The former Toronto policeman accused of bludgeoning and strangling his long-time mistress was "constantly" angry with her, the dead woman's widower told a Superior Court murder trial Friday.
The testimony came from Richmond Hill high school teacher Dominic Mariani, whose wife, Linda, was found dead in a plastic garbage pail concealed behind a wall in the home of Richard Wills.
Mr. Wills, 50, is charged with first-degree murder in the 2002 death of Ms. Mariani, which he insists was an accident.
The Mariani and Wills families and their children were close friends for several years, often visiting each other's homes, and together the four adults operated a power-skating business, Mr. Mariani told the jury Friday under questioning from lead prosecutor Harold Dale.
But by late 2001 the arrangement was not working out, in part because of Mr. Wills's temperament, Mr Mariani testified.
"Richard Wills would constantly be angry with my wife and the (skating) instructors," he said. "It was his way or no way at all."
As a result of the friction, Mr. Mariani said, he and his wife "decided that she was going to be in full control" of the business.
In earlier evidence, punctuated by a stream of interruptions requiring the jury to step out of the courtroom, one of Mr. Wills's best friends told the trial he could not recall telling detectives that one day before Mr. Wills turned himself in to police, he admitted to killing Ms. Mariani because she had threatened him.
Semi-retired auto mechanic Tony Jackson, 68, was also ambiguous about a portion of his police statement in which he recounted telling Mr. Wills: "Ricky, if you want me to believe you saying you killed Linda, tell me where the body is."
Mr. Jackson was asked by assistant Crown attorney Jeff Pearson if he did, in fact, say that.
"I said something in that context," Mr. Jackson replied, in a strong, occasionally inaudible Jamaican accent that some jurors appeared to be straining to understand.
In contrast to Mr. Mariani's testimony, Mr. Jackson told the jury he never witnessed any tension between Mr. Wills and Linda Mariani, both of whom he knew well. Their relationship he said, was "loving."
The threats to which Mr. Jackson alluded in his police statement and which Friday he could not recall being discussed was not the first such evidence heard by the jury.
In testimony at Mr. Wills's preliminary inquiry, read out earlier this week by trial judge Madam Justice Michelle Fuerst, Mr. Wills's now-deceased stepmother recalled him telling her and her dying husband that he was responsible for his lover's disappearance and that she had threatened to harm him and others.
At trial, Mr. Wills's lawyer, Raj Napal, has offered the jury an altogether different version of events.
Mr. Wills maintains Ms. Mariani, 40, slipped and banged her head on the ceramic-tiled wall of his house. It was because the pair had a "love pact" and wanted to be buried together that he stuffed her head-first into the garbage bin and walled her up for four months, he says.
The prosecution maintains Mr. Willis murdered his mistress because she refused to leave her husband for him. Police videotape played to the jury has shown that after Mr. Wills led police to her badly decomposed body in June, 2002, a skipping rope was found wrapped rightly around her neck.
Hunched at the defence table, flanked by two watchful police guards, Mr. Wills as usual paid close attention to Friday's proceedings, nodding, grimacing and passing a steady stream of notes to Mr. Napal.
Later in the trial he is expected to testify on his own behalf.