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“Oh my God. What am I doing?”
Ruby Penney questioned herself at times as she sat in the RCMP detachment in St. Anthony on Dec. 1, 2016, and gave a voluntary statement to a police officer.
Her daughter-in-law, Jennifer Hillier-Penney, had been reported missing a day earlier. Ruby was the first person to show up at the house after her granddaughter, Deana, realized her mother was nowhere to be found.
She told the officer there was one thing she couldn’t get out of her head — a phone call Jennifer had with her cousin seven months earlier, that Ruby and Deana had overheard.
“This is a long shot,” she said before launching into the story.
Jennifer, Ruby and Deana were coming home from a trip to Florida, when Jennifer got a call from Derick Hillier.
Derick had been hospitalized at the Waterford psychiatric facility in St. John’s, but said he was getting out soon.
“He told her he was Jesus Christ,” Ruby said.
She went on to explain how Derick told Jennifer he was going to come to her house with all of her dead relatives, and take her to a party in heaven.
“I can’t get it out of my mind now,” Ruby told the officer. “It’s possible that he did something.”
Ruby expressed guilt at times for bringing his name up at all.
“He’s my friend,” she said. “How can I do this to him?”
Ruby Penney is now dead. So is Derick Hillier. Ruby’s son, Dean, is on trial for first-degree murder at the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador in Corner Brook.
He has pleaded not guilty.
The court has yet to hear from any RCMP officer who spoke to Derick Hillier directly, but one officer who interviewed his parents did testify.
Staff-Sgt. Daniel Murrin said Hillier was in St. Anthony around the time, but said Derick’s parents told him he’d left to drive across the island before Jennifer Hillier-Penney was last seen on Nov. 30, 2016.
Deana Penney was also asked about the phone call when she testified on Monday, and rejected any claim that Hillier could have been responsible for her mother’s disappearance.
“That was a misunderstanding because the man was genuinely sick,” she said.
The trial was delayed on Wednesday due to a technical problem with the audio recording system in the courtroom. Proceedings got underway at 2 p.m.
The court will break on Thursday before returning for a half-day on Friday. The trial is slated to run until the end of April.
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