A Saskatoon courtroom saw a video Friday afternoon of a sobbing Doug Hales admitting to police Daleen Bosse died in his company but insisting he did not kill her.
Hales is on trial for first-degree murder for the death of the 25-year-old woman from Onion Lake Cree Nation who was last seen in May 2004.
The video was recorded on Aug. 10, 2008, shortly after Saskatoon police arrested Hales for Bosse’s murder.
In the days leading up to the arrest, Hales had told an RCMP undercover sting operation on three separate occasions that he had murdered Bosse.
He then later led undercover officers to the site of her remains in a remote wooded area near Martensville.
In the lengthy video, Hales initially sits stone-faced and silent as a police officer repeats the details of the different murder confessions.
The officer repeatedly says, “stop me if I am lying to you,” and later says “you haven’t stopped me so I must be telling the truth.”
He later plays audio of Hales’ different confessions to the undercover officers and says, “we are not asking if you did it, we know you did it.”
The officer then begins to show some compassion toward Hales saying, “you have killed somebody but it still does not make you a bad person,” and, “I am not seeing a cold blooded killer here.”
About an hour into the video, Hales breaks into tears and admits he was in Bosse’s company when she died but insisting he did not kill her.
He says Bosse came into Jax nightclub in Saskatoon where he was working as a doorman on May 18, 2004 and was kicked out for being intoxicated.
She tried to come get back into the bar but Hales says he took Bosse to her car so she could sleep off her drunken state.
When the bar closed a few hours later he says he woke up Bosse and they drove to get cigarettes and alcohol.
At some point, Hales says they tried to engage in sex but he was unable to perform due to his own level of intoxication.
While sitting in the car in the remote area near Martensville, Hales says at one point Bosse just stopped talking in mid-sentence, he couldn’t feel a pulse and her body went cold.
Knowing she was dead and he would likely be blamed, he says he then dragged the body from the car and burned it to erase any evidence.
He tells police the reason why he told the undercover officers he murdered Bosse was to impress them and he was fearful the fictitious criminal organization would harm him if he failed to show that he was a hardened criminal.
Hales adds he was also hoping to be included in an upcoming big job with the organization with the promise of a $22,000 payout and felt the false confession would gain him acceptance.