Richard Oland’s longtime mistress testifying about text messages between the two of them on both the day before and the day that his body was discovered face down in a pool of blood in his investment firm office in uptown Saint John.
The second-degree murder trial of Dennis Oland hearing that on July 6, 2011 Diana Sedlacek and Richard Oland, who had been in a romantic relationship for close to eight years, were planning to go on a trip together to Portland, Maine. At 6:44pm on that day Sedlacek sends a message to Richard asking if he’s there and she sends another at 7:19pm asking why he turned his phone off and threatens to call his house if he doesn’t answer the phone.
Sedlacek says she arrived home on July 6 in the afternoon and did not leave her residence in Darlings Island from that time to the morning of July 7. Asked if her then-husband left the home on July 6, she says no.
The day the body was discovered, Sedlacek sent Richard Oland a message at 9:37am saying “what the hell is going on with you?” She later sent him a text asking why police were at his office. She is asked if their past communications were seldom or often and she replied “very often.”
Asked when she first heard news of Richard Oland’s death she says that she saw his car being towed away so she “knew that something horrible had happened” but she didn’t know what, “maybe a heart attack or something.” She called his home. She says she found about about Richard’s death sometime that morning — “somebody said something to me,” she testified.
Sedlacek earlier testified that she and Richard Oland would physically be in each other’s presence three times a week and travelled together many times. She says that she would visit his office fairly frequently, “often after church on Sunday we would pop in there for a bit.”
Sedlacek says that she was self-employed in real estate in July at 2011. She testifies she has moved out of the province of New Brunswick.
The defence has yet to cross-examine Sedlacek.
CHSJ News reporter Laura Lyall is covering the Dennis Oland trial and is live-tweeting from the courtroom. You can follow along by going to the CHSJ News Twitter page or the Wave News Twitter page.
