A glimpse of a lifeless arm secreted in a large blue tote prompted an urgent phone call between Patrick Tansem and Rob Rafters, Beryl Musila’s boyfriend at the time, on the morning of July 9, 2017.
Rafters and Musila, then a 28-year-old mother of two, had just gone in to make statements at the St. Albert RCMP regarding the then-missing 75-year-old St. Albert resident Ron Worsfold, who Musila had been staying with.
A long-time family friend of Rafters, Tansem took the stand Tuesday in Beryl Musila’s first-degree murder trial in the Court of King’s Bench in Edmonton.
Musila, who is self-represented after firing a string of attorneys, has already pleaded guilty in Justice Larry Ackerl’s courtroom to indecently interfering with Worsfold’s remains. The Crown is alleging Musila drugged and beat Worsfold to death in his home on the night of July 7, 2017. The next day the court heard she put him in a Rubbermaid container and hauled his body to several locations in the region, eventually ending in Parkland County.
In riveting testimony, Tansem described the chaos unleashed after being asked to dump a large, heavy blue Rubbermaid tote in the wee hours of July 9, 2017. What was supposed to be a night of victory and celebration to mark the end of his successful parole turned gruesome at his family’s acreage outside of Devon.
The four-foot-by-two-foot blue Rubbermaid tote was covered in duct tape, and too heavy for him to lift by himself.
Musila told him it was full of “books and garbage,” he remembered.
Rafters and Tansem expected to take Musila’s belongings to a makeshift garbage dump in common use on the property, but the accused had other plans for the large, heavy tote, Tansem recalled on the stand.
“I was asked if we could dump the Rubbermaid somewhere else. I said, ‘Why?’ and she said ‘Just because,’” he said.
“I said, ‘Whatever,’ and obliged her,” he remembered.
“I drove to a clearing. She told me it was too open,” Tansem said.
They drove down a back trail on Tansem’s family property in Parkland County, he recalled.
“She pointed out a bushy area. She said, ‘We’ll put it there,’” he said, adding that the spot wasn’t quite secluded enough for Musila.
“She indicated it wasn’t far enough into the bushes … she said ‘push it further in,’” Tansem said.
They dumped the remaining belongings at the family’s dumpsite, he said.
Tansem: Musila told him ‘I did it, I killed Ron’
After returning to the house, Tansem was feeling the effects of the celebratory drinks, a tab of acid, and medicinal pot the day before.
But the night was about to get weirder still.
“(Musila) handed me box taped with duct tape and told me those were the weapons used to kill Ron Worsfold,” he testified, recalling that she said there was a knife and a hammer inside.
The courtroom fell silent as Tansem described a confession from Musila that followed, he said, recalling the words: “I did it, I did it, I killed Ron. I stabbed him in the throat.”
Tansem testified that when he told Rafters of her confession, Rafters confronted Musila, asking “Why did you get him involved?”
“I took that box and tossed it out (the) back door in (the) bushes, I didn’t want to have anything to do with what was in her head,” Tansem said.
He fell into bed, waking around 7 a.m. when Rafters asked Tansem to get his mother to drive him and Musila to the St. Albert RCMP to give statements in Worsfold’s disappearance.
“I started investigating, started putting everything together, and stuff seemed a little too weird,” he told the court.
He fetched the discarded box and opened it. The first thing he saw was a frilly cloth with blood on it.
He closed the box—and started shaking, Tansem testified.
Tansem to RCMP: ‘There’s a body on my property’
The biggest bombshell was yet to come. Tansem enlisted his mother’s boyfriend, Yannick Leveille, to move the tote from the secluded wooded area where Musila told him to dump it hours earlier to the makeshift dump with her other belongings.
“It slipped out of my hands, the lid popped open, and I saw an arm—and I freaked out,” Tansem recalled in Justice Larry Ackerl’s Court of King’s Bench.
Jurors heard that he called Rafters with the unhappy news.
“’She did it, she actually did it. There’s a body in that Rubbermaid. You need to turn around and turn her in,’” he told Rafters.
Tansem then called the St. Albert RCMP with a ghastly and urgent message.
“’There is a body on my property,’” he recalled telling them.
When Rafters and Musila returned to the house from St. Albert, “I marched right up to (Musila) and told her she had 24 hours to turn herself in,” Tansem said in court. “She said okay.”
It took 30-45 minutes for the St. Albert RCMP to get the rural property near Devon.
Musila had been pacing by the front door, waiting to leave, Tansem said.
“The last time I saw her, she was about to walk out the front door and meet her ride,” he said, adding that a white truck pulled up that belonged to the father of Musila’s two children.
That’s about when the RCMP got there, he said.
When they arrived, he took them to the dump site.
“I had to show them where everything was,” he said. “I showed them where the body had been dropped.”
In a sad stroke of irony, Tansem said he was asked to tote what turned out to be a dead body around just as he turned over a new leaf, committed to living a life free of crime.
“I was just getting off parole, I’d been on the wrong side my whole life,” he recalled, and noted the party that night had been to celebrate him getting off parole. .
He’s had no convictions since, Tansem said, a smile lighting up his face.
“That’s how I started to turn my life around .. that sentence, those charges,” he said, citing good news—a steady job building custom houses, a pending marriage to his fiancée, a baby boy, “paying my taxes.”
Testimony continues in the trial, which is expected to last another couple weeks.
