre-trial applications were heard, thereby sparing Millar’s family from “additional grief and anxiety.”

Layton noted his early plea meant MacKay surrendered several strong arguments that could have helped him fight the charge had it gone to trial. Chief among them was a Jordan application under section 11 (b) of the Canadian Charter — when the defence seeks a stay of proceedings for failing to resolve the matter in a “reasonable time,” as established by the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2016 R. v. Jordan case. In the case of a provincial trial, the period is 18 months.

“The parties acknowledge that the presumptive Jordan ceiling would have been surpassed by six months by the time the trial concluded, that no delay had been waived by the defence, and that despite attempts to schedule earlier trial dates it was not possible to do so,” Layton wrote, noting even the Crown stressed the importance of him forgoing the application.

The plea also meant MacKay gave up “‘very viable’ arguments for excluding Crown evidence, arising from alleged breaches” under sections 7, 8 and 9 of the Charter, which spell out the core legal rights protecting people from unlawful or unfair state interference.

The judge also said MacKay could have made a legitimate argument about identification after the Crown highlighted “numerous areas of weakness in its circumstantial case” during preliminary inquiry, “any of which may have ultimately affected the trial verdict.”

As highlighted by the judge, under the Criminal Code of Canada, a conviction of manslaughter without the use of a firearm normally carries a sentencing “range of four to fifteen years.”

But bearing all the factors in mind, Layton said he had “no difficulty in concluding that this is one of those cases where the circumstances justify a sentence below the range of four to fifteen years’ imprisonment.”

MacKay was sentenced to two years and 99 days, but received credit for 99 days spent in pre-sentence custody. He is also prohibited from owning a firearm for 10 years after release, was ordered to submit a DNA sample, and have no direct contact with the Millar family while in prison.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.

This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.