By Canadian Press

‘We were very close:’ Mother tells murder trial about last time she saw daughter

Apr 30, 2019 | 8:30 AM

WINNIPEG — A Crown prosecutor says a young Indigenous woman who was missing for months in Winnipeg before her body was found in a shallow grave in a farmer’s field met the man accused of killing her on a dating website.

Brett Overby, 32, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Christine Wood.

Crown attorney Chantal Boutin told a jury trial that Overby met the 21-year-old woman through the popular dating website Plenty of Fish in 2016.

She said Wood’s social media accounts were last connected to the internet through a router at Overby’s house, and online messages and texts showed she went to meet the man.

“That was a meeting from which she would never return,” Boutin said Tuesday.

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She told the jury that Wood didn’t leave Overby’s Winnipeg house alive. The young woman’s body was found outside the city 10 months later.

“He tried to bury that truth,” Boutin said.

The jury watched a video of a police interview with Overby in January 2017.

“Does the name Christine Wood ring a bell for you?” police asked him.

“No,” Overby responded.

He told officers he had used Plenty of Fish a few times following a breakup of a nine-year relationship in 2016.

Court also heard that Wood had travelled to Winnipeg from Oxford House First Nation in remote northern Manitoba that summer. She was staying at a hotel with her parents, who were in town to support a family member having surgery.

“We were very close, attached to each other,” Melinda Wood told the trial.

She texted her daughter every morning, she said, and they would send messages to each other all day.

She said they had gone shopping on what would be their last day together. Her daughter got a new outfit, was excited to wear it and said she planned to meet up with friends later that night.

Melinda Wood was shown photos that police had recovered during their investigation. She began to cry and told court that her daughter was wearing the new outfit in the photos.

Overby, wearing a white dress shirt and thin black tie, sat still as his lawyer, Sarah Inness, asked the mother if her daughter had been affected by the murder of her best friend when they were young.

Melinda Wood told court her daughter drank and did drugs in high school, but she wasn’t concerned about her girl having a problem.

Inness also asked if the mother worried about her daughter when, after high school, she lived in Winnipeg for two years while attending the University of Winnipeg. She later moved back to Oxford House.

“I wanted her to come home,” the mother said.

Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press