Early guilty plea helps earn two year sentence for B.C. man who buried ex’s mother in ‘surreptitious grave’ after killing her

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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.

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

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Jodine Millar’s Hyundai Tucson was empty when Abbotsford RCMP showed up a single-vehicle crash. Photo by Coquitlam RCMP

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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.”

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“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.

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

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“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.

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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.”

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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.

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

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”